Mica Nava

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 feminized 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.

Thoughts on contextualizing practice

Abstract This article looks at the contextualization of practice both in relation to the requirements of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and as part of a longer history of reflexivity in textual and visual culture. It offers suggestions for the analysis of practice in relation to its different moments and levels — production, text and consumption — and focuses on the notions of ‘structure of feeling’, ‘jouissance’ and ‘affect’ to see whether they can help explain the sensations involved in consuming practice.

Sometimes antagonistic, sometimes ardently sympathetic: Contradictory responses to migrants in postwar Britain

Most sociological and anthropological studies of UK race relations produced in 1950s stress the wide spectrum of British reactions to new migrants. Yet, recent historians have tended to focus on the racism and xenophobia of the research and period, on the ‘antagonisms’. The ‘ardently sympathetic’ responses referred to by Ruth Glass in 1960, which were evident also in 1950s fiction, film and radical political movements, have often been ignored or misrepresented in order to construct a more dystopian picture. This article examines the cultural and sociopolitical context of the time and argues that the mood was more critical of British insularity and more anti-racist than many recent historians of 1950s Englishness and race relations research allow. This was, in part, the influence of dislocated intellectuals from postwar continental Europe and the commonwealth, white and black, who, radicalised by anti-fascism and decolonisation, contributed to a growing cosmopolitanism.

Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society

This is a big book – with 500 pages of text and forty-two illustrations – and it makes big claims about the historical formation of post-war Britain. By focusing on relatively overlooked and discrete episodes, biographies and locations, Frank Mort tells a new story about sexuality and the origins of the ‘permissive’ society. The book is engagingly written, indeed quite gripping in parts, and meticulously footnoted; it draws on a wide range of sources and brings together the author’s research of the last two decades. In many ways, therefore, it is a very significant work. Its strength lies in the scholarly and imaginative uncovering of detail and the prominence given to the geopolitics of place. Its weakness is in the tenuousness of the main argument, especially as applied to the first few chapters. Mort takes as his starting point the 1950s call by the American sexologist Kinsey for the reform of Britain’s laws on prostitution and homosexuality. This sets the scene for a cultural history of transgressive and marginal sex during the decade between the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 and the Profumo affair in 1963. This, Mort claims, will challenge the ‘foundational myths’ of the ‘permissive society’, that is, those historical accounts which maintain that the 1960s represented a revolutionary and progressive break with earlier attitudes to sexual morality associated with increased affluence, particularly among the young. ‘Events and characters in my book profoundly question the idea that the sexual regime of the 1960s was progressive,’ he writes (5). The targeted historians include Hobsbawm, Judt, Marwick and Weeks. But Mort is wrong to set his narrative against, rather than imbricated with, these others. Hobsbawm, for instance, explicitly points to a longer and overdetermined history: ‘[sex], in all its manifold forms, did not have to be discovered . . . but [in the 1960s] it changed its public character’. He would be unlikely to disagree with Mort’s central contention that the sexual climate of the post-war era continued to exhibit Victorian mores and the influence of the upper class, since there were many contributing factors to the culture of the 1960s. But, unlike Hobsbawm, Mort insists on one main story. His focus is on London’s ‘pleasure economy’ and the sexual cultures singled out by Kinsey. He also centre-stages the geosocial elements of the city: the physical proximity of Soho, as sex centre, to the main areas of consumer culture and government. In addition, Mort’s narrative draws on personal biographies and media representations of the various scandals of the decade. The knowledges of sexologists, doctors, lawyers and social workers also contribute to the discursive frame. His significant actors are ‘young single women, Caribbean newcomers and a