The dialectics of urban cosmopolitanism: between tolerance and intolerance in cities of strangers

Abstract

Cosmopolitan cities have been envisioned as colourful, aesthetically creative places at the centre of trade routes and empires, imaged in their bazaars and cafes, where spices and exotic objects are traded or avante-garde artistic and literary expatriates congregate. In the twenty-first-century world of accelerated migrations, cosmopolitan cities are made visible in the proliferation of ethnic restaurants and festivals. But despite their cultural heterogeneity, cosmopolitanism in cities remains a fragile achievement. Such cities have the potential, it seems, to erupt into violence or, on the contrary, to display an intercultural creativity that transects and transcends social divisions. Building on Humphries and Skvirskaja’s work on ‘post-cosmopolitan’ cities, the present paper compares Eastern Mediterranean cities historically famous for their cosmopolitanism like Istanbul and Thessalonika, contemporary post-Communist cities like Sarajevo or Odessa and twenty-first-century global cities like Cairo or London to ask: what makes these cities both cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan?

Keywords:

• post-cosmopolitan cities
• ethnic violence
• multicultural cities
• cosmopolitan spaces
• Britain, eastern Mediterranean

Acknowledgements

This paper builds on Werbner (2014). It was first presented at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in Montreal in 2011 on ‘Mobility and Cosmopolitanism: Complicating the Interaction between Aspiration and Practice’. I am grateful to the convenors and participants, especially Vered Amit, for their comments. I also benefited from the comments of anonymous reviewers for the journal.

Notes

1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4989202.stm Three Asian men were found guilty of killing a black man during the riots.

2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14523363, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14537483 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMxwrrLFxxo

3. There are also French-speaking elites in the capital from Togo, the DRC and French-speaking West Africa. Mattia Fumanti studied Togolese associational networks.

4. http://www.euronews.net/2011/10/10/egypt-s-christians-protest-against-riot-deaths/

5. For example, Seyla Benhabib in the US or Deniz Kandioti and Yael Navaro-Yashin in the UK.

6. Homi Bhabha (1996) coined the term ‘vernacular’ cosmopolitanism to describe such encounters on the margins, Stuart Hall (2008) speaks of cosmopolitanism from below, while in my own work (Werbner 1999) I speak of working class cosmopolitans.

7. Paul Gilroy (2004) finds multicultural conviviality in London cafes. Wasserdorf (2011) finds an ‘ethos of mixing’ in London’s Borough of Hackney, but only in public places, with some groups resented for their exclusivity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pnina Werbner

PNINA WERBNER is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Keele University.