Dear colleagues
May I add to the cluster of book-promoting emails and draw your attention to
this one, published at the end of last year.
VISCERAL COSMOPOLITANISM: GENDER, CULTURE AND THE NORMALISATION OF DIFFERENCE
by Mica Nava, Berg (2007)
http://www.bergpublishers.com/Products/9781845202439/tabid/2093/Default.aspx
The book makes a contribution to the study of cosmopolitanism by exploring
everyday English urban cosmopolitanism and foregrounding the gendered,
imaginative and empathetic aspects of positive engagement with cultural and
racial difference. It
traces cosmopolitanism from its marginal status at the beginning of the
twentieth century to its relative normalisation today. Scholars have tended
to ignore the oppositional cultures of antiracism and social inclusivity.
This study redresses this imbalance and offers an account of the uneven
history of vernacular cosmopolitanism.
REVIEWS:
1. Mica Nava's explorations, sustained over many years, of neglected yet
mundane features of relations and attitudes regarding the 'other' in Britain,
is an important contribution to the analyses which challenge the reduction of
the race
question to a simple black and white issue. Her focus on the visceral and the
vernacular in cosmopolitanism is a timely corrective to the abstract
generalisations which today feed a resurgence of the demonisation of the
other as part of geopolitical strategies for the securitisation of society.
Couze Venn, Nottingham Trent Univerity
2. In this readable and provocative book, Mica Nava traces a persistent
expression of domestic cosmopolitanism in London throughout the twentieth
century. Visceral Cosmopolitanism significantly revises our assumptions about
the 'insular' long weekend of the interwar period and deepens our
understanding of the New Britain of the millennium.
Judith R. Walkowitz, Johns Hopkins University
3. Mica Nava's groundbreaking book expands the theoretical debate about
cosmopolitanism. In a clear narrative which combines historical, cultural and
contemporary political analysis with biography and autobiography, she makes
the case for cosmopolitanism as transforming, rather than negating, everyday
racialised boundaries.
Nira Yuval-Davis, University of East London
CONTENTS:
I. INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1
Cosmopolitanism, Everyday Culture and Structures of Feeling: The Intellectual
Framework of the Book
II. COSMOPOLITANISM AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE 1910s-1920s
Chapter 2
The Allure of Difference: Selfridges, the Russian Ballet and the Tango
Chapter 3
'The Big Shop Controversy': Ideological Communities and the
Chesterton-Selfridge Dispute
III. DIFFERENCE AND DESIRE IN 1930s-1940s
Chapter 4
The Unconscious and Others: Inclusivity, Jews and the Eroticisation of
Difference
Chapter 5
White Women and Black Men: The Negro as Signifier of Modernity in Wartime
Britain
IV. COSMOPOLITANISM IN POSTCOLONIAL BRITAIN
Chapter 6
Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually: Race in Postwar Fiction, Film
and Social Science
Chapter 7
Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed: Romance, Race and the Reconfiguration of
the Nation
V. CONCLUSION: ACTUALLY EXISTING COSMOPOLITANISM
Chapter 8
A Love Song to our Mongrel Selves: Cosmopolitan Habitus and the Ordinariness
of Difference.
Mica Nava
Professor of Cultural Studies
School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies
University of East London
University Way
London E16 2RD
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