After the Cosmopolitan?

Multicultural Cities and the Future of Racism

Michael Keith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134294527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Geografía humana

After the Cosmopolitan? argues that both racial divisions and intercultural dialogue can only be understood in the context of the urbanism through which they are realized.

All the key debates in cultural theory and urban studies are covered in detail:

• the growth of cultural industries and the marketing of cities
• social exclusion and violence
• the nature of the ghetto
• the cross-disciplinary conceptualization of cultural hybridity
• the politics of third-way social policy.

In considering the ways in which race is played out in the world's most eminent cities, Michael Keith shows that neither the utopian naiveté of some invocations of cosmopolitan democracy, nor the pessimism of multicultural hell can adequately make sense of the changing nature of contemporary metropolitan life.

Authoritative and informative, this book will be of interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers of anthropology, cultural studies, geography, politics and sociology.

1 Introduction

Globalisation, urbanism and cosmopolitanism fever

At the outset of the twentieth century 10 per cent of the population of the world lived in cities. In 2000 this proportion had risen to just over 50 per cent, and by 2025 the total urban population of the world is predicted to increase again in relative terms and to grow in absolute terms to a figure in excess of 5 billion worldwide.¹ These urban concentrations invariably involve flows of culture that challenge the ethical settlement of the city, become a key driver of economic change, raise massive questions about the nature of city transformation, and become the fault lines of various kinds of social division.

The process of urbanisation foregrounds encounter and contact in the metropolis. Through both the demographic movements of migration that generate the multiracial metropolis and the globalising networks of sentiment and identification that link places of residence to a transnational sensibility, the cities of the 21st century will increasingly be characterised by the challenges of multiculturalism. In this sense the analysis and dynamics of metropolitan cultural change has never been of more pressing importance for the research agenda of the social sciences. This volume attempts to conceptualise these dynamics.

It does so by framing the problems of multiculturalism within the languages of urbanism and city change. In doing so, it is consciously attempting to study culture from ‘up close’, but placing it within a context that is common, if not exactly universal to the challenges of multiculturalism across the globe. There has been a tendency to privilege national context (most commonly the United States or Britain in the anglophone academy), with relatively little attention paid to cross-national comparison² in attempts to generalise about contemporary multiculturalism. Such exceptionalism can tend to privilege the parochial. However, it is equally the case that attempts to work comparatively at an international level can alternatively privilege either that which is easily measurable or generalisations about ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ groupings that border on caricature or stereotypes.³ Culture and the dynamics of cultural change demand sensitive engagement and description, frequently over extended periods of time where nuances of language and meaning not only signify but are also causally significant. The book attempts to address this by suggesting that, by placing cultural change within international contexts of city transformation and common understandings of urbanism, it is possible to ‘frame’ the cosmopolitan city transnationally. Debates that address the configurations of citizenship, belonging and identity (or racism, intolerance and social exclusion) may emerge through academic engagements that may be largely ethnographic in nature and rooted in specific sites, but simultaneously invite comparative analysis.

The relation between national and transnational is changing. These changes disrupt, displace and dislocate conventional models of national sovereignty. This does not mean national sovereignty is eclipsed; even within contemporary models of transnational justice the nation state remains central to both the practice and the theorising of what David Held has described as cosmopolitan democracy.⁴ However, the disruptions to notions of national sovereignty create new problemat-isations of how we think about urbanism, and the realisation of cultural difference in patterns of residence, work and social organisation. The contemporary metropolis is consequently one key to the narratives through which twenty-first-century multiculturalism will become visible. Consequently, this volume attempts to develop a framework for analysing the specificity of particular urban settings whilst not losing sight of the routed nature of urbanism and the contingencies of forces of ethnic identity formation and racist intolerance.

Processes of globalisation have been examined across a range of disciplines, most commonly within a principally economistic frame of reference.⁵ Yet in recent years – across the stakeholder communities of the cities of the world – there has been a growing recognition of the role that culture plays in determining the boundaries of political debate, driving economic transformation, structuring urban citizens’ understanding of their homeplace and creating forms of social division. In this context there has been a growing fascination in the academy, in disciplines of political theory, cultural studies, anthropology, geography and sociology, with the nature and the potential of the category of the cosmopolitan.⁶

Cosmopolitanism fever

The provenance of this interest in the cosmopolitan is varied. In political theory the search for new forms of liberal government in the face of intensifying forces of economic globalisation reinvigorate a debate about the international order and the political settlement at different geographical scales of analysis below it.⁷ In cultural theory and anthropology the routed nature of cultural flows reconfigures theor-isations of the location of cultural production and the forms, norms and ethics of cultural creolisation.⁸ Globalisation reconfigures the ethnographic locale.⁹ The flows of migration frame the debate slightly differently,¹⁰ whilst the concerns of postcolonial theory challenge both the dominant cartographies of knowledge and cultural value and the metaphors of the ‘west and the rest’ that are sometimes deployed to make sense of them.¹¹

What such debate foregrounds is the sense in which transnational alliances and multicultural demographics reconfigure relationships between forms of social organisation and senses of unity. The degree to which new political imaginaries (at global, transnational, national, regional or metropolitan scales of analysis) are necessary under conditions of globalisation, for some might suggest the need for a constitutional patriotism or even what Craig Calhoun has described as a level of ‘peopleness’.¹² For others the very appeal to the global creates a horizon of possibilities that transcends the limits of nationalism and appeals to what can be described as ‘cosmopolitics’.¹³

All of these slightly different concerns share a routing through debates that foreground the ethical settlement of the good society in contexts of global flows of people, capital and values. They draw on an understanding of the times and places when languages of solidarity displace, disrupt and fracture, or reinforce, complement or amplify, languages of rights. To do so in turn demands taking seriously the spaces and the times when these languages become speakable, effective or causally significant, and the times and places when these languages are silenced. Given the epochal move towards an accelerated urbanism, this locates such debate within the contemporary city. An understanding of the dynamics of contemporary urbanism is consequently imperative for a consideration of both the potential of the cosmopolitan and its actually existing realisations.

Perhaps most importantly, such thinking points towards a reinsertion of the ethically contested nature of the cosmopolitan city in both its local and international realisations. Locally, the city does not merely curate the exotica of difference, it realises transnational (or global) politics in its streets and neighbourhoods, and reveals the contested and limited nature of the national settlement in its schoolrooms and town halls. Likewise, the nature of the local settlement of the multicultural highlights the limits of various sovereignties that stretch from the domestic arrangements of marriage through the public arenas of education to the welfare state rights of migrant minorities and the relatives of second- and third-generation diaspora communities.

Internationally, as Chetan Bhatt and Amy Chua¹⁴ have pointed out, geopolitical realities (rarely discussed) undermine both casual theorisation of ‘the west and the rest’ and sloppy descriptions of the curatorial metropolis of difference. Transnational political traces inhabit the cultures of diaspora populations of the contemporary metropolis. For Bhatt the tensions of the BJP’s incipient nationalism stray into the second- and third-generation politics of migrant communities from India. The routed traces of American and Saudi money underscore some forms of transnational Wahhabi radicalisation and international responses to it. For Chua the privileged positions of ethnic or migrant minorities within the crony capital-isms of South-East Asia or the post-communist world of Iron Curtain nations creates explosive tensions between democracy, ethnic hatred and economic transition. Majority rule and ethnicised minority affluence sit uneasily alongside one another. Similarly, the contemporary realisations of politics in Central America and postcolonial regimes in Africa play directly to the flows of migration in Europe and North America, cutting across the sometime spurious distinctions of refugee movements and economic migrants. The temporalities and spatialities of the postcolonial consequently disrupt a transparent understanding of time and space through the legacies of old empire in the crevices of the city and the architectures of city power in the structuring of ‘progress’.¹⁵ The metaphor of the new empire refigures both the theorisation of the global and the explanations of forms of twenty-first-century intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.¹⁶

The cosmopolitan city?

Although the city marks the most intense points of transnational collisions of culture and demography produced by globalising change, the loosely convened interdisciplinary field of urban studies has been relatively slow to consider the problems of cosmopolitanism. This is interesting, because in a search for alternative geographical scales of analysis, in a world where the nation state is at least weakened, the city is commonly invoked as an alternative register of political analysis. This is most prominent in discussions that consider the ethical challenge cosmopolitanism raises for social organisation and political action.¹⁷

Because transnational and global flows bring together very different ways of thinking, value and self-organisation, a notion of ethical contest is central to conceptualising the cosmopolitan, but also to a description of the forms of cultural encounter that characterise the cities of the twenty-first century. Yet in contemporary human sciences both the ethical and the cultural are two of the most contested terms in the vocabulary of the academy.

If we accept that the banal demography of global city change brings together both different peoples and different cultures, the challenge of cosmopolitan cities will inevitably become one that is simultaneously about both values and analytical rigour. In this sense the city is made visible through an analytic lens of the academic that may not only consider the political economy of migration, but also either erase or privilege the markers of minor difference triggered by processes of migration. A focus on religious practice, lifestyle, taste, sexuality, diasporic sentiment, community organisation, cuisine, aesthetic and cultural production and reproduction foregrounds certain kinds of difference. This process of making visible is a relation of power, as it is likewise when precisely the same differences are either stigmatised or erased in languages and practices of intolerance and racism.¹⁸ Hence for Jacques Derrida, when we consider the cosmopolitan future, ‘ethics is hospitality’ and is linked to the notions of the state after the end of sovereignty, and is tied explicitly to the future of the city after globalisation.¹⁹ Consequently, whilst globalisation promotes multicultural diversity, multicultural diversity brings with it a debate about the contesting of the social and political settlement of the city that runs throughout the chapters of this volume.

In this sense the book is not straightforwardly demographic. It takes as a first starting point that races, ethnicities and identities cannot be taken for granted as objects to be studied, precisely because the meanings of race, ethnicity and identity are context-dependent. A language of ethnicity privileges processes of collective identity formation. A language of race foregrounds the manner in which visible and cultural differences are recognised as source of both stigma and collective rights. The book takes as a second starting point that the urban is similarly empirically straightforward but conceptually chimeric. Concentrations of settlement in the metropolis bring to the fore challenges about the manner in which we think about, regulate and conceptualise the metropolis itself.

Such a stance foregrounds the relationship between empirical research that engages with the rapidly changing flux of the city and the theoretical apparatus that is used to make sense of this flux. This book attempts to address concerns that transcend the single city but are distinctive features of contemporary urbanism. In doing so it is necessary to conceptualise the particular relationship between empirical specificity, categoric generalisation and social and cultural theory. The spirit in which it is written attempts to combine a Chicago School commitment to the city’s empirical detail with a Frankfurt School commitment to the notion of critique.²⁰ The book argues for the necessity of combining deep empirical engagement with the material objects of city cultures with an awareness of the situation of such objets trouvés within the systems of cataloguing and taxonomising that is the nature of academic research.

In this sense the book draws on a sense of perennial wonder at the ability of the contemporary city to generate new forms of social organisation, new forms of cultural expression that draw on forms of global connection and local expression. Such a wonder demands an academic engagement with the empirical complexity and political creativity of the manner in which individuals and groups shape the frequently invisible spaces of the city. The rapidly accelerated pace of twenty-first-century city change provides what Pierre Bourdieu represented as a multiplicity of forms of bodily hexis: certain styles and forms of life mediated by culture within the city. The habitus of cultural forms in the contemporary city is consequently plural-ised at a rate of change that can defy academic categorisation and generalisation. In this sense the book argues that we should be suspicious of an analytical approach that privileges the chronological ordering of city life. The notion that space might be authored by time is potentially undermined by an analytical focus that recognises as well the different temporalities of the spaces of contemporary urbanism. A study of the spaces of the city might generate different chronologies simultaneously present within the flux of urbanism. Such a stance leads to an examination of the two starting points of the volume and the research that informs the substance of subsequent chapters.

Starting point 1. Race thinking and the city: the mimetic nature of cultural difference and racism

This book is written against a notion that leaves culture as a mere residual effect of the great forces of capitalist modernity, against a notion that underplays the significance of socially constructed divisions. But it is also written against the sort of analytical perspective that, by studying the object of cultural difference bound up in the concept of the multicultural city, turns that object into a thing in itself.

In this sense a key theme that echoes throughout the chapters of this book is the process of iteration, a notion that ethnic specificity and cultural difference are invariably on the move. What is seen at the heart of processes of race making and race thinking is the process of mimesis, a process that in principle has no beginning and no end. It involves an endless iteration between identification and categorisation, commonalities casting themselves as differences, different trajectories becoming visible and then disappearing.

Common sense might suggest to us that if the experience of multiculture is common to the world then it should be possible in a laboratory-like fashion to compare the different experiences of cosmopolitanism that define the contemporary nations of the world.²¹ Yet such a model would suggest a notion of firm demographic units coming into contact with receiving societies where the relative paths of success and failure, assimilation and rejection, model and stigma, might be tracked back historically and geographically to be explained analytically in terms of a quasi-chemical relationship between the variables of migrant culture and receiving societies. Such a logic generally takes a notion of assimilation as (explicitly or implicitly) teleological – an end point of the social processes of migration.

In contrast, this volume takes as a starting point the notion that demography is more fragile than this. It also suggests that in the spirit of critical theory the temporal and the spatial constitution of city life are themselves subject to analytical scrutiny.²² Consequently, throughout the volume I explore the tensions between languages of belonging and forces of power that make racial subjects visible. The city is commonly crucial to the mediation of such tensions. The forms of collective identity and the fabrication of racial subjects (or subjectification) that result are not necessarily commensurable one with another in any particular setting. But their incommensurabilities are mediated by the settings within specific patterns of labour demand and residential settlement.

The book questions efforts to general...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• 2: The mirage at the heart of the myth?
• 3: After the cosmopolitan?
• 4: The ghetto
• 5: Ethnic entrepreneurs and street rebels
• 6: The street
• 7: The cultural quarter
• 8: Tagging the city
• 9: The cartographies of community safety
• 10: The plan
• Notes