Cosmopolitan Modernity: Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of Difference

Debates about cosmopolitanism in the spheres of political philosophy, sociology and
postcolonial criticism have on the whole ignored specific histories of the cosmopolitan
imagination and its vernacular expressions in everyday life. This article draws on aspects
of the urban and often feminised worlds of entertainment, commerce, the arts and the
emotions in metropolitan England during the first decades of the 20th century, in which
an interest in abroad and cultural 'others' increasingly signalled an engagement with the
new, in order to argue for a notion of cosmopolitan modernity. This should be understood
not just as a reflexive stance of openness, but also as a dialogic formation - a
counterculture - part of a psychic and often gendered revolt against the conservatism and
xenophobia of the parental culture.

Citation:
Nava, M.(2002)'Cosmopolitan Modernity: Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of Difference', Theory Culture Society 19(1-2) 81-99.