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Theory, Culture &

Society

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Cosmopolitan Modernity: Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of

Difference

Mica Nava

Theory Culture Society

2002; 19; 81

DOI: 10.1177/026327640201900104

http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/19/1-2/81

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The online version of this article can be found at:

05 Nava (jr/d) 8/5/02 1:36 pm Page 81

Cosmopolitan Modernity

Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of

Difference

Mica Nava

cerned with questions of cosmopolitan democracy and global

governance or with travel and migration. The historical trajectory

of the cosmopolitan imagination and vernacular expressions in everyday

local life and culture has, on the whole, been neglected. My project here

will be to trace some of the complex historical detail and identify com-

ponents of the contradictory dynamic which have contributed to the emerg-

ence of an uneven yet popular modern cosmopolitan consciousness. This

will indicate how a more cultural studies and feminist approach can shift

the parameters of the theoretical debate, not only about the cosmopolitan

but also about the overlapping terrain of ‘difference’. I will argue that the

socio-political conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism need to be expanded

in order to consider a wider range of practices, aspirations and identiﬁ-

cations, among them, in particular, those associated with the speciﬁcity of

gender. An exploration of these elements and their contribution to the

historical formation of distinctive western cosmopolitan imaginaries enables

us to make better sense of the past and can also enhance our understand-

ing of the contemporary global conjuncture.

The geo-historical focus of my analysis is England, predominantly

metropolitan London, in the ﬁrst decades of the 20th century. The cultural

mood I explore is associated with modernity. As a historical-conceptual

framework, modernity has been notoriously contested, particularly in

relation to its periodization and boundaries (see O’Shea, 1996, for a review

of the debate). Nevertheless, despite the looseness of the term, some

versions (e.g. Berman, 1983) provide a useful starting point for a study of

Theory, Culture & Society 2002 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),

Vol. 19(1–2): 81–99

[0263-2764(200204)19:1–2;81–99;023248]

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M UCH OF the recent debate about cosmopolitanism has been con-

05 Nava (jr/d) 8/5/02 1:36 pm Page 82

82 Theory, Culture & Society 19(1–2)

the modern history of a cosmopolitan structure of feeling insofar as they

emphasize the ﬂuidity and excitement of modern urban life, physical

mobility and encounters with strangers, transformations in culture and

public space, and, above all, the advent of a new modern consciousness: a

psychic, social and visceral readiness to engage with the new, with differ-

ence. This was the broad conceptual frame for my earlier work on the

cultures of commerce and the associated expansion of the social, economic

and imaginative horizons of women (Nava, 1996), which in turn alerted me

to the signiﬁcance of cosmopolitanism as one aspect of modernity. In this

irregular conﬁguration in English culture, transnational identiﬁcations and

an interest in abroad and cultural difference – the allure of elsewhere and

others – increasingly became part of the way of making sense of and embrac-

ing the modern world (Nava, 1998). Cosmopolitan modernity, as I have

called this network of attitudes in order to emphasize its transactions with

the popular urban worlds of commerce, entertainment and cultural produc-

tion, was also a dialogic psychic formation which, I shall argue, developed

in part out of a revolt against the conservatism and narrow national identiﬁ-

cations of the parental culture. In this respect it was both of and against

mainstream Englishness.

Signs of the Cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitanism as an ideal to be aspired to surfaced unexpectedly for

me in the process of trawling the archive of the London department store

Selfridges for evidence of the culture of Empire in the years before the First

World War. 1 The store was emblematic in a number of ways and its archive

offers a useful insight into commercial culture of the period. Founded in

1909, Selfridges was considered a ‘monument to modernity’ and was one of

the most frequented tourist venues in London. It was reputed to have

attracted an astonishing one and a quarter million visitors in the week it

opened. 2 A combination of theatrical emporium and leisure garden at which

everybody was welcome, it was the brain child of the self-made American

retailing entrepreneur Gordon Selfridge, 3 who was not only a commercial

visionary and path-breaking publicist, but also a proliﬁc writer and, less

predictably, a supporter of women’s suffrage, a promoter of equal oppor-

tunities for women shop workers, and most signiﬁcantly in this context, an

ardent cosmopolitan. So instead of uncovering the expected signs of patri-

otism and a reiteration of pride in Britain’s imperial role in the world, what

the archive investigation revealed were continuous eulogies in support of

the cosmopolitan, of what Selfridge in his newspaper columns and adver-

tising campaigns identiﬁed as a modern, inclusive, progressive world-view

which quite deliberately challenged the traditional outlooks, insularity and

exclusivity that he so disliked – and which, as an American magnate and

public ﬁgure, he was so often forced to endure in London society of the time.

‘The cosmopolite is a citizen of the world’, he wrote ‘free from national limi-

tations and prejudices.’ 4 His practical support of the cosmopolitan was

expressed not only in the store’s publicity – he advertised in 26 languages

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Nava – Cosmopolitan Modernity 83

and claimed his store was the most cosmopolitan commercial institution in

the world at which all nationalities and races were welcome – but also in

the more general culture and merchandise that it promoted.

It is possible to read Selfridge’s cosmopolitanism as part of a global-

izing commercial agenda. No doubt ﬁnancial gains were made as a result.

However, given the phenomenal business and social success of the store,

his attitude should also be registered as an indication of a substantial strand

of contemporary opinion. The appeal to cosmopolitan ideals will therefore

inevitably have found resonance amongst his customers. The market is a

much more sensitive indicator of popular mood in this respect than, for

example, established literary texts, exhibitions, government records and

school teaching materials, all used frequently by historians and cultural and

political theorists. Commercial culture, precisely because of its respon-

siveness to the market, and to the preferences of women customers in

particular, can yield information about processes and preferences not easily

extracted from more conventional archival sources.

Selfridge’s cosmopolitanism, moreover, needs to be seen as part of a

wider structure of attitude, part of a more general embrace of the modern

which placed it deﬁnitively at odds with more conservative regimes of belief

of the time. Judith Walkowitz, in her recent work, conﬁrms the association

between cultural modernism and a new consciousness of London as an

increasingly cosmopolitan centre during this period. 5 A good example of the

dialogic reactive relationship between what was often a nationalist tra-

ditionalism at one pole and a more transnational modernizing impulse at

the other, and which extended across a number of overlapping cultural

spheres, was a public feud between Gordon Selfridge and G.K. Chesterton

which lasted for over 15 years and reached one of its periodic eruptions in

1912. Chesterton was a well-known and proliﬁc writer of journalism and

ﬁction, a staunch inventor and defender of English patriotism and tradition

(see Chesterton, 1987 [1904]), an opponent of votes for women, a noted anti-

Semite (as a protagonist in the 1912 Marconi scandal) and a critic of cosmo-

politanism (which for him was associated with Jewishness and decadence)

– yet, despite all this, he also deﬁned himself as a socialist, because he was

militantly opposed to large-scale capitalist organizations and supported the

small tradesman (Ward, 1944). Chesterton much disliked Selfridge’s vulgar

American style, giant commercial enterprise and cosmopolitan aspirations,

and on this occasion published in his weekly Daily News column a corus-

cating attack on – as he put it – ‘the unending hell’ of the large department

store and its mindless women shop workers, whom he described as automa-

tons, ‘like dress models without heads’, who nevertheless, according to him,

managed to emasculate their male colleagues (Chesterton, 1912). It is not

irrelevant to draw attention to Chesterton’s anxieties about the increasing

power of women since they alert us to the coexistence of misogyny and xeno-

phobia in this type of psychosocial viewpoint. 6 Chesterton’s imagery,

expressed at the highpoint of militant suffrage struggle, invokes a psycho-

analytic reading of fetishism and fear of castration while also falling

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84 Theory, Culture & Society 19(1–2)

squarely within the cultural convention of the period in which menacing

machine-like qualities are projected onto women (Huyssen, 1986).

Although Chesterton’s article was not an explicit attack on Selfridge’s store,

there is no doubt from the ensuing correspondence that it was widely inter-

preted as such. Selfridge’s response was to defend his staff vigorously. Two

hundred of his women employees also wrote to the press protesting at

Chesterton’s insulting ‘diatribe’ and defending the progressive inclusive

policies and conditions of their workplace (Women Workers at Selfridges,

1912).

Selfridge’s support for the cosmopolitan – for a broader world view –

was also apparent in the store’s promotion of the modern and modernist

cultures and products associated with foreign art and popular entertainment

forms. Among the speciﬁc commercial developments of this kind was a new

fashion in clothing and domestic décor which emerged in this same period

before the First World War (Nava, 1998). Its relevance in this context is that

it derived from a complex meshing – a condensation – of two distinct

‘foreign’ traditions, which blurred both in the public imagination and the

commercial domain to form a generic popular cosmopolitan style. The new

fashion was inspired both by the brilliantly coloured erotic oriental themes

and imagery introduced to London by the avant-garde Russian Ballet in

1911, and the concurrent globally fashionable and more popular styles,

colours and body postures of the tango with evocations of an exoticized

Hispanic America. These styles of heterogeneous ‘other’ origin, which

combined in the context of the department store, represented both a new

kind of interest in abroad and also – signiﬁcantly – a new, more sexually

assertive, femininity.

Among the speciﬁc narratives alluded to by these fashions was

Schéhérazade, the most successful and iconic of all the Russian Ballet reper-

toire, which, in addition to being visually and choreographically innovative

and spectacular, was based on the controversial opening chapter of the

Arabian Nights. This is the story of the Shah’s wives, who, while the Shah

and his courtiers are away on a hunting trip, order some of the male African

slaves of the household to be smuggled into their compound disguised as

dancing girls in order to seduce them. Rife with sexual anomalies, the ballet

depicts the seduction – the day-long sexual ‘clipping, coupling and carous-

ing’ as Richard Burton, the notorious 19th-century translator of the book,

put it – and the massacre which occurs when the Shah and his hunters

return unexpectedly. The slaves in this contradictory narrative are not only

dressed as women; in the performances of this period they were also

blacked-up. Leon Bakst’s original designs codiﬁed the Persian women as

white and their lovers as black. 7

The tango was similarly controversial. Established as a ﬂourishing

cultural industry in pre-First World War Europe and America, with tango

teas, tango exhibitions and tango academies as well as tango fashions – all

promoted in the commercial sector – the dance was frequently taught by

young male teachers from South America, the Caribbean and southern

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