Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference

Visceral Cosmopolitanism

Visceral Cosmopolitanism Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference

Mica Nava

Oxford • New York

First published in 2007 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Mica Nava 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Nava, Mica. Visceral cosmopolitanism : gender, culture and the normalisation of difference / Mica Nava. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-242-2 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1-84520-242-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-243-9 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 1-84520-243-0 (pbk.) 1. City and town life—England. 2. Cosmopolitanism—England. I. Title. HT133.N39 2007 306.0942—dc22 2007020714

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84520 242 2 (Cloth) 978 1 84520 243 9 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

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Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

For Maya, Sienna and Cassima Nava

Contents List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Part I Introduction 1

Cosmopolitanism, Everyday Culture and Structures of Feeling: The Intellectual Framework of the Book

3

Part II Cosmopolitanism and Commercial Culture, 1910s–1920s 2

3

The Allure of Difference: Selfridges, the Russian Ballet and the Tango

19

‘The Big Shop Controversy’: Ideological Communities and the Chesterton–Selfridge Dispute

41

Part III Difference and Desire in the 1930s–1940s 4

5

The Unconscious and Others: Inclusivity, Jews and the Eroticisation of Difference

63

White Women and Black Men: The Negro as Signifier of Modernity in Wartime Britain

75

Part IV Cosmopolitanism in Postcolonial Britain 6

7

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually: Race in Postwar Fiction, Film and Social Science Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed: Romance, Race and the Reconfiguration of the Nation

97

121

vii

viii • Contents Part V Conclusion: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism 8

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves: Cosmopolitan Habitus and the Ordinariness of Difference

133

Notes

165

Bibliography

183

Index

201

List of Figures 1 ‘Merchandise of the World’ from The Spirit of Modern Commerce: Selfridge’s Fifth Anniversary Souvenir Book, 1914 2 Léon Bakst’s costume designs for Scheherazade (1910) 3 ‘Inside London’s Coloured Clubs’, Picture Post, July 1943 4 Paul Robeson at the London Premiere of Show Boat, 1936 5 Jimmie fixes Jo’s grazed knee in A Taste of Honey 6 Kathie searches for Peter in the shabby, overcrowded rooming house in Flame in the Streets 7 Looking for Maggie in Sparrows Can’t Sing 8 Diana Family Portrait 9 Friends and relatives at Inhurst during the summer of 1947 10 Author with husband José and sons Zadoc and Orson, 1968 11 Zak Ové and Jake Nava hand out leaflets at an ANL demonstration, c.1978

23 29 77 88 101 106 108 128 147 154 158

ix

Acknowledgements This book has been a long time in the making and many people have given me valuable support and critical insight along the way. I would like to thank Ash Sharma, Jackie Botterill, Nira Yuval-Davis, Maggie Humm, Roshini Kempadoo, Jeremy Gilbert, Haim Bresheeth, Yosefa Loshitzky, Susannah Radstone, Mike Rustin, Sanjay Sharma, Ben Pitcher, Ulrike Vieten, Alan O’Shea, Barry Richards and Frank Mort, all either now or formerly at the University of East London, for helpful comments on different sections of the book and/or more generally for their collegial intellectual engagement with the project. Colleagues and friends outside my university have also made a significant contribution as critics, editors, advisors, hosts and/or discussants into the early hours: here I would like to thank Bill Schwarz, James Donald, Sallie Westwood, Suzanne Oboler, Erica Carter, Janet Holland, Lesley Caldwell, Maureen McNeil, Gita Sahgal, Gill Perry, Lucy Bland, Angela McRobbie, Sue Turnbull, Parminder Bhachu, Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, Helen Grace, Claudia Álvares, Abram de Swaan, Elliot Fratkin, Stephen Bronner, Guita Schyfter, Hugo Hiriart, Alex Fraser and Margret Tonnesmann. Members of my extended family have not only been personally supportive and added to the stock of memories and understanding over the years, some have also provided valuable critical comments on drafts of different chapters; for these multiple and varied contributions I would like to thank Zadoc Nava, Orson Nava, Jake Nava, José Nava, Mitra Tabrizian, Jreena Green, Emil Nava, Joe Nava, Kiffer Weisselberg, Alison Weisselberg, Katinka Keus, Maud Keus, Susi Reiman, Ruth Cordero, Alison Cordero, Alex Kharlamov, Artjom Kharlamov, Ina Wagner, Larry Naughton and Peter Chalk. In another register, I am indebted to my now-dead parents Marcel Weisselberg and Ankie Van der Voort Weisselberg, their sisters Erna Weisselberg Engle and Miekie Van der Voort Keus, and their friend Gertrude Wagner, for their input into the way I think and am. Many thanks to Zadoc Nava (again) for invaluable help with the image technology. Thanks to Dolf and Beverly Placzek, Joyce Egginton and Sheila Kitzinger for being such co-operative interviewees; and to Fred Redding (formerly the Selfridges Archivist) for guiding me with expertise through the recesses of the archive and drawing my attention to ‘the big shop controversy’. Thanks to Justin Dyer for his meticulous copy editing. I am grateful to the Department of Cultural Studies (now the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies) at the University of East London for the generous sabbaticals without which the book would never have been completed;

xi

xii • Acknowledgements and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for awarding matching research leave in 2003. Thanks too to the University of East London librarians for their support in tracking down hard-to-find texts, and particularly for obtaining a copy of Ruth Landes’ 1952 manuscript on race relations in Britain from the Smithsonian Institute. Drafts of the chapters have been given as papers at conferences and as funded lectures around the world, enabling me to refine my argument. Acknowledgements are due to the Research Centre in Intercommunal Studies, University of Western Sydney, Australia; Henry Luce Foundation, Clark University, USA; Metropolis Vienna Symposium, Austrian Ministry of Science; University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Mexico City University Network of Gender Studies and the British Council; Getulio Vargas Foundation, São Paolo, Brazil; University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Iberian Association of Cultural Studies; Ivan Franko National University, Lviv, Ukraine and the International Higher Education Support Program of the Open Society and Soros Foundation Network; Theory, Culture & Society Centre and the University of Helsinki, Finland; and to many UK universities (for whom the travel costs were lower). Thanks to all those people who invited me and/or engaged with my work. Some of the chapters in this book were first published in earlier versions elsewhere. Chapter 2 was published as ‘The Cosmopolitanism of Commerce and the Allure of Difference: Selfridges, The Russian Ballet and the Tango 1911–1914’, in International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1(2) (1998). Chapter 4 appeared as ‘The Unconscious and Others: Rescue, Inclusivity and the Eroticisation of Difference in 1930s Vienna’, in Caroline Bainbridge, Susannah Radstone, Michael Rustin and Candida Yates (eds), Culture and the Unconscious, London: Palgrave (2007). An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as ‘Wider Horizons and Modern Desire: The Contradictions of America and Racial Difference in London 1935–45’, in Frank Mort and Lynda Reid (eds), New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/ Politics, 37 (1999). A shorter and less-developed draft of the first third of chapter 6 was published as ‘Thinking Internationally: Gender and Representation of Racial Others in Postwar Britain’, in Third Text, 83(6: 20) (2006). Earlier versions of chapter 7 were published as ‘Diana, Princess of Others: The Politics and Romance of “Race” ’, in Re:Public (ed.), Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning, Kingswood, NSW: University of Western Sydney Press (1997) and as ‘Diana and Race: Romance and the Reconfiguration of the Nation’, in Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg (eds), Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief, London: Routledge (1999). I would like to thank the copyright holders for granting permission to reproduce the visual images in this book. Detailed acknowledgements are made in the captions. In some cases, despite every effort, the copyright holders have not been traced. They are invited to contact the publishers at the first opportunity to resolve matters.

Part I Introduction

–1– Cosmopolitanism, Everyday Culture and Structures of Feeling The Intellectual Framework of the Book

When I started the research for this book in the mid-1990s and typed ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ into the key word index at the British Library, fewer than a dozen relevant titles came up, and most of these were published over a hundred years ago.1 The more recent work consisted of a handful of publications mainly from political philosophy.2 I also came across one relevant journal article, the seminal piece by sociologist Ulf Hannerz (1990), but on the whole cosmopolitanism as a subject of intellectual interest was out of fashion. Now, in stark contrast, the British Library catalogue includes well over a thousand search results listing academic book titles and journal articles from the full spectrum of the social sciences and humanities. Many issues of journals have been devoted to the topic;3 conferences have been held; book proposals and manuscripts written and refereed; research council grants distributed; courses devised; positions taken. Tap ‘cosmopolitanism’ into Google and you will get almost a million citations. The growth, in part a reflection of geopolitical transformations, has been extraordinarily swift and dramatic. The scope of the debate in such a hot-house climate has been extensive. Cosmopolitanism throws up many potential theoretical directions and has delivered a wide range of relevant definitions and discussions.4 I don’t intend in this introduction to rehearse all these contributions, though I will refer to them where relevant. My objective here is to alert the reader to the distinctive ways in which I deploy cosmopolitanism in the course of the book: to show how the term changes not only according to the object of research – the historical episodes, texts and moments under consideration – but also according to the theoretical and political context in which the research takes place. My particular route through the historical and conceptual terrain I cover has led me to expand and orient the discussion in specific ways. Thus my concern has been to explore the relationship of cosmopolitanism to questions of ‘otherness’ and antiracism; to look at its relationship to the changing situation and imaginaries of women; to see it as a structure of feeling: as an empathetic and inclusive set of identifications; to focus on its vernacular, everyday, domestic expressions; to isolate some of its national and class specificities; and to trace its development from an oppositional culture at the beginning of the twentieth century

3

4 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism to the cultural mainstream today. These issues have been almost entirely neglected by other contributors to the debate. So what was it that prompted me so relatively early in the debate to go to the British Library in order to investigate what had been already written on cosmopolitanism? How did I become interested in the concept and the conditions of its existence? This story is relevant because it shows not only the fortuitous ways in which research leads are thrown up but also the rationale and foundation for the theoretical framework I have just outlined. This introductory chapter, which traces the contextual, incidental and intellectual development of my focus on cosmopolitanism, is complemented by the final chapter of the book, in which I narrate the autobiographical factors associated with the selection of specific topics and with the formulation of my argument. In the 1980s and early 1990s, cultural studies and cultural history, the areas in which I situate myself, were interdisciplinary intellectual fields broadly associated with marxism, feminism and postcolonial criticism and thus were dominated by a political critique (to which I subscribed) concerned with the relationship of social structures and discursive regimes to lived cultures. In this spirit my research in the late 1980s and early 1990s had moved from feminist theory to consumption and advertising (how that manoeuvre was made is revealed in Nava 1992) and thence to the socio-economic and symbolic part played by women in late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century modernity and the growth of urban consumer culture (Nava 1995, 1996). It was in this theoretical context and in pursuit of more information about this high point of modernity that I dug into the disorganised archive of the iconic London department store, Selfridges.5 It was a rich resource. Among the most interesting finds was a daily press column syndicated in several different newspapers from 1909 to 1939, often written by the American owner Gordon Selfridge himself, which included commentary on matters of cultural interest both inside and outside the store (chapters 2 and 3; Nava 1995, 1996). Particularly relevant for this introduction and the trajectory of my interest in the concept were the columns’ repeated and unexpected references to cosmopolitanism. Yet, at the time, in pursuit of information about women shoppers and the public spaces of consumption, I didn’t pay them much attention. However, in the mid-1990s, on the basis of my work on Selfridges, I was invited by the organisers of research project on Imperial Cities to contribute a paper on department stores and Empire to one of their seminars.6 The dominant view among historians and cultural geographers during the 1990s was that the years preceding World War I constituted the pinnacle of British Empire and imperial consciousness, so my contribution was expected to illustrate and confirm this. Yet the evidence in the archive led me in another direction altogether. I found no signs of patriotism or pride in Britain’s imperial rule at all. What the Selfridge newspaper columns and advertising campaigns of this period threw up instead were insistent and reiterated eulogies in support of cosmopolitanism and an inclusive, progressive outlook which

Cosmopolitanism and Everyday Culture • 5 deliberately challenged the insularity and exclusivity of London ‘society’ and the conservative sectors of the intelligentsia. Selfridge frequently expressed the opinion that the cosmopolite was a citizen of the world, free from national limitations and prejudices. Given the financial and social success of Selfridge’s store and his general responsiveness to the contemporary popular mood, it is reasonable to assume that this point of view was subscribed to by a fair proportion of his customers. Moreover, it is clear that in this instance, in this discursive register, cosmopolitanism was considered part of modern consciousness, part of the structure of feeling associated with ‘modernity’, that is to say, with a mood and historical moment which highlighted the fluidity and excitement of modern metropolitan life and culture and was characterised by a readiness to embrace the new (Berman 1983; O’Shea 1996a). Cosmopolitanism as a set of attitudes within this modernist frame signalled a loosening of national identifications and a positive engagement with difference. Linked also to the embrace of high and popular modernisms, cosmopolitanism constituted a countercultural revolt against ‘traditional’ cultural forms and regimes of belief at the time. Thus Selfridge’s cosmopolitanism foregrounds features usually absent from critical debates on the topic. His retailing philosophy and practice implied that cosmopolitanism, consumer culture and women’s interest in cultural difference and abroad were all part of the same ideological network. It was this loose worldview and its social and intellectual context which provided the intellectual starting point for the research in this book and propelled it into uncharted territory. The archival material has ensured that the ensuing research questions and the development of the argument throughout are rooted in historical particularity. They have emerged from a study of specific narratives, events and practices over the course of the century and in this respect differ from the social science work on cosmopolitanism, which is largely conceptual in origin and concerned with the present. Historians have on the whole been less interested in the topic than sociologists and political scientists (though see Walkowitz 2003 and Gilroy 2004).7 My first substantial piece of research on cosmopolitanism (chapter 2) explores the meanings of the term for Selfridge and his readers and customers in the years before World War I by studying in some detail the store’s promotion and the wider reception of two fashionable and interlinked modernist cultural phenomena, the Russian Ballet’s Scheherazade and the globally popular contemporaneous tango.8 Their significance in this context lies in the fact that each represented an exotic abroad, had a libidinous appeal for women and eroticised the ‘other’ male. Thus in the ballet Scheherazade, based on a story from the Arabian Nights, the women of the Shah’s harem, who are coded white in the contemporary designs by Bakst, seduce the black male slaves of the household while the Shah and his hunters are away. The tango also evoked a more wayward sexuality for women partly because of the sensuality of its body postures and the brilliance of its colours but also because of the reputed liaisons between young male tango teachers from South America

6 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism and their lady pupils; hence the term ‘Latin lover’. Together these cultural forms generated new fashions and ancillary merchandise in which the distinctive imageries of the oriental ballet and the Hispanic tango coalesced to form a hybrid popular cosmopolitan style of heterogeneous ‘other’ origin. Significantly, these alluring modern fashions and cultural products increasingly transformed the shape of the female body, penetrated the intimacy of the home and seeped into the imagination. They were thus incorporated into the culture of London’s shopping classes and in this respect signalled fusion, not keeping at a distance. Key among the political and theoretical points raised by chapter 2 is Edward Said’s magisterial thesis about orientalism, in which imagined orients contribute to the management, exploitation and domination of ‘others’ and the East (1978). At first glance his might appear the most appropriate theoretical framework in which to situate the promotional activities at Selfridges, but I argue that the thesis is not sufficiently polyvalent. Unlike the exoticising narratives identified by Said and other critics of orientalism, in which ‘other’ women are cast as objects of sexual desire and the oriental landscape is represented rhetorically as erotic female, the cosmopolitanism of the commercial and entertainment spheres allowed Western women, as shoppers, readers and spectators, to appropriate the narratives about cultural and racial difference for themselves. Indeed what characterises the narratives that I explore is that women are addressed as subjects. It must be remembered that the pre-World War I years were also the highpoint of militant feminism in which women were asserting themselves in multiple ways. The war and the postwar had significant consequences for the way masculinity and femininity were played out. The trauma and futility of the demographic decimation of young men gave impetus to women’s involvement in international pacifism (Montefiore 1999; Passerini 1999) and renewed their fantasies of Arab and Latin lovers, as demonstrated in hugely successful films such as The Sheik and the associated genre of popular ‘desert romance’ fiction (Melman 1988). How these developments in women’s cosmopolitan imagination and their sense of themselves impacted on the ‘other’ men is also discussed in this chapter and throughout the book. Inevitably the outcomes were in some ways contradictory. It is important to stress that the insufficiency of the postcolonial orientalist frame for my purposes is not to deny the facts of racialisation. On the contrary, racialisation has often been part of cosmopolitanism (Sharma and Sharma 2003) and this was particularly so during the early decades of the century. But my argument throughout the book is that racialisation must be understood according to its historical locality and signification. Indeed a central preoccupation of the work is to establish the variations and specificity of race relations and cosmopolitanism in London over the course of the twentieth century. Thus the cosmopolitanism of modernity, of the early decades of the century, was not about the erosion of difference. As a dialogic formation which developed in part as a revolt against ‘Englishness’ and the conservatism of imperial Britain, cultural and national differentiation remained a core dynamic.

Cosmopolitanism and Everyday Culture • 7 This is a theme which recurs in many of the literary expressions of the time: Nancy Cunard, editor of the monumental anthology Negro (1934), valued her black lover for his difference, for his greater humanity and creativity (Cunard 1968:108), while E.M. Forster’s representations of non-Englishmen as more authentic and desirable recur throughout his fiction and essays (1966 [1905], 1924). Indeed in an enigmatic yet prescient few sentence at the end of Howards End, Forster, in 1910, comments on the link between imperialism and cosmopolitanism, on the way polarised social forces influence each other. He wrote: ‘The Imperialist is not what he thinks. He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism’ (1979:315). The intensity of this dialectical relationship was to diminish over the course of the twentieth century, however, as ‘alterity’ – unclassifiable strange otherness – gradually and unevenly lost its ability to provoke and became part of everyday life (Sennett 2002). But throughout the century, empathy, hospitality, inclusivity, conviviality and the allure of difference in English culture have always coexisted with the most hostile manifestations of racialisation.9 This point is reiterated throughout the book to pre-empt misunderstanding. For very good historical reasons, historians of racial difference have focused mainly on the corrosive consequences of differentiation, on racism and xenophobia. My main concern, in contrast, is with the range of representational and emotional articulations of antiracism. As Tony Kushner has argued, ‘there is a dearth of material’ on such histories (2004:5). Chapter 3 of the book, ‘The Big Shop Controversy’, develops some of these themes but with another emphasis. Still related to cosmopolitanism in commercial culture during the early decades of the twentieth century, it explores a series of public conflicts between Gordon Selfridge and the celebrated and prolific author G.K. Chesterton, who triggered the controversy by writing an article for the press attacking the ‘unending hell’ of big shops and insulting women shop workers by comparing them to headless dress models (thus evoking the feared machine-like women of the age). Selfridge leapt to their defence and there ensued a series of angry letters to the press, among them one from 180 women employees at Selfridges criticizing Chesterton’s ‘diatribe’. What the controversy revealed was a condensation of ideological affiliations and social identifications, which, echoing the issues raised in chapter 2, were ranged along a discursive axis with the inventors and defenders of English patriotic tradition at one end and cosmopolitan modernisers at the other. Associated with these broad frameworks were different ideas not only about department stores and shop workers but also about foreigners, Jews and women: Chesterton, as his writing and biographers reveal, was not only a defender of little England and small shops, but also an unashamed antisemite and misogynist; whilst Selfridge, as part of his world outlook as a foreigner in Britain, was a proclaimed cosmopolitan and philosemite, a well-documented supporter of women’s suffrage and (as the chapter shows) a remarkably enlightened employer of women for his time. Indeed his skill at ensuring job satisfaction and performing the rituals of ‘social inclusion’ for his workers (Sennett 1999) was what earned him their loyalty in return.

8 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism In this sense the chapter also shows that ‘self-realisation’ and ‘new technologies of the self’ were in place in retailing well before the neo-liberal moment identified by du Gay (1996). However, more pertinent to the development of the argument in the book as a whole, the chapter on the big shop controversy raises questions about the social and symbolic position of Jews and the overlapping regimes of signification which encompass ‘others’ of whatever epidermal register or ‘blood’ line (and latterly, religious affiliation) the socio-political context of the moment requires.10 Furthermore it suggests a set of connections between these race issues and the changing position of women in the culture, as does chapter 2 on the Russian Ballet and the tango. These questions go on to provide the link with chapter 4 and are explored throughout the book. Chapter 4 foregrounds the unconscious factors in cosmopolitanism. A number of theorists have raised the issue of a cosmopolitan ‘disposition’ (Hannerz 1990; Urry 1995; Vertovec and Cohen 2002). Hannerz, for instance, argues that cosmopolitanism is ‘a perspective, a state of mind . . . an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness towards divergent cultural experiences (1990:238–9). But in his framework, the cosmopolitan (who seems always to be a ‘he’) has cognitive and semiotic skills which enable him to manoeuvre within new meaning systems while remaining culturally and emotionally detached. In fact the general tendency among these authors is to focus on the reflexive, the aesthetic and on social distance, ‘on seeing the world from afar’, as Szerszynski and Urry put it (2006:113). My approach, in contrast, has been to focus on the unconscious, non-intellectual, emotional, inclusive features of cosmopolitanism, on feelings of attraction for and identification with otherness – on intimate and visceral cosmopolitanism. These affectual elements in this version of cosmopolitanism are not easily explained in rational socio-cultural terms, yet psychoanalytic theory, despite its concern with matters of desire and the unconscious, has not offered very much either. As with other disciplines, the general focus of psychoanalysis has tended to be, from Freud’s work onwards, on the repudiation of otherness, rather than the unconscious dynamic involved in the attraction of difference; in explaining racism rather than antiracism. This chapter attempts to counter that neglect by culling the psychoanalytic literature for elements that can be assembled into a viable theory and, moreover, one that balances Freud’s emphasis on the masculinity of racial and ethnic conflict with an account which is able to illuminate the greater tendency of women to be inclusive and pacific. Ettinger’s notion of the symbolic ‘matrixial’ is explored in this context (2004). In the same methodological vein as the earlier chapters, chapter 4 also draws on a particular set of case histories and biographical narratives in order to see how far they too can contribute to the shaping of an explanation. In this instance the historical period is the 1930s and the location Vienna in a climate of growing fascism and antisemitism. The focus is on a number of sexual-romantic relationships between Jews and upper- and middle-class figures from Britain, the

Cosmopolitanism and Everyday Culture • 9 US and Holland, not Jewish but all ‘pro-Jew emotionally . . . as part of [their] antifascism’, as Richard Crossman put it (1946:27). Among them were the psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner, writer Jan Struther, and future leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell. Most of them were not only pro-Jew emotionally; they were also prepared to put their lives at risk because of their political commitment to people from beyond their immediate social and national communities. In the exploration of this dynamic another unexpected and recurring feature of early emotional experience emerged: the autobiographical and biographical narratives of several of these figures, particularly Gardiner and Struther, include notably similar accounts of neglectful mothers and loving relationships with servants. Nancy Cunard, whose story is threaded through the book, had comparable early experiences (Chisholm 1981) as did Princess Diana (chapter 7). There is of course no inevitable connection between such childhood events and a heightened and eroticised political consciousness about racism in adulthood, but in some of these cases the links are persuasively suggested by the protagonists themselves. Chapter 5 returns to the territory of London and the UK and explores the specific nature of the meaning of epidermal difference during the interwar and war years. Between 1942 and 1945 many thousands of black American servicemen were stationed in the UK and received, on the whole, a remarkably warm welcome from across the class spectrum of the indigenous population, and particularly from women, with whom many developed romantic and sexual relations. As US General Eisenhower put it, ‘The British girl would go to a movie or a dance with a negro quite as readily as with anyone else’ (Gardiner 1992:155). This was despite strong opposition from white US servicemen and the US Army Command, which found the encounters so subversive that all photos of interracial dancing and socialising were subjected to military censorship and prevented from being published in USA.11 This chapter explores the unanticipated ways in which the influence of 1930s US cinema, jazz and dance culture developed in the context of wartime London and suggests that ideas about ‘America’ in the English imagination served paradoxically to undermine the significance of the visual and hence to transcend US codes of epidermal difference. In contrast to the assumed sovereignty of scopic regimes in modernity, my material suggests that music, dance and voice – particularly accent – also need to be taken into account (in addition to the socio-political climate) in order to make sense of the relative insignificance of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ during those years. Thus for many people in wartime England, black GIs were perceived first and foremost as American. In this instance, as in the others examined in the book, women displayed a greater sense of inclusivity, both reflexive and emotional, and were in general more hospitable than were the men. This is confirmed by Kushner’s research on MassObservation (2004) and the accounts of many of the US and Caribbean male migrants themselves during the middle decades of the century (White 1945; Pilkington 1988; James 2003; Levy 200412), thus again pointing to the specificity of the UK

10 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism experience and confirming the argument that ‘race’ and pigmentation have signified in distinctive ways in Britain, where social status has tended to be determined by cultural capital and habitus – by class and modes of speech and being rather than skin colour and caste (see also Webster [later Kitzinger] 1955; Little 1972; chapters 6 and 8 below).13 Thus, in contrast to the US, in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s the image of the ‘negro’ was more likely to be associated with modernity and the city – with jazz and swing and the Hollywood landscape of glamour and opportunity – than with segregation and slavery. In this respect, chapter 5 also represents a theoretical challenge to the thesis of ‘Americanisation’ in that Britain did not simply follow the USA in its race relations, despite its enthusiastic adoption of many other aspects of American popular and civic culture. This was partly because its moviegoing population (largely young, working-class and female) appropriated America’s cinematic narratives in diverse and often contrary ways, sometimes to undermine the cultural authority of the educated classes. In general, then, chapter 5 argues for a version of interwar English modernity which was decreasingly deferential and increasingly cosmopolitan and hence also at odds with the more conservative versions proposed by, for instance, Alison Light (1991). However in common with Light, the chapter confirms that women played a central part in the socio-cultural reconfiguration of the period. Chapter 6 is part of a section on the postcolonial. It developed in response to an essay by the black British novelist and political essayist Caryl Phillips, who claimed that most white British writers of fiction and drama in the 1950s and 1960s ignored questions of race and the growing presence of black migrants from the commonwealth. Even the exceptional cases could not engage imaginatively with a black character, particularly male, without ‘thinking sexually’, he claimed (Phillips 2004:6). My argument in chapter 6 is that his focus was too narrow, that white women novelists and film makers were a good deal more interested in exploring the experience of non-white immigrants and, moreover, less inclined to sexualise racial others than were the male authors of the time – both black and white. As the work of women showed, they were more likely to be ‘thinking internationally’, in Doris Lessing’s phrase (1957:22). This is perhaps not surprising given the probable ratio of encounters during these years, when 85% of immigrants from the former colonies were men, though, as I have already pointed out, women’s sense of hospitality was determined by other factors as well. The research of sociologists and anthropologists about the newcomers reveals similarly distinctive approaches. Although on the whole antiracist and partisan in their analysis of migration – ‘I am not dispassionate on this subject,’ wrote Ruth Glass (1960:xi) – some male sociologists were astonishingly disparaging about the white women who went out with black migrants. Michael Banton in particular (1955, 1959) described these women as (inter alia and over several pages) nymphomaniacs, liars and thieves, psychologically abnormal and rotten to the core, thus displaying simultaneously both misogyny and, more covertly, racism by implying that black

Cosmopolitanism and Everyday Culture • 11 men could appeal only to the most abject of women. The women social scientists of the time, while constituting only a small minority of academics, were nevertheless over-represented in the field of race relations because, as one of them put it, ‘women identified with marginalisation’.14 They were therefore more empathetic, often indeed ‘ardently sympathetic’ (Glass 1960:3), and more astute. Judith Henderson (1960), for instance, pointed to the advantages for both white women and black men in mixed relationships; she recognised them as a form of proto-feminism which advanced the status of women whilst also benefiting the men (see also chapter 5). As Guyanese author Ras Makonnen put it, ‘We recognised that the dedication of some of the [white] girls to our cause was an expression of equal rights for women. One way of rejecting the oppression of men was to associate with blacks’ (quoted in Gilroy 1987:163). Thus Makonnen recognised that black men and white women were similarly located in the overlapping discourses of white and male superiority. In this respect his views anticipated the parallel and interlinked developments that were to take place over the following decades between black and feminist politics and were to lead to the destabilisation of race and gender hierarchies. His reading was therefore more prescient and more optimistic than was, for instance, Frantz Fanon’s, whose anxiety about the feminisation of black men in relationships with white women in the French postcolonial context is expressed in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon 1986 [1952]). But as Homi Bhabha points out in his foreword to the book, Fanon ‘ignored the question of gender difference. . . . His portrayals of white women colluded with their cultural stereotypes’ (Bhabha 1986:xxvi). Fanon’s ambivalence towards women was not untypical of the period: it was manifest also in the work of both white and black men writing in UK during the 1950s and 1960s. So Makonnen’s insight was unusual. Chapter 6 explores the representations of racial difference and interaction of this period in some detail and also does a fast-forward through changes in the race climate and identity politics from the 1970s to the 1990s. My argument in the chapter, as well as throughout the book, is that developments in urban Britain were distinctive for a number of reasons. The historical asymmetry of race mixing – a result of the predominance of male migrants and travellers, the demographic outcomes of two world wars, the trends in entertainment and commercial culture, and women’s growing independence and disposition to inclusivity – contributed to the specific UK formation. The paradigmatic limits of racial acceptance during the postwar period were often set by the way miscegenation and, more critically, ‘mixedrace’ children were located in the culture. ‘But what will become of the children?’ asks the white trade unionist father of Kathie, who wishes to marry a black man in Roy Baker’s film Flame in the Streets (1961). The reality has been a good deal less dire than he predicted. The mixed-race children of white mothers in the UK, while obviously retaining their visibility, have tended to be accepted into the indigenous culture and hence have contributed to a greater permeability of socio-cultural and

12 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism epidermal borders; they have contributed to the cosmopolitanisation of its urban centres. This is to be contrasted with the US pattern, in which mixed-race children have historically been categorised as ‘black’, thus leaving existing boundaries and the racial ‘purity’ of whites intact. The growing cultural mongrelisation and familiarity of difference combined from the late 1960s onwards with an assertive race politics agenda. During those years, identity politics – of gender as well as race – were to take a range of forms, and some of the interconnections, contradictions and ring-fencing are discussed in chapters 6 and 8. But on the whole, by the 1990s, race and cultural difference in the UK was normal and ubiquitous, even if not always accepted. This was not only the case in the urban conglomerations where most of the descendents of the colonial migrants and other visibly different foreigners lived. The whole of the country was by then accustomed to dark-skinned people as a result of high profiles in the arts, TV, commerce and politics as well as entertainment and sport.15 Moreover, ‘mixed’ relationships in Britain’s major cities (particularly London) were several times higher than in any others in the Western world and growing. The estimated figures during the 1990s (drawn mainly from Modood et al. 1997) are set out in chapter 8. This, then, was the climate in the years before the turn of the century at the moment of the romance of Diana and Dodi, the subject of chapter 7. The drama of their death was an important event in British culture in part because of its impact on the institution of the monarchy but also because it generated such unprecedented attention around the world.16 Its relevance in the context of this book arises from the interracial intercultural nature of their relationship and the popular response to it. During the week following the accident the media were predictably dominated by the detail and implications of what had happened and what would happen. The commentaries and reportage reveal in striking form how ordinary it seemed for the Princess, the mother of the future heir to the throne, to be having a love affair (and even perhaps to be pregnant and planning marriage) with a man of North African Arab Muslim descent. The relationship was widely recognised by the press and public of all political persuasions both as an act of rebellion against the traditional authorities and, at the same time, as a very modern everyday mixed-race romance. One reason why it was so normal is that Diana, like many other indigenous white women, made her material and imaginary connections with foreigners and abroad in metropolitan Britain. (Her brother in his funeral eulogy described her as ‘a very British girl who transcended nationality’.) The increasing dominance of this pattern over the century (already referred to above) is why the cosmopolitanism I describe in this book is not only visceral and vernacular but also domestic. The topographical trope of the domestic refers both to the imagination and to the more material aspects of urban geopolitics. It signals a cosmopolitanism that takes place at home, in the family, in the neighbourhood, in the interior territories of the mind and body. As such, it suggests a structure of feeling that exists independently of travel to foreign countries or knowledge of foreign languages. This is a cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism and Everyday Culture • 13 that historically has emerged from engagement with otherness and elsewhere in the local zones – the ‘micro publics’ – of the modern global city: the street, the school, the gym, the shopping centre and the dance floor (Amin 2002; Sandercock 2003). In the same way, the intimate, albeit mediated, form of TV must also be included here insofar as, cumulatively, it generates, in the familiar domesticscape of the living room, an increasing deterritorialisation of the globe by normalising difference in the spheres of music, fashion, even politics (although often against the message of individual programmes) (Hebdige 1990). These quotidian experiences are not just replays on home territory of the travels abroad undertaken by Hannerz and Urry’s cosmopolitans, for whom the foreign is maintained at a distance (Hannerz 1990; Urry 1995). The everyday domestic cultures that have developed in many of London’s neighbourhoods over the last few decades are closer to the vernacular cosmopolitanism referred to (all too briefly) by postcolonial theorists like Hall and Bhabha in that they signal the increasingly undifferentiated, hybrid, post-multicultural, lived transformations which are the outcome of diasporic cultural mixing and indeterminacy rather than plurality and coexistence (Bhabha 1996; Hall 2000; Benedictus 2005). So the continuity not only of co-residence but of interaction, of mutual acknowledgement and desire, is what marks out domestic and vernacular cosmopolitanism, and, importantly, in the case of London today, does so not only for the one-in-four Londoners born abroad (Kyambi 2005) or for the many more whose parents were, but also for the several million native British subjects who inhabit the metropolis and take pleasure in its cultural mix. This is not to deny the coexistence of xenophobia and anti-immigrant feeling, which at opportune moments is ratcheted up for political purposes. The claim here is that interwoven with such feelings is a more generous hospitable engagement with people from elsewhere, a commitment to an imagined inclusive transnational community of disparate Londoners (Derrida 2001). This is exemplified by the 2006 WE ARE LONDONERS campaign declaring the symbolic unity of the city (chapter 8). So why London? There have been specific factors in London’s geopolitical history, in addition to the imaginative and cultural conditions already referred to, which have contributed to the contemporary mood. London is not only unlike New York or Chicago in respect of its cultural-racial mixing, but also unlike Paris and Amsterdam, despite a similar history of postcolonial relations. Eric Hobsbawm makes the point that over the last thirty years or so, the centre of Paris has been transformed into a ‘gigantic gentrified bourgeois ghetto’ from which the poor and immigrants have been extruded to housing projects on the city’s suburban periphery (Hobsbawm 2002:332).17 The Amsterdam experience is similar. Although London also has its gentrified areas, wartime bombing damage and the resultant almost random scattering of municipal housing across the city has meant that the middle and working classes, foreigners and natives, have lived and been schooled in much more intimate proximity to each other (although inequalities persist). So although

14 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism some migrant groups settled close to people from their own background while others were dispersed across the city, most were schooled in a culturally mixed environment, alongside both the ‘gentrifying’, often left-wing, middle classes who had moved into some of the neglected sectors of the city (Butler with Robson 2003) and a mobile, indigenous working class that was decreasingly cohesive as it in turn moved to the outer urban fringes because of postwar slum clearance or the desire to live in the more salubrious respectable suburbs. Such familiarity between groups is one of the factors that has shifted the axis of belonging in much of contemporary London. Yet residential proximity on its own is not enough to transform consciousness; what is required is interdependence and everyday participation in the projects and spaces of the city (Amin 2002). Moreover, Tariq Modood has pointed out that ‘political mobilisation and participation, especially protest and contestation’ are themselves a means of ‘integrating’, and that this is a factor which distinguishes British patterns of migration from those in other parts of Europe (Modood 2005:69). Richard Sennett’s related argument about mutual respect and the expressive work of acknowledging others – about the importance of performing ‘mutuality’ – although made about another context, is also useful in thinking through the conditions for the viable operation of cosmopolitanism (Sennett 2004:59). Domestic, local and political practices of this kind, boosted by the emotional and libidinal economies of identification and desire, are, I would argue, the foundational elements of twenty-first-century urban cosmopolitan imaginaries and more inclusive experiences of belonging. So although the domestic cosmopolitanism of London may be confined predominantly to the geographical limits of the metropolis, imaginatively and visually it has extended the borders of what it means to be a Londoner, and indeed British. It is increasingly clear, moreover, that in relation to cosmopolitanism, as was also the case with second-wave feminism, the personal is political; affective cultures are deeply implicated in political resistance and transformation, in antiracism as much as racism. Gender and structures of feeling – the micro-narratives and encounters of the emotional, gendered and domestic everyday – must be taken into account if we are to understand the specificity of the contemporary context. This then also points us to Bourdieu’s theory of ‘habitus’ (1990), which describes the cultural environments – predominantly the conscious and unconscious practices of the family – through which attitudes and dispositions are nurtured, naturalised and transmitted across generations. A cosmopolitan habitus, it must be noted, does not consist only of feelings and practices of inclusivity; it is also the breeding ground of loss, humiliation and rebellion. These darker moods are also part of the historical picture. It is for these reasons that the final chapter of the book, chapter 8, is autobiographical. In describing the history of my mongrel rootless family from the beginning of the twentieth century and linking it to the chapters in this book, I not only attempt to provide an example of how these processes of transgenerational transmission work

Cosmopolitanism and Everyday Culture • 15 and how visceral everyday cosmopolitanism has been transformed across the course of the twentieth century, I also attempt to situate my own personal and political history in relation to the intellectual project of understanding cosmopolitanism, and hence to illuminate the provenance of my academic research. The detailed story that I tell – of cultural mixing, of moving across and between continents, of conflict and conviviality, of pain and pleasure, of epidermal, class and religious differences, of race and gender politics, of local interaction, of belonging and not-belonging – ends up, despite all the caveats and contradictions, as a tribute to London cosmopolitanism of the twenty-first century, to my idealised imagined community. This is not to deny the troubling escalation of ethnic and religious hostilities engendered by Bush and Blair’s recent foreign policy, or the persistence of older malign racist formations. It is, nevertheless, a largely positive and utopian reading of twentieth-century cosmopolitanism for which I make no apology. Introductions to books are often really conclusions in that they are written at the very end after everything else is done. This is the case here. There is no doubt that when I started the work on cosmopolitanism the world was a simpler place. Although it was contentious to explore the allure of difference when many of my intellectual peers were concerned to establish the facts of racism and exclusion, that time was, nonetheless, a lot more straightforward than today. Yet despite the gravity of the divisions in the post-9/11 world, there are still some changes worth celebrating now. London’s cosmopolitanism is one of them. The mood and cityscape of the early twenty-first century that I describe here, that we see as we move though London’s public and private spaces, could not have been imagined by the social scientists fifty years ago. How this happened we are only now beginning to explore. And what life will be like in fifty years we cannot say. But one thing this domestic visceral cosmopolitanism may offer is a new image in the world, a new way of being modern, a supranational national identity, a means by which to counter Britain’s old and new imperial projects.

Part II Cosmopolitanism and Commercial Culture, 1910s–1920s

–2– The Allure of Difference Selfridges, the Russian Ballet and the Tango

In the period before World War I, often considered the highpoint of modernity,1 the London department store Selfridges was already an iconic institution. It is this status which makes it a particularly fruitful source for the development of a cartography of early twentieth-century cultural transformations not only in the spheres of commerce and consumption but also in relation to issues as apparently diverse as popular sexual fantasy and transnational identifications. This chapter will explore some of the contradictory impulses within the aesthetic and libidinal economies of metropolitan commercial and entertainment culture during this period and will suggest that imperialist ‘structures of attitude’ (as Said has called them, 1994:61) were less pervasive and more fractured, or at least ambiguous, than is commonly supposed. My specific focus will be on the adoption of narratives and fashions identified loosely with the orient and Latin America by modern urban English women at the beginning of the twentieth century, and therefore on the dissonance between aspects of the English female consumer imagination and some of the dominant and better-known practices and discourses about geographical others and cultural difference. This will be done by looking at two key cultural events promoted by Selfridges in the years before World War I – the Russian Ballet and the tango – which reveal, through their associations, the cosmopolitan aspirations of popular English modernity. Cosmopolitanism’s more positive engagement with foreignness and abroad has tended either to be overlooked by cultural historians or to be diagnosed as a symptom of the wider imperialist and orientalist pathologies of the period; and the specific location of women as consumers in this formation has not been addressed at all. This is the historical and theoretical terrain I visit here.

Gordon Selfridge: Moderniser and Cosmopolitan Selfridges2 was founded in 1909 by Gordon Selfridge, a self-made American entrepreneur whose class and national origins are relevant factors in this story. He had risen from stock boy to partner of Marshall Field’s of Chicago, the largest and most magnificent department store in the United States, had been denied a senior partnership by Marshall Field and came to Britain in 1906, partly out of pique,

19

20 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism determined to make his mark and revolutionise British retailing practices. He was already an established innovator and moderniser and the London enterprise, the biggest purpose-built store in the world and the first in Britain, was indeed to have a massive commercial and cultural resonance. The launch in 1909 was preceded by the largest advertising campaign in British history3 and during the first week alone the store attracted an astonishing one and a quarter million visitors – ‘a cosmopolitan crowd’, according to The Star (29 March 1909). Its architecture, plate-glass windows, roof gardens, lifts and electric lighting quickly established it as a technological and aesthetic ‘monument to modernity’, but it was a modernising cultural force in a number of less obvious ways as well. From the beginning Selfridge intended the store to become a ‘social centre’, a place where people could browse and meet; the first advertising campaign urged customers to ‘spend the day at Selfridge’s’ and stressed that there was ‘no obligation to buy’. In this way it contributed to the expansion of public leisure space, particularly for women (Leach 1984; Bowlby 1985; Abelson 1989; Nava 1996). By reiterating in many of its adverts that its prices were ‘the lowest – always’ and by introducing from the outset the American innovation of sales and bargain basements, it expanded the class spectrum of its targeted customers and helped enfranchise the middle to lower-middle classes into the world of consumer citizenship. As an employer, Selfridge operated exceptionally progressive and generous practices for his day and expected his staff to identify with and benefit from the commercial project.4 He was a supporter of women’s suffrage, advertised regularly in the feminist press and made clear his respect for the astuteness and economic power of women customers. Selfridge’s style of publicity, although considered vulgarly American by rivals, was imaginative and unprecedented, and in addition to full-page advertising the store provided entertainments and exhibitions not directly related to sales in order to attract the public.5 As part of the routine promotion of the store, Selfridge published a daily 500-word syndicated column in several national and London newspapers in which he or a member of his staff commented on events and moods of cultural interest both inside and outside the store.6 These columns, the 1909 launch and 1914 five-year-anniversary souvenir books (each with about thirty five pictures by well known artists and extensive commentaries) and Selfridge’s own 420-page book (Selfridge 1918) entitled The Romance of Commerce (in which he mounts a lengthy defence of what he considers the honourable but much maligned activity of international trade) are a rich source for an analysis of the store’s self-image.7 The focus in this chapter is on Selfridge’s interest in and promotion of cosmopolitanism and the way in which this reveals a complex and hitherto relatively uninvestigated popular modernist formation in which women, as consumers, play a critical part. Selfridge’s adherence to transnational identifications – which are partly a consequence of his personal and professional history and partly a reaction against trends within the contemporary structure of feeling – may turn out to be as significant an aspect of his modernising influence as his publicity and retailing

The Allure of Difference • 21 practices and may also emerge as a more important aspect of early twentieth century modernity than has been registered so far. In this respect my analysis will refute the view of Wollen (1994), who argues that liberal cosmopolitan merchants of the nineteenth century had ceased to aspire to cosmopolitanism by the beginning of the twentieth century. Selfridge’s brand of commercial cosmopolitanism is complexly located in geopolitical terms: it intersects with, yet goes against the grain of, the narratives of the moment about English tradition and Empire,8 and is not easily accommodated within the parameters of the orientalist discourses of the period. Its specificity seems rooted partly in the appetite for the new and distinctive of the burgeoning consumer culture and partly also in Selfridge’s own social aspirations and his sense of not-belonging in his acquired – or aspired to – class and country in which commerce and the foreign were so often disdained.9 In this respect he was part of a small but economically and politically significant sector already identified by Eric Hobsbawm as ‘the rare dynamic entrepreneurs of Edwardian Britain [who] were more often than not, foreigners and minority groups’, mainly Americans, Jews, Germans and Quakers (1971:169), and whose uncomfortable cosmopolitan presence contributed to the reactive invention of ‘the mythical Britain of travel posters and calendars’ (Hobsbawm 1971:170) – a Britain deeply implicated in the governance of Empire and the defence of ‘tradition’. Selfridge should be understood, therefore, both as a representative of a social group of London-based international merchants and financiers who were socially marginalised by the more traditional elites, and as an individual with an innovative cluster of views about the cultural role of the department store. The reactive interaction between the entrenchment of ideas about the superiority of traditional English life, on the one hand, and the increasing investigation and adoption of what was perceived as modern, different and foreign, on the other, is part of the dynamic which I want to look at in this chapter. The allure of difference – the fascination that it exercises for certain people or sectors of the population some of the time – is inextricably linked to the fact of its construction as difference and thus its simultaneous repudiation and distanciation elsewhere. The cosmopolitanism of Gordon Selfridge fits into this paradigm, and while perhaps not consciously formed in reaction to the xenophobia of pre-World War I Britain, it was nonetheless bound up with it. Selfridge’s store was founded at the height of British imperialism, yet he was strikingly uninterested in Empire (though he was deferential towards the monarchy).10 What he promoted in his daily columns was a cosmopolitanism which was modern, urban and ‘cultured’ and which included (as Hannerz has put it in relation to the late twentieth century, 1990:239) ‘an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness towards diversity’. How far he embraced ideas which were in some ways critical of the imperialist conventions of the moment, like, for instance, Theosophy, for which a primary goal was ‘the formation of universal human brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour’ (Washington 1996:69), is not known.

22 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism But, according to Leach, Theosophical ideas, as ‘a permissive form of mind cure’ which also encouraged people not to feel guilty about consuming, had a significant influence on department store owners in the United States during these years (Leach 1994:247).11 Selfridge was probably aware of the well-reported Universal Races Congress which took place in London in 1911 and aimed to promote ‘liberal internationalism’, the ‘transcendence of national divisions’, ‘universal world peace’ and ‘a pluralistic view of racial differences’ (Rich 1994:67-8). The conference, which was attended by the black American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois among others, supported J.A. Hobson’s idea that foreign investment could be a particularly effective means of promoting peaceful economic co-operation between races and nations (Rich 1994:73). This was consistent with Selfridge’s worldview (see Selfridge 1918). What we do know is that among the store’s launch publicity there was a full-page advertisement which appeared in all major newspapers throughout the world and expressed a welcoming message in twenty-six different languages, including Arabic, Yiddish, Japanese, Hindi, Welsh and Esperanto.12 Selfridge made it clear that he disapproved of traditional outlooks and in his columns wrote often about how pleased he was that London was losing her ‘insularity’ and ‘becoming really cosmopolitan’ (Selfridge Editorial, 5 November 1911). 13 The following passage provides an example of the style of his daily homilies and as well as an indication of his views: If we take Culture in its true sense as meaning intellectual development, a refining influence, a wide intelligent outlook . . . the connections between Culture and Merchandising become obvious; and perhaps it can be understood best of all in relation to the modern store. . . . Culture and insularity are never synonymous. . . . It is those who travel . . . and whose instincts are cosmopolitan who have the world-wide sympathy . . . characteristic of the trained mind. . . . When – as in merchandising – Anglo-Saxons turn to Latins and vice-versa for the fresh blood which is so essential, they are widening the scope of their intelligence. . . . Every foreign market in the world is a lesson in culture for the modern merchant. There are few other occupations . . . which bring a man so closely in touch with foreign nationalities. . . . In fact there are few languages and few arts, few nationalities and little literature, no moral and mental culture which cannot have some influence on Commerce as it is today. (Selfridge Editorial, 10 February 1912)

These unconventional ideas about abroad and the transnational nature and cultural importance of commerce, which emerged in part from the conditions of international trade, are a recurring theme in the store’s publicity and promotion during these years. Moreover in this passage Selfridge seems to be promoting social exchanges – possibly even intermarriage – between Anglo Saxons and Latins, an unusual slant at a time when eugenist ideas about racial purity and British superiority were widespread. Elsewhere he commends the modern market as a place where ‘nationalities can meet on common ground. The sole distinction, personal or racial, is merely that of taste. Such a place is unique in public life’ (Selfridge

The Allure of Difference • 23 Editorial, 11 July 1912). Examples of his views about the foreign appear again in the store’s 1914 Fifth Anniversary Souvenir book, The Spirit of Modern Commerce, where he once more promotes cosmopolitanism. For instance, the poster entitled ‘Merchandise of the World’ (figure 1) expresses in its editorial caption an egalitarian and non-hierarchical attitude towards national, linguistic and racial difference: ‘It

Image Not Available

Figure 1 ‘Merchandise of the World’ from The Spirit of Modern Commerce: Selfridge’s Fifth Anniversary Souvenir Book, 1914. Reproduced by kind permission of Selfridges Archive.

24 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism is our belief that no commercial institution in the world is more truly entitled to the description “cosmopolitan” than is our own. Here meet and mingle many of the world’s races, differing in customs, looks and tongues. Here East meets West and North meets South’ (Selfridge 1914). However, despite the refusal in the text to privilege West and North, the image tells a different story (though it is presented as an ‘embellishment’ to Selfridge’s main caption). So this and other similar plates are worth attention partly because of the contradictions they raise. Figure 1 shows an oriental bazaar in which a Western couple, presumably British, survey foreign merchandise displayed by sales-people dressed in national costumes; the foreigners, whether from Japan or Holland, are mostly smaller than the couple who are shopping, probably signifying Anglocentrism on the part of the artist rather than trouble with perspective; the woman shopper is wearing an ‘oriental’ gown with divided skirt, which will be returned to later in this chapter.14

Orientalism and Selfridges The dominance of the orientalist visual conventions of this and other plates in the collection – combined of course with the influence of Said’s Orientalism (1978) – initially distracted me from the text and Selfridge’s emphasis on and pride in the cosmopolitanism of his store, and so to begin with ‘orientalism’ seemed the appropriate theoretical framework through which to read the imagery, which depicts an invented orient that could indeed form part of a wider discursive formation used by the West to dominate the East and other ‘other’ places. Yet at the same time, orientalism, however heterogeneous – and Said’s critics have pointed to the way in which the term needs to be unpacked, and its historical, geographical and discursive variations need to be explored (Lowe 1991; Coombes 1994; Sharafuddin 1994; Melman 1995; Young 1995) – seemed insufficiently elastic to encompass the text. Moreover, in addition to the store’s claim to be cosmopolitan and the celebration of transnational exchange, there are other distinctive features arising from the commercial domain which modify the usefulness of the concept and delimit its transferability to this context. These are, first of all, the transactions of the market – the imperative of selling15 – and, secondly, the location of women as buyers, as subjects not objects of occidental fascination. The latter immediately challenges the recurring trope of orientalism, in which the penetration and domination of the East is compared to the sexual possession of oriental women by Western men (Said 1978:6; Torgovnick 1990:17). There are other significant ways in which the discursive formation that I am about to describe is different from those broad regimes of ‘cultural imperialism’ normally subjected to what is loosely known as postcolonial criticism. Yet there are also important interconnections which imply a different kind of interactive and reactive dynamic in which the ‘traditional’ forces of English culture both produce and are produced by other currents.

The Allure of Difference • 25 Said’s major contribution has been to take on Foucault’s approach and link the discourses of orientalism and cultural imperialism into a network of territories, imaginings and archives of colonial geography. This, though, tends to produce a monochromatic account (Lowe 1991) unable to register the specificities of operation, cultural emphasis and context which are required in order to establish not only polyvalence but also contradiction and the reactive dynamic referred to above. Nevertheless, some level of generality is useful, so before embarking on the detail of what went on at Selfridges I will sketch out three broad areas or phenomena frequently subjected to the orientalist critical gaze in order to demonstrate primarily the distinctiveness, but also the complex interconnections, of the popular cosmopolitan impulse of this pre-World War I moment. Thus first there is the orientalism deployed in the processes of military and administrative governance in the colonies, in which the colonized are despised or else constructed as inferior. However, ideas about the cultural and racial ‘other’ circulating in these geopolitical territories do not travel unchanged to the metropolis (as Said’s thesis implies). As Stoler has pointed out (1997), European supremacy abroad relied on the maintenance of difference and hence on the regulation of interracial sexual relations; moreover, prohibitions were often formulated in response to the frequent transgression – or fears of transgression – between colonisers and natives. Cultural and sexual restrictions on European wives and daughters were required to be particularly stringent because of the perceived dangers of everyday continuous and intimate domestic encounters with otherness.16 Yet, paradoxically, these women on their return to the metropolis, where restrictions were not clear-cut, would bring with them, consume, display and share out to friends, culinary and material goods that were forbidden to them in the colonies because of their symbolic proximity to the colonised (Chaudhuri 1992). These tensions of everyday colonial life are both connected to and confounded by the events I will describe. A second strand of imperialist thought and practice – of orientalism – which spills over into, yet is at the same time oppositional to, my narrative is expressed in the discourses of science and anthropology, and mediated by museums, exhibitions and photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the principal preoccupations of these developing spheres of knowledge was the observation and classification of physical and psychic difference, and therefore the elaboration and consolidation of distance (Green 1986; Greenhalgh 1988; Coombes 1994). Thus once more separation was at stake, which is not the case in the formation I am about to describe. Yet the curiosity about difference, the appetite for looking at and knowing the visible signs of difference in the visual cultures of exhibitions and museums – the consuming gaze – is present also in the commercial and entertainment cultures promoted by Selfridges. Indeed the spatial configuration of the department store permits a distinction to be made between what Anne Friedberg has productively called the ‘mobile’ gaze of flânerie, spectatorship and consumption which operates across the spheres of commerce and cinema and is most often exercised by women,

26 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism and the panoptic controlling male gaze of museums, the camera and government through which difference and distance are confirmed. Although both the panoptic and mobile gaze as visual practices are part of the scopic regimes of modernity, Friedberg argues that they are antithetical in power terms (Friedberg 1993). One more strand in the broader regime of orientalist discourse to be compared briefly with what was going on at Selfridges is the orientalism of the artistic, literary and theatrical spheres, and specifically the more radical formations associated with cultural modernism at the turn of the century (though evident in literature and travel writing throughout the preceding century) in which the orient and abroad were often represented as more colourful, authentic and erotic than the West. This perspective, often of French provenance, is exemplified in the famous 1910 London exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, curated by Roger Fry, which generated widespread critical excitement and acclaim (as well as outrage) and was advertised by a Gauguin painting of a native Tahitian woman. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of the first works of fine art to declare the influence of African sculpture, was produced in 1907. As Torgovnick (1990) and others have pointed out, a belief in the relatively untrammelled sexuality of the ‘primitive’ was a recurring theme in much of this work. Among the classic literary instances from an earlier moment, and also from France, are Flaubert’s Kuchuk-Hanem and Salammbô (Said 1978; Lowe 1991; Melman 1995). These artistic enunciations confirm the usefulness of distinguishing between the exoticising imagination and the more authoritarian colonising imagination, and it is the former strand which is closest to the commercial domain I am about to describe, a claim which would certainly have gratified Gordon Selfridge, who was so concerned in his writing to assert not only the cosmopolitanism but also the artistry and romance of commerce. Yet, as will emerge, the conventions of these exoticising narratives, in which the oriental woman is cast as object of sexual desire and the oriental landscape is treated rhetorically as erotic woman, are also different in important respects from what was going on at Selfridges.

The Russian Ballet and Oriental Fashions On 12 May 1911 Selfridge headlined his column ‘The Russians are Coming’ and used it to promote the advent of the Russian Ballet to London. He described the arrival as a ‘Russian invasion’, but one which was to be welcomed. ‘The invaders are dancers, the most splendid and distinguished in the world’; this was so, he wrote, even though they came from ‘a country regarded until a few years ago as semibarbaric, given to tyranny . . . and violent revolt’. So he provided in his brief trailer a frisson of excitement, a reminder to his readers of the reputed volatility and passion of Russians.17 At the same time he took the opportunity to promote the store’s new Russian merchandise: ‘The Saison Russe will not be confined to theatres . . .

The Allure of Difference • 27 Selfridges has a Russian season of its own’ (Selfridge Editorial, 12 May 1911). A few weeks later, once the season was under way, the column referred again to the Ballet, this time to its reception: ‘The Imperial Russian Ballet has arrived at Covent Garden and has turned the heads of London.’ Readers were encouraged to compare the artistic achievements and co-operation of the dancers to the creativity of the store’s management and employees: ‘At Selfridge’s we are all keeping step to the music . . . the public is our audience, we have our stage managers, scene painters and our stars. Our art is the art of commerce. . . . There is a wealth of romance,’ writes Selfridge with some passion (Selfridge Editorial, 24 June 1911). In fact the Russian Ballet, though with its roots in Moscow and St Petersburg, was composed mainly of dissidents and critics of the Tsar’s regime who were already resident in Paris (hence the frequent French appellation, Ballets Russes) and was sponsored largely by merchant patrons of the arts (Garafola 1989). The company was directed by the famous impresario Serge Diaghilev, considered by many art historians to have been the most influential figure in the European and North American art world of the first quarter of the century, and consisted of a remarkable group of avantgarde dancers, artists, designers, choreographers, librettists and composers. The modernist impact of the repertoire extended beyond ballet because it not only broke with the conventions of classical academic dance and music but was also strikingly innovative in terms of narrative and design. The company performed in Paris in 1909 and then again in 1910 where it was an immediate artistic sensation. The first London visit was in 1911 (this is the ‘invasion’ referred to by Selfridge), where initially there was some uncertainty about how ‘the straitlaced, puritanical, conservative and philistine English [would] react’ (Buckle 1980:233). But this was to underestimate the receptivity of large sectors of London’s cultural consumers, and the Ballet quickly became the most fashionable and popular theatrical event of the period. The Sunday Times commented: ‘There has been nothing like the vogue of the Russian Ballet for a generation. So attractive are their performances that many people are postponing their departure from town’ (Buckle 1980:241). The reception, in this largely pre-cinema culture, was unparalleled not only in fashionable society but also among intellectuals. Leonard Woolf (Virginia’s husband) compared its revolutionary impact at the time to that of Freud, Einstein, Proust, Joyce, Matisse and Picasso. Diaghilev’s ballet crowned them all, he said, and, moreover, seemed to transform London into a cosmopolitan city: Night after night we flocked to Covent Garden, . . . [the] new art [was] a revelation to us benighted British. . . . In all my long life in London this is the only instance in which I can remember the intellectuals going night after night to a theatre, opera concert or other performance as, I suppose, they . . . do in . . . Paris. (Woolf cited in Garafola 1989:314)

Several of the ballets in the early repertoire contained oriental themes and imagery. Peter Wollen (1987) has argued in his important essay that the company ‘launched

28 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism orientalism’ in fashion and the art world. The claim requires qualification since an interest in the orient was already well established throughout Europe long before the advent of the Ballet, and in fact Garafola (1989) has suggested that its oriental repertoire was in part a response to the Parisian appetite for such flavours, while in Britain Maud Allan’s sensual oriental veil dances had already achieved widespread notoriety (Bland 1998) and Liberty’s department store had for many years sold oriental fashions (Adburgham 1975).18 However, the orient of the Russian Ballet was different. It was a vibrating, brilliantly coloured, erotic, violent and exciting orient, unlike the more tormented pastel construct of the aesthetes or the more spiritual orient of Theosophy.19 Designed mainly by the Russian artist Léon Bakst, over the following years it was indeed to have a seismic and relentless influence on art, theatre, fashion and commerce.20 The most celebrated, iconic and financially successful of the company’s repertoire was Scheherazade (Schouvaloff 1996). Performed for the first time in Paris in 1910, it, more than any other ballet, was to ‘astound the public and change the appearance of women and drawing rooms throughout Europe and America’ (as Buckle put it, 1980:155). Bakst’s vision of a ‘barbaric and voluptuous orient’ and his set and costumes became the most famous decor of the age (Buckle 1980:158). 21 More theatre than ballet, with a vivid and dramatic narrative, ‘a riot of pulsating colours, orgiastic sensuality, frenetic leaps and savage rhythms’ (Adburgham 1975:90), it became an instant success, and after the first performance the audience applauded for a full twenty minutes (Buckle 1980:257). ‘I have never seen anything more perfect, not more exciting, on any stage than Scheherezade,’ wrote Leonard Woolf (1980:30). The story, based on the opening chapter of the Arabian Nights (or Thousand and One Nights), is of a despotic Persian king who leaves his palace to go on a hunting trip.22 In his absence his favourite wife and the other women of his harem bribe the eunuch guards to admit the African male slaves to their compound. The eunuchs succumb and the slaves, disguised as women, enter the internal courtyard of the palace, where they are seduced by the Shah’s concubines; the special golden slave, Masud (performed by Nijinsky), is invited to be the lover of the Shah’s favourite wife. There follows a period of intense sexual activity between the women of the harem and the slaves during which, according to the notorious Victorian translation of Richard Burton (which, in its abridged version, will have been the most familiar at the time, though its unabridged version is likely to have been known by repute23), ‘all fell to satisfying their lusts and they ceased not from kissing and clipping, coupling and carousing till day began to wane’ (Burton 1919:6). The Shah and his hunters return unexpectedly and, enraged by the betrayal, massacre the slaves and the concubines with their scimitars on stage. Only the favourite wife is spared, but she finally commits suicide. The curtain falls on a stage littered with the corpses of the illicit lovers. Contemporary accounts of the ballet stress the passion, the violence, the piercing music and unfettered movement, and above all the visual excitement of the decor

The Allure of Difference • 29 and performance. Not much is made, in these or in more recent histories I have looked at, of the racial and gendered aspects of the narrative or of the connotations at the time of Burton’s translation of the Arabic text, on which the narrative was based. Yet these must have had an extraordinary resonance and have played a part, however unacknowledged, in the subsequent uptake of oriental fashions in the West. In relation to race, the original ballet designs are unambiguous. The Persian women are represented as white, or without colour, and the slaves as black (figure 2). In the early ballet performances the dancers who played the part of slaves were blacked-up (see photograph of 1910 Paris performance in Kodicek 1996:96–7, reproduced in Nava 1998). Bakst’s original design for Masud, the ‘golden slave’, indicates that he too was coded as black (figure 2), but in fact photographs of Nijinsky in costume show that he was less blacked-up than the other slaves.24

Image Not Available

Figure 2 Léon Bakst’s costume designs for Scheherazade (1910): the Blue Sultana (left) and Masud the Golden Negro, performed by Nijinsky.

30 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism The racial dimensions of the story will certainly have had a more problematic resonance in the early twentieth century metropolises of the Western world than in their original Muslim context (Melman 1995:155). British audiences will have been reared on the prohibitions of Empire and medical ideas of difference yet they are also likely to have been aware of Burton’s late nineteenth-century esoteric footnote in his translation of this section of Arabian Nights about the ‘imposing’ sexual organs of Africans (Burton 1919:6) and his more general preoccupation with the sexual inadequacy of the Western male.25 They are additionally likely to have been familiar with the more recent contentious reputation of the erotic dimensions of modernist African and ‘primitive’ art and, furthermore, like Selfridge, may have read about or even attended the Universal Races Congress, which promoted the equality of the races and even miscegenation (Rich 1994). Under these circumstances, with these conflicting messages, the ballet experience will have been both disturbing and arousing. Gilman’s exploration of modernist perceptions of black sexuality attempts to identify some of the components of this cultural fascination and distinguish between the inflections of the British (colonising) and European (exoticising) imagination (Gilman 1985:125; Lowe 1991). The British consumption of Scheherazade appears to have collapsed these distinctions – and in this sense represented a cultural revolt against its own more paternalistic imperial tradition. The heady corporeal mix of the ballet narrative disrupted not only the dominant racial conventions of the period but also ideas about masculinity, femininity and sexual politics. Women in this narrative make use of the absence of the despotic patriarch to resist his authority and betray him, an ominous message about the absence of men – in the colonies, at war and work – and the domestic entrapment of women. Moreover, despite Burton, most discursive constructions of sexual relations between occident and orient were between dominant Western males and Eastern females, and Scheherazade, insofar as it emphasised the transgressive libidinal desire of women and eroticised the black male, confounded this. Furthermore, the sexually active men in the drama were also feminised by their disguise of female attire. And, to compound the complexity of the sexual representation still further, Nijinsky, who played the part of Masud, the principal and most potent African male slave, was in real life the lover of Diaghilev (though he later married a fellow dancer and had a child) and as a performer was an object of desire for both women and homosexual men. Nijinsky was enormously popular perhaps because of the enigma of his appeal. His performance in Scheherazade was described by Benois, one of the creators of the ballet, as ‘half cat, half snake, fiendishly feminine and yet wholly terrifying’ (Wollen 1987:14) and Garafola has suggested that Nijinsky’s projection of sexual heterodoxy was one of the main attractions of the Russian Ballet (1989:323).26 His ambiguous sexuality as heterosexual predator in performance, yet also sexualised object of the male and female gaze, was to place him as a forerunner of 1920s male stars of the cinema, like Valentino (to whom I will return). Meanwhile, as an aside, it is interesting to note that gay-male creations of male sexuality and the eroticised

The Allure of Difference • 31 male body – in this instance Diaghilev’s shaping of Nijinsky – seem to have opened up for women spectators during this period more active and desiring libidinous fantasies. E.M. Forster’s representations of unsatisfactory repressed English men and his more sympathetically drawn English heroines who are attracted to the emotional authenticity and intensity of ‘other’ ‘foreign’ masculinities are another parallel instance of homosexual depictions of male–female relations which provide a different way of imagining femininity, sexuality and national identifications. In fact E.M. Forster was a regular attender of the ballet, along with Leonard and Virginia Woolf and other major figures of Bloomsbury and the arts and literature. We know that performances in the pre-war period also attracted ‘society’ figures, politicians, foreigners and Jews, financiers and entrepreneurs (Garafola 1989). Among these, no doubt, was Gordon Selfridge. It is inconceivable that he would have celebrated and publicised the company in his mass circulation columns and in his store without also being an enthusiastic member of its audience. That he should promote such a profoundly unconventional – even iconoclastic – vision supports the notion of the commercial arena as populariser of cosmopolitan and modernist identifications. One of the ways in which the oriental imagery of the Ballet circulated in the department stores was through the fashions of the most famous Parisian dress designer of the period, Paul Poiret. Coincidentally, on 24 June 1911, the very day of Selfridge’s newspaper missive, Poiret and his wife Denise gave a huge Thousand and Second Night ball in Paris to celebrate his new oriental designs (the extraordinary party and decor are described in detail in Wollen 1987:12). There is some dispute about whether Poiret’s vision of the orient preceded Bakst’s – they were certainly concurrent. Poiret’s commercial reach and influence were already well established by the time the Russian Ballet arrived in Paris. Affected by the rational dress movement and Liberty’s department store, he had a few years earlier started to ‘wage war on the corset’ and introduced new dress shapes designed to follow the line of the body (Adburgham 1975; Wilson 1985; Wollen 1987:10); as a consequence the American dancer Isadora Duncan was a client of his (Duncan 1928). Poiret was also responsible for introducing into mainstream fashion ‘Turkish culottes’ or the divided skirt. Now, taking advantage of the success of Scheherazade, he promoted and popularised a more flamboyant oriental look (while continuing to lay siege to the corset) which, at its most theatrical and elaborate, consisted of harem pantaloons and turbans in brilliant greens, purples, crimsons and oranges and heavy gold jewellery; versions of the style permeated a wide range of spheres and social levels. The more conventional variants were like the dress worn by the shopper in Selfridge’s Merchandise of the World picture (figure 1). Oriental balls became fashionable in London also; perhaps the most celebrated was an Arabian Nights extravaganza held in the autumn of 1911 (Garafola 1989:302), inspired again by Scheherazade and designed to crown Diaghilev’s autumn season, but there were dozens of such examples which demonstrated the rippling influence

32 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism of the ballet in London. Oriental fashions, colours and furnishings were ‘the rage’ everywhere and transformed the territory of the English female body, house interiors and even the visual landscape of the West End. ‘Pale pastel shades which had reigned supreme . . . for almost two decades were replaced by a riot of barbaric hues – jade green, purple, every variety of crimson and scarlet, and above all, orange’ (Lancaster cited in Adburgham 1975:90). Violet Keppel, daughter of Edward VII’s mistress and later lover of Vita Sackville-West, was among the young women who decorated their rooms to look like the set of Scheherazade (Souhami 1997:107). Lady Maud Cunard, American heiress, who hated the gloomy traditional decor of her husband’s baronial hall in the country, redesigned her townhouse in Cavendish Square in the style of Scheherazade when she moved there to be with her lover, Thomas Beecham, in 1911 (Chisholm 1981:50).27 ‘Colour had universal freedom, even in the department store’, Matisse is supposed to have said (Wollen 1987:22), and according to Juliet Duff, a contemporary London patron of the Ballet, ‘Harvey Nichols windows blossomed in red and purple’ (Buckle 1980:242). Inevitably Selfridges, with the largest and most theatrically composed windows of all the stores, displayed and stocked the full range of oriental merchandise, from carpets to fabrics, gowns to turbans, jewellery to perfumes in the panoply of fashionable colours. Moreover, in such a feverish climate, it would be naïve to assume that the popular influence of oriental fashion and the ballet was confined only to questions of colour, texture and style – to the material level. The narratives, particularly of Scheherazade, presented women differently, as subjects as well as objects of sexual desire. They offered another way of imagining a new, less constrained, more insubordinate femininity, 28 and elements of these narratives will have been present, even if only as allusions, in the store environment. So Selfridge’s disposition towards the cosmopolitan and the artistic avantgarde, and his commercial and personal inclination to satisfy his women customers, combined in this instance in the promotion and popular dissemination of the oriental mood of the Ballets Russes.

The Tango Another event that confirmed Selfridge’s identification with the exotic and the cosmopolitan was a private costume ball organised by the French Ambassador and a committee of dignitaries, of whom Selfridge was one, to raise money for the French Red Cross. The ball, described in the press as the most original ever held in London, took place in three ballrooms on the top floor and roof garden of the store on 1 July 1913. There were over two thousand guests and the party lasted from 10 pm to 5 am, when breakfast was served. Four thousand lights glittered in the luxurious foliage of the roof garden and the general decor was oriental. Many of the guests wore oriental costumes and danced the tango under the stars to an American rag-time orchestra that played throughout the night (though more conventional waltzes were available

The Allure of Difference • 33 on the floor below). Selfridge’s archive has many pages of cuttings about the event. It was reported extensively in the British and French press and all of the excited newspaper accounts include references to the tango-dancing. What did the tango signify in this context? Why did it seem important? Despite its origins in the barrios of Argentina, its early appropriation by some of the fashionable elites of Europe in the early part of the century was not unlike the uptake of the Russian Ballet (Savigliano 1995; Collier et al. 1997). Its highpoint was 1912–14 but it continued to be in vogue well into the interwar period. Paris was supposed to have promoted the tango to the rest of the world as it did the ballet, and similar claims have been made for its significance and influence in relation to fashion, art and a new eroticism for women. In fact it was to be even more influential and more contentious than the ballet – partly because its reach was a great deal wider. It very quickly became massively popular across the class spectrum as well as internationally, and was in this respect unlike any preceding cultural activity anywhere. Tangomania extended from the aristocracy to the lower middle classes, from St Petersburg to New York, and was thus an astonishingly cosmopolitan and modernising force. It was more contentious than the ballet because it involved not only the pleasure of looking – of being a spectator – but also body-to-body encounters of an unprecedented sensuality and intimacy which took place in the public domain. A measure of the controversy that the tango provoked can be deduced from the extensive correspondence in the Times and elsewhere (launched by ‘a critical peeress’ in May 1913, just six weeks before the Selfridge tango ball) in which it was accused of being lascivious and decadent and, most horrifying of all, of encouraging encounters between young ladies and men who might be of ‘American and South American negroid origin’ (Collier et al. 1997:83).29 An opponent in France suggested that dancers looked like ‘Mohametans . . . under the influence of opium’ (cited in Savigliano 1995:116). These critics were in turn accused of being old-fashioned and reactionary and the dance and its culture defended because it was artistic, exciting, good exercise and, of course, new. The debate is referred to in a London magazine commenting on the forthcoming Selfridge tango ball: ‘a floor below will be reserved for waltzes and old fashioned square dances, so both Box, the ragtimer, and Cox, the negroid hater, should be satisfied’ (London Opinion, 21 June 1913). Commercially, the tango craze spawned a huge ancillary industry (and was thus modern in this sense also) consisting of dance academies, theatre performances, exhibitions, lectures, balls and tango teas, which expanded liminal public space for women in this largely pre-cinema period (as did the department store) and was indeed staffed in part by young male performers and dance-teachers – tangueros – from South America, the Caribbean and southern Europe, with whom women from northern European and North American cities were reputed to have sexual liaisons (whence the term Latin Lover) (Savigliano 1995; Collier et al. 1997). Rudolph Valentino taught the tango at one such academy in New York before he became a movie star (Botham and Donnelly 1976), and acted the part of a wealthy Argentinian

34 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism tanguero who has a love affair with a French officer’s wife in Paris in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921).30 The film shows them dancing at a tango-tea circa 1913. Central to the new industry were tango fashions. There were special tango dresses with a split or divided skirt to facilitate tango glides; tango hats fitted closely to the head like turbans and had vertical feathers in order to allow partners to dance face-to-face; there were special tango shoes, tango undergarments, tango jewellery and tango colours (Savigliano 1995; Collier et al. 1997). Selfridges advertised its Tango gowns in the daily press. The significant factor about these new fashions in the context of the argument that I am making here is the degree to which they overlapped with fashions inspired by the orientalism of the Russian Ballet. These styles of heterogeneous ‘other’ origin combined in the cosmopolitan cityscapes of the Western world and confirmed the move to new body shapes and a new modern consciousness. Among the producers of these hybrid garments was Paquin, whose tango gowns were based on designs by Léon Bakst, the creator of the oriental sets and costumes for Scheherazade.31 Poiret’s oriental harem-culottes were considered ideal fashions for tango dancing and were widely adopted. The tango colours were brilliant reds, yellows and greens, like the colours of Scheherazade. Special tango make-up included ‘oriental kohl’ for the eyes and dark red lipstick. Tango attitudes included the use of long ‘oriental’ cigarette holders. The new all-elastic flexible tango corset (called Tango) was a major fashion innovation and, consolidating the influence of Poiret and oriental fashions, led women to abandon steel-boned corsets. As with Sheherazade, the tango offered a model of a more sexually active and wayward femininity. Fashion historian Beatrice Humbert (cited by Savigliano 1995:127) has argued that the tango was the detonator of a new morality, that it promoted the liberation of women and provided them with a venue to exhibit their sensuality in public. What emerges from this account, then, is that the distinctions between the popular appropriations of Diaghilev’s production of the orient, and the tango as a condensation of an exoticised Hispanic America, were blurred not only in the public imagination but also in the commercial domain.32 They combined to form a kind of generic popular cosmopolitanism – a commercial orientalism – with a distinctive libidinal economy in which women were key players and cultural difference signalled not the abject and the excluded but the modern, the liberating and perhaps even the progressive. The struggle to achieve a measure of personal independence – to become a ‘new woman’ – although carried out in a relatively haphazard and unreflexive manner on the terrain of popular and commercial culture, was not unconnected to the contemporaneous and highly conscious suffrage struggle of the political domain. Both entailed a refusal of compliant gender relations and a rejection of the parental culture and ‘tradition’. During the summer of 1911 (on 17 June), within days of the ‘invasion’ of the Russian Ballet, the largest and most spectacular of all

The Allure of Difference • 35 the suffrage demonstrations marched down Oxford Street past Selfridges towards Hyde Park. This was a highpoint of the movement and there were an estimated six or seven miles of marchers and pageants and many thousands of vivid and beautifully executed banners (Tickner 1987). Gordon Selfridge in his column of the following week commented admiringly: ‘Last Saturday we saw a sight not easily forgotten . . . six miles of women intent upon their political status . . . these women were asking for a voice in legislation’ (Selfridge Editorial, 21 June 1911).33 This example of popular mass action was, paradoxically, increasingly welcomed in the commercial domain in that it was further evidence of the modernising impulse of women consumers and of their aspirations towards economic and political power. (The shop-window smashing campaign was not to occur for another year.) Among the many thousands of marchers on that summer day will have been large numbers of Selfridge’s customers, members of the audiences of the Russian Ballet, viewers of the Post Impressionist exhibition, tango dancers, dress reformers and Theosophists. There were artists’ and writers’ groups and representatives from many parts of the world.34 Delegates to the Universal Races Congress are likely to have been there. Annie Besant was certainly there (Tickner 1987:130); so most probably was Emily Lutyens, her fellow Theosophist, who, a few weeks earlier, had welcomed Krishnamurti at Charing Cross Station on his arrival in London with Besant (Washington 1996:135). Lutyens’ sister, Constance Lytton, one of the most famous suffragettes of all, was also there. Feminist protest after the 1911 demonstration became more violent as the government failed to respond, and two years later, just two weeks before the Selfridge rooftop tango party, central London witnessed the last great public spectacle of the suffrage campaign: the funeral procession of Emily Wilding Davison, martyr for the cause, to which floral tributes were sent from all over the world (Tickner 1987:138). In their wide social embrace, their deployment of the visual and their forwardlookingness, these marches exemplified not only a modernism of the streets – a public display of cultural change – but also, like the tango, a symbolic mapping of an emerging geopolitical terrain in which the cityscape of the new woman was increasingly, if tangentially, linked to a metaphorical abroad with evocations of greater social and sexual freedoms.

Rudolph Valentino and Desert Romance The war and the years immediately following it saw major transformations in the position of women, not least as a result of the decimation of the male population, but the prewar focus of this chapter means that these must mostly remain out of frame.35 Nonetheless there is one story worth following briefly into the 1920s and the postwar expansion of cinema as popular form, because of the additional light it casts on the relationship between commerce, women and an imaginary abroad. This involves establishing a complex chain of associations (partly by adopting the film theory

36 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism notion of star-as-auteur) which connects the Selfridge’s tango party of 1911 through the international Tangomania of the following decade, to the celebrated performance of Italian-born Hollywood movie star Rudolph Valentino as an Argentinian gaucho and tango supremo who introduces the skill and passion of the dance to prewar Paris in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,36 to Valentino as seductive star of the movie The Sheik, to British desert romance fiction and back once more to fantasies about an exotic but indeterminate orient and their commercial invigoration in the department stores. The movie of The Sheik came out in 1921 and was seen by an estimated 125 million spectators, mainly women, throughout the cinema-going world. The film was based on a novel written by E.M. Hull during the war while her husband was away at the front and was first published in 1919 (Hull 1996). It was the most successful of the immensely popular genre of erotic literature known as desert or Eastern romance, authored mainly by English women for women, with oriental subplots and oriental landscapes in which the prototype heroine was English and the hero a sensual foreigner, usually Arab, Latin or Mediterranean (or at least initially appearing to be so) (Melman 1988).37Although the genre had started before the war, it reached its highpoint in the decade immediately afterwards and was linked, as Melman has pointed out, to the emergence of the flapper – ‘the new type of woman: politically emancipated, economically independent and sexually uninhibited’ (Melman 1988:89-90) who inhabited a traumatised and rapidly changing postwar world in which masculinity was indeed in crisis. In this context the term ‘sheik’ epitomised in the Western imagination the absent virile lover. Valentino, as star of the Hollywood version of The Sheik, successfully delivered the promise of the novel, albeit in a contradictory fashion. He was powerful, magnetic and passionate with an exciting physical presence, yet his sexuality was ambiguous. Like Nijinsky, he wore make-up, slave bracelets and rather feminine clothes – in his case white flowing robes, baggy trousers, sashes and embroidered waistcoats. The novel The Sheik, which preceded the film, contains vivid descriptions of the heroine’s appreciation of the hero’s body – of the pleasure of looking: ‘He had flung aside the heavy cloak that enveloped him . . . and was standing before her, tall and broad shouldered. . . . Diana’s eyes passed over him slowly’ (Hull 1996:48). The casting of the male hero as erotic object of the female gaze in the novel was repeated and made more complex in the films in which Valentino, as performer and dancer as well as lover, was rendered the scopic object of both the camera and a mass female audience (Hansen 1991:263). This subtle feminisation proved immensely popular and again tells us something about the complex ways in which women’s desire for men seemed to increase as the polarization of gendered attributes diminished. But Valentino’s appeal38 was based on more than just his heterodox masculinity. Like Nijinsky in Scheherazade (and the tangueros in the dance academies of Paris and London) he was also an imaginary other – dark, intriguing, soulful and hot-blooded; his own southern European appearance disguised always as something yet more

The Allure of Difference • 37 exotic and remote (Hansen 1991). His seductiveness, which was not confined to the US and extended to Britain also, resided above all in his subversive difference.39 The association of Valentino with both Argentinian tango and Middle Eastern desert echoes the confluence between oriental and tango fashions of the prewar period. Again we see a generic Eastern-Latin figure. And again women are positioned differently: as spectators; as consumers of the visual; sometimes as sexual initiators; and as unfulfilled in their allotted lives. Again we can make the link back to consumption, because, as before, these films and fictions spawned a huge new industry of ancillary consumer products – records, fashions, accessories, furnishings and jewellery (for men as well as women) – which offered a fantasy of sexual adventure and travel to distant places, which became all the craze, and which of course were also stocked by Selfridges for its women consumers.

In conclusion I want to argue first for the specificity of the orientalism of the commercial domain. Unlike the orientalism of colonial domination and scientific and anthropological discourses – whose purpose and operations serve to maintain cultural and racial distance – commercial discourses, just because of their embeddedness in the market economy, narrate an abroad which is enticing (but not too strange). Market considerations – the commercial imperatives of selling – ensure that commodities with foreign associations succeed only if cultural difference is produced as attractive. Denigration will not promote sales. In this sense, therefore, commercial narratives are related to the more positive – if still ambiguous – representations of contemporary avantgarde and popular cultural formations like the Ballets Russes and the tango. And so we return to Gordon Selfridge’s cosmopolitanism, to his anti-insular transnational and utopian vision in which cultural difference is promoted, appreciated and even desired. Although his vision is associated with commercial considerations and was in part a response to existing taste formations, it would be unjust to him and a misinterpretation of the conjuncture to reduce his cosmopolitanism merely to the imperatives of the market. The cosmopolitanism I have been looking at is part of a broader modernist formation, rooted in the restlessness of turn-of-the-century migration and diasporic culture, itself a consequence of, on the one hand, exclusion and exile, and, on the other, the allure of the city and the new, and associated with transnational identifications and the sense of not belonging anywhere. This is the geopolitical terrain – as Raymond Williams (1989) and others have pointed out – from which emerge the metropolitan cultural imaginings and new knowledges of émigré modernist art, literature and politics which include a commitment to the universal ‘brotherhood of man’ and a fascination with difference and the ‘primitive’ (Torgovnick 1990; Rich 1994). This modernism is part of a cosmopolitan revolt against tradition and the academy, it is

38 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism about the destabilisation and transcendence of national identities and borders as well as those of artistic form. What I want to argue here is that the ideals and impetus of cosmopolitanism are not confined to the intelligentsia and the critics of bourgeois society (and in this respect I disagree with Wollen, 1994). During the period that I describe, cosmopolitanism is absorbed into mainstream department store culture, into the realm of commercial and popular modernism (Walkowitz 2003). But cosmopolitanism does not entirely lose its critical edge in this new habitus. Like modernism, it is part of the movement against the conventions of certain sectors of Victorian and Edwardian Britain – the imperialism, snobbery, traditional hierarchies and narrow nationalisms – from which Gordon Selfridge, the self-made modernising American businessman and immigrant to Britain, is himself both overtly and subtly marginalised in his life in London. It may appear paradoxical, yet it is logical, that the dissemination of popular cosmopolitanism should occur through the networks of commercial capitalism for another reason as well. Like the cinema, whose highpoint was to follow the period that I have been looking at, department stores and the manufacturers of mass-produced fashions were uniquely obliged to be sensitive to the taste of the consumer. And indeed it was one of Selfridge’s great commercial strengths that he recognised the power and authority of the consumer. Moreover, he was fully aware that his consumers were nearly always female: ‘Three quarters of the store exists to meet the needs of women’ (Selfridge Editorial, 6 July 1911) and ‘It is the woman customer who is responsible (indirectly) for the taste and distinction of our merchandise. She may not realise the influence she has on production’ (Selfridge Editorial, 20 October 1911), he stated unequivocally in his columns. Thus the other extraordinary and defining element in the world of consumption which marks it out so distinctively and is so important here is that women are addressed as subjects. In this it anticipates the relations of spectator to screen, as we saw in the discussion of Valentino. Women therefore, in their capacity as mediators between narratives of cultural difference and the market, occupy a remarkably strategic location in the formation of a commercial cosmopolitanism as well as more generally in the consolidation of twentieth-century consumer culture. This is a position which challenges the notion of the domination of a phallocentric discourse and sits uneasily with the postcolonial thesis which argues that the occidental fascination with the ‘East’ is structured like the desire of a man for a woman. Yet the critical picture that I am outlining also contains a paradox: the consolidation of women’s authority in the marketplace and the increased value as well as commodification of cultural difference as depicted here are likely to have been achieved, at least in part, at the cost of feminising the oriental or ‘other’ man. This contradiction notwithstanding, the appeal of cultural difference – and the different masculinity inscribed therein – can also be read as a victory for the colonised or excluded male in his contest with the (white) coloniser.40 Part of the distinctiveness of the commercial formation that I have been describing is a consequence of the intimacy of the domains and levels which link the woman

The Allure of Difference • 39 consumer to cultural difference. ‘Other’ cultural products not only make an impact on English taste formations during this period but are increasingly introduced into the private domestic sphere, into the sanctity of the home. Moreover, oriental and foreign fashions and fabrics adorn the person, and, like the abandoned corset and the fantasy of an ‘other’ lover, reinvent the body. This very physical encounter – fuelled in part by English female subjectivity and desire and the sexual and political discourses of the moment – disrupts the anthropological distance of scientific observation and the museum culture, of the ‘other world’ as exhibition. Those more polarised representations, organised and orchestrated by scientists and administrators, are not obliged to take into account the response of the women consumer. What I describe here, then, is an emergent formation, linked to the narratives of difference in dance and theatre, in which boundaries are not so rigidly maintained and in which the intricate processes of what Robert Young has referred to as ‘fusion’ (1995:5) are produced through an odd alliance between store owners, as modernisers and popularisers, and women consumers. This goes against the grain of much postcolonial41 criticism of recent decades, which has focused on the way in which ‘orientalism’, through its imagined orients, has contributed to the management, exploitation and domination of others and had as its main preoccupations or starting points the injuries perpetrated by racial discourse. While this body of work has been of enormous political and cultural value, my intention here has been different. What I have tried to do is draw attention to the more ambiguous, utopian and perhaps even emancipatory formulations of the commercial uptake and reworking of transnational culture; to the specific meanings and varying contexts of cosmopolitanism, exoticism and orientalism These undermine the binary constructions of the colonised and coloniser which exist in much critical work on imperialism and race (as Young has also argued, 1995).42 Academic writing has tended to condemn Western fascination with difference (where it is addressed at all) as inevitably exploitative and voyeuristic. 43 Kobena Mercer is an important exception here, who in the revised version of his article on Mapplethorpe, ‘Reading Racial Fetishism - Part 2’, withdraws his earlier criticisms of ‘erotic objectification’ and ‘aestheticisation of racial difference’, and argues that what counts is history, authorship and context; fetishism is not necessarily a ‘bad thing’, especially insofar as it involves shifting attention onto the instability of whiteness (Mercer 1994:190). Part of the project of this chapter has indeed been to refocus the investigating eye onto the instability of whiteness. My argument has been that the interest of occidental women in a metaphorical orient, their fascination with imagined other people and places – whether geographically located in Persia, Russia, Africa or Argentina – must also be understood as a form of reaction against the politics and emotional customs of the moment, as a half-conscious identification with other subalterns, and, moreover, as a sign of the precariousness of Englishness and English masculinity. The conjuncture I have described is one in which Britain’s Empire was showing increasing signs of fissure and yet (or, perhaps, therefore) colonial

40 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism relationships with racial others were fraught with prohibitions. At the same time, a modernist cosmopolitan impulse which rejected the social and emotional constraints of English traditionalism and embraced foreign travel, modes of living and cultural forms was increasingly popularised through commerce and the cinema. This period was, furthermore, the highpoint of a profoundly confrontational feminism. Thus the allure of a culturally repudiated other of the kind described in this chapter can also be interpreted as part of a wider revolt against the parental culture and the symbolic control of the father.44 The constellation of contingent fantasies about escape and renewal reveal as much about the insufficiency as the supremacy of the West. They tell us something about the pervasive experience of lack and enclosure in everyday life and they cast light on the complex dynamic of the internal psychic world and the enigmatic processes of projection onto, and identification with, difference. Desire for the other, for something different, is also about the desire for merger with the other, about the desire to become different. Stuart Hall has several times referred tantalisingly, but all too fleetingly, to the complex interrelationship of racism and desire. He has suggested that racism emerges from the denial of the desire for difference, that disavowal of desire for the other lies at the heart of racism (Hall 1992, 1997).45 I hope here to have added some historical substance to this important thesis.

–3– The Big Shop Controversy Ideological Communities and the Chesterton–Selfridge Dispute

On 2 February 1912 the Daily News printed a letter signed by almost two hundred women workers employed by Selfridges, voicing their views on what had come to be known as the big shop controversy (Women Workers at Selfridges 1912). The writers of the letter objected in strong terms to the ‘stigma of contempt’ that had been levelled against shop assistants like themselves by the celebrated author G.K. Chesterton in an article entitled ‘The Big Shop’ published by the Daily News the preceding week. Over the following period the offending piece generated a flurry of heated correspondence, column writing and reportage in the national and London press. Although the women were significant players, the key adversaries in the dispute were Chesterton and Gordon Selfridge. The controversy represented an emblematic moment in a more enduring cultural conflict of the early part of the twentieth century which cut across the fault lines of class and political affiliation and revealed in embryonic form some of the collective solidarities and divergent discourses about tradition, modernity, national identity and women’s place that were to be explored much later, in the socio-political and historical debates of the last decades of the century (Anderson 1983; Berman 1983; Hobsbawm 1983; Wilson 1985; Nava 1996). The unlikely protagonists in the controversy were to clash again in 1927 in two public debates, and although the main topics of contention were once more, at least ostensibly, developments and principles in the organisation of retailing, it is the positioning of these in relation to the wider networks of consciousness of the period that has made their excavation particularly fruitful. The unforeseen nature of some of the findings can be attributed in part to the critical and historical neglect of the cultures of entrepreneurial commerce and their interface with the wider social world. Yet, the big shop controversy (despite being ignored by historians and biographers) can be counted among a number of public conflicts, some a good deal more significant and iconic than others, which contributed to the formation of allegiances based on socio-political ideals during the early years of the twentieth century in England and elsewhere. Probably the most significant catalyst for such an ideological community was the Dreyfus Affair, which polarised the whole of Europe and much of the world – a polarisation which continued after Dreyfus’s exoneration in 1906 and consisted broadly of a division between royalists, militarists, nationalists

41

42 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism and antisemitic forces, on the one hand, and socialists, republicans, anticlericals and intellectuals, on the other. Leonard Woolf described the impact on himself and many of his contemporaries at Cambridge at the time: We felt . . . we were struggling against a religious and moral code of cant and hypocrisy which produced and condoned such social crimes and judicial murders as the condemnation of Dreyfus. . . . Eventually . . . almost the whole world seemed to be . . . ranged upon one side or other. . . . I still think . . . the Dreyfus case might have been a turning point in European history and civilization (Woolf 1975: 152–3)

Although on a much more minor scale, the big shop controversy revealed another condensation of ideological affiliations and social identifications which overlapped with the allegiances identified by Woolf and others (e.g. Sennett 1986) in relation to Dreyfus and also echoed the specifically English social divide between ‘athletes’ and ‘aesthetes’ of the first decades of the century (Mitford 1960; Hoare 1997).1 What emerged in rough terms along the particular discursive axis under scrutiny here was a schism between inventors and defenders of English patriotic tradition, on the one hand, and cosmopolitan modernisers, on the other, as it was played out on the terrain of the department store.2 Thus some of the themes and sites explored in the preceding chapter are re-examined here. In tension in the big shop controversy were cultural imaginaries of an idealised static past and a dynamic utopian future. Central to these disparate visions were differently configured notions about the distribution of social honour, political and personal opportunities for women, and national and racial belonging. It is the unexpected juxtaposition of these different ideas in the arena of commercial culture, and their association with specific biographical narratives, that makes the unfolding of the big shop controversy so gripping.

The Protagonists Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was one of the most brilliant, popular and well-respected literary figures of the period.3 Contradictorily, he was political and editorial collaborator and close friend of Hilaire Belloc, an erudite and witty author of extreme right-wing polemic, with whom he attempted to spearhead a Catholic revival, and at the same time close to some of the major figures of the intellectual and literary left, such as George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and the Webbs. Like a number of other authors of his generation (among them Belloc and Wells), Chesterton’s output was astonishingly prolific and included dozens of books (fiction, poetry, drama, biography, history, travel, religious comment, literary and art criticism) and hundreds of articles and newspaper columns. He was a regular, provocative and acerbic speaker and took part in numerous live public debates, which were a common form of educational entertainment in the twenties and thirties. A theme

The Big Shop Controversy • 43 which ran continuously throughout this intellectual output was his ‘patriotism’ and faith in England and the ‘English tradition’. A second related theme was the defence of the small producer and retailer, whom he argued had been swept away during the industrial revolution. Both were relevant to the dispute with Gordon Selfridge. One of Chesterton’s most popular novels, and the one he himself considered his first ‘important’ book, was The Napoleon of Notting Hill (published in 1904), which, as his biographer Maisie Ward put it, ‘contained the most picturesque account of [his] social philosophy that he ever gave’ (Ward 1944:153). The hero of the book and the Napoleon of the title is Adam Wayne, a patriotic warrior and idealistic defender of local tradition, who is ready to fight to preserve the integrity of Notting Hill, the west London neighbourhood he considers ‘the Eden of [his] childhood and short heaven of first love’ (Chesterton 1987:64). His aim is to protect a row of small shops in a local street from commercial development by an alliance of entrepreneurs (among them the owner of a department store in Kensington High Street) and local government officials. In order to prevent the shops from being sold, Wayne mobilises a band of local soldiers whom he leads to war, armed with medieval weapons, against the collaborating boroughs of South Kensington, West Kensington, North Kensington and Bayswater, all much keener to do business deals with the modernisers. Wayne, who finally vanquishes his foes after several urban street battles, is presented to the reader as heroic, romantic and phallic: ‘[W]ith his face flung back and his mane like a lion’s, [he] stood with his great sword point upwards, the red raiment of his office flapping round him like the red wings of an archangel. . . . And the king [who observed him] saw . . . [that] this was sanity, this was nature’ (Chesterton 1987:98). Wayne and the men in his ragbag but committed army are crusaders against the evils of ‘modernity and monotony and civilisation’ (Chesterton 1987:86). Their passion and idealism are contrasted with the unimaginative ignoble self-interest of the entrepreneurs and bureaucrats, who are dominated by mundane concerns about development and progress. Chesterton’s championing of the corner shop, the small producer and ‘the ordinary little man’ involved a critique not only of big business and state bureaucracy (he was against the state provision of education and other social benefits) but also of the privilege of class and wealth. He was both anti-capitalist and anti-socialist because both systems aimed to extend their international influence and introduce industrial rationalisation and economies of scale. This anti-modernism was the central plank of his politics over the course of his life and constituted a key feature of his disputes with Selfridge. Given this ideological framework, it is relevant to note that the events of the 1912 big shop controversy took place just one year after the publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s text Principles of Scientific Management, which so profoundly influenced the production-line regimes of Henry Ford as well as those of the USSR, and was widely discussed by European intellectuals (Gramsci 1973; Schwarz 1991; Wollen 1993; Nava 1996). Chesterton is likely to have been familiar with the book and alarmed by its advocacy of rationalisation in the workplace.

44 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism Also relevant to the events of 1912 are his political and personal views on the role of women and women’s suffrage. He was robustly anti-feminist and against votes for women at a time of intense pro-suffrage militancy. According to his biographer Maisie Ward – who heard him debate aggressively against feminist Cicely Hamilton, author of Marriage as Trade (1909) and Diana of Dobson’s (1908), a novel (also staged) about a woman worker in a department store – his view was that voting ‘belonged to masculinity’ and that if women were allowed to vote, the institutions of marriage and the family would certainly be threatened. Rumours about the nonconsummation of his marriage, described as ‘Victorian’ and ‘devoted’, suggest anxiety about (hetero)sexuality (Coren 1989). But none of his biographers is very interested in his views on women and his anti-feminism remains largely unquestioned. It is instructive that his book The Napoleon of Notting Hill contains not a single female character. Even more contentious, both at the time and from the vantage point of today, was Chesterton’s antisemitism and his involvement in the Marconi scandal, which took place only months after his first public confrontation with Gordon Selfridge in 1912. The scandal, which by his own admission continued to obsess Chesterton for the rest of his life, has sometimes been compared to the Dreyfus Affair in its targeting of Jews and its political divisiveness. Cecil Chesterton, Gilbert Chesterton’s brother, was found guilty of libel as a consequence of accusing Jewish members of Asquith’s Liberal cabinet of corrupt share trading in an article published in the weekly political magazine Eye-Witness edited by Gilbert. Both brothers and Hilaire Belloc, who was more rabidly antisemitic than either of them, denigrated Jews in general because they believed that the primary loyalty of Jews was to their ‘blood race’ and religion, not their country, and that transnational links and identifications – the phrase they used was ‘the Jewish International’ – overrode the loyalty of Jews to any single nation. What Gilbert Chesterton objected to so strongly was, as he put it, ‘the pretence that a Jew could be an Englishman’ (Ward 1944:354). Jews therefore could not be trusted with government. The idea of the Jewish International was used as a rationalisation for the tenet that Jews should be excluded from positions of power.4 Chesterton insisted, however, despite these views, that he was not antisemitic because ‘some of his best friends were Jews’ (and indeed Leonard Woolf and three or four other Jewish boys do seem to have been members of the same exclusive debating society as Chesterton and his brother while at St Paul’s School; Woolf 1975). The contradictory nature of Chesterton’s claim and the sceptical response to it by his critics are likely to have ascribed an enduring notoriety to the phrase, so that even today it signifies insincerity, or, at the very least, ambivalence. Ironically Chesterton and Belloc seemed to have been blind to the inconsistencies of their position: accusations of supranational religious loyalty could similarly have been levelled against themselves as Catholics. Chesterton was also, perhaps surprisingly, a critic of Empire. But, although apparently against the grain of his English patriotism, this was not an enlightened

The Big Shop Controversy • 45 position. His view was that the colonised countries and peoples – even those who were white – were so inferior they did not merit the expenditure of English resources. It was Englishness above all that he valued and celebrated. ‘Chesterton’s “Englishry” finds its essence in that sense of being opposed to the prevailing trends of the present. . . . It is a defensive stance adopted against the power of the state and the transformations that follow in the wake of modernising history’ (Wright 2005:8824). That this should also be a ‘white’ England,5 that he should also be racist against people from elsewhere in the world, will not come as a surprise. After the 1911 Universal Races Congress (chapters 2 and 8) he wrote a review about the event for the Illustrated London News in which he ‘sneered’ at the ‘fallacy’ of ‘philanthropic anthropology’ that different races could ‘come together (Rich 1994:72). Given the general spectrum of Chesterton’s views it is thus not unexpected to find that his xenophobia extended to North America as well. On a visit to the US in 1920s he particularly singled out the cosmopolitanism of New York for criticism.6 Presumably he also agreed with Belloc, who claimed in GK’s Weekly (the magazine edited by Chesterton and formerly called Eye-Witness) that US and international financial and business interests controlled the British government. This argument was being made contemporaneously with Chesterton’s involvement in the League of Distributists (of which he was elected president in 1926), an organisation designed to support the small farmer, craftsman and shop owner; to distribute land in order to ensure ownership by larger numbers of people – ‘to restore possession’; to have men ‘working for themselves – their own employers, their own employees’; and to undermine industrial ‘overproduction’, large shops and the increasing dominance and ‘insanity’ of the machine (Ward 1944: 440–1). This, then, was the powerful and maverick antagonist of Gordon Selfridge. We are already familiar with Gordon Selfridge (1856–1947).7 A number of points made in chapter 2 are, however, worth reiterating here in this new context in order to set the stage for his dispute with Chesterton. Selfridge was a self-made, selfeducated midwestern American, not Jewish, who had worked his way though the ranks at Marshall Field’s, the grandest department store in the US. In 1906 at the age of fifty he came to the London, determined to transform English retailing. In 1909, only three years later, he opened his own store, Selfridges, in Oxford Street. This was an astonishing accomplishment. The land was bought, a company formed, the site cleared, the new building conceived and designed, planning permission sought and denied and then approved, the store built, merchandise bought, staff hired and trained – all in less than three years. As readers will now know, it was the largest, most famous and most modern purpose-built department store in the world – a ‘monument to modernity and commerce’. At the launch Selfridge paid tribute (unconventionally) to the one thousand construction workers who had finished the building in record time. Another one thousand workers were employed as sales staff, buyers and managers. During the Gala opening week, following an international promotional campaign of quite unprecedented scale and expense, the store attracted

46 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism over a million visitors. The advertisements invited the public to spend the day at Selfridges with no obligation to buy – to ‘make the store [their] headquarters’. This was a crucial aspect of Selfridge’s innovative approach to sales. He wanted people to feel at home in the store and was determined to attract customers from a wide class spectrum. All the ads stressed that the prices at Selfridge’s were low. This, combined with the luxurious and modern environment, did indeed attract the public. Selfridge was immediately recognised as a truly visionary entrepreneur (H.G. Wells described him as the Mozart of the commercial world – 1933:182) who, as we saw in chapter 2, was from the outset presciently aware of the influence and economic power of his women customers. ‘This House is dedicated to Women’s Service first of all’, one of the launch advertisements stated. His innovative widely syndicated daily press column provided a forum for him to reflect daily on a wide range of issues that extended far beyond the business of his store and frequently included laudatory homilies about women customers’ commercial skills and their contribution to the modern world – all pertinent questions in a period of intense and widespread suffragette militancy. Unlike Chesterton, Selfridge believed in votes for women and was prepared to say so publicly and repeatedly.8 He supported the struggle by advertising regularly in the feminist press, stocking goods in suffrage colours for the big suffrage demonstrations, and expanding the range of ready-made fashions ‘so that the promoters of the feminist movement [could] have more time to urge their points of view’ (Selfridge Editorial, 6 March 1914) and spend less time having clothes custom-made. His support extended to more abstract philosophical issues as well, and just one week before the publication of Chesterton’s attack on big stores, the column opened a debate that would be considered modern a century later: ‘[T]he English language needs a new personal pronoun – one without gender,’ he argued. ‘In the Editorial Rooms at Selfridge’s we continually find ourselves in difficulty for the lack of [such] a pronoun. . . . If we write of the “he’s” we presumably exclude all the “she’s”. . . . We have to fall back on using “they” . . . more or less incorrectly, or keep repeating pompously “men and women” ’ (Selfridge Editorial 29 January 1912). Selfridge was also a staunch advocate of cosmopolitanism, as we have already seen. This may have been partly because, as an American, he was never fully accepted into English ‘society’ and so identified with other foreigners. As is spelled out in greater detail in chapter 2, his columns make constant reference to the desirability of a more cosmopolitan outlook and cultural mixing; he disapproved of ‘insularity’ and ‘traditional’ attitudes to other nationalities and religions, and promoted cosmopolitan and modernist cultural forms whenever possible. Although the term ‘cosmopolitan’ was used by Selfridge to suggest familiarity with other national cultures and freedom from prejudice, during this period it was also frequently used by antisemites as a coded reference to Jewishness. So Selfridge’s adoption of the term, as well as his open support for Jews, represented a direct challenge to those with views like Chesterton’s. For instance, in the midst of the Marconi scandal (and

The Big Shop Controversy • 47 shortly after the big shop controversy) Selfridge’s press column included a tribute to the Rothschild brothers, honouring their major contribution to culture and business (Selfridge Editorial, 4 June 1912). A few weeks later it stated that Selfridges ‘speaks the same language as the stores of New York, Paris, Berlin, Chicago or Vienna. . . . Cosmopolitanism becomes more marked in this great house of business yearly. . . . The modern market is a place where nationalities can meet on common ground. . . . Such a place is unique in public life’ (Selfridge Editorial, 11 July 1912). Selfridge’s support for Jews remained consistent over the years and included placing regular advertisements in the Jewish Chronicle (e.g. for typewriters for ‘the modern miss’), stocking kosher food and Jewish goods in the store, giving charitable support to the Hoxton Jewish Lads Brigade, and during the 1930s arguing in favour of allowing free entry to Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, partly on humanitarian grounds and partly because of the cultural assets they would bring. Selfridge was offended not only by English insularity but also by the snobbish and disdainful views about finance and trade held by intellectual and social elites of the period. ‘Why does society tend to ignore or belittle all trade and those connected with it? Why is not the art of commerce as recognised as the art of sculpture and painting? Why don’t we hear more of the “Science of Commerce”; of the “Ethics of Commerce”?’ he asked (Selfridge Editorial, 27 July 1911). So another objective of his column was to elevate the status of business by stressing its merits. This was also a recurring theme in his The Romance of Commerce (1918), which tracked the history of international trade and sought to persuade readers of commerce’s artistry, professionalism and contribution to international relations. Selfridge embraced most forms of modernisation and was fascinated by new technologies. From the beginning he made innovative use of electric lighting, plateglass windows, lifts and telecommunications. In the 1920s he supported the early development of television: Logie Baird first demonstrated his invention at the store in 1925, and although it was considered no more than a novelty by the press, Selfridge insisted it had great potential. Television ‘is not a toy’, he is supposed to have said, ‘it is a link between all peoples of the world. Great good can come of it’ (Honeycombe 1984:57). Similar foresight was apparent in his obsession with the development of a Channel tunnel to connect continental Europe with Britain. This theme, which demonstrated both his cosmopolitanism and his interest in technological invention, was the subject of no fewer than fifty of his press columns in the years 1928–9 alone and was first raised by him before World War I (Honeycombe 1984:173). Such a persistent attempt to undermine the borders of England must surely have antagonised Chesterton. Most relevant to the topic of this chapter were Selfridge’s extensive retailing and management innovations and the continuous reiterations in his columns about the value and initiative of his staff – all no doubt designed to enhance the success of the store and thus boost sales. Selfridge brought with him from Marshall Field’s employment practices and levels of pay that were on the whole far more progressive

48 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism and generous than those in operation in London at the time, and were in turn to affect labour relations throughout the department store sector in UK. For a start he refused to use the demeaning ‘living-in’ system for women workers so vividly described in Diana of Dobson’s (Hamilton, 1908). A public testament issued by Selfridge at the launch of the store called ‘The Spirit of the House’ (a forerunner of the corporate mission statement of today) claimed that the aim in relation to shop workers was ‘to appreciate fully Intelligence, Originality, Loyalty – recognising merit and merit only as the door to advancement . . .’. Regarding pay he argued: ‘It is desperately silly to hold wages down’ because that undermines ‘the spirit of enthusiasm and earnestness and “I will” which means [so much] to the employer’. The loyalty of employees is ‘only earned by fair, friendly and generous treatment’ (Selfridge 1918:10). Among the practical measures designed to win the loyalty of staff were education and training programmes for employees of all levels. The store introduced the first graduate management schemes and was known for providing regular promotion opportunities (‘None of us here has a “place”. . . . There is no assistant but has a right to expect to become a buyer. . . . “Keep your ambition!” is an exhortation much more likely to be heard in this house than “Keep your place!”’, Selfridge Editorial, 3 June 1931.) There were extensive staff leisure facilities (including weekly sports events, dances and outings to the theatre) and a drama group – the Selfridge Players – which performed in the West End (in 1911 they put on a play called The Suffragette). Selfridge introduced staff discount schemes on all goods sold in the store and provided in-house medical and dental services. Educational programmes included excursions abroad: in 1912, fifty employees were taken to Paris to visit the major department stores and facility houses. This event is mentioned in the big store controversy letter to the press from the women employees (below). In 1928 (shortly after the second cycle of confrontations between Chesterton and Selfridge) one hundred male and female employees of all ranks and from all departments of the main store and the group of Selfridges Provincial Stores went on an organised trip to America and Canada for a month (of which two weeks were paid holiday and two weeks paid work time) to see department stores there. They sailed in Tourist class (not Third) and, judging from the photos and written accounts in the press and holiday scrap books, had a brilliant time.9 A Staff Council was established from the beginning, consisting of a forum of representatives from each of the 130 departments and senior members of staff and management, to discuss store policy and operations (and echoed practices in the progressive school sector). In retailing it was an innovation apparently introduced by Selfridge and considered by his director of staff the ‘most important contribution to the betterment of staff management’ (Pound 1960:95). It was clear that Selfridge recognised the importance of the morale and satisfaction of workers (who were mainly women) to the success of the store. In 1912 he erected a bronze tablet in the roof garden of the store in honour of his women employees, which bore the inscription: ‘This tablet is a tribute to women’s work in the establishing of this business and

The Big Shop Controversy • 49 is set up as a permanent record of their splendid loyalty and the quality of service they have rendered’ (Honeycombe 1984:181). Although this tribute was probably made after the dispute with Chesterton, the acknowledgement of the importance of women to the success of the store had been articulated from the time of the launch – and indeed during Selfridge’s time with Marshall Field’s in Chicago.10 Selfridge, astutely, often publicly promoted the skills of his women employees, buyers as well as sellers, in his newspaper column, and insisted, in line with feminist argument, that good business women were in demand because they were as talented as men. In fact women buyers were likely to be better than men, he argued, because they were more likely to know what the woman customer would want. Against the grain of popular prejudice, he maintained he did ‘not believe that the woman in business is continually thinking of matrimony to the detriment of work’.11 There is no doubt that Selfridge’s employment philosophy and practices were, like the other aspects of his retailing vision, exceptionally innovative and enlightened by the standards of the day. To make this claim is not to deny their significance as part of a larger business strategy oriented to profit. It is, however, to acknowledge their usefulness in promoting the reputation of the store and ultimately their contribution to labour reforms in the sector as a whole. Conditions in other department stores were far less benevolent than at Selfridges. In John Lewis, they lagged so far behind that in 1920 employees went on an astonishing six-week strike. This prompted an insurrectionary take-over by John Spedan Lewis, the son of the original owner of the store, whose approach was more progressive and who introduced in the mid-1920s the still-operative and well-known profit-sharing scheme for employees (Flanders et al. 1968). Poor conditions at the Army and Navy Stores and the growth of the Shop Assistants Union led, in 1919, to a brief strike and substantial wage increases. Resistance to autocratic management was also strong at Whiteley’s in Bayswater, where it was suspected that a series of fires were lit in the shop by discontented staff (Lancaster 1995). It is clear that one of the ways these disputes were finally resolved was by adopting some of the more generous and self-regulatory employment practices introduced at Selfridges.

The Controversy The igniting spark for the controversy was, as noted at the start of this chapter, the provocative piece written by Chesterton for his weekly column in the Daily News called ‘The Big Shop’ (27 January 1912). Like Selfridge’s daily advertorial, the column provided Chesterton with a means of disseminating his opinions to a wide sector of the reading public while at the same time earning him a regular fee. Although the article was flippant and probably off the cuff, it nevertheless contained a pithy expression of his political and religious views. It is unlikely, however, that he or anyone else could have anticipated the strength of reaction it produced. Below are some edited sections:

50 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism THE BIG SHOP I have dreamed of [hell] more than once; and in each case the background and setting were the same: They were always taken from one of those big London shops where ladies go shopping; the universal providers who provide everything but comfort; the awful interminable emporia, which have room after room, department after department; that is how I always imagine hell, even in my sleep. . . . artistically and socially [the large modern shop] is exactly like hell. The ladies who minister to the shoppers are made up exactly like the dress-models that stand beside them. When you look at the dress-model you think that some shop-girl has had her head cut off; when you look back at the real shop-girl you feel inclined to do the same to her. . . . The models [are] dressed so well and the women trained so ill, you can hardly tell the difference but for some outstanding detail – such as the absence of a head. . . . The whole is dominated by the shop-walker, surely the most unmanly of all the trades of men; unmanly alike in its effeminate surroundings and unchivalrous domination. . . . [These] men bully the poor women they know and toady the rich women they don’t . . . I now come to the practical [point]. It is said by the Socialists and the big capitalists (who generally agree with one another) that the big emporium is more practical and efficient. It is not. The whole theory that the big shop must be better than the small shop reposed on a perfectly simple fallacy. The Capitalists (and the Socialists) said that it must be more convenient to buy everything in the same place: and so it would be if you could . . . But the big shop is so big that you have to go from compartment to compartment over quite as wide a space as separates the shops in the little country town I inhabit . . . [Shop assistants in big shops] are the tired slaves of a colourless system; . . . But no generous person ever abuses the Big Shop when it fails to fulfil an order – as it generally does. For he [sic] knows that this will mean flinging some wretched slave out of that hell into the lower hell of unemployment. (Chesterton 1912a)

The piece is a good example of Chesterton’s political and philosophical views insofar as it combines a challenge to both socialists and capitalists, a reference to his religious faith and an elaboration of his already well-known critique of large shops in which the traditional shopkeepers of small country towns are contrasted with the colourless employees of big store departments. Most contentiously, and the reason why the piece elicited such an animated and angry response, Chesterton gratuitously insults women shop workers, who are accused not only of being stupid – like dress models without heads – but also of contributing, in conjunction with women customers, to the ‘effeminacy’ of the men who work alongside them in the stores. The female domination of the shopping environment is used to justify Chesterton’s rudely expressed desire to decapitate the ‘shop girls’. It is the women themselves, he implies, who are responsible for provoking his antagonistic feelings.

The Big Shop Controversy • 51 Chesterton’s text can be read in a number of ways. His hostility was representative of a more widespread social concern about the increasing power of women during that period, both within and outside the commercial domain, associated with the growth of feminism (Nava 1996). But there are further interpretative possibilities. In psychoanalytic terms, the association of headless models with ‘unmanly’ shopwalkers compellingly suggests a preoccupation about castration not only of the women (as in Freud’s thesis, in which the child unconsciously fears that the father has castrated the mother, 1977) but also by the women, along the broad lines proposed by Barbara Creed in The Monstrous-Feminine (1993). At the same time the all-encompassing big store can be seen to represent the maternal figure capable of symbolically engulfing the infant – thus evoking the incorporating as well as the castrating woman. Related arguments are made by Klaus Theweleit in his Male Fantasies (1987) when he explores male fears of dissolution and annihilation by women during this period, and, in relation to the department store, by Tag Gronberg when she argues that modernist shop mannequins with effaced features in the 1920s ‘present a strikingly phallic aspect’ (1997:390). Fears based on these overlapping propositions can be seen as the unconscious rationalisation for Chesterton’s revenge. The figurative use of the machine in the text speaks more specifically to the anxieties of the age. The shop mannequins also suggest the manufactured machinewoman. Andreas Huyssen, in his article on the vamp and the machine, has drawn attention to the widespread early twentieth-century projection of cultural fears about women onto machines, which during this period were increasingly represented as demonic, threatening and inexplicable. ‘Women, nature, machine had become a mesh of significations which had in common: otherness’ (Huyssen 1986: 70). These same anxieties are evoked by Chesterton’s expressive and uneasy imagery. They confirm what we know about his attitude to the contemporaneous suffrage struggle as well as to machines. The machine as a metaphor for the way in which the big shops devour and obliterate the less successful small shops of the locality is also a central trope in Zola’s famous novel about the department store in Paris (1992). The machine in these accounts represents not only destruction but also modernisation – both anathema for Chesterton. His description of big store employees as ‘slaves of a colourless system’ also connotes machinery, through the associations with modern ‘scientific’ production methods and new forms of workplace discipline of the kind advocated in Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Selfridge is unlikely to have interpreted Chesterton’s column in the abstract and referential style offered here. What is clear is that he took the newspaper attack quite personally, despite the fact that there was no obvious reason to do so, given the progressive reputation of employment practices and staff training schemes in his store. Nevertheless, he was clearly right to recognise that as an individual and in his capacity as store owner, he stood for a range of attributes thoroughly disliked by Chesterton. The following week Selfridge used his column to take up cudgels on

52 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism behalf of all involved in the modern department store sector (Selfridge Editorial, 31 January 1912). Selfridge’s response to Chesterton was inelegantly written, poorly argued and defensive. Compared to Chesterton he was not a stylish writer. But he was clearly provoked by Chesterton’s elitist tone and pretentious literary and theological allusions (the latter omitted from the quotes above). He accused Chesterton of being ‘ignorant’, of having a ‘suburban and narrow knowledge of the present-day department store’ (note the scornful use of suburban), of being unaware that the despised male shop walker was a thing of the past, and, moreover, of knowing nothing about the work conditions of modern sales staff. Chesterton’s piece was an ‘extremely unintelligent condemnation’, concluded Selfridge. His own reply was more of a scatter-gun attack. In an astonishingly clumsy closing sentence (probably dictated to a secretary), which nevertheless ironically revisited the machine metaphor and allusions to hell, Selfridge bullishly defended his employees and issued a challenge: But if Mr. Chesterton should really discover a remediable flaw in the machinery of this business – machinery in which each employee is not a cog or wheel, but a thinking progressing individual – a personality – if he can point out how we can ‘do it better’ – more as they would do it in heaven (if Mr. Chesterton knows), we will thank him for any suggestion, and will make it worth his while, much more substantially than did the ‘Daily News’ in accepting his article condemning a great industry – and condemning it with eyes shut. (Selfridge Editorial, 31 January 1912)

Selfridge offered to make a payment to a charity of Chesterton’s choice. The next day the right-wing paper the Daily Express, delighted to have the chance to get at the more left-wing Daily News, the publisher of Chesterton’s original piece, took up the attack: ANGRY LONDON SHOPGIRLS. REPLY TO AN ATTACK BY MR. G. K. CHESTERTON. ‘ENTIRELY IGNORANT.’ Scornful irritation is the feeling chiefly aroused among the proprietors, managers, shopwalkers and young women employees of the great London shops by the aspersions wantonly cast upon them by Mr. G. K. Chesterton in a recent diatribe published by the ‘Daily News.’ Inquiries made by the ‘Express’ . . . show that the men are disposed to regard . . . [it as] . . . a ridiculous jape. . . . The young women, on the other hand, are keenly resentful of the slight which has been so discourteously offered them . . . A representative of Messrs. Selfridge’s [said] . . . ‘Our women assistants . . . feel so keenly about it that three hundred of them are signing a letter in reply which will be sent to the ‘Daily News’ tomorrow.’ (Daily Express, 1 February 1912)

The Big Shop Controversy • 53 As announced, the women workers did indeed write their own letter of protest, though in the end only 180 of them signed it. It was sent to the Daily News the following day and copied to the Daily Express, which published it as a news item with a contextualising commentary and the full list of signatories.12 The letter is an extraordinary document. Much more cogently written and argued than Selfridge’s own effort, it offers a rare insight into the self-image of women workers and their views about working conditions in the retailing sector – one of the new feminised spaces of the social – during the early years of the century. It is quoted here in full: ‘THE BIG SHOP.’ ‘G.K.C.’ AND WOMEN WORKERS. EMPHATIC PROTESTS. Sir,–We, the undersigned, who are business women associated with the House of Selfridge, ask you to publish this letter in justice to ourselves and all women employed in similar businesses upon whom the stigma of contempt has been laid by the article written by G. K. Chesterton in your issue of Saturday last. As representatives of the women of this house, we have had a meeting, and feel that we owe it to ourselves to make a protest in the same journal that this, to us, so offensive article appeared. Does it not seem to you, Sir, to cast a reflection on the intelligence of us women that we should associate ourselves with an employment which, if the charges Mr. Chesterton brings are true, destroys the individuality, stultifies the initiative, and in general leaves no space for the slightest crumb of reason to exist in such an atmosphere. His whole charge against what he calls the atmosphere of the personnel in the department stores is without the slightest foundation. We are proud to say that we feel as women workers we have in our ranks some of the brightest intelligences associated with commerce, or that part which is handled equally by women and men. The very responsibilities which some of us are called on to undertake could not possibly have reasonable justice done to them if any of the evils that the writer imagines existed. It would mean a dead financial loss to the heads of any business. One can, of course, speak very much more easily of the surroundings of one’s own employment, and we emphatically declare to you that the atmosphere of this business has no superior not only in this class of business but in any other business or profession, for in it the highest form of intelligent democratic administration is reached. We look upon ourselves as members of a ‘Business Republic’, for each department is represented on a Staff Parliament or Council where free speech, free thought and general initiative is expected to be shown on all occasions. It may be a surprise to you, Sir, and to the readers of your paper, to know that such are the demands on the intelligence of the workers under such modern business methods as are represented by a department store that its women workers are constantly educating themselves, and with this in view, during the Easter holidays we are forming a party under the personal guidance of a member of the general management to visit, as a business refresher, the large department stores and speciality houses of Paris.

54 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism Does Mr. Chesterton think that the heads of a great business are able or would even try to carry out in detail all the schemes that are conceived and initiated? Surely even a writer must realise that the most wonderful schemes conceived in the greatest brains must come to naught if there is no intelligence to carry them out in detail. We ask you to have the fairness to us women workers, who are daily striving to put our work on a dignified basis, to help us quickly remove the wrong impressions conveyed to your readers by the recent article. WOMEN WORKERS 100, Oxford Street, W., Feb 1st, 1912. About 180 signatures of women workers employed at Selfridge’s are appended. (Women Workers at Selfridges 1912)

A number of key words emerge from this text which evoke an image quite at odds with Chesterton’s fantasy of headless automatons. The language deployed with such effect by the authors of the letter – the references to justice, business women, individuality, initiative, intelligence, responsibility, equality between women and men, women workers, democratic administration, business republic, staff parliament, free speech, free thought, constant education, dignity – presents an image of a highly skilled, reflexive and (in contemporary managerial discourse) self-actualised group, who demand to be taken seriously and who are prepared to offer unequivocal loyalty to the institution that acknowledges their contribution. There is no evidence here of an automated regime. Nor is this the voice of women transformed by their contact with commodified things into ‘things’ themselves – into depersonalised objects, the ‘mimics of mannequins’ – as Benjamin put it in his Arcades Project (Buck Morss:101). It also exposes the limitations of the historical periodisation adopted by du Gay (1996) (from Rose 1989 and Miller and Rose 1990), which presupposes that ‘new’ technologies of subjectivity emerged synchronously with the new technologies of post-1980s flexible post-Fordist retailing. This theoretical framework is based on the assumption that the success of modern corporations is enhanced by the ‘self-realisation’ of employees as individuals. However, the letter from the Selfridges women shows that very similar practices, in which creativity, autonomy and responsibility contributed to personal self-realisation and the ‘production of the entrepreneurial self’, were in place among workers in retailing far earlier than the ‘neoliberal’ moment identified (rather loosely) by du Gay as the historical turning point. What kind of response did the letter elicit from Chesterton and other contemporaries? None, it appears. On 3 February, Chesterton replied with an article on what he called ‘impersonal slavery’.13 The main target of this new condescending and mocking attack was Gordon Selfridge. He appears to have decided that the eloquent letter, signed by 180 women workers and published in two national newspapers, did not merit a response, or even an acknowledgement:

The Big Shop Controversy • 55 I am much amused to observe that Messrs. Selfridge have themselves taken the field to reply to me, and describe the happiness and purity of their establishment with an enthusiasm which, if not literally disinterested, is perfectly sincere. I bear them no malice for not liking my literary methods; or for attaching little weight to the aesthetic argument. Business men are a serious race, especially American business men. And though I think myself that externals are symbolic of a spirit; and that vulgarity, pomposity and desolating boredom hurt the soul as well as the eye, I do not ask the earnest American to follow so fantastic a train of thought. I should not be surprised at business men not understanding symbolism. But it seems to me that business men do not even understand business . . . Whatever may be said in favour of large organisations, it is palpably not the fact that they ensure the satisfaction of the workers. (Chesterton 1912b)

Chesterton attempted to substantiate this last claim by going on to refer to the contemporary wave of strikes in the docks, railways and mines. But his generalisation about the dissatisfaction of workers in large corporations patently did not apply to Selfridges. In this sense Chesterton misunderstood the nature of retailing and did indeed show ignorance about the specific conditions of the store.14 Pro the little man and the small shop keeper, pro the ‘traditional’ and the English, he assumed that all large organisations, and in particular those owned by American magnates, were run on assembly-line principles and were oppressive for workers. His antagonism towards modern industrial organisation and what David Harvey (1989) has called the ‘heroic’ modernism of the machine age anticipated the more developed critique of scientific rationalism and the dystopian views of Fordism and mass production that were to be articulated in a number of influential texts during the 1920s and 1930s, among them Huxley’s novel Brave New World and Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times. But the work of selling at Selfridges (and subsequently at other stores as well as they modernised and followed some of the Selfridge innovations) was an inappropriate target for Chesterton’s attack. As Susan Porter Benson (1986) has pointed out in her pioneering study of American department store workers in the early years of the twentieth century, social relations have always constituted the essence of selling so women sales staff were valued for their ability to understand what customers wanted and to ensure that they returned, rather more than for shortterm increases in sales figures. Management emphasis on the importance of ‘getting close to the customer’ is not a recent innovation (as du Gay appears to claim, 1996). Although rationalisation could improve the efficiency of the systems and structures of retailing, service and selling remained resistant to the growing tendency of industrial organisations (whether capitalist or socialist) to regulate the workforce and levels of output. Selfridge was aware of this. ‘When an assistant is serving a customer . . . the whole reputation of the store . . . is in the hands of that single assistant’ (Honeycombe 1984:233). Unlike mass production, selling was a complex ‘art form’, he argued,

56 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism which required ‘individual judgement, the right words and actions . . . and the right personality’ (Selfridge Editorial, 11 January 1936). Moreover, the conditions of selling, unlike factory work, were immensely public and visible, and – particularly during the years before World War I, when feminist agitation was at its peak – were subject to the scrutiny of female customers, some of whom were active in campaigns to reform shop work. A work regime that was manifestly exploitative would have generated bad publicity. In the light of this intractability, Selfridge’s semi-conscious strategy of maintaining staff productivity by ensuring job satisfaction and identification with the corporation seems to have been immensely effective. It guaranteed what Richard Sennett considers increasingly absent from the labour market – that is to say, a sense of ‘social inclusion’ (Sennett 1999:25). Social inclusion, according to Sennett, ‘requires mutual recognition; people must signal that they are aware of each other as legitimately involved in a common enterprise’. This is what Norbert Elias has called ‘social honour’. It ‘denotes that members of a group are noticed and heard’. Social inclusion of this kind must involve public rituals in order to establish a mutual bond. The symbols of inclusion need to be witnessed in order to be effective (Sennett 1999:25). It seems, then, that whether by design or whether simply as a consequence of his optimistic, flamboyant and naïve good will, or whether as a result of his own social marginalisation, Gordon Selfridge was particularly skilled at performing these rituals of inclusion. His continuous reiteration in his press column of his good intentions and ideals, his declarations of respect for his workers, particularly women workers, and his readiness to do public battle on their behalf against criticism together constituted a really monumental gesture of inclusion. Under the circumstances it is not surprising that his employees reciprocated by writing to the press in defence of their working conditions. They felt recognised by Selfridge. In the words of Percy Best, staff manager at Selfridges in the early years: ‘Mr Selfridge gave his staff a sense of ownership and responsibility and, coupled with the freedom from restrictive management, engendered an enthusiastic loyalty and pride’ (Honeycombe 1984:187). In contrast, Chesterton’s psycho-social formation prevented him from even acknowledging the women workers’ letter. The conflict between Chesterton and Selfridge was to rumble on until 1927, when it erupted again in the form of two public debates. The first, in February, was organised by Chesterton’s Distributist League, and seems to have been reported only in G.K.’s Weekly (19 February 1927:244), the magazine edited by Chesterton. The topic was ‘Is Monopoly a Menace?’ Selfridge was one of six speakers and the only one invited to speak ‘in defence of “big business”’. Only two of the speeches were reported: Selfridge’s and Chesterton’s. Whether Selfridge was aware at the time that he was being set up as the fall guy is not clear.15 His argument was that ‘any man or woman’ (note the inclusion of ‘woman’ here) with ‘energy, judgement, determination, ambition, nerve and above all ambition’ could start up a newspaper or store. Never a great public speaker, Selfridge, according to this account, was

The Big Shop Controversy • 57 sneered at by Chesterton, who deployed wit and oratorical skill to ridicule Selfridge’s language, ideas and his ‘beautiful and romantic optimistic temperament . . . brought from the land of his birth’. The laughter from the audience elicited at Selfridge’s expense was recorded mercilessly in the report. The same anti-Americanism and sarcasm were apparent in the second debate, which was held at the Sesame Club on 5 December of the same year. This one, on small shopkeepers, was extensively reported in a wide range of newspapers and magazines, among them the Times, New York Herald Tribune, Estates Gazette and Grocers Review.16 Broadly it seems that Selfridge again applauded progress and the commercial imagination and argued that the loss of small shops to competitive larger shops was not necessarily a bad thing. Chesterton predictably defended the small trader and attacked the ‘economic despotism’ and ‘slavery’ of the large store while also deriding the naïve romanticism of those who thought otherwise (‘to loud laughter’). In fact Chesterton’s argument was as naïvely romantic as Selfridge’s insofar as it disavowed the paternalistic despotism and economic exploitation that can occur in small family businesses and adhered to an idealised past. But, unsurprisingly, this was not noted in the press accounts, which were in agreement that once again Chesterton had won the day hands down. As Maisie Ward, who was at the event, put it: The Selfridge debate . . . was sheer cruelty, so utterly unaware was the business man that he was being intellectually massacred by [Chesterton] who regarded all that Selfridge’s stores stood for as the ruin of England. Occasionally Mr. Selfridge looked bewildered when the audience rocked with laughter at some phrase that clearly conveyed no meaning for him at all. (Ward 1944:311)

Selfridge attempted to have the last word and to restore to himself and commerce some of the dignity that had been so humiliatingly eroded by Chesterton. Just days after the debate, he protested once more: ‘Commerce . . . is a career which gives scope for . . . public service [and] the finest qualities of character, intellect and the imagination. We have little patience with the writer who seeks to show his cleverness by reducing everything to the crudest of mercenary motives’ (Selfridge Editorial, 10 December 1927). Never very vindictive, this was the nastiest he got. What he really longed for, the theme which recurred throughout his writing and was evident from the very inception of his store, was acknowledgement. His dream was for men of business to receive the same kind of public esteem as professionals. All were involved in market transactions: ‘The writer sells to any who will buy. . . . The doctor too is a merchant . . . he sells to whomsoever seeks his advice. . . . The lawyer sells his legal language. . . . The statesman sells his knowledge of . . . the principles of government,’ he argued (Selfridge 1918:2).17 The failure to grant social recognition to commerce was both inequitable and a problem for history:

58 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism It is very remarkable how poorly documented . . . the careers [of financiers and business men] seem to be. While the . . . affairs of obscure men of letters are made the subject of intense research, . . . far more thrilling and illuminating documents . . . about the makers of great fortunes are neither gathered nor cherished . . . These are men who make history and we want to know more about them. (Selfridge Editorial, 5 March 1932)

In sum, the respect Selfridge expressed in so dedicated a fashion towards his own workers was not always accorded to him in the public world. This lack of respect, Selfridge’s narcissistic wound, lay paradoxically at the core of his retailing achievement and public influence. It fuelled his determination to signal his appreciation of his workers and salute their inclusion in his project in a public and ritualised fashion. It also, in combination with the injury of not-belonging in English society in class or national terms, seems to have contributed to his visceral cosmopolitanism and pro-feminism.

The Last Laugh So perhaps at the end of the day, Selfridge did have the last laugh. Not only have his innovations been more materially enduring than Chesterton’s, but in today’s climate, esteem is differently allocated and the conventions of the politically and socially acceptable have changed. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Selfridge’s mixture of (in the language of today) internationalism, anti-sexism, popular modernism and progressive employment practice appears a good deal more attractive and honourable than the intellectual elitism, misogyny and xenophobic Little Englandism of his anti-capitalist antagonist – the merits and ‘postmodernity’ of Chesterton’s support of small producers notwithstanding. Yet for critics schooled in the work of neo-marxist theorists, it is tempting to be cynical about Selfridge’s romantic defence of big business and to read his rituals of inclusion as politically calculating strategies designed only for the advantage of the enterprise and the maximisation of profit. But this would be to fall again into the reductive trap of privileging the production–consumption cycle as the most significant motor of history and locus of exploitation. It would also be to deny the unpredictable outcomes of biographical peculiarities and contextual specificities, which in this case seem to have been especially significant. Other theorists might be tempted to analyse the respect and autonomy accorded to the women workers in the store as mere vanguard ‘technologies of the self’, as an early form of modern regulation. Yet in effect this repeats Chesterton’s disavowal; it diminishes once again the women’s own persuasive voice and their insistence on the multiple benefits of the Selfridges regime. The conflict between Chesterton and Selfridge as narrated in this chapter suggests that socio-political assumptions about anti-capitalist and capitalist, intellectual and entrepreneur, need to be reassessed and subjected to more detailed

The Big Shop Controversy • 59 historical investigation of biography, aspiration and context. The discourses of commerce have, until recently, been largely neglected by cultural historians. Yet the unexpectedly innovative and utopian views expressed by Selfridge in his newspaper columns not only influenced business practice and the popular imagination of his time, they also contributed to the modernisation of the wider ethical-political agenda. Finally, the story presented here has been worth excavating not only because these neglected aspects of the past have made possible a new reading of emergent and divergent cultural formations in the first decades of the twentieth century. It is also interesting, as all historical accounts are, because some elements of it reverberate in very contemporary ways. There are continuities as well as discontinuities. Today there are similar disputes about big modern shops and small corner shops, and similar struggles in defence of the rural, the local and the small producer-trader. Debates about the conditions of women shop workers are still concerned with questions of autonomy, belonging, commodification, and proximity to the customer. Fears about the loss of Englishness persist, albeit in tension with deeply rooted hybridisation and cosmopolitanism of early twenty-first century urban Britain. Chesterton’s views about the impossibility of being both an English patriot and a Jew have now been updated and transposed to Muslims and, in the chaos of the new world disorder, have become tragically pertinent again. All these issues have resonance today. Yet at the same time the story I have told here is indicative of a very particular moment in English cultural history when the women’s suffrage movement was at its most hopeful as well as militant, when department stores provided a new social and work space for women, and utopian visions of the modern and the cosmopolitan were still relatively innocent. So the story is both historically specific and contributes to an archaeology of the present.

Part III Difference and Desire in the 1930s–1940s

– 4– The Unconscious and Others Inclusivity, Jews and the Eroticisation of Difference

Visceral Inclusivity Stanley Cohen’s impressive book States of Denial includes one small but significant section on altruism in which his concern is to explain why some people did help Jews escape from Nazis in occupied Europe during World War II, despite the extraordinary risk to themselves. The reason for such heroic acts, Cohen suggests, is that these people possessed something he calls ‘instinctive extensivity’, which is in effect a disposition towards inclusivity, a spontaneous ‘sense of self as part of a common humanity . . . rather than tied to specific interests of family, community or country’. But interestingly, in his view, ‘nothing explains its biographical origins’ (Cohen 2001:265). It either exists or it doesn’t. According to Cohen, some people feel compelled to include and defend those from beyond their immediate social group and others do not, but we don’t know why. The logic of Cohen’s argument is that altruism and instinctive extensivity constitute an arbitrarily bestowed natural inheritance. Could this be the case? Or should we probe a little deeper into their psychosocial and geopolitical determinants? Making sense of the frequently unconscious dynamic underlying some people’s positive and inclusive perceptions of others and ‘elsewhere’ – sometimes in the face of widespread racism and xenophobia – is a central concern of this chapter and a relevant component of the entire book. In order to remind readers and reframe this crucially significant question, the focus of the work as a whole is on the cosmopolitan imagination, its gendered and vernacular expressions in British cultural and emotional life, and on the shift in this formation from a counterculture of modernity in the first decades of the twentieth century to the cultural mainstream by the end. The approach throughout has been to combine an analysis of the broad socio-cultural contextual factors with specific case studies and personal narratives. As with Cohen (2001), one aspect of the project is the attempt to unravel the psychic and affectual elements – the partly unconscious dialogic reactive figurations that compose visceral cosmopolitanism – which are in play in feelings of desire, sympathy and hospitality towards cultural and racial others and the foreign. It is important to note that these feelings of benevolence and interest have often coexisted with, and operated against the grain of, dominant political and

63

64 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism representational regimes of exclusion and racism, of ‘white paranoia’ (Sharma and Sharma 2003).1 They have constituted a repudiation of the prevailing mood. In part such attitudes are informed by more or less rational analysis, by reflexive political and cultural critique, by a desire to broaden horizons and experience the new, by an aesthetic and intellectual stance of openness towards others and elsewhere. But committed opposition to racism and a deeply felt sense of connectivity to others is also often rooted in non-rational unconscious factors as well. Paradoxically, however, psychoanalysis, despite its preoccupation with the unconscious, has had little to say about the attraction of cultural and racial difference or the complex processes of identification with otherness and the socially ostracised. Historically, it has been more concerned with the unconscious factors that fuel antagonism, with the irrational ‘passion’ of racist violence to others.2 Freud addresses the question of such antagonism in his Civilization and Its Discontents (1963 [1930]). Written before the holocaust yet in a climate of growing menace, his object is to make sense of the persistence of aggression, and more specifically the often bitter hostility between ethnic and racial neighbours, predominantly men, which he argues was rooted in the son’s rivalry with the father. He calls this type of fundamental hatred, which serves to reinforce the internal relations of the group or nation, the ‘narcissism of minor differences’. More recent explanations tend to see racism as pathology rather than part of the natural inherited order of things, as Freud implied. Although rooted in diverse approaches, the post-Freudian accounts are broadly united by the idea that the pariah race(s), selected according to historical and geopolitical fortuity, are constructed unconsciously as despised objects on whom whites or indigenous groups project disavowed negative shameful or libidinous feelings about themselves. Hence the vigour of popular racism is fuelled by repression. The psychoanalytical literature on this theme is substantial and constitutes part of a wider attempt to make sense of the historical devastation wrought by racism and its hyper-charged nature (see, for example, Ackerman and Jahoda 1950; Fanon 1986 [1952]; Rustin 1991; Lane 1998; Žižek 1998; Stavrakakis 1999; Frosh 2002). Yet, although the unconscious forces at work in racial persecution have more obvious political consequences, it is important to explore the complex non-rational dynamic involved in the parallel and contradictory history of antiracism: of inclusivity and eroticised identification with difference. This also has significant theoretical implications.

Vienna – A Case Sudy One way of advancing a psychoanalytic understanding of these issues is to deploy the device of the contextualised case study. This is because, as Žižek (1998) points out, neither a socio-cultural nor a psychoanalytic approach on its own can do the job. So,

The Unconscious and Others • 65 to explore how notions of alterity and enactments of inclusivity are structured by both historical contingency and the unconscious, by a ‘confluence’ between psychic and socio-political fields, as Stavrakakis (1999) has put it, the focus in this next section will be on a particular complex of inevitably partial but nevertheless illuminating narratives and imaginaries associated with Jews and a group of antifascist foreigners in interwar Vienna. During the early 1930s, Vienna – ‘red Vienna’ – was both symptomatic and emblematic of the political changes occurring in Europe as well as in the consciousness of the English left. The Austro-Fascist overthrow in February 1934 of the democratically elected socialist municipality of Vienna, celebrated for its social housing, schools, medical care and swimming pools, was a political forerunner, albeit less iconic and less studied, of the overthrow of the elected Republican government by Franco and the ensuing civil war in Spain. The Austrian crisis, in which several thousand socialists and workers were killed in street battles and many thousands imprisoned, and which saw the bombardment of the new social housing projects, among them the celebrated Karl Marx Hof, similarly drew to it a contingent of foreign political sympathisers and militants who helped distribute clandestine arms, money, pamphlets and food to the outlawed besieged socialists and their families and organised the escape of hundreds from the country. In some cases they participated in the military resistance of the Schutzbund (the social democratic defence league), whose members, after the 1934 putsch, were forced to go into hiding, in some instances in the city’s sewers (made famous in Carol Reed’s iconic 1949 film The Third Man). Among those from England who got involved in these activities were Hugh Gaitskell, later leader of the Labour Party (Brivati 1996); Naomi Mitchison, celebrated left-wing author and activist (Mitchison 1934, 1979); Stephen Spender, half-Jewish poet, ‘a modern-day Shelley’ according to Virginia Woolf (Leeming 1999:84; see also Spender 1934, 1951); and G.E.R. Gedye, the respected Central European correspondent for the Times (Gedye 1939). My mother, Ankie van der Voort, was there from Holland to study the city’s innovative social housing programme (see chapter 8). Muriel Gardiner, medical student and trainee psychoanalyst, was there from Chicago (Gardiner 1983). All of these young foreigners were part of the same extended social network and were active to a greater or lesser extent in the political underground. All had been radicalised, or further radicalised, by the ideals of interwar internationalism (Passerini 1999), the perilous rise of Hitler and fascism, and the 1934 events. It was in reference to these years and this mood that Dick Crossman, the English Labour Party MP and a school friend of Gaitskell’s, described himself and his non-Jewish political comrades as ‘pro-Jew emotionally . . . as part of “antiFascism” . . . instinctively standing up for the Jews whenever there was a chance to do so’ (Crossman 1946:27).3 And indeed in the context of virulent and mounting antisemitism, not only in Germany and Austria (Arendt 1959; Bronner 2003) but also (a good deal more often than usually acknowledged) in Britain (Kushner 1989;

66 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism Kapp and Mynatt 1997), many of these figures married or had emotional and sexual relationships with Jews, in part as an act of visceral political revolt against the antisemitism and conservatism of the parental culture. Virginia Woolf, who married Leonard in 1912, was an earlier example of this kind of defiance. According to her biographer, she married Leonard partly because of his ‘problematic Jewishness’ and the fact that this was the ‘opposite of the sort of . . . marriage which either of her parents could have countenanced’ (Lee 1996:308). Two decades later, Hugh Gaitskell married Dora Frost, who was Russian Jewish, again – according to his biographer – partly because she ‘personified the rejection of his family and the constraints of his upbringing. . . . It is difficult to imagine anyone further removed from Gaitskell’s family and background than Dora’ (Brivati 1996:33). Jan Struther, author of Mrs Miniver, a widely read chronicle of everyday upper-middle-class plucky 1930s Englishness, who was singled out by cultural historian Alison Light (1991) as one of the exemplars of interwar ‘conservative modernity’, was in fact a much more contradictory and unstable figure than her writing implied. She too flouted the conventions of her upper-class background by leaving her husband and children for a ‘penniless Jewish refugee’, a poet from Vienna who was twelve years her junior and whom she met while doing refugee work in London in the late 1930s.4 As a member of the editorial board of the Times, her ideas about Vienna and the plight of Jews as both tragic and heroic were presumably derived in part from Gedye’s radical anti-appeasement reports about developments in Central Europe.5 Vienna and Jewishness were symbolically important for my mother as well. From a social democrat Dutch Theosophist family, and therefore often marginalised in the conservative Christian community of her childhood, as were of course the Jews, she left Holland and travelled abroad as often as she could. In 1933, shortly after she arrived in Vienna, she met my Jewish father and lived there with him until they left for England in1937.6 During the interwar years, Jews and their symbolically resonant and problematic love affairs with non-Jews were also represented in English literary fiction. Elizabeth Bowen’s House in Paris (1946 [1935]), Virginia Woolf’s favourite Bowen novel, is an example of this. Written after Hitler’s rise to power, but about a non-specific historical moment, it vividly conveys the contradictory feelings among interwar liberal upper-middle-class families about love affairs between their daughters and ‘continental’ Jews. The heroine, Karen, falls passionately in love with Max, the enigmatic, slightly feminine, dark-eyed, half-French, half English-Jewish antihero, but is made aware that socially, as a husband, ‘he would not do’.7 In the context of the 1930s political climate and pervasive antisemitism, the relationship between non-Jews and Jews was as complexly charged with desire, transgression, ambivalence and repudiation as relationships between Afro-Caribbeans and whites were to become in the postcolonial climate of the 1950s and 1960s (chapter 6). Among the non-Jewish foreign activists in Vienna who risked their lives doing clandestine work for persecuted socialists and Jews between 1934 and 1938, and

The Unconscious and Others • 67 who formed sexual relations with Jews or other ‘others’, was the American heiress and psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner, later Buttinger. Gardiner, who had lived in Vienna on and off from the late 1920s, was doing her training analysis with Ruth Mack Brunswick, completing her medical studies, and was simultaneously active in the political underground. Almost fifty years later she wrote an autobiographical account of her experiences during this period entitled Code Name ‘Mary’, for which Anna Freud wrote the foreword (Gardiner 1983; Freud 1983). 8 Gardiner’s vivid reconstruction of the social environment she lived in recounts her personal relationships as well as her political activism. In addition to her many Austrian friends, she refers to Gaitskell, with whom she walked and talked in the Vienna Woods; to Gedye, the ‘sympathetic’ journalist who connected her to the underground; and to Stephen Spender, eight years her junior, with whom she had a love affair. Gardiner was the first woman Spender was attracted to (Gardiner 1983:54; see also Spender 1934 and 1951) and his long poem Vienna, written in 1934, in which he laments the defeat of socialism in the city and observes his own sexual-emotional confusion, was dedicated to her. Gardiner’s book, written so much later, is more dispassionate than Spender’s poem (as befits an elderly psychoanalyst) yet is nevertheless an absorbing account of both her life and the epochal period 1934–8. The illegal and highly dangerous antifascist underground work in which she was involved, and in which she operated ‘in the face of all reason’, as Anna Freud put it (1983:xi), included obtaining forged passports, hiding socialist militants and Jews in her Vienna flat and country cottage, supporting fugitives financially and smuggling them out of the country, while all the time sustaining the appearance of a rich American student of psychoanalysis and medicine, concerned with her studies and young daughter. After the Anschluss in March 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria, the situation became even more desperate. In his book, Gedye quotes a Times article, probably written by himself, which chillingly depicts the moment: In Vienna and Austria no vestige of decency or humanity has checked the will to destroy and there has been an unbroken orgy of Jew-baiting such as Europe has not known since the darkest days of the Middle Ages. . . . [Jews] are rapidly being forced out of every economic activity, and what was once a community outstanding in intellect and culture, is being turned into a community of beggars. . . . There can be no Jewish family in the country which has not one or more of its members under arrest. . . . Not a day passes without its toll of arrests and suicides. . . . Thousands stand outside the Consulates, waiting through the night so that they may register their names. (Gedye 1939:356).

Most waited in vain. Some escaped with forged documents acquired by Gardiner and others who put their own lives in continuous jeopardy. Gardiner emerges in this context – albeit from her own account – as a person who seemed to possess ‘instinctive extensivity’ to an extraordinary degree; moreover she was politically

68 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism astute, tirelessly active, meticulously organised and astonishingly committed, generous and brave. It is therefore all the more extraordinary that she should make a strikingly naïve and ill-considered ‘mistake’. The nature of this mistake is evidence of the broader syndrome of inclusivity and identification with difference which is here under investigation. The story is as follows: in the summer of 1938 Gardiner passed her final medical examinations. She had been unwilling to leave the country without graduating because a medical degree was required in order to practise as a psychoanalyst in the US. By this time the Anschluss had already taken place, but as a US citizen Gardiner considered her clandestine activism still relatively low-risk, and during those final critical months before the outbreak of war she was involved in more dangerous rescue work than ever before. In order finally to graduate, she was required by the university and new Nazi laws to complete lengthy forms about religious ancestry, baptism and marriage. This was partly to ensure the separate graduation of American Jews (Austrian Jews had already been excluded from the university). Although Gardiner’s paternal grandfather had been a Jew (but non-practising), the rest of the family on both sides came from established English Protestant stock: she had been brought up as a Protestant, had married a Protestant (though was now divorced), and had identified herself as such on all official forms since birth. The form-filling was the site of her error. Her description of the event is as follows: The easiest thing, and the only sensible thing, would have been simply to write that my parents and grandparents were all Protestants. Certainly I had no scruples about lying to the Nazis and in this case there was not the slightest danger that a lie would be detected. But I felt a sudden unexpected sense of solidarity with my American colleagues, all of whom were Jewish. I don’t know why I felt this. I barely knew them, had no personal ties with any of them and did not consider myself a Jew. But I wrote ‘Jewish’ as my father’s religion. I think now that this was a senseless thing to do; it could only hurt me and make me less useful to my friends. It did no one any good. I ask myself now what impelled me to do this irrational, injudicious act. I cannot believe it was a sudden upsurge of Jewish identity, which I had never felt before and have never felt since. Was it a passionate need to identify with the oppressed? I have no answer. (Gardiner 1983:129)

Nor, interestingly, especially for a trained psychoanalyst, does she try very hard to find an answer, either to this specific problem (which the authorities fortunately chose to overlook) or to the broader intractable question of how she came to possess such a visceral commitment to ‘others’ which encompassed not only her politics but also her love affairs. As with Woolf and Struther, she selected as her lover (after Spender) someone profoundly different – in her case a leader of the outlawed Social Democrats, Joe Buttinger, who came from a working-class peasant background and who as a child had suffered years of deprivation. The family had had insufficient food and clothing, inadequate housing and minimal education: ‘[N]one of the children

The Unconscious and Others • 69 had ever received a present . . . and the family did not own a single book’ (Gardiner 1983:68). It was through his political involvement with the socialist movement in the workplace that Buttinger had started to read widely and in the process had become well educated. Buttinger and Gardiner were not only lovers and comrades; they concurred on most things and were later to marry. Their initial meeting took place in 1934 in the context of her providing him with a safe refuge. He remained in hiding in her Vienna flat and country cottage for nearly four years until their flight from Austria. Although her lover, he was during the early years of their relationship also in effect her prisoner.9 In her book Gardiner makes no direct attempt to interrogate the conscious and unconscious motives that might have operated in the genesis of this love affair and choice of love object, or in her political identifications and ‘passionate need to identify with the oppressed’, as she herself puts it. Nonetheless she does offer an autobiographical sketch of her childhood which sets out in relatively lay terms some of the details that might be relevant to the origins of her psychic formation. A central determinant was, in her view, the cold, rather fearful relationship she had with her wealthy, often absent, parents and her close emotional and social relationship with her Irish nurse Mollie, ‘the person I loved most . . . I felt very sad that I could not love my mother as I loved Mollie’ (Gardiner 1983:9). The family residence on Chicago’s South Side took up half a large city block, and her luxurious lifestyle was a stark contrast to the servants’ stories about the living conditions of the poor and, of particular importance for Gardiner, their abject experience as steerage passengers on their voyage to America. It was through her emotional proximity to the servants that she became increasingly sensitive to the injuries of social inequality and developed a political consciousness and a determination to change the world. At age 10 she organised a suffragette march with friends, and during her adolescence in World War I she declared herself a pacifist. While at university she rejected the social mores constraining her personal and sexual life and became increasingly active as a socialist. Inevitably this is a very truncated account. What is valuable about it, however, is that it introduces a new element into the argument about instinctive, emotional cosmopolitanism. Until recently I considered that women’s particular receptivity to psycho-sexual (not just sexual) relationships with people from elsewhere was determined in part by their own sense of exclusion as women, and that this was a factor which impelled their identification with and empathy for other ‘others’. Additionally I considered that the apparent predominance of upper-middle-class and aristocratic women who flouted class and racial boundaries in their selection of lovers during the 1930s was a result of the limited availability of biographical sources about more ordinary women, and was not in itself a feature of class background.10 But Gardiner’s story suggests that romantic libidinal relationships with people from other classes and cultures – with difference – might also be an outcome of certain specific child-rearing principles and practices of the upper and upper-

70 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism middle classes which were particularly dominant during the Edwardian period (Gathorne-Hardy 1972). The intensity of the early emotional contact between children of this background and their working-class nurses, combined with the routine absence of parents, could well have led to deeply felt empathy for the socially ostracised. In Gardiner’s case it seems to have led to fantasies, and indeed practices, of rescue; to wanting to save and protect; to an eroticised inclusivity; and, in relation to her lover and virtual prisoner, also to a contradictory exercise of power. The emotional centrality of the nurse and the ensuing conflict of loyalties and unlikely object choices also emerged as significant factors for some of the others whose stories have figured in this chapter. Hugh Gaitskell, who was deeply politicised by his Vienna experience (although already a socialist before he went), also had a privileged childhood in class terms, yet was also deprived of an emotional relationship with his parents: he was left for several years with a Burmese nurse while the parents travelled overseas for the colonial service. Brivati describes Gaitskell’s ‘beloved ayah, Mary’ as one of the few stable emotional elements of his childhood and crucial to who he was to become. A photograph in which, as a blonde two-year-old, he grips the cloth of his young dark-skinned nurse’s sari and moulds his body to hers, conveys the mutual intensity of this kind of relationship (Brivati 1996:plate 3). Jan Struther, also referred to earlier and another child of the upper classes who later led a rebellious life, had a similarly passionate relationship with her nurse. As was common at the time, the nurse was dismissed with traumatic effect when Jan, as youngest charge, reached seven and was ready for more formal education: A world without Lala was as monstrously inconceivable as a world without my parents. . . . I used to read books, sometimes, about children whose mothers and fathers died. . . . But no one ever bothered to write a book about a child whose nannie died or went away for no apparent reason, which was why I was so completely defenceless when it eventually happened to me. (Struther quoted in Maxtone Graham 2001:9)11

After that, she said, she was ‘infected’ by mistrust. Like Gardiner, Struther identified her relationship with her nurse as formative in the development of her adult sense of justice; in her autobiography she describes a particularly determining moment when she felt her beloved Lala was humiliated by her mother: When I think of Lala, one small incident always comes back to me. . . . My mother and various guests were having tea . . . and Lala was making scones for the whole party . . . standing by the fire . . . ladling the batter on to . . . the iron griddle . . . [she] made a second batch, and then a third. . . . My mother had poured out the tea [and served the family and guests]. . . . After a while Lala turned her red hot face from the fire and said to my mother, ‘Could I please have a cup, Madam?’ . . .

The Unconscious and Others • 71 I was swept by a wave of shame, embarrassment and vicarious remorse. It was the first time that I ever had the feeling that I afterwards learned to call a sense of pathos: and it was the first time I was ever consciously aware that the social system was more than a little cock-eyed. This is an opinion I have never had any temptation to revise. (Struther quoted in Maxtone Graham 2001: 27–8)

There are many such examples, although there were, of course, also numerous children for whom intense relationships with nurses did not lead to a heightened consciousness of the injustices of class or to a greater sense of inclusivity. Nonetheless Gardiner and Struther’s analyses are particularly valuable as reflexive narratives constructed by themselves in an attempt to understand and explain the unpredictable nature of their adult political and sexual lives. Their accounts not only provide insights into the choice of love object, they also feed into the psychoanalytic literature to which I shall now turn in order to make more sense of the attributes constitutive of the mood described here – that is to say, instinctive extensivity, visceral cosmopolitanism, the eroticisation of otherness – and their empirical proximity to femininity.

Psychoanalytic Insights There are a number of broad yet interrelated questions associated with this structure of feeling which psychoanalysis should be able to illuminate. First of all, what unconscious mechanisms are involved in the emotional and libidinal attraction of difference? Secondly, how might these be connected to a commitment to inclusivity and a relative disregard for the borders associated with family, ‘race’ and nation? Thirdly, if, as the evidence suggests, this visceral cosmopolitanism has been driven predominantly by women (particularly during the twentieth century in the UK), how can gender differences in responsiveness to ‘others’ in terms of sympathy and desire be explained? What can psychoanalysis add to geopolitical and cultural-historical formulations? The following speculations are tentative and embryonic. The approach has been to cull, on intuitive as well as rational grounds, an eclectic selection of promising insights from a fairly broad range of psychoanalytical literature. This reveals that explanations for the allure of difference, where they occur, are rarely gendered and that, unsurprisingly, interpretations are diverse. Most clinical accounts do not explore the large questions that impact on the social and political – they tend to focus on the micro-dynamics of the consulting room and private life. Yet here too are variations. Thus in clinical terms, a libidinal engagement with difference, with people who are unlike the parents, can be variously interpreted as a strategy of avoidance or a sign of psychic health: for some clinicians such sexual and emotional preferences, particularly where repeated, are a sign of unresolved conflict arising from the repression and displacement of childhood incestuous desire for the parent

72 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism (though this presupposes that the key figures in the emotional and psychic world of the child are the parents, which, the biographies of Gardiner and Struther remind us, is not always so), whereas for others a fascination with difference and the new and a willingness to take risks are perceived as part of maturation and individuation and a way of transcending what Adam Phillips has called ‘the dull security of sameness’ which ‘unconsciously kills desire’ (Phillips 2000:340). Julia Kristeva, who also focuses – albeit elliptically and from a more theoretical stance – on early childhood identifications and attachments, in her case to address the socio-historical questions of nationalism, seems to concur with Phillips about the significance of the dull security of sameness. In her reading of nationalism, the ‘nation’ is imaginatively rendered as a transitional object, as something to hang on to in the precarious process of separation from the mother(land). Attachment to the safety of the local, the known, is interpreted as a narcissistic impediment to mature transition. For Kristeva, the cosmopolitan imaginary of the late twentieth century and ‘living with foreigners’ can lead to the recognition that we are all strangers, that the ‘other’ is within ourselves. In a heterogeneous ‘paradoxical community’ only strangeness is universal (Kristeva 1993; Davey 1999). She also suggests (though without explanation) that women may be, by inclination, more ‘world oriented’ than men. Kaja Silverman, in another densely expounded argument, combines Lacan with the philosopher Max Scheler in an attempt to distinguish between different forms of identification and different modes of relating. Following Scheler, she proposes two styles of identification: the idiopathic and heteropathic (Silverman 1996:23). Different responses to the mirror phase – different ways of integrating images and identity – result in different styles of relationships with love objects. The heteropath acknowledges the separateness of the other: this style of identification does not presuppose an imaginary unity yet is capable of sympathising with the other. In contrast an idiopath tends towards a cannibalistic consumption of the love object: there is no separation or acknowledgement of difference, there is no imaginary alignment with others. Although not tied to racial difference or to gender, this theory may be helpful in understanding the relationships with ‘other’ love objects and the psychic mechanisms involved in an inclusivity which nevertheless recognises and accepts difference. Jean Walton, also concerned with psychoanalytic accounts of identification, is among the few theorists who address the question of racial difference and desire from a specifically gendered of view. As part of a critical evaluation of classic psychoanalytic texts, she offers an innovative re-reading of the famous Joan Riviere essay on womanliness as masquerade (1986 [1929]), in which Riviere’s intellectual female patient recounts childhood fantasies and a dream about a Negro man. Using a broadly Lacanian approach, Walton provides an insight into this neglected racial sub-theme in Riviere’s essay which can be easily transferred to the Jew in the context of 1930s Europe. She suggests that:

The Unconscious and Others • 73 By shifting the emphasis from penis to phallus, we may be able to see how Riviere has possibly misread her patient’s imagined attacker as a father figure; it may be more pertinent to see him as occupying a position similar to that of the woman, insofar as he, too, might have reason to engage in masquerade to ward off retaliation by those who fear he has usurped their position of privilege. . . . [His] relation to the phallus, as signifier of white male privilege in a racialized patriarchal society, is as tenuous as her own. (Walton 1997:228–9)

Thus what Walton does is to offer a psychoanalytical reading rooted in a specific cultural history which enables us to distinguish the relationships of white (or racially privileged) women to racial others from those of racially privileged men. White women in this reading, particularly those who aspire to transgress the boundaries imposed by the conventions of cultural femininity, identify and empathise with racially ostracised men, because, like themselves, they are contingently denied power. In the process, as we have seen in the stories of Struther, Woolf and in Bowen’s House in Paris, racially other men – in this case Jews – are feminised.12 The theories drawn on so far have broadly been preoccupied with the early roots of identification and desire, with object relations and the symbolic meaning of the phallus to the child. However, there may be another significant way of understanding the unconscious and specifically gendered forces in play in the formation of instinctive inclusivity. The sensate pre-verbal relationship of the child to the mother is one important influence on adult identity and empathetic thinking, but the female child’s own potential as a mother – the imagined, intuitive and emotional effects of having a womb (merged perhaps with memory of being in the womb) – also makes a contribution. Bracha Ettinger (2004) has called this imaginary the matrixial. Her obscure yet nevertheless very promising thesis, which draws on elements of Lacan as well as object relations, has recently been interpreted for us, though hardly simplified, by Griselda Pollock (2004).13 The central claim of relevance to the discussion in this chapter is that the matrixial offers an additional and prior signifier to the phallic/castration paradigm. Rooted in the affective intrauterine connection between the mother and the child, women’s subjectivity – femininity – is more likely to be about conjoining than difference, about ‘jointness-in-separateness’, ‘severality’ and ‘encounter’. According to Ettinger, the matrixial has more permeable borderspaces and thresholds and a less differentiated relation to others and foreignness.14 Roy Boyne, in his introduction to her work, summarises her thesis and its implications thus: In general terms, the deep and abiding consequences of an opening out of matrixial thinking, of placing gestation and birthing in the foundations of social and selfunderstanding, is the very possibility of valuing the other more highly than the self: a vista toward the horizon of the indispensability . . . of the other. (Boyne 2004:3)

74 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism So this is another theory which adds to the architecture of the psyche and gives us a sense of why some people, women more often than men, are sympathetic to outsiders and inclined to instinctive extensivity. Despite its different style and theoretical provenance, Ettinger’s thesis confirms Freud’s original point about men’s greater predisposition towards conflict with ethnic and racial others. Together the eclectic combination of insights outlined here (and produced mainly by women theorists, it must be pointed out) evoke Virginia Woolf’s celebrated quote about women’s ambivalent relation to patriotism: ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (2000 [1938]: 234). What I hope to have sketched out here is a different country, a neglected landscape, in which inclusivity, desire for difference, a disposition to interdependence and political altruism transcend the limitations of cultural and geopolitical borders; a place in which Virginia Woolf might have felt a little more at home. Cosmopolitan cultural imaginaries exist, even if precariously, contingently, and in tension with much darker forces; historically they have fuelled innumerable small heroic acts.

–5– White Women and Black Men The Negro as Signifier of Modernity in Wartime Britain

Just as we have dancing to substitute for sex, we have lyrics for our feelings. Belfrage 1994:166

Don’t Fence Me In: White Women and Black Men A little-known event occurred at the end of World War II which is nonetheless emblematic of a specific trajectory within English modernity. On an August afternoon in 1945 hundreds of young English women besieged the army barracks in Bristol at which black GI soldiers were stationed, protesting at their imminent departure for the United States and the refusal of their commanding officer to allow them to take leave of their girlfriends. Singing Bing Crosby’s hit ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, the women broke down the barriers surrounding the encampment and later attempted to get through the gates at the train station shouting: ‘To hell with the US army colour bars! We want our coloured sweethearts’ (Smith 1987:204). This display of personal commitment, sexual desire, political opposition to segregation, disregard for convention and the law, and ironic deployment of American popular culture was probably unique in the way it made dramatically manifest the lineaments of a situation whose genealogy I want to explore in greater depth. But the relationships involved were not exceptional. They were among the very many sexual and romantic encounters between white British women and black servicemen from the United States which took place between 1942 and 1945, and which, I shall argue, can be traced back to the commercial and entertainment cultures of the interwar period and the idea of America and the modern in the English popular imagination. These developments in turn contributed to groundwork for the distinctive formation of British postcolonial domestic race relations in the second half of the twentieth century – and, in particular, the gradual, albeit very uneven, normalisation of relationships between men of Afro-Caribbean descent and white English women.1 During the three years of the war in which American (mainly male) forces were stationed in Britain, interracial marriage was legally outlawed in almost half the states of the Union and heavily discouraged elsewhere. Yet in wartime Britain, although a minority of people disapproved of social (and certainly sexual) contacts with racial

75

76 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism others, what was remarkable – given the extensive influence of American culture – was that large numbers welcomed the black GIs and found the official segregation and the aggressively racist behaviour of most white servicemen shocking, particularly in the context of the war against fascism. The American army command was disturbed by this unanticipated response and, in an attempt to diffuse racial tension within its own ranks, considered it appropriate to warn its troops about what it had already perceived as the different ‘racial consciousness’ of the British and especially of the women. As General Eisenhower himself made plain: ‘The . . . British girl would go to a movie or a dance with a Negro quite as readily as she would go with anyone else’ (Gardiner 1992:155). However, American anxiety about the repercussions of such behaviour, particularly ‘back home’, was widespread. After the publication in the American press in 1943 of photos of black American servicemen dancing with white English women, the army command went to the extraordinary lengths of imposing military censorship on all photographs portraying interracial dancing and social mixing. It also did its best to discourage such behaviour in the flesh, though with only limited success, given its lack of authority over English women (Back 1997:190; Smith 1987:197). As Barbara Cartland put it, reflecting after the war on her experience as a WAAF moral welfare advisor: ‘It was the white women who ran after the black troops, not vice versa. . . . [They] would queue outside the camps, they would not be turned away and they would defeat the Military Police by sheer numbers’(quoted in Costello 1985:319). The indignation and aggression of many white American troops about this state of affairs eventually led to the establishment of separate social events and dancing clubs for black servicemen which white women could attend without fear of conflict. These were endorsed by the British government under pressure from the United States’ army command. Among the black clubs in London were the Bouillabaisse, in New Compton Street, and Frisco’s International, in Piccadilly, both in the Soho area and around the corner from the Rainbow Club, the main social gathering place for white American troops. Images in a 1943 Picture Post photo essay entitled ‘Inside London’s Coloured Clubs’ show a few white men and a few dark-skinned women, but most of the people dancing and socialising are black men and white women (figure 3 and cover) (17 July 1943). Graham Smith has claimed that despite the general welcome extended towards black GIs in the context of war, there was ‘near-universal hostility towards interracial sexual relations’ from the British public and the government (Smith: 1987:121–3, 188). This interpretative emphasis has been echoed by Bill Schwarz, who quotes the same phrase from Smith’s book in order to support his argument about the ‘reracialisation’ of Britain in the postwar period. This process was largely determined, according to Schwarz, by the widespread fear of miscegenation (Schwarz 1996:197). Yet Smith has undermined his own claim by referring to a 1943 Mass-Observation survey which showed that ‘one in seven people disapproved of mixed marriages’ (Smith 1987:200). One in seven is a remarkably low figure and hardly supports the contention of ‘near-universal hostility’. In fact Tony Kushner’s recent valuable

White Women and Black Men • 77

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Figure 3 ‘Inside London’s Coloured Clubs’, Picture Post, July 1943. Photo Felix Man, Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

research into the Mass-Observation archives confirms that many observers were strongly against ‘racial superstition’ and ‘objected to colour prejudice’ (Kushner 2004:25, 133). Moreover, evidence from the dance halls, cinemas, photographic archives and personal memoirs suggests that large numbers of young white women found black men socially and sexually interesting, despite public opposition. A more qualified analysis of social disapproval in terms of age and gender would probably have produced a different reading. In a context in which the men in mixed relationships were mainly black outsiders, concerns about miscegenation were unsurprisingly greater among indigenous men, so the roots and components of the hostility were not homogeneous. As the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R James observed on his first visit to London in the early 1930s (when there were still relatively few black people in London): ‘The average English girl in London has little colour prejudice, and in fact, were it not for English men I doubt if she would have any at all. . . . The girls, far from being prejudiced, are very much interested . . . it is the [English] men who are responsible for a great deal of the trouble’ (James 2003 [1932]:102). Anxiety during the war years was inevitably exacerbated and was generated not only by the social and sexual success of dark and foreign men, that is to say, by the issue of race; it was also generated by women’s insubordination – by the uppityness and sexual fantasies of daughters, sisters, sweethearts and even wives.

78 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism The response in the following decades to the arrival of mainly male migrants from the Caribbean displayed similar contradictions, despite the fact that during the 1950s British antagonism to outsiders was greater than it had been during the war. The increase in hostility was due in part to a domestic situation in which racial others, now no longer American and affluent, were competing for work and accommodation, especially in London. Among the continuities, however, was the welcome extended by English women, which, as before, has until recently tended to be excluded from the memories and written histories of the period.2 Yet, as with the 1940s, photos and archive film footage of metropolitan jazz and dance clubs depicted venues densely packed with black men and white women dancing and talking to each other (Gilroy 1987).3 The popularity of these urban meeting places, despite the more general climate of hostility, again provides evidence of the unevenness of the British response to miscegenation and the particularity of the experience of women.4 English women’s interest in dance and cultural difference, and the willingness of so many of them to operate against the grain of English prejudice and the far more deeply entrenched conventions of American society in the early 1940s, constitute a significant milestone in the history of twentieth-century British race relations. The reception of the black GIs and the texture of the first widespread physical encounter between ordinary English people – predominantly women – and racial others in the British context was profoundly shaped by the impact of Hollywood cinema and the dissemination of American commercial culture and popular music in the 1930s. In relation to questions of race, the allure of the modern and the elaboration of an America of the imagination were to have paradoxical and unanticipated consequences.

America and Elsewhere in the Imagination England in the 1930s, as Keith Williams (1996) has pointed out, was distinguished by a new ‘else awareness’. There was a new presence, particularly in the metropolitan consciousness and landscape, of abroad and cultural difference, though interpretations of this somewhere else were inevitably diffuse. America occupied the pre-eminent position in the league both of mythologies and anxieties about the foreign and in terms of its material impact imprinted on the buildings, imagery and sounds of London. Yet throughout the interwar years the debate about this influence was monopolised by critical and pessimistic voices from both the right and left of the political spectrum. This is to be contrasted with a different set of narratives of much longer duration associated with continental Europe which during this period possessed a powerful resonance for the English middle and upper classes. Inevitably these ideas about the foreign tell us as much about the country and class in which they were generated – about a particular version of Englishness – as about elsewhere (Said 1978). Paul

White Women and Black Men • 79 Fussell, focusing specifically on the 1930s, has drawn attention not only to the fascination of abroad, but also to the hostility expressed by writers and intellectuals towards what they perceived as the small-mindedness, bleakness and xenophobia of an increasingly suburbanised Britain (Fussell 1980). For these travellers, abroad represented culture, romance and sensuality; home was philistine, prosaic and frigid. Both were territories of the mind. Travel to other places made possible the break from home and a new beginning. As W.H. Auden put it as a young man on his departure for Berlin in 1928, ‘the real life-wish is the desire for separation from the family . . . and the immense bat shadow of one’s home . . . from all opinions and personal ties: from pity and shame’ (Porter 1998:2). Expatriation was rooted in a psychic revolt against parents and the parental culture. Abroad offered a new degree of anonymity and personal and sexual freedom. Although these English travellers were predominantly men (those selected by Fussell entirely so), the interwar expatriate writers and artists who moved to Paris and Florence because of the imagined freedoms that these cities offered also included women. Among them were Violet Trefusis, a novelist and, like Auden, a homosexual, for whom France represented escape and who, after her notorious affair with Vita Sackville-West, was banned from England on pain of disinheritance by her mother (Souhami 1997). Another was Nancy Cunard, poet, communist activist and editor of the 800-page anthology Negro (1934) and, like Trefusis, from an aristocratic family, whose avantgarde lifestyle in Paris and with her long-term partner, African-American Henry Crowder, expressed her rejection of her family and society in England. Indeed, in 1931 she published a pamphlet entitled Black Man and White Ladyship (1968) in which she attacked her mother for her racism and snobbery – her moral corruption – in attempting to exclude Crowder from England. Abroad was a better place for them. During these years, Europe, and particularly the cities of Paris, Berlin and Vienna, seemed to offer more enlightened, liberal and sophisticated forms of sociability, set, moreover, among landscapes and architecture perceived to be of historical and aesthetic distinction. Continental Europe was not only somewhere to go to. It also travelled as a cultural myth replete with élite and sometimes transgressive associations back to the cityscape of London – to the museums, theatres, shops and restaurants of the metropolis and occasionally to the provinces. This well-established and class-specific pattern of abroad in the imagination and the mapping of Europe onto the streets of Fitzrovia, Soho and elsewhere has been vividly documented in the literature and correspondence of the writers of the time. Their voices have described and rationalised a romantic and intellectual commitment to different ways of living – to a cosmopolitan consciousness – generated by the existence of other urban environments to which, for them, escape was always materially possible. There were few such eloquent advocates or biographers, however, to speak on behalf of America in the imagination and the influence of America on the topography and culture of London.5 Yet the United States had a presence and a resonance that far exceeded that of Europe. Its connotations and its main constituency were however

80 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism markedly different.6 The myths of America which circulated in interwar England were derived mainly from Hollywood and they reverberated most forcefully in the sphere of popular rather than élite culture, in the burgeoning world of consumption and entertainment, in cinemas, dance halls and shops. These sites and institutions attracted lower-middle- and working-class young people from the cities, predominantly women, as often as three or four times a week. They were among the popular urban environments which contributed to the transformation of the prosaic climate of interwar Britain and disrupted the cultural authority of the educated classes (Jephcott 1942; Richards 1984; Williams 1996). The two most recurrent motifs which America symbolised in the discursive regimes of the cinema were modernity and opportunity. In addition to the cinematic projection of iconic modern urban skylines and the latest technological innovations, the image of America disseminated in the popular movies was of a forward-looking, democratic, irreverent, glamorous, jazzy and somewhat sentimental land, in which a working girl could marry a millionaire. As John Grierson put it in 1932 when he wrote about how he preferred American to British cinema: ‘Hollywood always had the good sense to . . . salute the common life. Behind its luxuries there has always been a suggestion of [ordinary] origin. Behind the gowns and gauderies there has been a frank allowance that the lady inside them started . . . as a shop girl’ (Hardy 1981:74; see also Kracauer 1995). This optimistic vision of the new world was promulgated in the first instance by an industry improbably dominated by first-generation Jews from rural Eastern Europe. Rooted in a history of marginalisation and nurtured by fantasies of assimilation and metropolitan success, it had a relentless appeal (Gabler 1988).7 In Britain as elsewhere, the utopian narratives of Hollywood spoke to the aspiring working and lower middle classes with remarkable prescience – albeit in unfamiliar English (Dyer 1992; O’Shea 1996b). This America, whose symbolic traces were present not only in London but also in the provinces, operated psychically (like Europe for the literati) as an imaginary somewhere else; as a refuge and a fantasy of a better future, as a means of breaking away from the constraints of class and parental conventions of deference, denial and despair (see also Alexander 1994).

The American Beat: Music and Dance America’s influence did not derive only from the movies. Nor was it confined to the working girl. Another cluster of associations, which fed into popular images of America and transformed the social life of cities during the interwar period, were generated by American popular music and dance styles. The continual references in both the critical and popular literature about this period to ‘syncopation’ and the ‘syncopated beat’ of the new clubs, music and dance steps convey a sense of the perceived physicality – as well as irregularity or off-beatness – of the impact of American sounds and movement which complemented the cognitive and emotional

White Women and Black Men • 81 response to the movies. Syncopation – a beat that goes against the conventional grain and is not only played and heard but performed expressively with the body – connotes both rhythm and defiance. The music, whether big band swing or jazz, was usually performed in interwar London by Americans and often blacks (the provinces had to make do with British swing bands, though few of these were considered of any worth) (Graves and Hodge 1991 [1940]:385). Jazz and American swing appealed first, during the 1920s, to the middle and upper classes and then spread, in a modified form, with the epidemic of social dancing, to the working class as well. Part of the attraction of American popular music in Britain, especially jazz, was, according to Eric Hobsbawm, precisely its American provenance. ‘Jazz bands came from the same country as Henry Ford’ (Hobsbawm 1998:267). The music was played in the movies. It had a democratic and classless appeal. It connoted modernity. This was its overriding signification. During the course of the 1930s, jazz and swing had become became increasingly associated with the urban and also with Jews: it was a ‘mongrel creation of the American metropolis’, whose rhythms and lyrics were adopted and made popular by the (Jewish) composers of Hollywood musicals (Back 1997:176). ‘True swing was . . . a fine product of Jewish sweet passion, negro relish of living and the stimulating climate of New York City,’ wrote the English commentators Robert Graves and Alan Hodge at the time (1991 [1940]:386). The image of jazz and its derivative forms as metropolitan and cosmopolitan was much stronger in Europe, particularly in Britain, than the United States, where the music still retained evocations of slavery, the rural and the primitive, despite the modernism of the Harlem Renaissance. In Europe, American swing was popular not only because it connoted modernity but also because it was so suitable for dancing. The meaning of dance has proved difficult to theorise (see, for example, the dilemmas of Warde 1997). It has nonetheless been a major feature of modern cultural life and represents a form of non-verbal expression which connects an embodied affective primal sense of the self to the social. In Britain, the dance boom of the 1930s formed an intrinsic part of the spread of greater personal and sexual freedoms for young people of all classes, and for women in particular. The aristocratic socialite Lady Marguerite Strickland described her experience of dance culture in the following way: I went to lots of clubs every night. . . . [They were] all dark. The idea of the darkness was that you’d be dancing with someone else’s husband and your husband was across the room with the man’s wife. The dancing was so important, the new band music was so marvellous. I used to know all the tunes and the band leaders who used to play in the clubs were all friends of ours. It was all so exciting. (Weightman and Humphries 1984:34)

These club encounters permitted the development of other kinds of socially transgressive relationships as well. Nancy Cunard, heiress and bohemian, included

82 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism among her lovers in Paris black American jazz musicians; and Edwina Mountbatten, even more wealthy and related by marriage to the royal family, was also rumoured to have had an affair with a black band leader who played at private parties in London (and also with Paul Robeson, according to his biographer Martin Duberman, 1989:618–19). Dance for working-class women was just as popular as it was for the middle and upper classes. Thousands of new dance venues opened in the interwar years and many young women went to their local Palais or Mecca as often as four or five evenings a week. ‘The hot rhythm and syncopated music seem to be in the same tempo as the noise and speed of the factory and make an easy appeal to people who live in a continuous din,’ wrote sociologist Pearl Jephcott in her attempt to make sense of the cultural pursuits of the working girls in her study (Jephcott 1942:120). Dressed in fashions inspired by Hollywood, young women danced with each other until approached by the men. On the whole, though, according to Jephcott, ‘boys were less enthusiastic about dancing than girls’. Hobsbawm makes a related point when he stresses the preference of young men for buying records and listening to American music (1998:268). Women’s passion for dancing was not matched by men’s; their desire to dance was not gratified as often as they wished. Englishmen were reticent and bashful dancers and their participation was often little more than a tactic in a strategy of sexual conquest. The reasons for this national and gendered discrepancy in the skills and pleasures of dancing are not clear. Dancing for English women was both narcissistic display and a form of sexual foreplay – a substitute for sex – at a time when full intercourse was both risky and disreputable. The ineptness on the dance floor of many Englishmen may have been related to the broader anxiety about the feminisation of society (Nava 1996; Priestley 1997 [1934]). This in turn is likely to have been compounded by the tradition of a segregated pub culture which kept young men away from dances until after closing time (Mort 1999). Whatever the cause, this particular tendency was to be exacerbated during the war years when the dance skills of many GIs – and especially black GIs – filled the lacunae left by the ambivalence and physical absence of British men. Dancing and music for North American blacks was a form of self-expression in a context in which a public voice and democratic participation had been institutionally denied. As Duke Ellington put it, ‘What we could not say openly we expressed in music (Back 1997:175).8

Hollywood in Oxford Street and the Holloway Road The imprint of America on England in the interwar period extended beyond the culture of music and dance to the materiality of the metropolis, its architecture and retailing institutions. London during the 1920s and 1930s was a rapidly expanding city, unlike much of the rest of Britain, which suffered more acutely from the depression. Among the new buildings were restaurants, cafés, chain stores, cocktail bars, dance

White Women and Black Men • 83 halls and cinemas, which all promoted a much more vigorous public sphere and fantasy life and were part of the burgeoning commercial and entertainment culture inflected by the idea of America. In Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries’ upbeat account, during this period London became ‘shockingly and excitingly “modern”, pulsing to a syncopated American beat that pervaded the whole of its teeming life from the West End cocktail party to the Hollywood movie showing to packed houses in [the high street] picture palace’ (1984:8). The evidence for working-class attendance at the cinema, especially among the young and female, and mass participation in what was an overwhelmingly American movie culture during the interwar years is well established (Richards 1984). But the integration of relatively poorly paid workers into the world of consumption and the consumer economy is less well documented and more disputed. Yet this period saw a steady expansion of low-priced chain stores throughout the country, and particularly in the high streets and newly built suburbs of London. Best known among these were Marks & Spencer (influenced by American retailing practices) and Woolworth’s (an extension of the American chain), which targeted the lower middle-class and young workers with some disposable income. Despite the national economic recession of the 1930s, the newer industries of the south-east remained buoyant and consumption levels increased overall, with the highest growth rates in London. Although the large department stores showed a decline in profit margins compared with their highpoint before World War I and with the expanding multiples, Oxford Street retained its position as the hub of British retailing and commercial culture (Nava 1995). Selfridges, the largest department store in the street, was, as noted earlier, founded and owned by American magnate and cosmopolitan moderniser Gordon Selfridge, whose explicit commercial strategy included the recruitment of customers from the lower middle classes and the improvement of working conditions for his mainly female staff (see also chapters 2 and 3). With some self-interest as well as accuracy, Selfridge described Oxford Street in one of his store’s daily press columns in 1933 as ‘the Greatest Shopping Street in the World’: There are more spectacular streets than Oxford Street. . . . But for the number of people per yard who go shopping in it, for the amount of business done and for the concentration of first-class stores and shops offering immense varieties of merchandise at prices which attract the general public, Oxford Street is . . . beyond all doubt the finest in the world. . . . All day long and on to midnight the pavements are filled with people from all parts of the country and the world. Up to 7 o’clock they are shopping. After that they are looking at the displays in the windows, and these displays alone would make Oxford Street a place of international distinction. (Selfridge Editorial, 11 December 1933)

This passage draws attention to the activity and excitement of Oxford Street: the late night shopping, the celebrated windows, the cosmopolitan crowd and the unique combination of luxury and affordable prices which enabled the street to retain

84 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism its pulling-power during the 1930s. Selfridges was a significant innovator in this respect, and, in line with some American retailing practices, deliberately targeted the full range of the market. Although the store promoted its expensive merchandise (haute couture ‘cocktail suits and ball gowns for the sub-deb, the deb and her mother’) in Vogue, Tatler and other society publications, it also advertised its lowcost clothes and household goods in the down-market press with full-page cluttered advertisements, deliberately designed in a style which connoted sales and bargains. ‘Selfridges is the cheapest shopping place in London’ these announced. And indeed it was the case that bargain-basement goods at Selfridges were as cheap as, if not cheaper than, at many provincial and suburban stores, which were unable to compete with the attractions of Oxford Street and could not achieve the economies of scale required to keep prices down. Even the cheap clothes at Selfridges were more stylish than elsewhere, and during the 1930s the store specifically targeted a new kind of customer, the modern working girl, who, despite unequal pay, was at a life stage with relatively few domestic financial obligations. She was therefore able to spend a good proportion of the money she earned on herself in order to dress stylishly and transcend, at least, the appearance of class. In the 1936 Selfridges’ advertisement entitled ‘Cheque and Chic’, the copywriter succinctly acknowledged these skills of self-presentation and appealed to the working girl’s aspirations for a modern and socially classless image: Modern miss dresses so well . . . it is impossible to decide whether she is working-class, middle-class or – hold your breath please – a film star. ‘Chic’ you realise, doesn’t always spell ‘cheque’. Films create fashions and none are more sartorially mimetic than the average working-class girl. . . . Smartness these days can be achieved on a surprisingly modest outlay . . . the ‘Inexpensive Department’ is an adventure in charm and economy.9

This advertisement, surprising for its linguistic complexity and its uninhibited reference to class, spoke to young women already in the West End because of their jobs, as well as to those who travelled there specifically in pursuit of renewal and escape. Such fantasies were more vividly mobilised, though perhaps not gratified, by excursions to Selfridges and Oxford Street than the much less glamorous local high streets. As Jean Rhys’s anti-heroine Anna put it epigrammatically in Voyage in the Dark (1934), in an acute expression of elsewhere in the imagination: ‘I walked along Oxford Street thinking about my room in Camden Town and that I didn’t want to go back to it.’ Observing other women looking at the Oxford Street shop windows, she ‘saw that their eyes were fixed on the future. “If I could buy this then of course I’d be quite different”. Keep hope alive and you can do anything’ (Rhys 1969: 111). Later Anna met her friend Maudie ‘coming out of Selfridge’s and we went into a tea shop . . . she was full of a long story about an electrical engineer who was gone on her. She was sure she could get him to marry her if she could smarten herself up a

White Women and Black Men • 85 bit. . . . So I lent her eight pounds ten’ (Rhys 1969: 136). Like the myth of America, Oxford Street proffered the idea a better future, however precarious. Looking at the shoppers and the shop windows was also part of the process of learning about the world, an expansion of the field of the visible and the cognitive for the 1930s urban flâneuse which echoed the panoramic cinema experience. Despite, or perhaps because of, the draw of Oxford Street, Hollywood stars and movie styles were used in attempts to attract customers to the less-favoured parts of town as well. The Nag’s Head section of the Holloway Road in north London was one such centre. At the turn of the century this area had been quite prosperous – albeit not very fashionable, according to Lupin, the rebellious son of Mr Pooter in George and Weedon Grossmith’s 1892 The Diary of a Nobody (1965) – but by the 1930s it had declined. Only alternate tube trains stopped at Holloway Road after 1932, so it was almost as easy for shoppers from the suburbs to go to the West End. The notorious Campbell Bunk, reputed to be the most criminal and poorest street in north London, was half a mile away (White 1986). Yet yards from Campbell Bunk, in the heart of this depressed working-class area was one of the most extravagantly decorated, atmospheric cinemas in London, the Finsbury Park Astoria. Built in 1929, with three thousand seats for which all-day tickets cost as little as four pence, this exotic and luxurious venue had a retro-oriental foyer with a Byzantine cupola, Moorish fountains, Bengali friezes and Baroque mirrors (Atwell 1980). So international film culture penetrated here too – even if in oriental vernacular, and even if the buildings ‘smelt of poor people’, as the Camden Town cinema visited by Anna did in Rhys’s novel (1969:93). By the mid-1930s American modernist décor was in the ascendant, and in 1936 on the Holloway Road itself, Marks & Spencer confidently launched what it called a ‘super-store’, while across the road, an ultra-modern Gaumont Picture Palace, one of the few in Britain designed by American cinema architect Howard Crane, opened its doors in 1937. Both of these venues were yards away from Jones Brothers, which at the turn of the century had been a very successful middle-range department store, but by the mid-1930s was struggling to survive, despite having been taken over in 1927 by Selfridges Provincial Group. In an attempt to revive the fortunes of the store, Gordon Selfridge Junior, managing director of Jones Brothers and son of the founder of Selfridges, commissioned a survey to report on the state of the local market and advise on the store’s image and advertising methods. The result was a comprehensive report submitted in October 1936, which attributed most of the steep decline in sales over the preceding decade to the insensitivity of Jones Brothers to changing fashions (Pritchard, Wood and Partners Limited 1936).10 One of the examples cited was the astonishing 82% decline in the sale of women’s underwear, explained in part by ‘the tendency for women to wear fewer and fewer underclothes’ and in part by the rise of the neighbouring Marks & Spencer (Pritchard, Wood and Partners Limited 1936:34). The overriding message of the recommendations proposed by the marketing consultants in their report was that the modernity of the store should

86 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism be promoted. The new slogan was to be ‘There is always something new at Jones Brothers.’ In order to demonstrate the modernization of the enterprise there needed to be ‘a constant flow of exhibitions, demonstrations and free attractions . . . [and] the installation of a free cinema which . . . would keep a steady stream of people passing through the store’ (Pritchard, Wood and Partners Limited 1936:50). On the fashion front, the store was advised to stock American shoes, stockings and dresses, which, the report pointed out, were increasingly popular in Britain because they were stylish, well cut and cheap (even though ‘the quality and finish may be very bad’). These items would boost sales because young women are becoming more and more insistent on smart clothing, and this applies equally to the artisan class. An illustration of this . . . is that the working girl insists on wearing fine stockings undaunted by the fact that they will only last about a week. She can buy a good imitation of an expensive stocking for about 1/- and she prefers to buy a new pair every week than ‘invest’ in something more durable. (Pritchard, Wood and Partners Limited 1936:53)

The promotion of American goods, the report continued, would ‘give the advertising a powerful and original new story’. This was required in order for the store to survive the competition from local multiples and the appeal of Oxford Street.

The Mississippi at Jones Brothers At the centre of the new commercial strategy lay a recognition of the need to attract a new generation of women consumers to the store – young working women in particular. Jones Brothers was urged to do some ‘bold thinking’ and to position America and the modern as central features of its new publicity campaign.11 Among the policy decisions stimulated by the marketing report was a special Christmas attraction launched in 1937. In addition to the normal Father Christmas for ‘the kiddies’, the store presented a remarkable reconstruction of a Mississippi show boat, complete with accompanying ‘Uncle Tom’ and ‘darky’ musicians who sang and strummed banjos (Islington Gazette, 17 December 1937). At the end of a trip in the boat down a simulated river, advertised as ‘full of fun and excitement’, each visitor received a ‘surprise gift’ from Uncle Tom. The evidence about this tantalising event is scanty. Whether the ‘darkies’ were hired from the small local population of Africans and West Indians, many of them students, or from the group of black American musicians with night jobs in the West End, or the indigenous mixed-race families of the dock areas of east London (from whom were recruited the extras for films about Africa and Empire made in the UK film studios), or whether they were blacked-up whites, is not known.12 What is clear is that the performance was intended to increase the flow of customers to Jones Brothers, and that black men and the allusions to the Hollywood movie Show Boat, released in London in 1936, were

White Women and Black Men • 87 considered a major attraction. They articulated the special appeal of America and the modern and were part of the design to draw in local female customers. At the time the Uncle Tom appellation was benign (it was not to acquire connotations of political accommodation until the 1960s) and would have immediately evoked Paul Robeson, the celebrated and charismatic black American star of Show Boat (figure 4). Robeson, resident in London from the 1920s because (like C.L.R. James) he found the atmosphere consistently less racist than in New York, was extremely well known to British cinema, theatre, concert and radio audiences during this period (Duberman 1989). Between 1935 and 1940 he starred in six British feature films and received top billing in each. Among them was Big Fella, which, in the week after the Christmas show at Jones Brothers, was screened half a mile away at the luxury Mayfair Cinema in the Caledonian Road. In 1937 Robeson was ranked tenth in the Motion Picture Herald list of the British cinema-going public’s most popular film personalities and voted the most popular singer on British radio. During this period he also played the lead part in several theatre performances, among them C.L.R. James’ 1936 play about the Caribbean revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture. At the same time he was becoming increasingly overt in his support for the left and antifascism. In the months before the Jones Brothers Show Boat tableau, Robeson was giving concerts with a popular political repertoire, sometimes as often as three a day, in ordinary music halls and cinemas like the Finsbury Park Astoria and the Holloway Gaumont (Duberman 1989). As Ron Ramdin noted: ‘In these centres of working-class entertainment he was able to reach vast new audiences who understood the emotional depth of his folk-songs and Negro spirituals. Here Robeson touched the pulse of the British people’ (Bourne 1998:244). As part of his support for antifascist causes also sang at smaller venues. For instance, in 1938 he gave a concert at an exhibition of German ‘degenerate art’ at the New Burlington Galleries in order to raise money for banned artists and Jewish refugees from Hitler. There is no doubt that Robeson made an extraordinary impact on British culture between the wars. This was manifest across the range, from his performance of Othello to the dubious Show Boat tribute enacted at Jones Brothers. His stardom and particularly his American accent – heard as often on the radio as in the movies and inseparable from the celebrated and emotionally charged timbre of his singing voice – evoked for English audiences a compelling identification with American culture. Robeson personified a complex range of attributes from the heroic to the abject, from the modern and ‘cultured’ antifascist to the noble primitive. Bill Schwarz has argued that ‘Robeson provided a potent means by which – for white English men and women – the possibilities of the modern world came to be internally recognised, known, judged and felt. . . . English memories of becoming modern, and of first becoming aware of race, can still work through the figure of Robeson’ (Schwarz 1996:187). Robeson was the single most significant black figure (indeed often the only one known) for most ordinary English people in the 1930s. Hence perceptions of him made an important contribution to the prismatic understanding of blackness

88 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism

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Figure 4 Paul Robeson at the London Premiere of Show Boat, 1936. Photo Sasha, Hulton Archive/ Getty Images.

both then and later during the war years. The more nuanced English view during this period, in which blacks were seen as primarily American and therefore modern, must be contrasted with perceptions and practices in America itself, where the everyday experience of race was inseparable from its national history of slavery.

The Significance of Accent Robeson’s speech and accent were factors which contributed significantly to the British perception of blacks as inherently part of the landscape of the modern world. The connotations of American accentuation and speech rhythms and the ascendancy of American slang became increasingly contentious in Britain during the interwar period. The resonance of this different way of speaking English was rooted in the influential narratives and aesthetic of American movies, which were consistently more popular than British-made films among working-class audiences throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The success of Hollywood cinema during this period was based on its idealism, its depictions of glamour and abundance, and its democratic story-lines which featured ordinary men and women in a sympathetic light. And, of course, these ordinary heroes spoke American. The structure of feeling, the utopian

White Women and Black Men • 89 sensibility and style of language present in this genre of entertainment has been contrasted with the flatness and rigidity of most contemporary British films, in which characters knew their place and spoke either mannered upper-class English or caricatured Cockney (Richards 1984; Dyer 1992; Sklar 1994; Williams 1996). The enunciation of English class-specific speech in English movies served to reinforce the stigmatisation of those among the British population whose speech was not ‘standard’. It contributed to the defence of social hierarchy – as the unashamed categorisation of U and non-U speech in the postwar period illustrated (Ross 1959). But the cultural distinctions based on how people spoke (comparable in some ways to the American distinctions based on race) were to generate their own opposition. American speech patterns heard in the movies provided the first alternative to local or BBC ‘Oxford’ English for most British people. American accents and phrasing were often adopted both as a fashion and as a form of resistance to snobbish class-bound speech codes. There are many examples of the discomfort of the educated classes in the face of the rejection of ‘correct’ English. In the words of one schoolmaster concerned about the ‘American nasal twang’: ‘[E]ither ban talking films or have them made by people who can speak . . . the King’s English’ (Field 1974:111). In fact the process was under way even before the talkies arrived. Expressions used in the subtitles of American films like ‘OK’, ‘kid’ and ‘sex appeal’ were enthusiastically embraced (Graves and Hodge 1991:138–40). In 1927 (before the talkies) a Conservative MP complained: ‘They talk American, think American, dream American. We have several million people, mostly women, who to all intents and purposes, are temporary American citizens’ (Williams 1996:63). Despite the hyperbole, by 1936, the year of Show Boat, Winifred Holtby reported that young working women up and down the country, consumers of the same narratives of romance and opportunity, were speaking ‘cinema American’ to each other as part of a culture of youth and opposition (Holtby 1981:35). Parodic American speech seemed to promise the possibility of self-realisation, and even perhaps collective empowerment. Part of the tourism of the mind and the expansion of cognitive and imaginary horizons, these tongues of elsewhere were also the accents of song and swing and therefore of dance and the newly enlivened body. The singing and speaking voice, although clearly conveying complex meanings through speech, can also be argued to have a different modal significance as pre-verbal communication, as sound. Paddy Scannell, in relation to the technical transformations wrought by radio during this period, has suggested that voice was ‘the expressive register of being’.13 What is clear is that the semiotics of voice have (until recently) been singularly unattended to in the critical literature of modernity, in which the focus has been overwhelmingly on the expanding scopic regimes of the twentieth century: on observing and appearing, on the visual. What I am suggesting here is that the quality of interwar American speech – that is to say, accent, timbre, song, linguistic playfulness and disregard for the constraints of formal (British) English – and its association with both the cinematic experience and

90 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism the idea of a better elsewhere, played an important part in laying the groundwork for the particular historical reception of black American soldiers by white English women during World War II. The evocative American speech patterns used by black as well as white GIs contributed during this conjuncture to a relative diminution of race and the visual as cultural signifiers.

White Women and Racial Others: Reaction and Identification This is not to suggest, however, that race and racism were insignificant factors during the late 1930s. On the contrary, precisely at the time that racial difference was being reshaped by popular entertainment cultures it was also becoming increasingly politically salient. Responses were polarising. In this context women’s fascination with cultural difference and their sexual interest in racial others was not only connected to fantasies of abroad and the constraints of Englishness, it was also often a self-reflexive act of defiance in a social climate in which the repudiation of racial others was increasingly widespread. (In the context of 1930s Europe, ‘racial others’ of course also encompassed Jews – see chapter 4.) This ambiguous dynamic was even detected, in a muddled way, by racial supremacists themselves. For instance, Henry Champly, racist author of a prurient, manic and heavily italicised travelogue entitled White Women, Coloured Men (originally written in French, published in UK in 1936 and much reprinted), tracked the growing desire of white women for black men in Europe and around the world. He feared that miscegenation would bring about the downfall not only of the white race but also of the whole human race, and attributed the problem to white men’s ‘uncultivated sexual side’ and to white women’s fascination with the unknown and ‘legendary’ which drives them ‘to prefer even Negroes’ (Champly 1936:264; original italics).14 Unexpectedly, the author also blamed the influence of commerce and the growing fashion for sun-bathing: ‘The windows of our most up-to-date shops display . . . wax-dolls in swim-suits . . . with their faces, arms and legs dyed a deep ochre. That is the ideal of fashion which is preparing the minds of White women to accept the idea of cross breeding’ (Champly 1936:276; original italics). Paranoid fears of this kind generated their own opposition and indeed even promoted empathy and identification with blacks on the part of some women. This process of reaction was articulated in both polemical and fictional form by some of the figures from the 1930s to whom I have already referred. Thus Jean Rhys’s white heroine Anna, who preferred Oxford Street to Camden Town, compared the cold anonymity of her life in London with her childhood in the Caribbean, where she had felt at home among the black people who cared for her and inducted her into the mysteries of the landscape and life. Anna remembered ‘always wanting to be black’ despite, or perhaps because of, the opposition of her snobbish and rejecting white step-mother, who accused her of ‘growing more like a nigger every day’

White Women and Black Men • 91 (Rhys 1969:45, 54; see also chapter 6). Nancy Cunard’s much more adversarial and conscious intervention into racial politics seems also to have been fuelled, in part, by a long battle with her racist and disinterested American-born mother and the people of her social class in London. Her identification with the socially excluded also shaped her relationship with black American Henry Crowder and endorsed her commitment to the ‘negro cause’, as it was then called (Chisholm 1981). Jessica Mitford, who eloped with Esmond Romilly to Spain to support the International Brigades (and after he died married an American Jew), was another upper-class woman who rebelled against her background. In her account of her growing commitment to communism, as an isolated adolescent in an autocratic family of Mosley supporters in the 1930s, she referred to her fantasies of ‘love-at-first-sight with some Sicilian peasant, Greek shepherd or swarthy African’ (Mitford 1960:97). The responses of these women to race and difference were composed of a complex interplay of reason, reaction, identification and empathy, set in a context in which abroad and the foreign seemed to represent new freedoms. The voices of Rhys, Cunard, Mitford and others like them should not, however, be understood only in relation to the personal and biographical. These women were also part of a broader political opposition to the injustice of racist laws and practices, a movement which extended across the social spectrum and included within it working girls who shopped at Selfridges and ‘fell in love’ with Paul Robeson, not only for his beauty and his voice, but also for his left-wing politics and his opposition to the growth of fascism (Bourne 1998:244–55). So the appeal of racial others was part of a rational, contingent, antifascist, political stand. This political commitment was to be boosted at the beginning of the war, with the awareness of the contradiction between the Allied nations’ condemnation of German racism and the continuing existence of American race laws. The fragments of these biographies and the narratives of interracial interest also illustrate more complex and perhaps unconscious processes of psychic identification and realignment: they indicate the growing identification and empathy of white women as women with the colonised and excluded racial other. This is a dynamic which can be uncovered in other historical and geopolitical instances of feminist consciousness as well (for instance in the anti-slavery movement), but it has been remarkably absent from psychoanalytic commentaries, which have focused predominantly on the construction of blacks as ‘bad objects’, on whom whites project negative feelings.15 Very little work has been done on the attraction of otherness. The empathetic identification of white women with black men and the construction of black men by white women as desirable has also been neglected by postcolonial critics and historians of race, for whom the focus has justifiably been on the more injurious legacies of difference. Yet the psychic and political forces at work in these relationships have had wide-ranging as well as contradictory repercussions. In the domain of sexual politics and everyday life, a romance with an excluded other man may enable the white woman to diminish her own social marginality – but

92 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism only in the context of the relationship itself. The spin-off for the black man is an enhancement of his status in the broader community of men, both black and white. Another outcome of white women’s desire for culturally and racially different men is to force into social consciousness and onto the critical agenda a more assertive and contrary female sexuality than commonly acknowledged. This was particularly so during the middle decades of the century, when transactions such as these will have undermined some of the privilege and authority of white men. The half-conscious processes of identification and the juggling of power in this nexus of exchanges will have contributed to the wider democratisation and modernisation of socio-sexual relationships between men and women in this century. The Guyanese author Ras Makonnen described a comparable dynamic in the social encounters of the 1950s: ‘We recognised that the dedication of some of the [white] girls to our cause was an expression of equal rights for women. One way of rejecting the oppression of men was to associate with blacks’ (Gilroy 1987:163). White women’s relationships with black men in the 1930s and 1940s were also a form of proto-feminism. They were expressive of a rebellion against the constraints of both femininity and Englishness.16

Different Modernities: The Contradictions of Americanisation The anxieties of English educators and intellectuals about what was perceived as the excessive and negative influence of American popular culture has been well rehearsed in the critical histories of the interwar period (Hebdige 1988; Carey 1992; Williams 1996). What is significant here is that the spectre of Americanisation – in this instance America’s cultural conquest of Europe though Hollywood cinema – was considered by many influential thinkers in the 1930s to hold most dangers for young women. Socialist novelist John Summerfield expressed this concern characteristically in his 1936 reference to ‘silly girls’ with their ‘synthetic Hollywood dreams, pathetic silk stockings and lipsticks, their foolish stirrings’ (quoted in Alexander 1994:204). J.B. Priestley, in his 1934 lament about the influence of America, also implied that the most susceptible subjects were young women: ‘factory girls’ who ‘want to look like actresses’ (Priestley 1997). These anxieties about the colonising force of Hollywood and mass culture and the vulnerability of women were bolstered by the perceived diminution of men’s authority in the home and workplace and the feminisation of culture. So it is pertinent that among the few interwar intellectuals prepared to acknowledge the pleasures of consumption and the cinematic experience were a number of women, including Elizabeth Bowen, Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittan and Virginia Woolf. But the dominant voices from across the political spectrum were critical and anxious. Underlying such criticisms are assumptions about how cultural influence works. Essentially, the model is one of an easily manipulated subject and a strategically

White Women and Black Men • 93 developed text. These pessimistic theories about cultural processes are not confined to the critics of the 1930s. Although generated predominantly during this period about the impact of mass American culture, most famously by the cultural analysts associated with the Frankfurt School, similar critical presuppositions are apparent in the writing of much more recent theorists and historians of commercial and entertainment culture. Thus Charles Eckert, in his richly detailed exegesis on the influence of cinema on commerce in the 1930s, ‘The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window’, has argued that ‘films functioned as living display windows for fashion, music, emotion and the life-style of the middle and upper classes’. His thesis was that the cinema was part of a carefully planned strategy: a ‘celluloid imperialism’ designed to ‘manipulate’ ‘captive audiences’. In this dystopian vision, messages are transmitted and received in unfractured unfettered way (Eckert 1990:103-4, 120). Victoria de Grazia’s more recent history of Americanisation in the years before and after World War II carries some of the same problematic assumptions. She has argued that the United States imposed a ‘sociable market’ on Europe over the course of this period which defined European modernity and domesticity.17 Underlying accounts of this kind is the presupposition of a mimetic uptake of American styles, behaviour and values; of an easy, untrammelled influence transmitted to consumers throughout the world. American films, stars and music did indeed have a powerful presence in Britain during the interwar years. Commercial culture was saturated with the imagery of cinema, and this predominantly American presence was materially mapped onto the streets, bodies and the imagination in the ways I have shown. Nevertheless, an analysis of how this influence operated, how ‘America’ was read and made sense of and acted on, points to a more problematic and contrary picture. Cultural colonisation is transmitted through a range of discursive registers and its impact is extremely uneven. There are contradictory legacies. Thus in relation to the meaning of racial difference, Britain did not simply ‘follow the USA’. Different histories produce different outcomes, and ‘the negro’ in Britain during the interwar period, although still discriminated against in multiple ways, was nevertheless associated increasingly with the modern and with the Hollywood landscape of the new world, rather than with narratives of empire or America’s internal memories of slavery. Epidermal difference did not signify in Britain as profoundly as did class and accent. There are also implications here for the way in which modernity has been conceptualised. What emerges from this fractured picture is that modern ideas and the experience of being modern in the twentieth century, which include relations between ‘races’ and perceptions of racial difference, have not developed in a uniform way across the globe. Nor has modernity been all-embracing within English society. Rooted in a broader cosmopolitan consciousness, whose existence and structure have been shaped in part through a history of conflict and tension with dominant conservative and nationalist traditions within British culture, English modernity has been a distinctive formation. And pivotal to it have been the complex

94 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism and contradictory fantasies of ‘elsewhere’, the new, the more democratic and the sexually free. This more utopian and insurrectionary version of modernity is at odds not only with British traditionalism, but also with what Alison Light (1991) has identified as the mood of conservative modernity of the interwar period. The strand of modern experience explored in this chapter was not only more cosmopolitan and racially diverse, it was also articulated through popular consumerism and the cinema and dance cultures of the moment – through mass culture. However, in common with Light’s thesis, my argument also confirms that women played a central part in the social reconfigurations of the period. The cultural response of English women to racial others which emerged during this conjuncture was ultimately both a product of Americanisation and a critical repudiation of it. Paradoxically, the white working girls who wanted to look like movie stars, and about whom the left so despaired, in the end, through their defiant relationships with their ‘coloured sweethearts’, contributed significantly, if indirectly, to the struggle against American race policies and the expedient wartime supporters of racism in Britain. At the vanguard of English modernity, these young women and their fantasies of a better life laid the groundwork for a more liberal cosmopolitan culture, one which anticipated the postwar ‘emancipation of emotions’ (Wouters 1998) and the escalating miscegenation of white, black and mixed-race British at the end of the twentieth century.

Part IV Cosmopolitanism in Postcolonial Britain

–6– Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually Race in Postwar Fiction, Film and Social Science

Problem Caryl Phillips, the respected black British Caribbean novelist and political essayist, now based at Columbia University, has argued that most white British writers of fiction and drama of the 1950s and early 1960s ignored questions of race and the growing presence in the UK of new migrants from the colonies and Commonwealth. The ‘myopia’ is ‘shocking’, he writes (Phillips 2004:6). Among the authors whom he singles out for criticism are Kingsley Amis, John Osborne and John Braine, all ‘Angry Young Men’ at the time and considered critical of the status quo, yet all failing even to register the issue of postcolonial migration. Although Phillips acknowledges that there were some exceptions (he cites Colin MacInnes, author of City of Spades and England, Half English, and Shelagh Delaney, author of A Taste of Honey), he claims that even these authors projected stereotyped views of the newcomers. ‘One might conclude’, writes Phillips, ‘that it is somehow difficult for a white English writer imaginatively to engage with a black character, particularly male, without thinking sexually’ (Phillips 2004:6). In contrast, he asserts, the African and Caribbean writers of this period (and he refers specifically to Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and V.S. Naipaul) offer a more rounded picture of England’s indigenous population. Well, can this argument be sustained? Were black people as absent from the white literary landscape as Phillips claims? If not, was gender a relevant factor? Were there significant differences in the way in which men and women as authors represented racial alterity not only in the literary and cinematic texts, but also in social science research of the period? If ‘sexual thinking’ in relation to racial others was indeed widespread, were the objects of this sexual thinking only black men? And was sexual thinking only a product of the white imagination? These questions are relevant not only in relation to Phillips’s thesis and representations of the historical moment itself – the past – but also because they help register the complex interaction of gender and racial difference and transformations in the politics of identity over the intervening decades.

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Context The representation of ‘others’ during the 1950s and early1960s extends the exploration of the English urban cosmopolitan imagination to the postcolonial period. As has been argued in earlier chapters, the version of cosmopolitanism under examination is concerned with the vernacular, the everyday and, in particular, with the gendered and affectual elements in play in positive or egalitarian perceptions of cultural and racial difference at home. The project has been to trace cosmopolitanism as a structure of feeling and aspiration by looking at specific texts and episodes and to trace the uneven process of its relative normalisation across the course of the twentieth century. Yet, as has also already been noted, despite this shift in the popular mood, cosmopolitanism has continued to coexist in tension with xenophobia and the repudiation of racial and cultural others throughout the period. The historical moment looked at here is particularly important in the trajectory of this complex formation given its pivotal position in relation to decolonisation and the geopolitical and social transformations of the postwar. Although the migrants of the 1950s were not the first major wave to come to the UK from abroad,1 they did nevertheless constitute an unprecedented expansion in the population of black and ‘other’ British subjects, thus inevitably generating a spectrum of responses among Britain’s indigenous population, from hostility, rejection and denial, to sympathy, curiosity and sexual desire. Their presence necessarily promoted a new consciousness among whites about the unstable meanings of epidermal difference and the process of decolonisation. Inextricably linked to these transformations throughout the century were questions of gender. Theorists of cosmopolitanism have not addressed this at all. Yet, as I argue throughout this book, women in Britain have figured more prominently than men in the history of twentieth-century hospitality towards people from abroad. The reasons for this are complex: among the historical and geopolitical factors have been the demographic consequences of two world wars which reduced the numbers of available men. But more important in this context have been the gendered patterns of migration to Britain over the course of the twentieth century, which have meant that indigenous women were the first to have intimate relations with the predominantly male visitors and migrants from abroad. Women were also more exposed to the global flows of popular modernity; as shoppers, readers, and dance hall- and cinemagoers, they were more likely to encounter and embrace the narratives and fashions of ‘elsewhere’: of the new, the foreign and the different (see chapter 2). This modern consciousness shaped the welcome extended by English women to US forces stationed in UK during World War II, which was often notably nondiscriminatory in racial terms. Indeed, as I point out in chapter 5, the US army command felt it necessary to warn its troops that ‘the British girl would go to a movie or a dance with a negro quite as readily as with anyone else’ (Gardiner 1992:155). These widespread wartime encounters with racial others in turn laid the

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually • 99 groundwork for the interaction of white women with black migrants of the 1950s, of whom 85% were men. Although these outsiders were less affluent than the black GIs, and were especially badly treated in the postwar housing shortage as well as in the workplace, there were nevertheless continuities in the relationships they formed with some white women from England and the continent. During this period English women were not only more likely than English men to socialise with the newcomers; they were also more likely to identify with the migrants, who like themselves were often marginalised and denied power in the overlapping regimes of white and male superiority. So the alliances of white women with racial others and the socially repudiated can be understood, as several of the Caribbean migrants also recognised, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as a form of proto-feminism: interracial relations constituted a revolt against the constraints of docile ‘femininity’ as well as the parental culture, and in this way anticipated the political critique that was to emerge more clearly at the end of the decade with the women’s movement. As we saw in chapter 5, Ras Makonnen (from Guyana) made this point when he said that ‘the dedication of some of the [white] girls to our cause [in the 1950s] was an expression of equal rights for women. One way of rejecting the oppression of men was to associate with blacks’ (Gilroy 1987:163; chapter 5). Indeed this sense of commonality between the situation of black men and white women has been noted by Phillips himself. In an interview on The South Bank Show (13 April 2003) in the context of a discussion about his novel A Distant Shore (2003) he said that he always felt empathy with the vulnerability of women: ‘This is an understanding that comes from the experience of colonisation.’ Finally, it may also be the case that women are more disposed to what Stanley Cohen has called ‘instinctive extensivity’ or inclusivity. This is a kind of intuitive and spontaneous ‘sense of self as part of a common humanity’, a semi-conscious, not easily explained disregard for borders demarcating family, ‘race’ and nation (Cohen 2001:265). According to this and other psychodynamic theories, it therefore might also be the case that women (not all women) are intrinsically more likely to feel sympathy for strangers and outsiders than are men (chapter 4). This, then, is the intellectual and historical context which frames my interest in and response to Caryl Phillips’ argument. It thus becomes clear that the fictional, cinematic and social science texts of that moment must be interrogated differently. They are evidence not only of literary and academic output but also of how a critical historical moment was viewed and experienced. They are social texts that can help illuminate how race was understood during the years preceding the more developed and self-conscious regimes of identity politics, both of gender and race, which were to emerge and become embedded over the following decades. Given this strategic location, texts authored by women need to be examined with more care. Can they too be accused of the ‘myopia’ in relation to the migrant presence that Phillips has attributed to the (male) authors he looked at? If not, to what extent were women’s imaginings and representations in this climate different from men’s? Secondly, how

100 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism far were the imaginings and representations of black authors (male in this case) different from those who were white? The initial research for this chapter entailed reviewing the fiction, drama and cinema of the late fifties and early sixties to see whether there were significant texts that Phillips had overlooked or could be interpreted differently. Uncovered in the process were a number by white women and men which did indeed depict migrants and racial others. Also reviewed was the fiction of some Caribbean writers. All the authors were considered either artistically or commercially noteworthy at the time, and several still are today. All their outputs were published or first screened between 1956 and 1962, with most in a narrow window between 1960 and 1962. While in the midst of this research I became increasingly interested in contemporaneous sociological and anthropological studies of the new migrant presence. As with the literary outputs, much of the social science work on this topic was produced in the same short time span – between the mid-1950s and early 1960s – and much of it also demonstrates a bifurcation in the approaches of men and women authors. Although academic studies do not as directly express the imaginings of their producers, and were not among the targets of Caryl Phillips’ critique, they are of course nevertheless evidence of the sociological imagination (Mills 1959) and of the gender and race consciousness of that moment. An analysis of them therefore complements the study of the fictional texts.

Fiction and Film Shelagh Delaney is cited by Phillips as one of the only two white writers of the moment to write about race. This is not the case, as we shall see. But Delaney is the only woman I came across who depicts an interracial sexual relationship. Her play A Taste of Honey, which was written when she was seventeen and achieved wide success both in the theatre and as a film (directed for the stage by Joan Littlewood in 1958; then made into a film, directed by Tony Richardson, in 1961) tells the story of seventeen-year-old Jo, who is neglected by a gadabout mother and falls in love with a ship’s cook, Jimmie, who happens to be black (Delaney 1982 [1956]).2 Phillips accuses Delaney nevertheless of reproducing the sexualisation of the black male, and he cites in support an exchange in the script in which Jo says to Jimmie: ‘Sometimes you look three thousand years old. Did your ancestors come from Africa?’ ‘No,’ says Jimmie, ‘Cardiff. Disappointed?’ To which Jo answers, ‘There’s still a bit of jungle in you somewhere’ (quoted in Phillips 2004:6). In the film, the dialogue forms part of a flirtatious banter at the couple’s first meeting and is preceded by Jimmie saying, ‘Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old’ (not quoted in Phillips). So Jo is responding to Jimmie’s comment about women’s essential agelessness whilst at the same time innocently restating a now unfashionable modernist precept about race and authenticity (echoing inter alia

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually • 101 the views of Cunard 1934 and 1968). This is a very minor part of their interaction and seems a slim hook on which to hang an accusation of racialised sexualisation. Phillips seems to be suggesting that difference and myths about national origins should remain un-noted. He goes on to argue that Delaney ‘found it difficult to see her black character as much more than an irresponsible though admittedly charming sexual outlaw’ (Phillips 2004:6). This is hard to sustain. Although Jimmie is a relatively undeveloped figure, his relationship with Jo is depicted as tender and loving. Both are lonely and both reach out to each other. At their second encounter, Jimmie gently fixes Jo’s knee after she has grazed it in a fall (figure 5). When finally they do make love it is Jo who initiates the sexual contact. She invites Jimmie to stay over in her empty house (her mother has gone off to marry her new beau) even though she knows his ship will leave the following day and she may not see him again. She is not put-upon or seduced. In fact Delaney’s unwillingness to characterise Jo as victim was always one of the innovative features of the play. Supporting evidence for Phillips’ claim that Jimmie is a ‘sexual outlaw’ seems slim. Doris Lessing is another white British writer who cannot be accused of ignoring the migrant experience. Herself a migrant from Southern Rhodesia, and already a

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Figure 5 Jimmie fixes Jo’s grazed knee in A Taste of Honey. Dir. Tony Richardson, 1961.

102 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism political activist of the left, she arrived in Britain in 1949, one year after Windrush (the boat that brought the first postwar British Caribbean migrants), with a completed novel in her luggage which centrally addressed ‘racial inequality’ and depicted a highly charged ambivalent relationship between a white woman and her African servant (Lessing 1989).3 Like the migrants from the Caribbean, Lessing was struck on her arrival by the sight of white men labouring at the dockside, and like them she was dismayed by the decay and greyness of London.4 ‘Everybody was indoors by ten and the streets were empty.’ Moreover, because of the acute housing shortages of the moment, she too had difficulty finding somewhere to live, though in her case the problem was having a two-year-old child. Single mothers and children were scarcely more welcome than blacks. It took Lessing six weeks to find a garret ‘too small to unpack a typewriter’ in ‘cosmopolitan’ Notting Hill (Lessing 1998:4–5). Lessing was one of the most noted white writers of the period, so it is surprising that Phillips should have overlooked her. The only woman to be included in the 1957 book Declaration, a collection of ‘Angry Young Men’ writings, she, not unlike Phillips today, was scathing about the provincialism of British literature of the period, and, like Phillips, targets (among others) Kingsley Amis and John Osborne (also a contributor to the volume): ‘By provincial . . . I mean that their horizons are bounded by their immediate experience of British life and standards’ (Lessing 1957: 22–3). ‘This is a country so profoundly parochial that people like myself, coming in from outside, never cease to marvel.’ She overstates the case since most white migrants from the Commonwealth did not share her radical vision. But she was shocked at how ignorant even left-wing British intellectuals were about political and social conditions overseas, in the colonies and Soviet bloc: ‘Thinking internationally [for them] means . . . taking little holidays in Europe or liking French or Italian films. Meanwhile, the world churns, bubbles and ferments’ (Lessing 1957:24). Lessing’s much-lauded novel The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, describes life in London in the late 1950s for Anna Wulf and the spectrum of people with whom she interacts. These include (in addition to her women friends and son) socialist comrades from all over the world, the community of African political exiles in London, refugees from Hitler and McCarthyism, and a Ceylonese lover (who is no more or less endearing than her other lovers). In sum, this is not a novel that overlooks immigration from Britain’s colonies and elsewhere, even though its main focus is on cold war politics and Anna’s sexual, creative and unconscious life. The racially other people we meet are not particularly sexualised. Indeed Anna herself protests at attempts by publishers to promote her first book about Rhodesia in terms that she considers excessively sexualised and racialised. So Lessing at the time was staunchly anti-racist, though this was later to change.5 Jean Rhys is another white migrant from the colonies, but of a different generation. Born in Dominica in 1894, she spent the first sixteen years of her life there and her writing is saturated with memories of this experience. Hers is a more passionate and tender, albeit troubled, relationship to the native people and landscape than

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually • 103 is Lessing’s to Africa. ‘I used to long so fiercely to be black,’ writes Rhys in her autobiography (Rhys 1979:53). Anna Morgan, the heroine of Rhys’s 1934 novel, Voyage in the Dark, insists she is ‘a real West Indian . . . I’m the fifth generation on my mother’s side’ (Rhys 1969:45; see also chapter 5). Like Rhys herself, Anna’s closest emotional relationships as a child were with black people, yet her disappointment was that she could not belong among them. Ford Madox Ford, in his 1927 preface to a collection of her stories, made the case for a connection between Rhys’s provenance and her literary point of view: ‘Coming from the Antilles . . . [she has] a terrifying insight . . . [a] terrific . . . passion for stating the case of the underdog . . . [and] a sympathy of which we do not have too much in Occidental literature with its perennial bias towards satisfaction’ (Ford 1972:138). These contradictory identifications – ‘her racial background and her identification with black women’ – prompted Sukhdev Sandhu to include Rhys among his black and Asian writers in his recent book London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (2003:128). These writers reveal again a more complex picture of white writers than Phillips allows. Rhys’s sense of not-belonging is confirmed, like other migrants to London, by her perception of the city as grey and soulless and by her experience of the loneliness of furnished rooms. Like Lessing and Caribbean writers such as Selvon, she maps out and names the streets in an attempt to make them familiar. But unlike Lessing and Selvon’s characters, hers drift hopelessly through their lives, lacking purpose and confidence. Rhys’s work of the post-World War II postcolonial period continues her recreation of the imaginings and identifications of her childhood.6 In 1960 she published a long short story, ‘Let Them Call it Jazz’, which, although recently reissued, has been surprisingly neglected by theorists.7 The story foregrounds the experience of the Caribbean black migrant, in this case a woman, Selina, while also returning to the themes of Rhys’s early work – loneliness in the city, homelessness, random small acts of kindness, dependence on strange men – now all compounded by racism: ‘Don’t talk to me about London. . . . To walk about London on a Sunday with nowhere to go – that take the heart out of you’ (1972:44–5). Selina describes her hostile neighbours, ‘the husband . . . stare at me worse than his wife – he stare as if I’m wild animal let loose’ (1972:47). This delicate, bleak and sad story, written in Rhys’s usual minimalist style, linguistically as innovative as Selvon (whom I shall come to later) in its normalising of Creole idiom, is also about a defiant uplifting song that Selina first hears sung in Holloway prison, in a voice ‘that jump the gates of the jail easy and travel far, and nobody could stop it.’ (1972:60). Later she whistles it at a party to remind herself of how it transformed her life, but the melody is appropriated by some musicians, jazzed up and sold. ‘I could cry,’ she says, ‘that song was all I had. I don’t belong nowhere really’ (1972:63) – neither really black like the musicians, Rhys implies, nor white like the other prisoners in Holloway. So, in common with the more obviously autobiographical work of Rhys’s youth, this story demonstrates a poignant empathy with its young female protagonist and with

104 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism not belonging anywhere. The character is no more sexualised than any of Rhys’s other women. Elizabeth Taylor is a different kind of author altogether. Thoroughly middle class and middle England – parochially middle England – she writes with dry precision about ordinary events and respectable people. Yet, notwithstanding, she has two vivid short stories about black migrants in her 1960s collection The Devastating Boys (1995). The title story (Taylor 1995b) is about two black East London children who go to stay with a middle-aged academic and his wife in the Oxfordshire countryside. Sharp, funny, closely observed and quite without clichés, this is a narrative about the personal and emotional transformation of both sets of protagonists as they encounter each other’s cultural idiosyncrasies. It is an account of well-intentioned naïve hospitality that is recognised as such, yet warmly responded to by the boys. Another story in the same collection, ‘Tall Boy’, repeats some of the tropes selected by other writers to evoke the loneliness of immigrants, isolated in inhospitable bedsits, especially on Sundays. Here is the opening sentence: ‘This Sunday had begun well, by not having begun too early. Jasper Jones overslept . . . – and so had got himself an hour’s remission from the Sunday sentence’ (Taylor 1995a:66). Again, this is an imaginative engagement with the experience of the migrant, removed from his community, alone in a foreign country and eager for any kind of social contact. It’s not a story about the sexualisation of the black man: Jasper Jones is serious, vulnerable and ordinary. Lynne Reid Banks’ novel The L-Shaped Room, first published in 1960 when she was in her early twenties, made into a film in 1962 and reprinted almost yearly since then, also includes a black character and urban bedsit territory. The heroine, Jane, who is pregnant and doesn’t know what to do with herself, develops a tender friendship with a Jamaican musician, Johnny, the occupant of the adjacent room to hers on the attic floor of a furnished house in west London. Again the motif is urban loneliness and the squalor of postwar London housing; yet here too, as in some of the other narratives of transformation, there is also a celebration of the vitality and generosity of the changing metropolitan populace. However, not only is the black man not constructed as sexual, his sexuality and even his masculinity are disavowed: Jane and Johnny embrace each other at a moment of extreme despair and Jane reflects, ‘It [was] very strange . . . there [was] not even that trace of sexuality which there always is between men and women, even those who are just friends’ (Banks 1980:120). Such emphatic denials are of course often a sign of their unconscious opposite – thus in this case desire. But that might be too subtle a reading for a book which, despite its continuing popularity, is an example neither of ‘good’ literature, nor, by the standards of today, of enlightened sexual and racial politics. Yet, nonetheless, the narrative provides an insight into a moment of transition and shows a willingness to engage with alterity and ‘others’ as an increasingly normal part of the modern London cityscape. In this context ‘thinking internationally’ is depicted as part of a revolt against the constraints of the conservative parental culture.8

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually • 105 So what we begin to see is that the work of white women writers about the presence of colonial black migrants is not easy to categorise. There are various themes that emerge, among them identification, empathy, personal transformation, rebellion and epidermal difference as a signifier of urban modernity. Surprisingly, despite the frequency of real-life sexual and romantic relationships between white women and ‘other’ men at the time, only Delaney focuses on sex or desire. In fact, it is the male writers, both white and black, who ‘sexualise’ interracial relationships, as I will now show. They have this in common even though their positioning in the modern drama of interaction is quite different. There is not much to go on, however: apart from City of Spades and Absolute Beginners, both by Colin MacInnes, who is deservedly praised by Phillips for his path-breaking and sympathetic engagement with the new postcolonial London, the only fiction or drama I found written by a white man with black characters and black–white relationships is the play Hot Summer Night by Ted Willis (1959), later produced as the film Flame in the Streets (1961), also scripted by Willis.9 It is surprising that Phillips overlooked this since Willis was a major writer of ‘progressive’ and ‘social problem’ TV, films and drama at the time and, moreover, miscegenation, racism and the build-up to the 1958 Notting Hill race riots are central to the plot, especially of the film. (The play, set in 1957, is different in a number of significant respects.) There are two parallel race themes in this story, one about discrimination against a black worker, Gabriel (who is married to a blonde woman, now pregnant), and another about a growing love affair between the shop steward’s daughter, Kathie (also blonde and a teacher), and Peter (her black colleague). A markedly multiracial population is visible on the streets and in the schools. Although the two black men are represented as respectable and hard working (no singing, dancing or ganja here), this highly charged drama does indeed sexualise and racialise them both. About racism as much as race, the film is full of menace and in fact paradoxically works to reinforce racism by repeatedly reproducing racist comments about black workers, the dangers of mixed marriages and the poverty of migrant housing conditions, rather than critiquing them. There are two main sources of this in the narrative: the first is Kathie’s socially aspiring mother, who voices disturbingly bigoted and abusive views (Willis 1959:41). Interestingly it was not unusual to depict middle-aged ‘sexually frustrated’ women in this negative way in the pre-feminist 1960s, thus, as Lola Young points out, in effect realising Fanon’s sexist thesis that ‘abnormal sex lives’ lay at the root of women’s Negrophobic attitudes (Fanon 1986:158; Young 1996:114). The second main source of racist comment in this film are white working-class male workers and the teddy boy bikers, who in the last scene start a fight with the local black population, disrupting the peaceable multiracial celebration of Guy Fawkes, and viciously assault Gabriel, the black worker. But before this climactic and violent scene, Kathie, disgusted by her mother’s racism, leaves her parents’ house and walks through the dark streets, lit by fireworks, to be with Peter. This is her first visit to his

106 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism place, despite the six-month love affair, presumably to indicate that their relationship is not driven by desire. After asking several (black) passers-by the way, she arrives at his house, and again we have the trope of decaying overcrowded accommodation (figure 6), in this case confirming her mother’s worst fears: ‘[Blacks] live like animals . . . six, eight, ten to a room.’ As Kathie goes from floor to floor in search of Peter she encounters one stereotypical cameo after another and in one room comes across Judy, Gabriel’s pregnant white wife, who warns her of the dire consequences of marrying a black man. Finally she finds Peter, who, although a professional teacher, also shares his room (in his case with other student types who have ties and ‘educated’ accents). She tells him she wants to marry him despite the bleakness of her journey and their future. Kathie’s father, who has followed her, tries forcefully to persuade Peter to give her up because, according to him, ‘only one in a hundred mixed marriages work’ and he doesn’t want his daughter and his daughter’s children to suffer. This widely disseminated cliché about the social fate of mixed-race children surfaces also in the work of sociologists (see below) and was drawn from same ideological frame

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Figure 6 Kathie searches for Peter in the shabby, overcrowded rooming house in Flame in the Streets. Dir. Roy Baker, 1961.

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually • 107 as the attribution of prejudice to neighbours, used at the time to justify the denial of accommodation to non-whites. However, Kathie and Peter refuse to abandon each other and finally all return to the mother, who is forced to compromise. But despite the more conciliatory outcome, this melodramatic and dystopian film is as much an incitement to racism as a solution. The narrative heaves with anxiety about the disruption caused by the newcomers, and the extended tracking scenario in the shabby rooming house is used to exemplify the worst of the alleged threat of migration. This dark representation is in stark contrast to a similarly constructed scene in the film Sparrows Can’t Sing, directed and scripted by radical director Joan Littlewood (1962). Here too we see the device of a native Londoner journeying through the now foreign territory of a rooming house occupied largely by ‘others’, but in this case the mood is quite different. The central character – a seaman who has been away for a few years and has returned to his old neighbourhood in search of his wife Maggie – clearly relishes the cultural transformations that have taken place in his absence. At one point he enters a room full of West Indians, who, on hearing that he has lost Maggie, jokingly offer him one from their own group. ‘Is this your Maggie, my friend?’ one asks. ‘I wish she was,’ he says wistfully, and dances with them to their spontaneously made-up calypso about the problems of losing Maggie (figure 7).. The scene is upbeat and friendly. All the foreigners in the house are registered as an ordinary part of changing London. This film, unlike Flame in the Streets, is not an attempt to foreground race. Racial difference simply appears from time to time in the changing cityscape of east London. 10 So this is evidence once more of a consistent difference between the representations of racial others produced by white women and those few produced by white men during these years. It again supports the thesis that women, both as authors and as characters, were on the whole more sympathetic to outsiders than were men – Kathie’s fictional mother notwithstanding. This is evident in the race relations social science texts of the time as well, as will be discussed in the next section. It is important, therefore, in the context of the broader argument made by Caryl Phillips, also to ask how far the vision of Caribbean writers of the period conforms to these gendered patterns of distinction. Trinidadian Sam Selvon, whose best-known book is The Lonely Londoners (1985 [1956]), and who is cited by Phillips as a writer who does address the complexity of the migrant experience ‘with eyes that take in not only black people but white people too’ (Phillips 2004:4), is perhaps the major chronicler of the West Indian (and African) (male) experience of metropolitan life in UK during the 1950s. As in the other texts referred to, loneliness, poverty and dismal accommodation loom large, but Selvon’s account is also (equivocally) optimistic. The people he writes about have big dreams: they love London, despite everything, and embrace the modern and the excitement of the new. Bad times are endurable because at the end of the day Britain has granted an escape from the hopelessness of Caribbean island society. So they even register the sun in London (Selvon 1957).

108 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism

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Figure 7 Looking for Maggie in Sparrows Can’t Sing. Dir. Joan Littlewood, 1962.

Selvon not only tells a great story, he is also an exhilarating stylist. Sandhu calls Selvon’s writing ‘pavement poetry’ (Sandhu 2003:181). But ironically (given Phillips’ approbation), of all the writers under review, Selvon is the most inclined to sexualise his characters. Moses, the main protagonist in The Lonely Londoners, and his friends, the ‘boys’, are all constantly on the make, and all the women they pursue are white. Most are English but several are from abroad, because, as Selvon points out, in the postwar climate young women from continental Europe were often as desperate as Caribbeans to get away from home: ‘[L]ike the newspapers say about the Jamaicans, [European women think] the streets of London paved with gold’ (Selvon 1985:87). But Selvon’s characterisation of the women is minimal. Most don’t even have names: they are called ‘English’, ‘the Austrian’, ‘it’, ‘number’, ‘thing’: as in, ‘This number was a sharp thing and Cap like it more than the regular Austrian’ (Selvon 1985:41).11 This depersonalisation is mitigated somewhat by the fact that it’s not driven by hostility or a sense of superiority. But women are on the whole marginal in the narrative. They figure mainly as achingly elusive objects of desire, and although sometimes difficult to please, they are not petulant or small-minded, as they are in so many of the accounts

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually • 109 of contemporary white male novelists or dramatists. Nor are they ‘rotten to the core’ or ‘psychologically abnormal nymphomaniacs, as some sociologists of the moment claimed (see below). In itself, therefore, ‘thinking sexually’ about racial others does not, if applied to Selvon, seem as grave as Phillips suggests. However, this is not the case for Jamaican Andrew Salkey, whose novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) has a meaner, more misogynistic attitude towards women, a posture also fashionable among white Angry Young Men of the late 1950s (and which subsequently contributed to the conditions for the emergence of secondwave feminism). The main setting of his novel is again a rooming house and again the main relationships are between the tenants in the house. Here the protagonist is clever, angry middle-class Jamaican Johnnie Sobert, who is confused about class, race and above all sexuality, and who ends up in a sadomasochistic relationship with duplicitous, devouring fellow-lodger Laura (who is white) when he would, it becomes clear, have much preferred fellow-lodger Dick (also white). Johnnie insults not only Laura, he is also gratuitously offensive and, moreover, racist towards an Indian woman, another lodger in the house. Unlike Selvon, Salkey’s main cast of characters does include people outside the social circle of West Indians: there are several indigenous British and some Africans and US blacks. Salkey is not kind to any of them, but the person he is nastiest to is certainly emasculating Laura, the woman his ‘hero’ has sex with. So, of all the representations of black and white men and women in this sample of texts, by far the most perversely sexualised and racialised are Laura in Autumn Pavement and Kathie’s mother, Nell, in Flame in the Streets. Drawing on Barbara Creed’s thesis in The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), it could be argued that Laura’s desire for the black man is depicted as monstrously feminine, while Nell’s fear and loathing is both monstrously feminine and monstrously racist. Their male authors have endowed these female characters with imaginary powers of castration. What emerges more generally from these texts, therefore, is a regime of representation where, firstly, racial others are not as overlooked as Phillips suggests and where, secondly, ‘thinking sexually’ is firmly embedded in the conventions of 1950s and early 1960s prescriptive ideologies of gender rather than race. It is odd that Phillips has borrowed from feminist thought the critique of sexual thinking for his argument about race without also addressing feminism’s central concern with the ways in which gender operates discursively in the culture.

Social Science Sexual thinking of the 1950s is also evident in the social science race literature of the period, and, as with the fictional accounts, is differently inflected according to the gender of the author. The mid-1950s to early 1960s saw a flurry of sociological and anthropological work on the new dark-skinned postcolonial migrants to Britain,

110 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism of which a strikingly high proportion (about two-thirds) was produced by women. Among them were Joyce Egginton (1957) (foreign correspondent for the Observer), Ruth Glass (1960), Judith Henderson (1960), Margaret Usborne (1960) and Sheila Patterson (1963). There were also several whose research was widely cited at the time but remained unpublished, among them Violaine Junod (1952), Sheila Webster (later Kitzinger) (1955), Ruth Landes (1953) and Joan Maizels (1960).12 The main male contributors to the debate were Kenneth Little (1972 [1948]), Anthony Richmond (1955) and Michael Banton (1955, 1959).13 The high proportion of women doing this research is all the more remarkable given that they constituted only about 10–15% of graduating sociologists and anthropologists at the time (Halsey 2004).14 It is indicative of the status of race as a topic and women as social scientists, both then and now, that Halsey (among the most esteemed sociologists of his generation) makes only the briefest of references in his recent A History of Sociology in Britain to research on race done during that period and, moreover, cites only the work of male sociologists Little and Banton on the topic (Halsey 2004:99).15 He is just as remiss in relation to gender. Although he mentions that Olive Banks graduated at the same time as he did (in 1951) from the London School of Economics, the only woman in a cohort of thirteen, he makes no reference at all to her very substantial contribution to the sociology of education and the development of second-wave feminism. Nor indeed does he refer to any other work by or about women during the 1950s and 1960s. In a climate of such abject neglect it is perhaps not surprising that so many women social scientists should identify with, or at least be very curious about, the condition of similarly marginalised others in the culture. Indeed Sheila Webster (later Kitzinger) (1955) made this point explicitly in interview: ‘Our marginalisation as both women and as anthropologists focused us on the problems of other marginalised peoples,’ she said.16 She was one of very few women in her student cohort at Oxford. In this generally inhospitable academic environment, women appear to have been slightly more attracted to anthropology, with its greater emphasis on everyday life, on kinship relations and most of all on difference in its multiple variations, rather than to the more encompassing categories of social system and class – the principal concerns of 1950s sociology.17 These distinctions notwithstanding, anthropology, under the influence of the new conventions honed by Mass-Observation in the late 1930s and 1940s, with its emphasis on ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ – on the quotidian at home rather than abroad (Kushner 2004) – increasingly shared with sociology a range of concerns and methods. But did the fact that women were relatively more likely than men to do research into the circumstances of the new postcolonial migrants in Britain affect their conclusions? Was the content of their work significantly different from that produced by men at this conjuncture, or did they simply adopt the methods and conceptual approaches advanced in the dominant paradigms of their discipline(s)? The answer is a bit of both. As we shall see, there are some notable perspectival continuities between the fictional and cinematic representations examined earlier in this chapter

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually • 111 and the sociological and anthropological accounts produced by men and women during this same period – especially in relation to interracial marriage and sexual encounters. The academic research reveals significant differences in the way in which male and female social scientists represented what they themselves defined as the paradigmatic limits of racism or racial acceptance: that is to say, the degree to which miscegenation and mixed-race children were tolerated, or welcomed, or not; and how that was understood. As with the literary and cinematic representations considered earlier, I will argue that ‘thinking sexually’ – albeit indirectly – in relation to racial difference in the social sciences was predominantly the preserve of men. Although there are now historical accounts of the theoretical debates about ‘race’ as a category in British anthropology between the wars and of the rise of ‘race relations’ social policy in the 1950s (Rich 1990; Barkan 1996), little attention has been paid to the specific sociological and anthropological texts of the late 1950s and early 1960s about postcolonial settlement in Britain, and none at all has been paid to questions of gender configuration within the overall frame. Chris Waters’ article ‘ “Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses on Race and Nation in Britain, 1947– 1963’ (1997) is the only attempt at a cultural-historical analysis (though not a gendered one) that I have come across (though see also Schwarz, 1996, about the general period). Yet despite a detailed and scholarly reading of the texts and moment, Waters concludes – against the grain of the evidence, in my opinion – that the ‘representation of the black migrants . . . as un-British helped to reconfigure and secure the imagined community of the nation during a period of rapid change and great uncertainty’ (Waters 1997:208). In my view he tends to overestimate – and indeed sometimes misrepresents – the cultural distancing of the new migrants in the sociological texts in order to make his argument.18 He attributes to the sociologists a form of binary thinking about racial difference and posits a national ideological homogeneity encompassing both the sociologists and the indigenous British which not only oversimplifies the sociological work but also paradoxically reproduces the model of white insider and foreign-born or dark-skinned outsider that he has set out to critique. His analysis overlooks the extent to which a sense of the ‘nation’ was already fissured by internal political divisions, previous waves of migrants and the cultural mixing of postwar Europe (see, e.g., Snowman 2003; Kushner 2004; Winder 2004) and underestimates how far the migration and race relations literature of that period constituted a radical political critique of mainstream British insularity and xenophobia as well as a critique of much interwar social science. My argument is that the work of the race sociologists and anthropologists should be read as evidence of a much more fractured public consciousness than Waters allows and, furthermore, as yet another sign of a burgeoning, albeit sometimes contradictory, cosmopolitanism – which here as before was driven predominantly by women. My defence of the progressive nature of the work applies, though with reservations, to both the male and female writers, even where (and here I agree with Waters) some of their comments about ‘coloureds’ and ‘strangers’ grate disagreeably by the standards of today; where

112 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism the unselfconscious ‘we’ of an implied national unity set in opposition to the migrant newcomers goes against the political grain of the authors’ own critiques; and where, as we shall see later, attitudes expressed by some of the social scientists, particularly the men, towards white women who go out with black men are distinctly contentious and reveal the profound ambivalence of their authors. On the whole, though, it must be recognised that the corpus of work was a serious – albeit contradictory – attempt at challenging existing bodies of work and enlightening public opinion, much of which was mired in ignorance, fear or lethargy. Ruth Glass’s unequivocally partisan declaration in the preface of her important book Newcomers: The West Indians in London (1960) is evidence of the radical aspirations of this political project. Glass, who, it is relevant to point out, was born in Berlin and came to Britain in 1930s as a Jewish refugee from Hitler, states: ‘I am not dispassionate on this subject. I share “the very definite opinion . . . [that] discrimination because of race, colour or religion is an intolerable insult to the dignity of an individual” . . . and to the society in which it is practised. This is my premise’ (Glass 1960:xi). Writing in the wake of the 1958 Nottingham and Notting Dale riots, in which a black man was killed, she blames not only white racists but also the ‘timidity of tolerance’ (1960: 218) and ‘sluggishness of goodwill’ (1960:219) of government and much of the white British public.19 But, importantly, her book also draws attention to the anti-racist actions of, for instance, ‘Keep Britain Tolerant’ political groups and interracial social clubs and housing associations and thus emphasises the heterogeneity of response to the newcomers, whose ‘distinctiveness . . . often causes antagonism; but . . . also frequently evokes ardent sympathy . . . the colour question produces vehement reactions, negative and positive’ (Glass 1960:3). Thus the picture she presents is of a moment in which ideas about cultural and racial difference are far less embedded and fixed not only than in the US but also than Waters and other postcolonial historians of British race relations claim. Moreover, she also debunks assertions that the only model offered to the newcomers is one of adaptation and assimilation. Although acknowledging her own minoritarian position, she makes the point, ahead of her time, that ‘adaptation is a two-way process . . . it seems to have occurred to very few people that the “host society” could in turn acquire some new interests and aptitudes from the migrants’ (Glass 1960: 231). Glass is not the only one to take up a radical political position both in her writing and in her political life. Although it is important to be wary of deducing too much from the political dispositions and experiences of authors or from other texts in their corpus of work, it is nevertheless interesting to note the evidence of radical consciousness, political activism and emotional commitment to outsiders among the women social scientists to whom I have already referred. Joyce Egginton, author of They Seek a Living (1957) – a title indicating the broad political-economy approach of her book about West Indian migrants to Britain and the conditions which impelled them to leave – was subsequently New York correspondent for the Observer, where she covered inter alia the Cuban revolution and the US civil

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually • 113 rights struggles ‘with intense commitment and determination to speak up for those who could not defend themselves’.20 On one occasion in 1958, later known as the Kissing Case, she posed as a social worker and daringly smuggled a camera into a reform school in North Carolina, the heart of the deep South, where two black boys aged seven and nine, who, having been denied legal counsel and access to their mothers, had been sentenced to indefinite detention for kissing a white girl on the cheek. Egginton’s article and photographs were published on the front page of the Observer and triggered the formation of an international defence committee and protests outside US embassies across the world.21 Joan Maizels, whose work on West Indians in Willesden is unfortunately no longer obtainable, was author with Nan Berger of an extraordinarily prescient, but neglected, feminist text which was published in 1962, long before the UK Women’s Liberation Movement constituted itself in the late 1960s and also before Betty Friedan’s seminal book.22 Ruth Landes, a Jewish American anthropologist who was ostracised in US both because of the innovative nature of her research and because of her personal love affairs with black men, was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to the UK and in 1953 produced a monograph entitled Colour in Britain: A Study in Emerging BiRacialism, in which she compared the meanings and experiences of racial difference in the UK and the Americas; the research was widely cited by the key writers in the field (Banton, Henderson and Patterson) though never published. Her biographer (Cole 2003) passes over the London moment in Landes’ professional writing but gives us enough information about her personal, political and intellectual life, as well as her professional marginalisation in US academia, to justify situating her in this gallery of dissenting women researchers on race. Sheila Patterson, although less radical than some of her female predecessors, evidenced both in the description of herself (1963:41) and in her general analysis, nevertheless also did not fit socially into the homogeneous Britain imagined by Waters. She presumably includes herself when she writes: ‘In situations involving coloured peoples, researchers tend to be affected . . . by the somewhat negrophile and anti-white bias of most . . . of the existing . . . literature on this subject’ (Patterson 1963:35). Patterson had done fieldwork in South Africa and was married to a Polish refugee. And Sheila Webster (later Kitzinger), whose unpublished research on African and Caribbean students at Oxbridge was also widely cited and who subsequently became very well known (under her married name) for her progressive approach to childbirth and criticism of existing NHS practices, also married a foreigner, the German Jewish refugee economist Uwe Kitzinger. I have not been able to find out anything about Henderson, except that she was joint author at a 1960 conference on ‘racial integration’ of a paper entitled ‘The Roots of Discrimination’ with Marie Jahoda, another Jewish refugee from Hitler, who had been imprisoned for her political activities and writings in Vienna in the 1930s and was later to become an eminent social psychologist at Sussex University concerned with (among other things) questions of racialised difference in the UK (Rich 1990:188).23

114 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism Most of these women therefore are evidence of a more fluid, heterogeneous and fractured postwar Britain than many of the cultural theorists about that moment allow (e.g. Smith 1987; Waters 1997; Mort et al. 1999); they disrupt the notion of an increasingly homogeneous national identity (Waters 1997) and call into question Bill Schwarz’s thesis that England became ‘more intensively racialised’ during the immediate postwar years (Schwarz 1996:199) by offering a more polyvocal account. In my view, race consciousness – the racialisation of England – was actually more acute in the 1970s and 1980s (as will be argued later). The research produced in the 1950s and 1960s that I have been able to access indicates that in theoretical terms these women social scientists were concerned to establish the distinctions between, on the one hand, English xenophobia and class consciousness and, on other, the ‘pigmentocracies’ (Patterson 1963:35) of South Africa, the USA and even, though to a lesser extent, the Caribbean itself. Using this general conceptual frame, one can deduce that migrants to the UK were increasingly likely to be categorised by the general public as well as academics according to class position rather than the colour of their skin. This emerges particularly in the research on students from Africa and the Caribbean by Sheila Webster (later Kitzinger) (1955).24 The male contributors to the social science literature were also committed to developing a progressive sociological analysis with a particular focus on the geopolitical specificity of Britain’s class relations (Banton 1955, 1959; Richmond 1955; Little 1972 [1948]). In policy terms all argued for improved legislation to outlaw discrimination. But what is so incongruent, yet also confirms the pattern which emerged in relation to the literary and cinematic texts explored earlier, is that the most striking political anomalies, from the vantage point of today, occur in relation to their depictions and explanations of sexual relations between black men and white women. Michael Banton, probably the most influential and widely cited race sociologist of the 1950s and 1960s and still active today, establishes the tone. In his often interesting and sympathetic study about migrant settlement in Stepney (1955), in which, following Little, he argues that British racism is associated with class distinction and foreignness rather than ‘psychological avoidance’, he also describes white women who ‘consort’ with black men in staggeringly misogynistic terms. They are, he says, ‘mentally and educationally sub-normal’ (1955:158), ‘economically inferior’, ‘emotionally unstable’ with a background of ‘personal rejection’ (1955:152), often prostitutes or ‘nymphomaniacs’ (1955:153), ‘liars and thieves’, ‘thoroughly bad’, ‘rotten to the core’ (1955:160). Richmond, though less vituperative, also elaborates on the ‘deviant’ nature of white women who go with black men (Richmond 1955:280–1). Banton’s second book White and Coloured, written four year later (1959), continues in the vein of his first. Although he grudgingly concedes here that ‘a minority of the [white] women . . . could equally have married white men’, he argues that ‘the great majority . . . are outcasts from white society . . . with a background of deprivation . . . psychologically abnormal . . . self-destructive . . . [and] incapable of stable relations’ (Banton 1959:127). The

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually • 115 tabloid-style invective and innuendo are, as in the earlier book, sustained over many pages, and better-off women are not exempt (despite the earlier claim about ‘economic inferiority’): ‘[W]ell-to-do women have been known . . . to invite illlettered but powerfully built Negroes from Stepney to Mayfair parties’ (1959:129), he claims salaciously. No evidence is provided. As the Jamaican Baron Baker commented ironically many years later, reflecting on that moment: ‘If I was walking down the street with the Queen of England . . . it would be assumed she was a street girl’ (Pilkington 1988:93). Thus what appears to be at work in Banton is a covert repressed form of racism: a projection on to white women who go with black men of all the delinquency and perversions, all ‘the sexual thinking’, it would be unseemly – given his political perspective – to attribute directly to black men. But by implication he suggests that the attractions of black men are of a kind that appeal only to ‘outcast’ women: to prostitutes and the thoroughly abject. No ‘good’ white women, he implies, would desire a black man. Hence black men cannot amount to much. Through this sequence of associations Banton simultaneously exposes both his own disavowed racism and his hostility to women. Yet – and here we see the paradoxical return of the repressed – at the same time he contradictorily claims that white men and ‘coloured immigrants’ (note the assumption that all are men) regard each other as ‘sexual competitors’; but, for some reason, ‘among Englishmen this attitude is almost invariably unconscious’ (1959:131). Why should these men be competitors, one wonders, if the white women in question are so emphatically the ‘rejects of white society’ (1959:131)? Perhaps the women were not quite as dreadful as Banton would have us believe. Indeed one might speculate that the claim reveals rather more to us about Banton’s own ‘unconscious rivalry’ with black men – or even perhaps with the white women partners of black men – than he would care to acknowledge. This kind of writing would not come as a great surprise to Caryl Phillips. On the contrary, it clearly confirms his assertion about race and ‘sexual thinking’ – albeit circuitously, in that Banton’s hostile narrative overtly targets only white women. What is perhaps less expected, but again consistent with the literary and cinematic pattern discussed earlier, is that in those ostensibly pre-feminist days, the women social scientists, although many of them Banton’s students and obliged to cite his ‘findings’ in their literature reviews, interpret his data somewhat differently. Judith Henderson (1960) is an example. Although she sets out to report on existing research for the newly established Institute of Race Relations, her account of the dynamic in interrace sexual relations offers not only a quite differently inflected picture from Banton’s but also one more consonant with the argument advanced in this book: White wives of coloured men . . . find themselves in an anomalous position in two ways. First they enjoy an advantage, vis-à-vis their husbands, as members of the host society. They tend to play a more dominating role, and to receive greater consideration than they might, were they themselves coloured or their husbands white. Secondly, they are

116 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism committed to the cause of the coloured man living among whites and act as mediators. This is true particularly in the matter of obtaining houses or jobs, when they frequently take the initiative. (Henderson 1960:69)

Henderson thus saw (as did the Guyanese writer Ras Makonnen – cited above) the relationship of white women with black men as a form of proto-feminism which tended to advance the status of the women whilst also benefiting the men. She was also perceptive about the contextual specificity of racial and gendered rivalries and their embeddedness in colonial power, so not essentialist in her views: ‘In this country, women are better disposed towards coloureds than are men; but in the colonies, where the danger is of white men consorting with coloured women, their tolerance is much less’ (Henderson 1960:71). Fernando Henriques was to make a similar argument about white women in the US, where interracial relations were almost invariably between white men and black women and where, he says, white women were the ‘strongest upholders of prejudice’ (1974:106). Henderson’s point is also consistent with the views of C.L.R. James, who on his first visit to London in 1932 observed that ‘[t]he average English girl in London has little colour prejudice’ (2003 [1932]:102) whereas ‘the average man in London is eaten up [with it]’ (James 2000 [1932]:83). Sheila Patterson (1963) develops the argument about the specificity of the UK situation by identifying it as a dynamic, reciprocal ‘immigrant–host’ framework, influenced by class and cultural difference as well as by British xenophobia, and not as one structured inflexibly by skin colour. It is often assumed that ‘reciprocity’ is a more recent issue in the race relations debate and that ‘assimilation’ was the dominant paradigm at the time, but a reading of the literature shows that this was not the case (see also Ruth Glass’s comment above about adaptation being a two-way process). However, Patterson’s accounts of the relationships between black men and white women in Brixton show evidence of her ambivalence about this limit point (despite her proclaimed ‘negrophilia’ – see above). Echoing Banton, she refers to some of the white women as ‘casuals’, ‘misfits’ and ‘declassed’ (1963:395), even though she admits that her contact with them has been limited and that she has had to rely on the views of local informants, mainly white male ‘moral welfare officers’, for information. Her prose does not make clear whether it is she or they who so disapprovingly ascribe to the women not only sexual ‘promiscuity’, but also political motives in their choice of partner. Some white women choose black men, she writes, ‘pour épater les bourgeois’ (to shock the middle classes) or ‘because they feel impelled to make a thoroughgoing gesture across the colour barrier. . . . Some white wives of coloured men also professed this motive, actually meeting their future husbands at meetings of protest and political organisations concerned with human rights or anti-colonial aims’ (1963:288). So, like Banton, Patterson’s targets tend to be white women rather than back men. Yet, despite a somewhat patronising tone, her depiction offers us a picture of women who were not prepared to accept the

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually • 117 social conventions of the moment – who consciously stepped out of line, and who, as Ruth Glass (1960) put it with much more sympathy, felt ‘ardently’ inclined to extend hospitality to the newcomers.25 Joyce Egginton, also going against the views of the ubiquitous moral welfare workers, described these women as ‘immensely courageous’ (Egginton 1957: 114). It is unfortunate that the work of radical women anthropologists like Maizels, Landes and Webster (later Kitzinger) was never published and is not widely available. Indeed it may not be coincidental: Cole tells us that Ruth Landes’ work in the US was systematically marginalised by rivalrous male anthropologists for three decades (Cole 2003). Webster (later Kitzinger) has presented a not dissimilar picture of Oxbridge academic life. But these possibilities notwithstanding, we have seen enough to confirm, first of all, that migrants were certainly not invisible in the social science literature of the period, and, secondly, that the major part of the research on this topic was produced by women, even though they constituted only a tiny minority of active researchers in their disciplines. Like the women fiction writers and filmmakers of the period, their work was inevitably affected by the circumstances of their own lives and similarly tended to demonstrate an empathetic engagement with difference – a disposition towards thinking internationally and an inclination towards inclusivity – which, in combination with the fictional and cinematic representations, contributed considerably to the shifts in sociocultural thinking and the formulation of new anti-discrimination legislation that were to occur in the following years. As to ‘sexual thinking’, well, what these texts show us again is how intricately bound up with each other – how intimately intertwined – were issues of race and gender in Britain in the postwar period. Sexual thinking oscillated in terms of its object between black men and white women. But what we see here is that white women were often, and perhaps unexpectedly, more overtly and demeaningly represented as oversexed misfits than were their black male partners, particularly by white men. We also see in embryonic form the development of some tentative and semiconscious alliances between some black men and some white women which, over the following decades, were to challenge traditional authorities and hierarchies of race and gender and consolidate the groundwork for early twenty-first century urban cosmopolitanism.

Identity Politics and Hindsight This shift towards the cosmopolitanism of the present (which I outline in greater detail in chapter 8) was not, however, a tale of simple progress. It was accelerated, yet simultaneously interrupted, by an exhilarating, if contradictory, period in the 1970s and 1980s when what we now call identity politics exploded into public consciousness as a consequence of the organisation and militancy of the new social movements and, to a lesser extent, the left. Rather than the 1950s (Schwarz 1996),

118 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism this was the period which in my view most effectively ‘re-racialised’ Britain, and the racialisation was paradoxically in part the outcome of the declaration of ‘black identity’ by Caribbean, African and South Asian groups and their political organisation against the racism – sometimes virulent, sometimes complacent – of public institutions, interpersonal relations and, importantly, the representation (or not) of blacks and Asians. Racialisation was thus produced by the postcolonial migrants and their supporters as much as by white racists, and its effects were substantial and enduring; indeed one consequence has precisely been the normalisation of difference and the frequently convivial and cosmopolitan climate of twenty-first century London. But that is to jump ahead. On the way there were problems, some of which persist. A number of black intellectuals have analysed the 1980s conjuncture and its complex dynamic and outcomes (e.g. Hall 1991, 1992; Gilroy 1992; Mercer 1994; Modood 2005). As with feminism, with which race politics has had much in common, there emerged among some groups what Mercer has described as ‘a dogmatic discourse of antiracism’ which resulted in the inhibition of engagement with race issues because of the fear of being ‘incorrect’ (Mercer 1994:283). Gilroy too has criticised the ‘moralistic excess’ of some antiracist politics (1992:49) (he singles out in particular the ‘same-race’ adoption policies of local government). Yet, the 1980s in particular were years in which there was also an extraordinary flowering of black intellectual and cultural expression which emerged from postcolonial diasporic dialogues. Mercer has called it a ‘renaissance’ which was ‘to call into question the very identity of the components of the [British] national culture’ (1994:22). So the new cultural politics were both transformative and inhibiting. They produced a new awareness of Britain’s postcolonial histories and imaginaries and new insights into racism and the exclusionary practices which operated across the spectrum of national identifications. But they also brought new anxieties about who could speak. As with feminism, this was a contested domain. Some people – both black and white – believed that only the oppressed were entitled to voice opinions about their own condition. Although this view was challenged, one outcome was to generate a new self-consciousness and reserve about encroaching on the territory of others and thence about what could or could not be uttered. It was precisely this self-censorship which meant that, despite the parallels with feminist identity politics, there was on the whole a failure by both black and feminist theorists to investigate the interrelationships between the hierarchies of white and male dominance and the interconnections between race and gender politics (the relatively small number of black feminists – who carried the moral authority to speak in both camps – bore an unreasonable burden in this respect – see Feminist Review 1984; Mirza 1997). But on the whole feminist theorists (of all complexions), like postcolonial theorists, engaged with the ideas debated inside their social movements, with the left, and with the oppressors; most of the time they maintained a respectful distance from each other’s concerns while nevertheless recognising the parallels.

Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually • 119 Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, things are changing. Contemporary cosmopolitanism and the increasing normalisation of difference has meant that people are more comfortable with alterity and more reflexive about engaging with questions of race (if white) and gender (if male). It is from this new vantage point, in this climate, in which difference – particularly epidermal difference – has become ordinary that I have attempted in this book to analyse twentiethcentury cosmopolitanism and, in this chapter, in the context of a dialogue with Caryl Phillips, to trace the confluence of race and gender discourse in 1950s and early 1960s England. Phillips was completely right to single out this critical period as seminal for the production of ideas which were to contribute to the formation of British race relations. But my research suggests that he was not so right to suggest that white writers either ignored postcolonial migration or found it difficult ‘to engage with a black character, particularly male, without thinking sexually’ (2004:6). His mistake was to focus too narrowly on the literature of white men. If he had looked at the work of women authors as well, he might have come up with some different answers. Although some of the work produced by women was naïve, patronising and Eurocentric (judged by the ethical-political standards of today), much if it was also pleasingly radical and forward-looking in its readiness to entertain and defend the idea of the modern, cosmopolitan, even mongrel, society and to argue that the ‘host’ community had obligations to the ‘newcomers’. What is revealing and unexpected, moreover, is that, on the whole, the representation of migrants in the literature I looked at has dated less, and grates less, than has the representation of white women in relationships of one kind or another with migrant men. It is these latter representations in which race and gender are so combustibly combined that the myopia and misogyny are often most evident, and which now, with hindsight, expose most acutely the transformations in the way in which race and gender political consciousness has changed. The novelist Lynne Reid Banks has commented on her own work in this respect. Still today a regular producer of fiction, she was interviewed by the BBC in 2004 about the continuing success of The L-Shaped Room forty-four years after its original publication. Asked about her representation of the Jamaican character Johnny, she conceded that he was rather an embarrassing stereotype, ‘but . . . if I changed anything I would change Jane’s initial fear of him. That’s very non-PC now.’26 So Banks’ clumsy depiction of her white woman character is more troubling to her than is her black man. Playwright Ted Willis and novelist Andrew Salkey might also have been embarrassed about the representations of their white women characters’ attitudes to racial others were their works still as prominently in the public domain.27 And Michael Banton, still writing today, should surely also feel discomfited by his disparagement of those women who, against much popular prejudice and xenophobia, were hospitable rather than hostile towards migrants from abroad.

120 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism So the broad picture sketched out in this chapter not only demonstrates the inextricable links between representations of race and gender during those years. It also highlights the cultural and intellectual production of a particular moment before the emergence of ideas about how race and gender should be represented, before the full force of identity politics transformed the socio-political landscape and generated through its political activities a new awareness and caution about what could be said. The texts of the 1960s were expressions of a particular conjuncture in twentiethcentury cultural politics. Thereafter, and for at least another couple of decades, it became more difficult for white writers to stray imaginatively or analytically into the problematic terrains of affective and sexual relations between racially different people – to theorise or represent ‘thinking sexually’ about racial others – despite the overwhelming and obvious increase in such practice in this country. But in the current climate of transnational affiliations in which an astonishing one in four modern Londoners was born abroad (Kyambi 2005) and hybridity and miscegenation are commonplace, this is ceasing to be the case; with good reason. Kobena Mercer has argued that ‘solidarity . . . begins when people have the confidence to disagree over issues of fundamental importance precisely because they care about constructing common ground’ (Mercer 1994:284). Mutual challenges are now more likely. And as Bill Schwarz has so cogently pointed out, ‘the work of decolonisation in its expansive register requires popular self-activity, not only on the part of the colonised but on the part too of the native citizens of the metropolis’ (Schwarz 2003:254). Although I am more of a resident – a ‘Londoner’ – than a ‘native citizen’ (chapter 8), my work on cosmopolitanism is an attempt to do just that.

–7– Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed Romance, Race and the Reconfiguration of the Nation

Every now and again there are cultural events which freeze-frame the transformed and transformative elements of a historical period. Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and the week which followed exposed to the world the lineaments of a new British nation which bore no resemblance to the conventional heritage images disseminated around the globe in travel posters, films and BBC dramas over the decades following World War II and the decline of Empire. The lead role, it is true, still belonged to a princess, but the supporting cast – the metropolitan populace – was composed to a remarkable extent of the visibly different dark-skinned children and grandchildren of Britain’s former colonies, bolstered by a cosmopolitan ragbag of migrant physiognomies from around the world. And more striking still: in this new scenario the lover of the golden-haired princess was dark-skinned and from somewhere else as well. The public face of Britain was no longer white. This new picture of the nation, captured and played back on the endless hours of television footage following Diana’s death, was not only transmitted to the world outside; it registered and was constitutive of a transformation in the domestic consciousness as well. Something analogous happened in France in the summer of 1998. Again a single much publicised event – the victory in the World Cup of France’s multiracial football team – momentarily re-imaged and reconfigured for the global eye as well as for the French themselves the meaning of Frenchness. Like the death of Diana, the incident served to reveal and consolidate – albeit more contentiously than in the case of Britain, given the strength of the racist right in France at the time – a new set of national identifications. In common, both events represent the largely unanticipated consequences of the dissolution and diaspora of former imperial populations. They were in this sense specific to the late twentieth century. Though inevitably rooted in Europe’s colonial past, in some ways they constituted a historical break – a new beginning. But these major shifts in national identifications require a catalyst, and in Britain it was the death of Diana that served to define the new mood. The media accounts of her public recognition of racial others in her renowned charity work and her public romance with Dodi Al Fayed captured the imagination of a modernising culture, still basking in the climate of optimism and anti-traditionalism generated by the Labour victory earlier in the year, and projected onto the screens and consciousness of the

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122 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism world during the course of the one intense week following her death a new British rainbow nation. Although a sexual relationship between an aristocratic cosmopolitan English woman and a racially other man was not without historical precedent in the twentieth century,1 and thus is not specific to the postcolonial period, what was remarkable and new in this instance was the exposure of the affair in the public domain and, particularly in the weeks after the couple died, its favourable popular reception,. This can be attributed partly to the decline in deference towards royalty among the media in the period since the war, leading to the mass circulation of information about hitherto unpublicised events, and partly – and importantly – to transformations in sexual politics with the associated increase in personal freedom for women which have meant that Diana was less constrained by the need to protect her sexual ‘reputation’.2 In a context in which revelations about the private lives of celebrities have become routine and confessional practices are increasingly commonplace, one of the features which in the end seems to have contradictorily defined Diana and Dodi’s modern interracial romance was its place in the gallery of everyday mass culture and hence, despite its high profile and the feverish fascination that it elicited world-wide, its surprising ordinariness. Within hours of Diana’s death on 31 August 1997, British television and press coverage of her life and the mode of her dying was intercut with accounts and images of public mourning. The widespread and uninhibited demonstrations of grief following the news of the fatal accident were initially as much of a surprise as the death itself, but, before the day was out, these emotional displays had been established as a key feature of the Diana phenomenon. So the sense of national and then international loss, the style of mourning and the mourners themselves all became objects of media interest. The focus of attention was widened to include not only Diana and the circumstances of her death but also the response of the people. And from the start, as was noted by journalists, camera operators and spectators alike, the many thousands of mourners included a remarkably large number of black, brown and non-‘white’ faces. Among those captured on our screens leaving tributes at the different shrines and waiting in line for many hours to sign condolence books, or just hanging out, racial and cultural diversity was far more visible than is usually the case in British media representations of public events.3 As the bouquets of flowers accumulated there emerged a growing sense of surprised pride in this new inclusive nationhood, even among the conservative press. There was also a recognition that the new multicultural Britain may have contributed to the new symbols and style of mourning. Emotional display, flowers, candles and incense at public shrines are not part of the history of British funereal practice. Initially there seemed to be some trepidation about speaking of racial difference. On the evening of the death, BBC reporter Margaret Gilmore at Kensington Palace referred several times to the astonishing response of the public and the fact that, as she put it, ‘people from all sorts of walks of life, of all ages, from all over the country, even from abroad – so many ordinary people’ were there, yet, although the

Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed • 123 camera lingered on black faces, she could not quite bring herself to single out racial difference. However, within a day or two, most of the newspapers were commenting openly on the ‘multi-ethnic’ mourning: ‘Young, old, black and white, they came to pay their respects. . . . Prince Naseem Hamed was among the earliest. . . . Mourners of all creeds prayed according to their faith. . . . Catholics, Moslems and Sikhs. . . . A Nigerian woman read a poem of lament for “My Beautiful Diana, My Sister” ’ (Pukas and Gallagher 1997).4 Some of the papers confidently celebrated this new nationhood and unity: ‘In our grief for Diana, there is none of that old British reserve. We are united as never before. . . . It is the new British spirit, the spirit of Diana, proclaimed proudly throughout the land,’ claimed the Mirror (4 September 1997) in an editorial illustrated by a cartoon entitled ‘United Kingdom’ which depicted mourners of different race, class, religion and age – a rainbow coalition5 – linking hands in front of a flag at half-mast and binding together the landscape of the nation. The unity of emotion and sense of collective loss represented by the press was sufficiently flexible to permit the coexistence of a range of identifications, and in London differences of allegiance solidified over the week of mourning so that by the funeral itself, the principal shrines had developed their own distinct symbolic associations: Buckingham Palace was for middle-Englanders and the tourists; Kensington Palace, the most densely packed with flowers and other offerings, provided, as Diana’s home, the gravitational pull for her supporters and the critics of the royal family; and the department store Harrods was for those who celebrated the coupledom of Diana and Dodi and wanted to commiserate with the Fayed family (or perhaps were just in need of refreshment: Harrods had a stall which served free food and drinks to those waiting to sign their books of condolence).6 Of course not everyone was aware of these distinctions. Some people were indifferent or hostile and kept well away.7 Others stayed at home and watched the whole thing on the television, and many of those who trekked into town admitted only to curiosity and the need to witness for themselves the seismic transformation in British culture, so visited all three sites. But informal canvassing as well as the early allusions of reporters suggest that blacks, Asians, gays, single mothers and others who located themselves outside mainstream British culture and identified in some way with the oppressed and vulnerable were more likely to visit Kensington Palace and Harrods than Buckingham Palace, and some of the written tributes left with the flowers confirm this. For instance among the many thousands at Kensington Palace were the following two richly evocative and moving messages: Queen of the Coloured Hearts Queen of the Devastated Queen of the Unloved Ones Queen of the Unknown Love from the Unknown. (Daily Mail, 4 September 1997)

124 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism and: Dear Diana Thank you for treating us like human beings not criminals From the lads at HM Prison Dartmoor. (Daily Mail, 4 September 1997)8

So what was rendered visible in the days following the fatal accident in Paris and Diana’s death was evidence of her astonishingly wide appeal and her ability to unify people from across the social spectrum. Most striking of all was her ability to speak to and recruit into her orbit those groups who considered themselves marginalised from the more orthodox political processes. Even the Labour Party in its most euphoric and victorious moment, after its May 1997 victory, could boast relatively little support from the young, the unemployed and ethnic minorities. In the days following the 1997 election landslide, the Labour Party’s publicists issued press releases and photos celebrating its one hundred women MPs, but there was no similar promotion for the handful of non-white and ethnic minority MPs. Many on the left were struck by Blair’s failure in this respect and were disappointed that the Labour Party was not making a greater effort – or was too afraid of middle-England – to win the confidence of blacks and Asians and recruit them as supporters and participants in the new political project. In contrast, Diana effortlessly captured the support and the imagination of those groups without losing the constituencies of the centre.9 In this sense she became, as Martin Jacques has put it, ‘a new kind of public person, a new kind of leader’. She was a unique ‘representative of cultural modernity’ who exposed ‘the chasm between the traditional institutions of governance – Westminster and Buckingham Palace – and the culture and concerns of the people. . . . Tradition, deference, protocol, hypocrisy, men in suits . . . were progressively besieged by authenticity, emotion, informality, the female. . . . Diana’s appeal was quintessentially of our time’ (Jacques 1997:6–7). Her style of being in the public world – her spontaneity, warmth and vulnerability, her in-touchness – showed up the limitations not only of formal political processes, even of the left, but also of the old-fashioned, emotionally constrained and out-of-touch royal family. Her treatment at their hands, her visible disappointment with her life and her sensate longing for something better is partly what mobilised the extraordinary process of mutual recognition and identification between herself and the people. Her friend Rosa Monckton offered an insight into the texture of this process: ‘Diana had a huge capacity for unhappiness, which is why she responded so well to the suffering of humanity. She felt real pain . . . she had a unique ability to spot the broken hearted and could zero in on them. She was relentless in her ability to give’ (Monckton 1997). Diana’s life experience, her own traumas and humiliations, led her to identify with the marginalised and needy. And they in turn identified with her. Among those with whom she identified at this intuitive level were people with AIDS, the young urban homeless, the victims of landmines, the socially marginalised

Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed • 125 and excluded. Her passionate determination to make a difference led her to radical political positions not easily tolerated by governments and what she called ‘the establishment’. Thus, for instance, she believed in a transfer of resources from rich countries to poor (Hencke 1997);10 she intervened with considerable effect in global politics on the question of landmines (despite being accused of being ‘a loose cannon’ by leading Tories) and had meetings planned with Labour Party women MPs. So her charitable impulse went beyond the conventional parameters of Victorian philanthropy. She was prepared to engage politically (although she insisted that what she was doing was not political) and endured criticism and even ridicule in order to change things. Unlike most other members of her class involved in charitable work, her practice was fuelled by more than just a sense of duty and some compassion. Her psychic formation, rooted partly in the experiences of her childhood and her powerful identification with outsiders, extended beyond charity to her friendships and the people she dealt with in her professional life, and of course finally also to her lovers.11 Although surprisingly overlooked – or at least uncommented upon – in the endless media portrayals of her, after her separation from the royal family she made a series of both formal and personal contacts with foreigners and racially ‘other’ firstgeneration British. At one level these relationships confirm the analysis of her as an icon of the modern, more open and more fluid Britain. Paradoxically it is the very lack of attention to racial and cultural difference in these interpersonal exchanges that signals cultural modernity. The taken-for-grantedness of the transracial transcultural social encounters suggests a kind of post-anti-racism, and marks a significant – if uneven – British cultural transformation that was reflected in the composition of her mourners after her death. Yet, at the same time, these relationships with outsiders also signalled her awareness of the history of social exclusion in Britain and can as well be read in part both as a marker of her own sense of not belonging and as a challenge to the traditionalists – whether in Buckingham Palace or on the Clapham omnibus. There were a number of such encounters or friendships, some of them more publicised and notable than others. Her firm of solicitors was Jewish, as was her psychotherapist, and one of her closest women friends was Brazilian. For the first high-profile media event instigated and controlled entirely by her, the Panorama interview, considered by the BBC its coup of the year, she selected (or accepted) as her interviewer not a Dimbleby or any of the other established mandarins of the BBC but a relatively unknown journalist, Martin Bashir, of Indian Muslim origin.12 About the same time she seems to have been introduced to the Egyptian heart surgeon Magdi Yacoub at a charitable event organised by Mohamed Al Fayed (Al Fayed had been a friend and associate of her father’s for ten years and she maintained contact after her father’s death). Through Yacoub, Diana met Hasnat Khan, a heart surgeon of Pakistani origin, described as ‘dashing’ by the Mail, with whom she seems to have had an affair (or was ‘romantically linked’, as the newspapers put it

126 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism coyly). During this same period she made several private visits and at least one on behalf of charity to her friends Jemima and Imran Khan in Pakistan (no relation to Hasnat). Imran Khan is reputed to have said that ‘there was hardly any non-Muslim who worked in a Muslim country with as much devotion and dedication as Diana demonstrated for the sick and poor in Pakistan’ (Streeter 1997). The claim was grandiose; notwithstanding, the photos of her cradling a dying child in his cancer hospital in Lahore received world-wide coverage and enhanced her compassionate reputation.13 At the same she took advantage of her convenient geographical location and ‘slipped her bodyguards’ to pay a social visit to Hasnat Khan’s family (Daily Mail, 1 September 1997; whether she met up with Khan himself was not reported in the press). All this certainly made an impact on the Islamic world. Diana’s multifaceted and respectful relationship with Muslims was noted by the countries of the Middle East and Asia (as well as Britain) and raised again in the conspiracy allegations which circulated after her death. The British press was low-key about Diana’s romance with Hasnat, perhaps because she made little of it herself. And besides he wasn’t famous. Dodi Al Fayed was a different matter. The relationship was considered serious almost immediately because so little effort was made to hide it. It was public from the start and newspapers and apparently her friends spoke of love, passion and happiness. Yet Dodi was an unexpected and transgressive choice. This was mainly because his father, Mohamed Al Fayed, owner of Harrods, was loathed by the Tory party and considered rather disreputable by most sectors of the British public, even those who were Harrods’ customers. As an Egyptian in pursuit of British citizenship (which was twice refused) he had offered cash to Conservative MPs to ask questions in Parliament and then exposed their corruption, so although his actions had contributed to the May 1997 Labour victory, his complicity meant that he had few public defenders.14 Dodi, his oldest son, was, like his father, an Egyptian, a Muslim and a multi-millionaire, and in addition he had a reputation as a playboy.15 Moreover, the family wealth was no more than a generation old, made in trade rather than inherited. So for Diana to have a highly visible affair with Dodi was certainly a rebellious act. She was challenging the conventional loyalties and snobbery of significant sections of her own class and also of a good part of the traditional body politic of the nation. In taking up with a Muslim, she was also embracing (in the view of most white British) the least favoured exogenous cultural and religious group.16 Yet despite all this the press were remarkably kind to Dodi and the Fayed family, particularly in the days immediately following the accident. During that first week many of the papers compared the Fayeds with the royal family and the Fayeds emerged in the kinder light. They were represented as warm, welcoming, authentic, informal, generous and cosmopolitan (breakfast consisted of coffee and croissants) – all qualities considered absent in the royal family. ‘They made Diana feel wanted and loved’ (Express, 1 September 1997). Although references were made to Dodi’s previous love affairs with glamorous women, he was depicted

Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed • 127 as caring and sensitive: ‘Women liked, trusted and confided in him’ (Cunningham 1997). His ex-lovers remained his friends, and one of them is quoted as saying, ‘He was the kindest, gentlest man who took infinite care about his friendships’ (Roberts 1997). Unlike Charles, Dodi was described as ‘having nothing remotely pompous about him’.17 Like Diana, he had had a difficult childhood with separated and warring parents. Additionally he seems to have had a special and populist touch with Diana’s sons: he hired a private disco for them and his young half-siblings during their holiday in St Tropez. His partial residence outside Britain, in Paris and California – his cosmopolitanism – must also have been attractive for Diana. But perhaps finally, as the Express succinctly put it, ‘Dodi’s role as an outsider to the establishment which Diana felt had so badly let her down during her 15-year marriage, may have been just what attracted the princess to him’ (Crosbie 1997). There was something modern, different and satisfyingly political about her choice of Dodi. Although extremely wealthy, his social marginality made her relationship with him an act of protest against the rigid protocols and emotional constraint – the traditionalism – of the monarchy.18 Like the Panorama interview, the affair with Dodi was a public retaliation against her former husband and his relatives. It was a defiant Romeo-and-Juliet romance and was recognised as such by the hundreds of thousands who left messages of support and remembrance to them both together – to Di and Dodi – and who projected onto her their own fantasies of insurrection against parental prohibition and their desire for something emotionally fulfilling and different. The mood was even reflected by the BBC, which, as part of its emergency rescheduling after the couple’s death, screened Stanley Kramer’s 1967 American film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner about a love affair between a black man and a white woman. The fantasy, the desire for something different, seems to have been so powerful that in the end even Diana’s critics and opponents in the press seem to have been won over and expressed support for her relationship with Dodi. 19 Although this might have been no more than courteous and contingent, given that the two were now dead, it could also be interpreted as an attempt to reflect public sentiment, to stay in the mainstream. It is also likely to have been an act of reparation for the notorious press harassment and damaging stories of the past which were so strikingly disavowed in the days after the crash. Finally the turn-around might also in part have been a challenge to the Queen, a response to her refusal to participate publicly in the mourning. What is clear is that during the period immediately following Diana’s death, the British nation was reconfigured and a different mood prevailed. There was a sense of popular unity, of generosity, pride, perhaps even virtue, and a racial inclusiveness which permeated the country and was celebrated. The fact that this inclusivity was achieved partly by projecting onto the Queen and royal family the nation’s discontent is not relevant here. What is significant is that at its heart lay the acknowledgement and acceptance of the love affair and likely marriage of Diana, the people’s princess, with a foreigner: an Arab and a Muslim no less. In this instance,

128 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism British xenophobia seemed as much in decline and out of favour as the royal family. Dodi was made welcome – was even loved – by the people because he made Diana happy. The tragedy is that there was no opportunity to consolidate this racial reconfiguration. Maybe a child of Diana and Dodi, a mixed-race half-sibling to the future king, would have done the trick. It would certainly have confirmed Britain’s new sense of self during those last few years of the twentieth century and would have made internationally manifest changes that were already increasingly visible in every conurbation in the country. The modern rainbow nation, with Diana as its queen, would have been not just a multicultural nation where different groups exist side-by-side, but a postcolonial one where the descendants of the colonisers can no longer be distinguished from the descendants of the colonised, where cultural and racial differences are transformed by their interaction and merger with each other: where sexual desire and intermarriage produce a new generation of racially indeterminate Britons. It is precisely because this utopian vision is so appealing to so many, and yet at the same time so subversive, that the conspiracy theories,

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Figure 8 Diana Family Portrait. Photo Alison Jackson, 1998.

Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed • 129 which have continued to circulate in the West as well as in the Arab world, have had such an extensive reach. The rumours have varied in their detail and emphasis and some have been more plausible than others. Their interest lies only partially in their relationship to the ‘truth’; they are also evidence of the texture of popular myth. The most frequently recurring claim has been that Diana was pregnant and that she and Dodi were about to marry. It was also alleged that Diana, like her friend Jemima Khan, was considering conversion to Islam. These were the reasons that ‘the establishment’ allegedly instructed its secret agents to murder the couple (Fisk 1997). This has been the most persistent theory and has been reiterated on a regular basis over the years since the deaths (see, e.g. Pukas, 2006, but see also numerous websites).20 The supposed pregnancy can be read in these accounts as a symbol of a new and longed-for, yet also dangerous, union. The rumours, expressed graphically in Alison Jackson’s constructed photo Diana Family Portrait 1998 of Diana, Dodi and their mixed-race child (figure 8), are fantasies of cultural reconciliation.21 Diana and Dodi may be dead, but they have clearly not been eliminated from the popular imagination. What we saw played out in the brief and intense period following their death was a scenario in which racial difference was both highly visible and at the same time part of the taken-for-granted face of modern Britain. In this context a serious romance between a white English princess and a North African Arab Muslim millionaire was noted by the media and the public as a controversial step, yet at the same time was widely accepted as part of the everyday life of the endof-the-century cosmopolitan nation. A cynic could argue, that, like Roland Barthes’s photo of the Negro soldier saluting the French tricolour (Barthes 1972), the visibility of blackness in Britain during that period merely confirmed the whiteness of the national consciousness. But the national consciousness was already deeply fissured. Although Diana and Dodi’s deaths did indeed confirm the whiteness of the traditional institutions, they also signalled a much more radical transformation in the cultural identifications and fantasies of the people.

Part V Conclusion: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism

–8– A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves Cosmopolitan Habitus and the Ordinariness of Difference

The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformations that come of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves. Rushdie 1991: 394

This book ends with an autobiographical chapter, a historical narrative spanning a hundred years of my cosmopolitan rootless family as it has moved around the world, translated cultures, blurred boundaries, engaged with difference and has now settled, at least in part and for the time being, in modern ‘actually existing’ cosmopolitan London.1 This periodisation, while partially fortuitous, in that it starts with the birth of my mother in 1907, also shadows the episodes and structures of feeling that have been singled out and explored in the body of the book. The intention here is to offer a case study of a cosmopolitan family across generations, focusing therefore on the domestic and emotional – on habitus – as well as the global political. So the version of the past recounted here is shaped by the contours of this book, by the context of its writing in the present – as indeed are all histories. Yet this lens of the present has itself been reciprocally honed in complex ways by the personal narratives and sociopolitical climates of the past. The telling of the story thus has various purposes. One of these is to provide some insight into the provenance of academic research. Biographical details tend to be considered relevant only in the case of writers of fiction or drama. But the intellectual formation and personal history of academic authors are also worth knowing insofar as they cast light on the labyrinthine processes at work in the selection of research topics and the adoption of critical standpoints in debates. Recognising this, a few academic researchers do now expose some brief details about their origins in the prefaces to their books. Most, however, consider these biographical factors unimportant or too revealing; or they might want to avoid the dangers of reductive thinking and to sustain for themselves and readers the illusion that evidence and reason are the principal factors underlying the uptake of political

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134 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism and theoretical positions and the construction of historical narratives. But, as is well known post-postmodernism, the possibility of objectivity and ‘truth’ in such situations has long been abandoned. Discretion, moreover, can lead to obfuscation, though to make this point is not a defence of confessional culture. It is nevertheless part of an argument which insists that the details of our personal lives, our sense of national and familial belonging, our ‘race’, class and gender, our social and political positioning, do all affect our intellectual production – how we investigate and make sense of the world – though certainly not, it must be stressed, in any unmediated or straightforward way.2 This is not the main purpose, however, of making this final chapter a theoretically inflected autobiographical account. My project here is to complement, indeed to expand, the research and illustrate the main argument of the book by offering up an account – albeit partial and incomplete – of the making of a not untypical modern cosmopolitan London family in an increasingly interconnected world. A number of authors have used this method: they have drawn on their own experience to make theoretical arguments and historical narratives more vivid, among them Fernando Henriques writing about miscegenation (1974), Richard Sennett writing about respect (2004) and Kwame Anthony Appiah writing about cosmopolitan values (2006). This attempt falls broadly into the same camp. but has also been influenced by the more psychoanalytically oriented poststructuralist approaches developed, among others, by Carolyn Steedman (see also Hirsch 1997; Kuhn 2000; Radstone 2000 and 2005) which interweave memory and events in order to make more complex arguments about subjectivity and the constructed nature of all history, all memory, all autobiography. Steedman thus writes ‘about interpretations, about the places where we rework what has already happened to give current events meaning . . . about the stories we make for ourselves, and the social specificity of our understanding of those stories’ (1986:5). The narrative presented here similarly tries to integrate memories, the reworking of events, historical context and argument. This is the ‘story’ I have discovered about myself and set down at this stage in my life. But given that the purpose of this chapter is mainly to trace visceral cosmopolitanism through its various twentieth-century modulations, from its moment as a modernist counterculture to its current status as an ordinary everyday aspect of metropolitan UK culture, it will on the whole eschew reflexivity that strays beyond the boundaries of the cosmopolitan project. My intention has been to develop a domestic genealogy of cosmopolitanism linked to the different chapters in the book, and I hope to have achieved that. But in the writing something else has emerged as well. I already expected London to figure as a key territory in this account; I have written about the specificity of London and what I have called domestic cosmopolitanism elsewhere (Nava 2006). My argument in relation to London, as I point out in chapter 1, is that there have been specific factors to do with postwar urban reconstruction and the distribution of social housing, postcolonial migration and settlement, and the political mobilisation

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 135 of ‘black’ identity which together have fed into a more cosmopolitan environment than in most other cities in the world. In relation to the domestic, my argument is that most theorists of the cosmopolitan have focused on travel and abroad whereas a good deal of inclusive thinking and feeling, of ‘conviviality’ (as Gilroy terms it, 2004), takes places in the micro territories of the local: at school, in the gym and the café, at home. I have also throughout this book stressed the importance and general theoretical marginalisation of the affective elements in cosmopolitanism: of emotions and imaginaries, of empathy and desire, of the visceral. Finally a key element of my argument has been to explore the specificity of gender, in sociohistorical as well as psychodynamic terms, for an understanding of the way modern cosmopolitanism has developed in the UK. All these figure centrally in the book and are brought to the fore in this autobiographical narrative. What I think I have neglected over the years of working on this subject, and has now surfaced in the telling of my story, is the importance of family, of the ways families provide a site – a ‘habitus’ – for the fusion of differences, for ‘embodied history, internalised as second nature’ (Bourdieu 1990:56), and the transmission of inclusive dispositions across generations. This insight about the family expands the concept of domestic cosmopolitanism and adds another dimension, one which takes on board time and transmission; so, in addition to singling out the specificity of domestic, gendered and affective cosmopolitanism we must add transgenerational cosmopolitanism. It is ironic but perhaps not surprising that I overlooked the role of the family. My first published article, as I describe later in this chapter, was a feminist critique of the nuclear family and for many years I chose to live in what we called collective households. There were good pragmatic reasons for doing this because they were an effective way of enabling me to combine work with children as well as being great sources of mutuality for all. But the power of the libertarian critique (see the articles in Segal 1983, to which I also contributed) obscured for me the positive elements of families and, significantly, of my own family of origin (though I was always clear about the passion for my children). In relation to the transgenerational, well that should not have surprised me either; but it did. Having been deeply immersed in psychoanalytic thinking for many years, I anticipated that childhood would have an important effect on adult behaviour, so from my earliest work on the subject of cosmopolitanism I have assumed that the allure of difference might be part of a revolt against the parental culture. What has surprised me in the telling of my own story, and disturbed me as well, has been how alike are the versions I offer here of my mother and myself, of my parents’ extended family and my own, of my parents’ and their friends’ political preoccupations and my own. No doubt my brothers would have come up with different accounts – family histories necessarily contain multiple viewpoints – but they would have to agree with some of the main ‘facts’ presented here. So, here, in this case, the autobiographical form has exposed an unexpected linearity and continuity across generations of certain kinds of political consciousness and unconsciousness.

136 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism Finally, there is the question of writing style, of cultural practice. How, technically, should an autobiographical chapter in the context of an academic book be written? How to integrate historiography and memory (Radstone 2005)? What kind of narrative structure and style should be attempted? Should the material be thematically or chronologically organised? How do autobiographers establish the boundaries of what may be said about friends and family? These are troubling questions but, as is probably the case in most autobiographical writing, the story, although occasionally pummelled and polished to fit my brief, more or less wrote itself, albeit sometimes quite hesitantly and painfully. In fact, the problems of compression and the undercurrent of emotion seems to have led in places to unusually truncated prose, and in revising the chapter I found myself eliding sentences and drawing out statements that were probably doing the job of chain mail: armouring and concealing from the reader – and probably myself – private and vulnerable places. This chapter, then, also raises questions about the relationship between theory and practice, about the range of possible ways and forms in which ideas, knowledge and affect can be presented. Whether it provides answers, the reader will decide. My mother, Anna (Ankie) Van der Voort, later Weisselberg, was born in Amsterdam in 1907 and died nearly a century later in London in 2001, not long after 9/11. Her life spanned the period of this book and intersected with many of its concerns. As will emerge, the maverick conditions of her childhood made it unsurprising that she and her younger sister Miekie would feel like outsiders, would in turn feel empathy for other outsiders and would grow to possess what Stanley Cohen has identified as ‘instinctive extensivity’, that is to say, a disposition towards inclusivity and a spontaneous sense of self as part of a common humanity (Cohen 2001:265; chapter 4) – even if somewhat inconsistently at times. My maternal grandfather at the beginning of the twentieth century led a bohemian life, but in his forties he married, had two children and felt obliged to settle down so took a job, with comfortable tied accommodation, as a financial administrator of a large mental hospital in a provincial Dutch town. However, his paid occupation had less influence on how my mother and her sister were to grow up than did his eccentric views. My grandfather had rebelled against his family of Protestant colonial administrators and ruptured all contact with them to become a follower and teacher of Theosophy, a cultish movement associated with socialism and the appropriation of Eastern spiritualism whose admirable, modernist, humanist and much-reiterated first basic principle, first inscribed in 1896, was ‘the formation of a universal human brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour’ (Washington 1996:69).3 Despite the use of the generic ‘brotherhood’, this was a movement that promulgated revolutionary ideas about sexual, racial and religious equality and unity that in some ways remain modern over a century later. In line with the general philosophy of the movement my grandfather (whom I never knew) was also therefore in his time an advocate of women’s rights and dress reform, a critic of

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 137 Dutch colonialism in the East Indies, a vegetarian and a socialist. ‘What did it mean that your father was a socialist?’ I once asked my mother when she was already quite old and I had started to be interested. ‘He used to raise his hat to the maid,’ she replied, which although an absurdly trivial gesture in today’s terms was of some significance at the time. Whether he did more than this she didn’t really know, so it is not clear how active a socialist he was. But Theosophy was the major commitment in his life and he conducted regular seminars and meetings in the family home attended by people from Amsterdam and beyond. Moreover, his knowledge of the cultures of the East was extensive and he had a good collection of Indonesian art objects and crafts, which at the time, although not appreciated by conventional collectors, were signs both of aesthetic modernity and of his anti-colonialism.4 My mother’s mother was a less flamboyant figure. Although modern in some respects, in that she rejected corsets and was an active supporter of votes for women, she appeared, to the disappointment of my mother, to be content to be in the kitchen making the vegetarian food that Theosophy required and generally servicing the lives of her husband and daughters. ‘I swore early on, as a reaction, that I would never learn to cook,’ my mother often told us, which was indeed how it turned out to be. Her mother did not approve. Despite this oedipal defiance, it was probably the broad impact of Theosophy which more than anything propelled my mother out of the family and out of Holland into the wider world. For a start the adherence to their unorthodox set of beliefs and practices put the family beyond the pale with the local priest and school teacher. According to Ankie and Miekie, they were repeatedly threatened in the classroom with hell fire and damnation because they hadn’t been baptised and didn’t go to church. Village children threw stones at them. So they were withdrawn from school and educated for some years at home according to the modern pedagogic practices advocated by Theosophy. These incidents set my mother firmly against Catholicism as well as provincial Holland, though, or perhaps therefore, not entirely against spirituality, and she became in her old age a student of world religions.5 It was not only her rebellion against the constraints of provincial culture but also the allure of abroad and the desire to meet people from elsewhere that prompted her departure from Holland, and this too was in part influenced by Theosophy, which in the first part of the century was a buoyant international movement. Although certain factions were dominated by spiritualism, its main political goal about the formation of a universal brotherhood invoked much the same rhetoric about the equality of races and universal liberal idealism as the well-attended Universal Races Congress, organised by Jewish sociologist Gustave Spiller, held in London in July 1911, and predictably ‘sneered at’ by G.K. Chesterton (chapters 2 and 3). ‘The main ethos of the Congress was one of liberal internationalism . . . a concern to transcend national divisions [and] the promotion of a world order that could ensure the perpetuation of peace’ (Rich 1994:68). In fact 1911 was a significant year in this story for a number of reasons. Only a few weeks before the congress, Krishnamurti, one of Theosophy’s

138 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism principal gurus, had been brought to England from India as a sixteen-year-old boy by Annie Besant and Emily Lutyens. It was also during this summer that the Ballets Russes made its first dramatic visit to London and Gordon Selfridge, the department store founder, announced that he was so pleased London was losing her insularity and becoming more cosmopolitan (chapter 2).6 In addition 1911 was the peak of prewar militant feminism, to which Theosophists in England – as in the Netherlands – had many connections. 7 Finally, it was during these years that a number of progressive educational philosophies which promoted self-expression and freedom were beginning to make their mark (Washington 1996). Figures connected to the Theosophical Society, such as Rudolf Steiner and later Maria Montessori, were linked to a broader group of liberal educators who influenced the climate in which my mother and her sister grew up and on whom they in turn drew in the education of their own children. As a teenager, my mother met Krishnamurti (or saw him at least) at the enormous international summer camps organised by the Theosophists at their headquarters at Eerde Castle in Ommen in Holland from 1920 onwards. These exciting events, at which young people from around the world slept in tents in the grounds while their parents were allocated accommodation inside the castle, were my mother’s first encounters with the English language and people from abroad. Krishnamurti would deliver campfire talks (in English) under the stars in a gentle hesitant meditative style wholly unlike the declamatory rhetoric of his contemporary, Hitler. According to Washington, ‘his most constant injunction to others [was] to empty themselves of all prejudices and illusions’ (1996: 215). He and the camps were profoundly influential: For a brief, glorious decade from 1919 to 1928 [the Theosophical Society] flourished among the world’s youth as a sort of junior League of Nations. For what appealed to young people was not Theosophy’s ceremonial and psychic mumbo jumbo but its humanitarian, pacifist and internationalist ideals, embodied in the summer camps and in the fetching person of Krishnamurti himself. (Washington 1996:270)

Throughout 1920s and beyond Krishnamurti was a kind of star not unlike Valentino and Nijinsky (chapter 2) in that, with his exotic and somewhat feminised clothing, he represented both heterodox masculinity and intriguing and subversive otherness. So Theosophy was exciting and, as my mother would later acknowledge, had a lasting effect on her. Yet contradictorily, for her it was also associated with her small-town life and a climate of provincial prejudice. Thus at seventeen, while both her parents were ill and unable to prevent her leaving, she escaped from Holland to England, where she was an au pair in a Jewish family interested in progressive education, and later went to Florence, then a distinctly exotic city for a Dutch girl, where she took the boy Pucci (subsequently to become the famous designer) to and from school. It was at this time that travelling first became her means of escape from

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 139 insupportable events at home. ‘Holland was just not big enough for me,’ she said. In the late 1920s she travelled with her lover, André, a Jewish lawyer and Theosophy student of her father’s, to Paris, where they lived together on the Left Bank for several months while he completed his studies. This was an unusually rebellious act for a middle-class young woman at the time, and despite Theosophy’s defence of ‘free-thinking’, her mother was distraught. A few years later, after André’s sad premature death of peritonitis, my mother went to Vienna to study the innovative socialist housing projects as part of her social work degree. It was in Vienna, in 1933, that she met my Jewish father Marcel Weisselberg. He had lived in the city for most of his life, but, like many Viennese Jews, was born (in 1904) in the eastern provinces of the declining Habsburg Empire, in his case in Berlad, Bukovina, where his family were assimilated German-speaking timber merchants with business connections over a wide geographical region. This was no protection, however, and in 1907 the family fled from antisemitic attacks to Czernovitz, the capital of the region and a flourishing ‘cosmopolitan’ city with avenues, cafés, an opera house and a university (Lichtblau and John 1996; Hirsch and Spitzer 2003). From there they were forced to flee again, in 1914, ahead of the invading Russian army, to Vienna, where they settled for rather longer and the children were educated. As the oldest son, my father was expected to go into the business after completing the Gymnasium, which he did; though, like many sons of Jewish merchants, he would have preferred university and the more intellectual route taken by his older sister Erna, and younger brother, Konrad, both of whom not only went to university but were also, by the early 1930s, members of the Austrian Communist Party. Demetz, in his introduction to some of Walter Benjamin’s essays (Demetz 1986), describes this intergenerational struggle between bourgeois Jewish families with commercial interests and their more intellectual and politically minded sons (he doesn’t refer to daughters) as typical of the moment, and cites Freud, Husserl and Benjamin as examples.8 Although my father belonged to a younger generation than these figures, he experienced some of the same contradictions and in his case was radicalised during the interwar period by the expansion of socialism and communism across the continent, by Viennese municipal socialism at home, by the increasing virulence of Austro- and German fascism, and, no doubt, by his early childhood experiences of flight and displacement. In this sense he belonged to a fairly typical group of Viennese ‘non-Jewish Jews’ who were not religious or Zionist but all the same conscious always of their political Jewish heritage (Deutscher 1968; Fleck 2002). Yet, despite the secular and left-wing life style, he seems to have been among the first in his extended family and social network to go out with and then marry a non-Jew.9 This was later to be forbidden across occupied Europe (in Germany in 1935 after the Nuremberg laws; in Vienna in 1938 after the Anschluss; in Holland in 1941 after the occupation). But these barriers seemed unimportant for my mother. She already identified with difference, and in a climate of growing antisemitism her connection to my father was a combination of political defiance,

140 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism identification and of course desire. 10 In the early days of their relationship my parents spoke English to each other; later German; then, on their migration to UK, a mixture of both. Dutch was the language my mother spoke with her sister and in postwar England with our Dutch au pairs. French was used by our parents when they wanted us not to understand. But that is jumping ahead. In Vienna their circle of friends, who tended to gather at the Café Schottentor, included a number of people whose histories are threaded through this book. Among them was Marie (Mitzi) Jahoda, the sociologist, who, I discovered while writing this, was a friend and comrade of Joe Buttinger’s, the Austrian socialist who later married the American psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner about whom I write in chapter 4.11 Jahoda’s work on race and racism, produced after she left Austria in the late 1930s, is referred to in chapter 6. It was through her that my mother met Gertrude Wagner (Gerti), who became her closest friend and remained so for sixty years. Gerti was a colleague of Jahoda’s; she had worked for her on the innovative Marienthal project in 1930 (Fleck 2002; Jahoda et al. 2002) and was also an old friend of my father’s from their socialist youth movement days. It was in turn through Gerti that my mother met my father. He owned a car, a rare possession in those days, and drove my mother and others in the group to a Heuringer, a rural tavern where new local wines are tasted. Everyone drank a little too much. This was the story they told about how they met and became lovers. Another in the circle of friends was Hugh Gaitskell (see chapter 4), later leader of the British Labour Party, who the following year was a witness at my parents’ marriage. It was in Gaitskell’s company that my mother watched the shelling of the block of workers’ flats, the Karl Marx Hof, by the Austro-fascists during their attack on the democratically elected socialist municipality in the spring of 1934. As foreign nationals they felt relatively safe on the streets of Vienna under siege, unlike their Austrian socialist friends. Later my mother helped in the clandestine distribution of money and false documents sent by Quakers and the British Labour movement to underground members of the outlawed Social Democrats and their families hidden around the country, as did Muriel Gardiner (chapter 4). Among the other foreigners doing this work, and also organised by Hugh Gaitskell, was Naomi Mitchison, the novelist and activist, who wrote about the experience and mentions my mother in her Vienna Diary (1934). She describes how they were sent to Graz, one of the main centres of resistance. Later ‘A.W [Ankie Weisselberg] came to dinner with . . . me . . . I liked her; she was handsome and capable and full of fun and intelligence. If only one had the time to make friends with all the people one would really like to know!’ (Mitchison 1934: 257). My mother didn’t feel particularly capable, however: ‘I think I was just pregnant at the time but didn’t know that I was. I kept falling asleep in meetings. I don’t think I knew how dangerous it was to do what I was doing. I was very naïve’. But my mother often told me how this period in Vienna was probably the happiest of her life and that in this left-wing predominantly Jewish social circle she felt for the first time that she had friends and belonged.

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 141 Meanwhile my uncle Konrad Weisselberg, my father’s brother, had moved to Kharkov in USSR, married a Ukrainian woman (also not Jewish) and taken up Soviet citizenship. After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Vienna he was apparently offered a job at Harvard but (to the disappointment of my grandfather) preferred to go to Kharkov’s Physical Technical Institute, one of the best research institutes in the world, to which a number of Austrian and German scientists – many of them communists and Jews – had gone, hoping both to contribute to Soviet science and to escape the escalating menace of fascism. Central among them was Alex Weissberg, Konrad’s close friend, who later wrote a much-cited and translated personal account and political analysis of Soviet mass interrogations in the late 1930s, Conspiracy of Silence, for which Arthur Koestler wrote the preface (Weissberg 1952; Koestler 1952).12 Both Alex Weissberg and my uncle were among those imprisoned, interrogated and tortured by the KGB in 1937. Both were accused of being Trotskyists and counterrevolutionary agents of the Gestapo. Alex survived three years of incarceration to write the book (and a further five in wartime Warsaw). My uncle Konrad was executed. He left behind his wife, Galia, who was designated ‘a wife of an enemy of the people’, so deprived of her home and job, and their year-old child, my first cousin, also Alex. Galia, unsurprisingly, suffered a nervous breakdown and so young Alex became a feral child in war-torn Kharkov, living in cellars and begging for food from both Soviet citizens and the German occupying forces. But he too survived. He was taken in by a neighbour, studied and did well. In 1959, after Stalin died, his father was posthumously rehabilitated. Contact with the family in the West was tentatively remade and thereafter sustained, albeit infrequently, given the dangers and impediments of the cold war. Then, fifty years after Konrad’s death, in Gorbachev’s more liberal regime, my cousin Alex and his wife Nadia (whose Ukrainian surname, Kharlamov, he adopted to protect himself from Soviet antisemitism) met up with my brother Kiffer and his wife Alison in a Moscow hotel. With the aid of an interpreter they talked incessantly all day and most of the night.13 After this initial encounter we all communicated regularly and in 1991 the Ukrainian family came to visit us in the UK. They were here for the electrifying events which marked the collapse of the Soviet Union and witnessed the drama through the lens of the BBC refracted again through our minimal Russian and their limited English. Then in 1996, nearly sixty years after Konrad’s death, the KGB opened their archives to the relatives of those executed in the great purge and Alex, by now a middle-aged man, found a meticulously logged transcript of the ten-month interrogation of his father.14 This was finally what convinced him to make all efforts to ‘return’ to Western Europe. We did our best to help track down the critical evidence of his father’s Austrian citizenship, which was not easy given that all documents had been destroyed, but paradoxically the data in the KGB interrogation record itself provided most of the information required by the Austrian government. So, in the year 2000, Konrad’s direct descendants – Alex, his children and grandchildren – finally gained Austrian citizenship15 and moved, as

142 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism EU citizens, with their spouses to the UK, where they have experienced the tough uprooted lives of migrants but are now settled – indeed thriving – and are part of my complex international extended family. But more of that later. Back in prewar Vienna, the remaining family members had lost contact with Konrad. Erna was briefly imprisoned after the putsch in 1934. Although my father and grandfather were less radical than my aunt, and so perhaps less prescient about the impending political catastrophe, they nevertheless started in 1936, well before the Anschluss of 1938, to transfer the timber business out of Austria and moved in stages to Luxembourg en route for London. Erna and her children moved to Paris. Later Erna’s husband Fritz escaped by skiing over the Austrian border to Switzerland. After the German occupation of Paris, Erna, pretending to be Moroccan (she had a dark complexion), left Paris on foot with my cousins Ruth and Liz. They later met up with Fritz in Marseilles and finally escaped (though were arrested by the Guardia Civil on the way) via the Pyrenees and Lisbon to New York. My parents with my older brother, Klaus, my grandfather and my aunt Rosl, her husband and children, John and Susi (Czech citizens), came to London in 1938; for my mother and brother the flight entailed a lonely eighteen-month journey via Luxembourg and the Netherlands, yet they too arrived safely. Many years later I asked my aunt Erna, the most politicised of the family, why, with the exception of Konrad, the whole family ‘got out’. ‘Jews from the East’, she said, no doubt mindful of the family’s early refugee experiences, ‘had it in their blood to anticipate trouble.’ But of course that wasn’t necessarily so. There was no consistent pattern. Although World War II displaced a staggering sixty million people over the whole continent (Sassen 1999), in those years before the war many from Eastern and Central Europe didn’t or couldn’t leave. Some with businesses and established households left only at the last moment and lost all their possessions. Dolf Placzek, later Jan Struther’s ‘penniless Jewish refugee lover’, who came from a wealthy well-connected Viennese family, was among those who got out under the wire (chapter 4; see also note 15). Others, as Gedye so angrily recounted in his contemporary dispatches to the Times, killed themselves in despair as they became increasingly excluded, humiliated and unable to escape (Gedye 1939; chapter 4), while yet others were taken by the German transports to the concentration camps and never seen again. Nobody really knows why some Jews left in time and survived while others did not, though a left-wing political analysis and involvement in anti-fascist struggles made some more aware of the potential of a holocaust as well as more able to cope once incarcerated. My parents’ flight was not without pain: my mother gave birth to a full-term still-born child in Luxembourg after driving herself, in labour, to the hospital. She attributed the death to her shock after visiting the World War I graveyards at Verdun. My brother, who was three when he left Vienna, certainly suffered on his two-year trek across Europe and what must have seemed like an endless string of encounters with new languages, new houses and new families. My father died too young, at sixty, to find time to tell me his story, and I was too young to ask; or maybe the

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 143 memories were too painful to retrieve. In any case he didn’t talk much about those years and, as far as I was aware, had no desire to return to Austria, either physically or imaginatively. No doubt this third flight as a Jew was very difficult for him also. But the point is that my parents and my brother got out. They survived. They were safe. Moreover, their arrival in Britain was relatively easy. They were not categorised as enemy aliens and were not interned. Yet how their escape and survival affected them over the subsequent years is difficult to gauge. Anne Karpf in her testimony The War After (1997) explores the complex ways in which the legacy of surviving and not being able to protect others is transferred across generations through the minutiae of everyday cultural practices. In her case she cites her mother’s poignant and obsessive attention to keeping her children warm: buttoning them up and overdressing them as they grew up in the relatively mild English climate in the 1950s. In my parents’ case the dues of survival seem to have been paid by always having an open house to which dozens of people gravitated, particularly in the postwar period, and by a commitment to aiding and protecting all those who had had a harder time than we. My father’s insistent generosity and responsibility were facilitated by his financial success. He desired all those he cared for to have a house, a safe place, somewhere to belong. My mother also felt compelled to provide until the moment of her death, and for her also housing was the lynchpin. This relationship to housing – to having a house and maintaining an open house – has in turn been my parents’ legacy to me. A house, in the absence of a sense of national belonging, becomes the material means by which we try to connect to place, stability, the local. So this is one of the outcomes of diasporic existence: perpetual motion and the sense of not belonging anywhere exacerbate our longing to embed. My parents’ first house in England was in Hampstead Garden Suburb (though my mother would have preferred Swiss Cottage, the choice of the more intellectual refugees), and from there, once the war was underway, they moved to Newbury in Berkshire, where my father was stationed with a unit of the Pioneer Corps. George Clare (1982) has described how Austrian and other foreign-born nationals volunteering for the British army (including at a later date ‘enemy aliens’) were attached to the Pioneer Corps, which initially was a non-combatant regiment (though it later sent troops to Dunkirk). So Newbury during those years had a small community of wives, children and other hangers-on of predominantly Austrian origin. My parents, who had bought a modest house there, were at the centre of this network and our kitchen was always full of Austrians. From this pool my mother recruited a cook, Frau Blau, and a much-loved carer, Greta Weinberg, to look after my brothers and me. I was born in London at the beginning of the war; my younger brother, Kiffer, followed three years after. Greta would later say that she always felt she had to compensate for the fact that my mother paid more attention to the boys than me. As a result I was very attached to her, which may have contributed (as was the case for some of the people discussed in chapter 4) – in combination with the cosmopolitan habitus of the family – to my later radicalism: my feminism as much as

144 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism my anti-racism. In any case, Greta’s presence freed my mother to work for the Dutch government in exile, a job which entailed her travelling to London in a glamorous suit with, if possible, a rose in her lapel (I remember her stealing one from a garden on the way to the station). Exactly what the job entailed I never found out. My father, after Dunkirk, was released from the Pioneer Corps to direct the family sawmill in Somerset (established before the outbreak of war), where it was considered he could make a greater contribution to the war effort in part by employing Italian prisoners of war to make coffins and, as an Italian speaker, being able to communicate with them. It was around the Newbury kitchen table that I learned German, but it was not a great advantage in those days.16 On the contrary: I remember vividly being in the park across the road from our house, waiting my turn to go on the swings. The park-keeper’s wife stuck her head out of the upstairs window of the lodge beside the playground and, hair swinging loose like the wicked witches in my German story books, shrieked, ‘Don’t let her on the swings! She’s from that German family!’ I was about three. It was probably the first of many painful lessons of exclusion and not belonging. I ran home sobbing with confusion. There was a lot of linguistic unravelling to do: Germans were the enemy in the incessantly discussed war; germs were bad too; yet we spoke German. From then on the language at home was increasingly English, and I learned quickly that I spoke it ‘better’ than my parents and all the other adults around, that is to say, with a native accent. It was at about the same time that I saw black people for the first time. There was a US army base just outside Newbury, at Greenham Common, and among the troops stationed there between 1942 and 1945 were negroes (as they were then called). One of them directed traffic on a tricky crossing that we had to manoeuvre on my way to nursery school each day (not many traffic lights then) and I imagine that because my mother was nice to him he felt it safe to be nice to me. I have a clear memory of warm greetings and of him carrying me across the road on his shoulders. In Newbury, as in towns across Britain, black GIs were often (though not uniformly) made welcome by the indigenous population, to the consternation of many white GIs, whose views had been shaped by the entrenched racist culture of their own country. As pointed out in chapter 5, General Eisenhower himself observed that ‘the British population lacks the racial consciousness which is so strong in the United States’ (Gardiner 1992:155; see also White 1945; Kushner 2004). In some cases there were violent interracial conflicts between US troops, often triggered by the attention paid to their black colleagues by British women, many of whom were fully aware of the contradictions inherent in fighting a war against German fascism with a racially segregated US army. In fact one such incident, in which two black soldiers and a publican’s wife were shot, occurred just outside Newbury in 1944 (Smith 1987; Gardiner 1992). Left-wing Jewish refugees from fascism, like my parents and their network, were particularly likely to feel indignant about ‘racial prejudice’ and so were deliberately hospitable and friendly to these marginalised members of the allied forces.

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 145 Gerti Wagner, my parents’ friend from Vienna, was another member of the Austro-Newbury network. She had come to UK in 1937 and done an M.Phil. at London University, ‘Saving and Spending in Worktown’, based on her research as an investigator with the Mass-Observation Bolton study. There she met Bill Naughton, later to become well known as a novelist and playwright, but at the time a local lorry driver and a Mass-Observation diarist, with whom she was to have two children. The first, Barney, was born in Newbury in 1941 and brought up with my brothers and me. Gerti lived for long periods both during and after the war in my parents’ house whilst also conducting research for the Wartime Social Survey on attitudes to food, rationing, diet and evacuation (Wagner 1943). Although there were other friends with children in the Newbury network, none had any of my age (and all were boys), so I was the only ‘foreigner’ in my class at the small progressive primary school that my mother managed to find for us. I was quite happy there but had no close friends. I think my family was too strange – both foreign and assertive about their cosmopolitan political and educational principles – despite their serious attempts at learning to be ‘English’. ‘There was always talk of assimilation,’ remembers Larry Naughton, Bill Naughton’s son from his earlier marriage, who was eight years older than I was and another of the regulars at the house, ‘but they never really succeeded.’ Yet I at least now spoke ‘proper’ English, so other ways of justifying my difference had to be found by my school contemporaries and their parents for marginalising me: ‘you’re so dark’, some people used to say to me. One ten-year-old announced she didn’t like Jews because they killed Jesus. But on the whole I found xenophobia more commonplace than antisemitism. As soon as the war was over my parents bought a house in the countryside not far from Newbury.17 Inhurst House a large neglected country house, mostly built in the early nineteenth century, with outhouses and twelve acres of land, had been used for evacuees during the war.18 The rain came in, it was bitterly cold, had an overgrown garden and was not connected to the main electricity, gas or sewerage systems. No-one wanted it and it was cheap. But it was beautiful and large enough to accommodate with ease twenty-five people all at once – and indeed, for the next fifty two years until my mother sold it, it often did.19 In 1947 my mother’s sister Miekie and her family came from Holland for several months. They had had a much tougher war than we had. Both my maternal grandparents had died. Miekie and her husband Kees had had two children in the first year and a half of the war and another in 1944. The Germans had invaded Holland in 1940 and from 1942 had started to arrest and deport the Jews. From 1942 to 1944 my uncle and aunt, displaying similar ‘instinctive extensivity’ (Cohen 2001; chapter 4) to my mother, and a good deal more sheer bravery, force majeure, hid some Jewish friends and their baby in a duik, a secret recess built behind a book shelf in the attic eaves of their house. In 1943, when the occupying powers ordered Dutch men to be conscripted into labour camps, Kees was forced into hiding as well. He became part of a network of underground resisters and, as a skilled carpenter, undertook the building of duiks – used for secret radios as

146 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism well as people – in the area in which they lived. At that point Miekie became the only adult with the documentation permitting her to connect the two-family household to the outside world and, during the devastating famine in the winter of 1944/5, would cycle on a wooden-wheeled bike to the east to barter possessions, such as her leather riding boots and family jewellery, for food and fuel. Her underground activities, which consisted of finding safe houses for Jews, continued throughout the period. The well-known Diary of Anne Frank has been used since the war to suggest that it was commonplace for Jews to be hidden by Dutch families and that participation in the Dutch resistance was widespread. In fact this was not at all the case. Of the 80,000 Jews resident in Amsterdam before the war, only 5,000 survived. Their transport to the death camps was as efficient as it was from towns inside Germany and was shamefully unobstructed by most of the Dutch population (Mak 1999: 267). For my aunt and uncle to hide a family with a young baby in their house was therefore an unusual and dangerous thing to do, particularly since their next-door neighbour was a known member of the Nazi party, and their own children, my cousins, old enough to give away secrets. In fact my grandmother, who had been living with my aunt after the death of my grandfather in the early years of the war, fell out with her daughter over her involvement in the resistance movement. My grandmother moved out of the house and died not long after. The Jewish family and my aunt, uncle and cousins survived – though they were inevitably scarred. The symbolism of a safe hiding place has surfaced in my own adult life in semiconscious ways that half bemuse me yet generate visceral tears as well – even now as I write. My house in twenty-first-century London has a cupboard under the attic eaves hidden behind a bookshelf; it is used for suitcases but is big enough to hide about five people lying down. Likewise, a cortijo that we bought in rural Spain many years ago has a secret cave in which, again, about five people could hide – could be ondergedoken if necessary. The word comes to me in Dutch – because it is from a deeply sedimented level of childhood consciousness that my fantasies of concealment, protection and rescue bubble up. It was at the end of the war that I started to learn Dutch when the first of an unceasing stream of Dutch relatives, friends and au pairs came to stay in my parents’ house. It was in Dutch that I first overheard the stories of my aunt Miekie’s clandestine wartime activities. She, Kees and their three children, my cousins Niels, Katinka and Maud, came to stay for about six months in 1947. Gerti, her partner Bill, his two older children from his marriage, and their child Barney were there as well. A second son was born in the house the following year. They and my parents and their children formed the nucleus of those who were at Inhurst in the famously hot summer of 1947, but there were at least another dozen friends of these three families as well (figure 9). If there were not enough beds or rooms, people camped in the garden. We had dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits, grew food (wartime rationing was still in place) and went swimming in a nearby lake. A gardener and cook came in from the village. Then we acquired pigs and horses. My father by that time had a business

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 147 in London which seems to have supported us all and he commuted each day (often after an early morning swim in the lake). The local villagers were astounded by all the goings-on. I don’t think my parents anticipated how traditional and conventional would be our rural neighbours or how strange our household would seem to them. My mother stood for election as a Labour parish councillor – a naïve and brave thing to do – and, as a woman, a foreigner with a Jewish name and a newcomer to the area, got just six votes. Over the following years the flow of visitors, long-term guests and helpers from abroad continued. They came mainly from Holland, Austria and France, mostly friends of my parents and their friends, or their teenage children keen to learn English, often non-Jewish Jews. There were too some business friends of my father’s from Australia, Hong Kong, Egypt and other places. The English countryside seemed an ideal place for those who had endured the trauma of the war to forget and start again. Among the visitors was Alex Weissberg, who, after his years in the Soviet prison system and occupied Poland, finally got out and came to England with his Polish wife. About the same time my mother helped look after some orphaned and homeless children shipped out of Vienna to England as part of an Anglo-Austrian Society holiday scheme. One of them, aged five, became my adopted brother John.

Figure 9 Friends and relatives at Inhurst during the summer of 1947. Author bottom right. Her father top left. Photographer unknown.

148 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism Very slowly some local contacts were made. My mother tried hard to encourage us to fit in – and also to be accepted herself – but the main activities for children from big houses were pony clubs and gymkhanas. My older brother liked that world and was determined to join it. He wanted to be a farmer, and indeed that is what he became. But, after a brief early foray into the country set and life with ponies, during which I was made to feel very different – too bold, too clever, too foreign – despite being a good rider, I realised that the city and abroad were more to my taste.20 In fact my pleasure in the English countryside was destroyed by these early experiences and I have rarely visited it since. Several years passed before I understood that foreigners could also be conservative, unfriendly, withholding, and English people eccentric, expansive, cosmopolitan and radical; it was my progressive – albeit rural – boarding school which introduced me to a more liberal English world and taught me to distinguish between types of Englishness. Yet that too became constraining, and from thirteen on I went to London and the continent (as it was then called) as often as I could, often on my own, where I honed my Dutch and French and acquired some Italian. At school I studied Russian as an extra language for O level – a defiant and unusual thing to do at the height of the cold war – and spent holidays with Russian-speaking families (in France) in order to improve my competence. My first important boyfriend at school was French, from Algeria, and bilingual. Foreign languages during those years were not only an everyday feature of my family life, they were also a skill that bright girls were expected to acquire to enable them to do well at school and become bilingual secretaries if they wished, or, if very ambitious, interpreters. But although linguistic ability was an educational asset, it was also a symbol of otherness as well, and some of my class-mates sneered when I returned from an exchange holiday in France with an accent that was too authentic. Nevertheless I persisted because in the 1950s, unlike today, French was an exotic foreign language which stood for a more sexual and intellectual place: for bohemia, cafés, wine, Sartre, Juliette Greco, and so on. As Fussell pointed out of the 1930s, abroad represented culture, romance and sensuality while England seemed smallminded, prosaic and xenophobic (Fussell 1980; also chapter 5), and, despite the war, this was still the case in the 1950s. Among the authors I encountered during these years and who articulated the allure of abroad to me and its countercultural evocations were Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Camus, Orwell, Henry Miller, Malcolm Lowry and, a little later, Lawrence Durrell. None of them women, I now note. The pleasures of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf – of a past female vision of Englishness – came to me much later. London was beginning to change in the 1950s and I was visiting it more often. Some of my school friends lived there and my parents inherited from some Austrian friends who returned to Vienna a rent-controlled flat in a mansion block near Notting Hill which became their London base and allowed my father to avoid the increasingly arduous journey from his office to the Hampshire countryside. Coffee bars were popping up and my mother, with her memory of interwar café culture

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 149 in Vienna, Amsterdam and Paris, was an early habitué. On shopping expeditions we sometimes went to El Cubano in Knightsbridge, a stone’s throw from one of London University’s Commonwealth student residences in Hans Crescent and so a comfortable place for African and Caribbeans to hang out as well (chapter 6). My mother’s satisfaction in the cosmopolitan interracial atmosphere of the place was palpable. Alongside the pleasures of abroad I began to have a much better sense of the injustices of race politics and took a militantly anti-colonial line. At fifteen I argued with my boyfriend about Algerian independence; with my older brother about the colonial war in Malaya, where he had been sent with the British army; and had vivid fantasies about joining the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. On one occasion, when I was about sixteen or seventeen, a decorator working in my parents’ flat expressed crudely racist views about West Indian immigrants in Notting Hill; as my parents were not there I took it on myself, with spectacular adolescent righteousness, to sack him. He left the hall half-painted, the paint cans open. When my parents returned they were exasperated by my arrogance and the unfinished job, but my memory is that they were also quite proud, particularly my Dad. I don’t know how to unpick and explain the dynamic and origins of these powerfully held and boldly expressed political views and emotions, other than to situate them in the kind of chronological and domestic account I have presented here. My own marginalisation combined contradictorily with my bourgeois survivor’s privilege and the inheritance from my parents’ culture of both a sense of displacement and the need to protect others and correct injustice. Together these gave me a kind of innocent but fierce defiance which extended into most corners of my life (though did not affect my brothers in the same way – but that is another story). I spent a couple of rebellious years around that time neglecting school work (I was doing my A levels in London) and hanging out in Soho with artists and students from the Slade, mostly much older than myself.21 My liberal parents didn’t seem to mind the transgressive social life but made it clear that if I failed my A levels I would have to take them again, which made sense to me. But I got the grades required for entrance to London University (not high in those days) and decided to study philosophy, not because I was so desperately interested but because no one else I knew had thought of doing so. Being different was in itself desirable. I was interviewed by A.J. Ayer and offered a place for the following year. I went to New York to fill in the intervening months (and therefore missed the 1958 Notting Hill riots). I was just eighteen and hungry for the artistic life. In the end I lived there for three formative years, became a painter and gave up on philosophy and university. I loved New York and felt more at home there than in London. I spent the first few months with my aunt Erna and her husband Fritz, still radicals, who taught me, among other things, not to cross a picket line. This was not a lesson I had learned in England. One of the reasons I felt so at home in New York was that, for the first time in my life, I didn’t have to spell out my surname. It was also the first time that I came across religious Jews, not among my friends or family but on the

150 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism streets of the Lower East side, where I rented an apartment. My childhood had been profoundly marked by my father’s Jewish history and my parents’ flight from Central Europe yet was also wholly secular. I knew nothing at all about Judaism either as a religion or in terms of its cultural practices. In that respect I was a direct inheritor of my father’s non-Jewish Jewish Viennese culture. So it was a great surprise to see how divided were the cultural communities in New York and how orthodox was the life of many New York Jews (not my aunt, who was militantly anti-Zionist until the end). In England I had been called ‘foreign’ and ‘not really English’. In New York I became Jewish, though not entirely willingly, because I could see it was an appellation of exclusion as well as inclusion. Besides, as a category it was not large enough to encompass my particular and maverick history. But shortly after my arrival I fortuitously crash-landed into the epicentre of the New York cosmopolitan art world. This was the late 1950s and the cusp between abstract expressionism and the reassertion of figurative art and the beginning of postmodernism. I was a part-time student of George Grosz’s, by then in his declining years, at the Art Students’ League, but spent most of my time socialising downtown with a group of artists in their twenties and thirties, from whom (as I wrote to my parents) I was learning more about ideas than I would have if I had gone to university. Among them were Mary Frank, the sculptor, and her husband Robert Frank, the photographer and film maker; Dick Bellamy, curator of the earliest ‘happenings’, and Sheindi Tokayer, his partner; Alfred Leslie, who made the short film Pull My Daisy about the Beats with Robert Frank; Dody Muller, widow of painter Jan Muller and later lover of Jack Kerouac, with whom I shared a house in Provincetown one summer; and Arthur Tieger, a good friend but not very famous. Red Grooms, Jay Milder and I opened a gallery together – City Gallery – which showed post-abstract work by Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dines, Mimi Gross, Bob Thompson and others (including me) and I directed a teenage cast in Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening for an off-off Broadway theatre. At night when we had the money we hung out at the Five Spot and listened to the modernist jazz of Ornette Coleman; I had a job as a waitress at the Jazz Café. During those years my boyfriend was Leo Raditsa, at the time part of the same social network as me, a writer and defender of the radical work of novelist and critic Paul Goodman and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, but in later years to shift to the extreme right and become a neoconservative ally of Kristol, Podhoretz and the Commentary set (Bronner 2005 has described this context). We lived together on the Lower East side. My mother’s unconventional advice was that you should live with your lover for at least a year before getting married, but in the socio-sexual climate of late1950s America cohabitation was not a respectable thing to do, particularly for women, and Leo’s well-connected parents (Yugoslav and Italian) considered me (and I think my family) not good enough for their Exeterand Harvard-educated son. This is relevant because their disapproval and Leo’s resentment of my independence and productivity contributed to our break-up and to setting the stage for my next and most significant romantic-sexual relationship.

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 151 In the summer of 1960 I took off for a holiday in Mexico. After Leo and I split, I no longer had anywhere to live so it seemed a good time to go away, but I wasn’t yet ready to return to Europe. I did a bit of reading about the history of Mexico before I left but otherwise went recklessly, with no Spanish and no contacts. Familiar with authors such as Lowry and with the emerging revolutionary politics of Latin America (I had heard Castro speak in Central Park in 1959), I expected Mexico to be negotiable and comprehensible, like France or Italy. It wasn’t. But although it was tougher, more hostile and more enigmatic than I expected, I was determined to travel on my own in order to have an unmediated experience of the country and people. I took buses to Oaxaca and then Chiapas, where I fell ill with hepatitis (not the dangerous kind) and spent two weeks in a provincial hospital, as a result of which my Spanish improved fast. After six months, and some time spent in Mexico City, I visited Acapulco. It was already a tourist resort with a range of hotels to suit all purses but was nevertheless a dramatically beautiful place with lush tropical vegetation and a long looping Pacific coastline fringed with deserted beaches and backed by steep mountains that were etched sporadically by the makeshift barrios of the poor. It was in Acapulco on the beach that I met José (Pepe) Nava. The connection was visceral and immediate. We fell in love and were to stay together for eighteen years. We remain very close friends. He was twenty-four at the time, I was twenty-one. Before I met him he had been a fisherman and more recently had made friends with a Spanish Civil War refugee, Isidro Covisa, an anarchist and an artist. Together they had set up a beach hostel consisting of palm-thatched shelters and hammocks, where, for two US dollars, people could have two meals, stay the night and, if they wanted, have access to Covisa’s library. José had started to paint and was increasingly integrated into the network of local and Mexico City artists who would visit the bar, a broadly left-wing group that socialised together even though sometimes riven by political rivalries between its Communist Party and Trotskyist factions. José had spent most of his life on boats or the beach in the sun; he had hardly attended school; his beloved father was murdered when he was thirteen. These are all important factors in his life and the lives of those he has been close to.22 In the context of the narrative for this book, his ethnic and ‘racial’ provenance is also relevant. Many of the inhabitants of the Costa Chica region in Guerrero (which includes Acapulco) are of African origin, the descendants of released slaves. José’s mother was from such a family. They were also Catholics. His father was the child of a Spanish Evangelical missionary and a Mixteco Indian; people who knew him before he was killed told me that he was quite light skinned – his cheeks would go pink if he spent too long in the sun (like mine, they implied). The religious differences seem to have been unimportant, and as a child José went to both churches because both handed out food to their congregations. Physically, José looked more like his mother, which, later, when we left Mexico, was going to signify. In Acapulco it did not, however: as Bobby Vaughn has argued, the Afro-Mexicans of the Costa

152 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism Chica and their mestizo neighbours have, even now, an unusually un-racialised consciousness compared with elsewhere in the Americas (Vinson and Vaughn 2004; Vaughn 2006).23 Within a few weeks of meeting, José and I rented a small house with a view across the roof-tops to the bay in the rough barrio above the old town and spent a year there, getting to know each other, painting, and then giving lessons in English and art – the skills we had available to impart – to the curious kids who lived in the shacks further up the mountain and who came to watch us and sit on our scrap of terrace because they had nothing to do and no school to go to. Socially we were still connected to the local intelligentsia and also to some of the ex-pats then living in the town. During that period we participated increasingly in the politics of the region and a campaign to remove the corrupt municipal president. José had grown up with the inhabitants of this barrio and his aunts lived a hundred metres down the mountain. So although I was visibly an outsider, the local people treated me very well, not like a tourist, and drew on my typing and English language skills when needed. It was around this time that I dropped my given, usually mispronounced, legal name, Michaela, and its invariably misspelled Dutch diminutive, Miekie (after my aunt), for the simplicity of the Mexican abbreviation, Mica. My parents began to fear I would never return and sent us one-way tickets for a cargo boat that was to sail from New York to Antwerp. José had never left Mexico and was keen to go. We were aware that travel by bus through the still-segregated southern states of the US was out of the question for us. During those pre-civil rights years ‘interracial’ marriage was still against the law in over half of the US states and violence against black men with white women commonplace (see, e.g. Henriques 1974). So we flew to New York, over the top of the most virulent racism, and from there caught the boat. We were married by then because even sharing a cabin was not possible without a marriage certificate (regardless of epidermal difference). Moreover, although I was against marriage in principle, I wanted to be able to demonstrate publicly, on our arrival in the UK, my commitment to this unlikely partner. And in those days, in the anglophone world, to retain your ‘maiden’ name was a gesture of ball-breaking assertiveness. So this is how I became Mica Nava. After a domestic and snowy Christmas at my parents’ house with all the relatives from everywhere,24 José and I set off to explore Europe. France was not a hospitable place for people who could be mistaken for Algerians during those tense decolonising years and we were turned away from hotels and encircled by police with machine guns at a campsite. Amsterdam was much more welcoming, but we returned to England, where at least one of us was a native speaker and where, protected by my cultural capital – my ‘accent’ – and aided financially by my father, we paid key money for a large cheap flat near Chalk Farm. It was the period of fictional and cinematic representations of migrant others in films and fiction that I explore in chapter 6. We were both of that world and not of it. José’s Mexicanness and beginner’s English set him apart from the Caribbean migrants despite the physical resemblance, and as there were very few Mexicans in London during

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 153 the sixties, he was an outsider everywhere. Temperamentally that suited us both quite well. We liked belonging to the growing community of non-belongers and, in rapidly changing London, our friends, mostly artists, writers and student types, included people from South Africa, the US, Sudan, Holland, Surinam, France, Israel, Trinidad, India, Italy, Spain, as well as Mexico and, of course, the UK. It is important to note that for us ‘not-belonging’ did not mean being excluded. In the world we occupied, and with accommodation sorted, it did not appear to be a disadvantage for José to be Mexican and dark-skinned. We were not subjected to the hostility and ostracism experienced by many West Indians – at least not obviously. Michael Banton and Sheila Patterson’s descriptions of the white women partners of black men, women like me, as ‘deviant’, ‘subnormal’ and ‘social outcasts’ (Banton 1955, 1959; Patterson 1963; chapter 6), might have been a widely held view at the time, and their patronising misogynistic tone stings me now, but my personal encounter with such prejudice then was relatively rare – as, I think, was José’s. Our most persistent harasser in those days was a middle-aged woman neighbour who used to shout racist abuse at us and chop at our front and back garden hedges as often as she could, but even the police dismissed her as mad and reprimanded her. On the whole we were shielded from racist excess by our alternative network and social capital. But it was also the case that by then many people beyond the London bohemian middle classes were beginning to welcome the cosmopolitanisation of the city.25 So, we had no urgent desire to return to Mexico, even though nostalgia for its visceral pleasures ran as a persistent undercurrent in our lives. I also missed the dynamism of New York and the sense of participating in the unfolding of history. But the fact is we were stuck in London because we had no money to return. Travel to Mexico was relatively far more expensive then than now. Moreover, as time passed, the cost became yet more of an impediment because during the 1960s we had three children: Zadoc, Orson and Jake (figure 10). I worked as a translator and a teacher of English as a foreign language. José decorated houses, made children’s toys and painted. One way of surviving and supporting our travelling impulse was to exchange our flat, and later the house we inherited after the premature and sudden death of my much-loved father, for accommodation in Paris and then Andalucia. Going to Spain while Franco was still in power troubled our consciences, but we reminded ourselves that at least half the population of Spain opposed Franco in the civil war and they deserved the support of left-wing visitors. So, given the impossibility of getting to Mexico, coastal Spain became a substitute: the weather was hot, José could fish, the kids could play and people spoke Spanish. We went as often as we could, and still, over forty years later, go to the same village, where now we own the hillside cortijo with the cave behind the bookshelf. The 1960s was to be a political decade, and as it proceeded we got increasingly involved in anti-Vietnam war and international left-wing politics. José met people involved in the London black power network, among them Trinidadian filmmaker

154 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism

Figure 10 Author with husband José and sons Zadoc and Orson, 1968. Photo Sally Fraser.

Horace Ové (chapter 6) at the Mangrove in Notting Hill.26 In 1968 he went to Paris with New Left friends to witness the student uprising and was also involved in the Hornsey Art School occupation. I meanwhile looked after the kids. This was also the year of the CIA-supported massacre of student demonstrators at the Mexican Olympics and we were involved with a group of Latin Americans in London in publicising and protesting against the event. In September of 1969, just weeks after Jake’s birth, I went to my first and life-changing women’s meeting27 and, in the same year, finally overcoming my resistance to formal study, applied to the London School of Economics (LSE) to do a degree in Sociology. I started in 1970. In the same year José joined an experimental theatre group, the People Show, with which he performed all over the world for the next decade. The group was later dubbed the Rolling Stones of experimental theatre, but, in contrast, was a lot more cosmopolitan (and had some women members too): in the seventies it included an Armenian from Lebanon, a Pakistani, a Nigerian, a US-Italian Jew, a UK-German Jew, a couple of Brits and a Mexican, though, significantly, racial tabs of this kind were not kept at the time.28 Meanwhile I was totally swept up in the historical tide of the women’s movement and have remained actively involved – first mainly in consciousness

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 155 raising and feminist theatre,29 later in political debate as a member of the editorial board of Feminist Review (Nava 1972, 1992) and now, less directly, in developing the argument in this book – for over thirty-five years. Feminism, although not usually considered in relation to the cosmopolitan, is relevant to this narrative in a number of ways. As a social movement it was influenced politically and in terms of its organisational structure by the 1960s US civil rights movement and subsequent growth of black power, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the global student uprisings of 1968. Although the emergence of women’s liberation in the UK in 1969 was in part a reaction against the male chauvinism of these movements, it was nevertheless deeply embedded in the same left-wing, libertarian, internationalist and antiracist culture. In common with the other groups it sought to expose and challenge the injustices of hierarchies of power based on class, skin colour, gender, sexuality, tradition, and so forth. In the early years these radical social networks, which were composed predominantly of people under thirty, represented themselves and were perceived as revolutionary and alternative – in sum, on the margins. Thus feminism also heightened the consciousness of women involved in the movement (as well as of the wider public) about other forms of exclusion and oppression. As I have shown in this book, it was not new for women to identify with the marginalisation of other others, but the growth of identity politics associated with the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s shifted the balance of this process by placing questions of race more firmly on the political and intellectual agenda. There were other contributing factors of course: Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 and the migration to Britain in 1972 of tens of thousands of Asian refugees from Uganda were among them. Consciousness was stirred by global events as well as political debate. Racial difference could no longer be as relatively un-noted as it had been in the alternative modernist culture we had occupied in the sixties, but the process of foregrounding it – even within feminism and the left – was slow.30 In our lives British race relations were marked in different ways. One of the women in our house was half-Asian, half-English from Uganda and her family were among the forced migrants of 1972. A couple of years later, while at a party with José, I was approached by Selma James,31 a radical feminist activist from New York and the (white) former wife of Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James. ‘I didn’t know your husband was black’, she said. I hardly knew her and hadn’t though it necessary to tell her, but her observation stayed with me because at the time ‘black’ referred to peoples in the US and UK with a historical relation to Britain’s colonising and slave-trading past so it was unusual for José to be thus labelled by someone on the left.32 This was still the beginning of identity politics and the moment in which the category ‘black’ was broadened to encompass people of Asian as well as Caribbean and African origin in Britain – and indeed anyone else who didn’t quite fit, who was other (including for a while the Irish). It was a term that connoted ‘coalitionbuilding’ (Mercer 1994:28). Moreover:

156 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism Black was created as a political category in a certain historical moment.It was created as a consequence of certain symbolic and ideological struggles. . . . In that very struggle is a change of consciousness, a change of self-recognition, a new process of identification, the emergence into visibility of a new subject. A subject that was always there, but emerging, historically. (Hall 1991:54)

But as a Mexican without a relation to Britain’s imperial past, without a clear class location or ethnic community, José could only partially identify with the new designation.33 Nevertheless, by the end of the decade – with the rise of the fascist right in the UK, anti-immigration legislation and a frequently racist police force, and with the associated mobilisation of the antiracist left, mainly in the shape of the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) with its multiple cultural branches – he increasingly did. Stuart Hall has always stressed the impossibility of coherent identities and instead argued for the process of ‘identification’, so this broader, more fragmented notion of becoming, with its connotations of alliances, was baggy enough to accommodate a wider range of people (Mercer 1994; Hall 1996; chapter 6). What seems increasingly clear to me now, as I argue in chapter 6, is that it was the period of the late 1970s through to the 1990s (not the 1950s to early 1960s) which saw a ‘re-racialisation’ – a heightened profile of race relations – in Britain. This was a process, moreover, which was productively generated by the new critical consciousness of Britain’s colonial history and a new mobilisation around race issues on the part of black people themselves. It was an outcome of identity politics. Interestingly, Tariq Modood makes the related argument that ‘political mobilisation and participation, especially protest and contestation’, were themselves a means of ‘integrating’, and that this was a factor which distinguished British patterns of postcolonial settlement from those in other parts of Europe (Modood 2005:69; see also Phillips and Phillips 1999). So, during these years, racial difference was both increasingly normal and, paradoxically, at the same time increasingly registered and analysed. Meanwhile, more immediately, my life was dominated by children, study, my household and, perhaps above all, feminism. In the present depoliticised climate, the 1970s tend to be trivialised, particularly by journalists, as a decade of mini skirts and flares, yet for those of us on the radical left, and particularly for those of us in the women’s movement, this was the most seismically political period of our lives. In the second year of my course at LSE I wrote a conference paper (my first ever) which drew heavily on the debates that were around at the time. It was called ‘The Family: a Critique of Certain Features’ (Nava 1972; see also Nava 1983; Segal 2007) and analysed the ‘myths’ that sustain women’s role in the nuclear family as child carers and wives as well as advocating group living, shared domestic responsibilities and the abolition of monogamous marriage. Thus it was both critique and polemic. Like most of the literature produced by the women’s movement in those days, it demanded that we change the way we lived. After all, was not our most significant slogan ‘the personal is political’? But the pressures to change our lives were more

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 157 than most of us could bear. Between 1970 and 1980 I was a member of the Belsize Lane Women’s Group, one of the many hundreds of groups in the loose cellular network which constituted the burgeoning international movement. The core group consisted of about nine of us, of whom seven had husbands or male partners and children. By the end of the decade all of these partner relationships had dissolved. José and I were in fact the last to go.34 In our case, as in each of the others, there were many precipitating factors, among them the contradictions of the domestic sphere, particularly the unequal sharing of child care and responsibility for our complex extended household;35 the creativity and madness – not always productive madness – of global touring with the People Show; the rollercoaster transformative effects of feminist politics and theory; the stringent demands of being a student and my first academic job; and, on both sides, the odd relationship with other lovers. I look back from a more stable, late middle age and am amazed that we survived this intense and often fraught existence as long as we did. Perhaps it was because, unlike the other women in my group, I didn’t feel as subaltern in my relationship with José: in our case the power derived from our gendered positions was less unequal (a situation I describe in chapter 5 and elsewhere in the book); moreover, my contradictory sense of self both inside and outside Englishness and his as a non-white ‘foreign’ man may have meant that we identified with each other more. In a racialised patriarchal society we both had a tenuous relationship to white male privilege (chapter 4). Or perhaps he felt less free to abandon me/us. Or perhaps we just loved each other more. These issues are too complex and too private to rehearse here. But, despite the problems, one thing that bound us powerfully to each other, and does to this day, was our mutual respect for each other’s emotional commitment to our children. So we split up at the end of the 1970s and moved to separate houses in adjacent neighbourhoods in what was then a far less middle-class part of north London.36 Our sons, who in looks and colouring had come out half-way between us, had been among the darkest in their old school (Fitzjohns Primary) and had sometimes been subjected to xenophobic comment (particularly from one member of staff) about the family’s foreignness and life style.37 Now, in Tufnell Park, they were part of a middle-class minority, despite their skin colour, and already aware of race and class contradictions. Jake, aged nine, went off on his first day to the new primary school with some trepidation and a row of ANL skateboarders-against-racism badges pinned to his jacket; on the second day he had a welcoming party of black and skateboarding kids to greet him. Thereafter there was no problem about settling in (figure 11). Zadoc was already at the local secondary school, Acland Burghley, and Orson now followed. The school, which publicly declared its radical ethos at our first visit, was barely a stone’s throw from our house, thus emphatically local as well as socially and ethnically mixed, which pleased me because I was determined that my kids would avoid the limitations of my own narrow boarding school experience. I became a governor and remained one for twelve years, so grew to be as attached to the institution as were my children and was one of a group of committed staff,

158 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism

Figure 11 Zak Ové (left) and Jake Nava hand out leaflets at an ANL demonstration, c.1978. Photo Horace Ové.

parents and students who contributed to shifting it over that period, between the mid-1970s to the 1990s, from a ‘sink’ secondary school to one of the most popular in London. Acland Burghley was – and still is – one of the micro publics in which London’s vernacular cosmopolitan culture is lived out on a daily basis. It was not only profoundly diverse and mixed in terms of the cultural and national origins of its students, it was also, on the whole, comfortably convivial and, moreover, politically conscious about this everyday mixing. Already in the early 1980s, some staff criticised the banality of much multicultural educational activity of the time (which consisted of displays of national costume, music, food, and so forth) and insisted that what was required was an antiracist education which enlightened students about British colonial history and the origins of racism.38 This awareness probably enhanced the ability of kids to connect and my sons had a wide network of friends – male and female, black and white – over the school’s north London catchment area which exists still. Class difference, rather than ethnic or epidermal difference, surfaced as a factor particularly after GCSEs, when some kids left to get jobs. On the whole, though, difference was recognised but – despite identity politics – remained ‘mere’ difference rather than ‘alterity’, a term which Richard Sennett (2002) has suggested expresses the provoking quality of the unknown unclassifiable other (and describes my own childhood experience in the Home Counties). Indeed it was

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 159 increasingly ordinary during these years in this part of town for young people to have parents who were not English, not white, and not culturally the same as each other; their mixedness formed the constituent parts of what was already the growing mongrel city. It was not just my children who had multiple strands of ethnic and ‘racial’ identity. Similarly it was not just mine whose parents were not, or were no longer, together. In this part of town it was also not unusual to live in a ‘collective household’. Definitions and working practices in these varied but most were consistent with the 1960s and 1970s critiques of the nuclear family and based on the conviction that all would benefit from sharing the responsibility and pleasures of children and cooking. I deliberately chose to live thus, to avoid the intensity, isolation and burdens of single motherhood and sharply defined generations. The house was large enough to accommodate about eight people (including kids), and for most of the next two decades it did. Moreover, and this is how this section is relevant to the other narratives in this book, this way of living again reinforced the intimate daily connections between a mobile transnational population – the familiarity of difference – while making less claustrophobic the bonds of the immediate family. The people who moved through the house were, as before, from many parts of the world, from Peru, Mexico, Iran, India, Austria, Holland, Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, as well as from UK. Some are now part of the cosmopolitan populace of London. Others have moved on, or gone back. Many of them, who, in age terms, spanned the range from my kids to my self, have remained close friends with us – the core family – and each other. On the whole, the predictable frustrations notwithstanding, the practice of communal living worked well. It seemed indeed to strengthen the core family connections as well as the network of people from all over the world who spent years or months with us. The material house and its material neighbourhood are both central to this extended cosmopolitan network and to my existence as a Londoner. In the absence of other kinds of belonging – in the absence of an attachment to the national – the bricks and mortar of my house and the geopolitics of the local area become, increasingly, my anchors. This is one of the paradoxes of cosmopolitanism. A couple of years after moving to Tufnell Park I started a relationship with Pete Chalk which was to last, on and off, for the next twenty years. Wholly unlike José, he was blond, a scientist, a political activist, and from a family that had lived in north London for generations; so he occupied a different place in my own symbolic universe: physically like my mother, whereas José was dark like my father, Pete’s Englishness (yes, we all operate with oversimplified typologies) positioned me in a different, more exotic space than had been the case with José, while simultaneously enabling a greater sense of national belonging, thus confirming how mobile are identities, how variable our identifications and the component strands of hybrid consciousness. José and Pete’s birthdays were on the same day, however (although fifteen years apart), which, because they were so different, challenged

160 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism the astrologically inclined. Pete fitted well into the extended domestic network – he was as committed to this type of living as was I and a good deal more interested in the organisation of administrative systems for the household. In relation to the cosmopolitan, I and my family were his revolt against the parental culture.39 His conservative working-class parents were not happy with his choice of an older, notproperly-English, middle-class woman with a ragbag of mixed-race children and a still-on-the-scene foreign ex-husband. During the 1980s, moreover, we also had a couple of foster kids, one of whom, Gueke, had Nigerian parents. José also had two more sons, Emil and Joe, who, as my sons’ half-brothers (and physically much like them), have been a very present part of my extended family all their lives. All added to the unconventional package. Yet, Pete’s political path followed a pattern not unrelated to mine: he was a Labour Party councillor in the heady years of left-wing local government activism, first in Haringey, where he represented the residents of Broadwater Farm at the moment of the notorious race uprising (in 1985), and later, after he moved in with me, in Islington. In work terms we were compatible. Like me, he worked, and still works, in one of the culturally, ethnically and racially mixed ‘modern’ universities of the metropolis, at one point a front line of social interaction and now, in the early years of the twenty-first century, institutions in which such difference has become utterly routine (though of course not always unproblematic). The former polytechnics and the inner city schools were just some of the sites of cultural mixing and conviviality between indigenous and new migrant groups. Such encounters were increasingly taking place across the spectrum of geosocial zones of the city: in the street, the workplace, the gym, the baby clinic, the corner shop, the club, the art centre and the home. These interactive sites provided the foundations for a more inclusive experience of belonging, for a blurring of boundaries and a new cosmopolitan structure of feeling, to be distinguished from ‘multiculturalism’, in which the focus is on diversity and the other is held at arm’s length (Hall 2000; Hesse 2000).40 As I have argued throughout this book, despite the continuing existence of racism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant feeling in the UK, domestic social interaction, miscegenation and fusion are daily phenomena, particularly in London, and moreover operate across social class and occupational categories. Princess Diana’s very modern relationship with Dodi Al Fayed was an example of such cultural mixing among the upper classes (chapter 7) and she was not the only one in royal circles to choose a partner who was visibly from somewhere else. One of the Queen’s cousins married a Nigerian, Joy Lemoine, who, in the 1970s, was a member of the People Show alongside José. These are typical of the transformations that have taken place in the UK over the last decades, especially in London. The race relations sociologists of the 1950s and 1960s (chapter 6) could not have anticipated the extraordinary expansion of cultural mixing and intermarriage that would take place across the social spectrum over the next half-century. Then numbers were tiny and relationships between native English and immigrants, between white and black, still deeply unconventional.

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 161 Now, in contrast, this kind of mixing is absolutely routine. Figures are always hard to establish – particularly since racial and ethnic origins are not easily categorised because of the constant process of dilution – but in 1994 more than 50% of young British males of Afro-Caribbean origin and 35% of females were estimated to have white partners (Modood et al. 1997). The latest (albeit not very recent) UK data (2000) suggest that an astonishing 90% of ‘black’ men aged twenty and in a relationship are with partners who are not black (though how black is defined here is not clear) and that 40% of children with one ‘black’ (mixed?) parent also have a white parent. There is no reason to suppose that these trends have not proceeded at the same pace since 2000. It is important to note, moreover, that these changes are not confined to people of Afro-Caribbean origin: the Indian and Chinese populations in UK are heading in the same direction, albeit at a slower rate (Berthoud cited in Parker and Song 2001:2). Least likely to marry out, and this was so even before the escalation of conflict after 9/11, are Muslims of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin (though this is not the experience of our family – see below). The extraordinarily high figures of black–white relations in the UK compare to the very low estimated percentage – 3.6% only – of African-American males married to white partners in the US (Small 2001). Interracial relationships in Britain are also estimated to be ten times higher than the European average (Parker and Song 2001) (though it is not clear how Europe is defined here). All these figures are inevitably open to interpretation and contestation, but what is nevertheless clear is that ‘mixed-raceness’, which in the London context is an appellation more likely to indicate complex historical and geographical trajectories than essential racial origins, has become commonplace; it is ordinary; it exists alongside and is fused with the plurality of contemporary British physiognomies. It is a sign of a deeply embedded cosmopolitanism and an astonishing and unique propensity of Londoners to merge – to experience themselves as part of an imagined inclusive transnational community – despite countervailing forces (as I must insist on interjecting throughout). This affective quotidian climate, when added to the domestic environment, was obviously going to influence the emotional and libidinal choices of my sons as they grew up. How could it be otherwise? Predictably, as a result of new partnerships, the family now has many more geographical points of origin with connections scattered yet further around the world. The partner, now wife, of my oldest son, Zadoc, is Mitra Tabrizian, Iranian exile, film-maker and photographer. After twenty years together they have recently married and are now regular visitors to Mitra’s family in Tehran. Orson’s past girlfriends have been mainly ‘mixed-race’ with one or both parents from somewhere in Britain’s former colonies – Nigerian-Irish, GhanaianEnglish, Jamaican-English, Pakistani. His partner now, dancer Jreena Green, the mother of his daughter, Cassima, grew up in Birmingham and is half-Barbadian (which includes a bit of Scottish) and half-Pakistani. Greta Wynn Davies, the mother of Jake’s daughters, Maya and Sienna, my other granddaughters, is half-Welsh, a quarter-Jewish and a quarter-English. Emil’s girlfriend, Malika, is half-Moroccan

162 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism and half-Mauritian. Joe, the youngest of José’s sons, not yet with a long-term partner, who lives during the school term time with his (English) mother in a rural part of the south coast, has long sensed the allure of the city and the cosmopolitan; when he was no more than five he was asked by one of his older brothers what he wanted to be when he grew up: ‘a Londoner’, he replied. Jake now lives and works a good deal of the time in Los Angeles, so for the first time part of a Mexican/Latino diasporic community, though, at 6 foot 4 inches and with a London accent, is not easily accommodated there either; but he enjoys the proximity to his many Mexican Angeleno cousins. In work terms all of my sons, all of them film-makers, all of them cultural translators, foreground in one mode or another – whether avantgarde, political or popular – non-white and ‘other’ worlds. All of them have been involved in the project of ‘the centring of marginality’, as Stuart Hall so compellingly put it (Hall 1987:44). And these are just the stories of the immediate family. There are first and second cousins of their generation – from Holland, the US and Mexico – who have also acquired partners from beyond the confines of their ancestral imagined and geographical territories. So, will this new generation be destined always to translate cultures, to be in between, a foot in different camps, to have divided roots? Or will they (in the case of those resident in London) simply belong to the tribe of London hybrid non-belongers – to the nation of Londoners? And are these Londoners the new British? Or will they never be more than Londoners; ever only partially acknowledged citizens and therefore ever marginal in relation to the nation; destined always to feel unable to utter the ‘we’ of national inclusion (as I have always been)? There are moments when these issues come to the fore, when they are highlighted by real and widely publicised political and historical events. In chapter 7 I argue that Diana’s death was one of these in that it exposed to the world the fact that Diana’s mourners bore no relation to the conventional heritage images of Britain. The grieving metropolitan populace was seen to be composed of an assortment of migrant and postcolonial physiognomies; it was no longer wholly white. Moreover, it was not just ‘multicultural’ either; it was mixed. Diana’s love affair with Dodi, an Egyptian Arab, exemplified this mixing. Such emblematic happenings have recurred more frequently over recent years and have consolidated not only the new image of London and UK around the globe but also the consciousness of Londoners themselves in relation to their sense of belonging to the city and the nation. Among these iconic events was London’s bid for the Olympics in July 2005, which was successful in part because of the deliberate promotion of London as a global city and Londoners as the most culturally diverse population in the world. The brief moment of euphoria and metropolitan pride generated by the award was followed only hours later by a yet more significant event: the darkness of the bombs of 7/7, which, in mutilating and killing people from a wide range of national origins, again transmitted to the world an image of London’s cultural diversity, and at the same time was constitutive once more of

A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves • 163 a new awareness of commonality and interdependence among Londoners themselves. Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, when interviewed immediately after the event, put it thus: ‘Among those who died were Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, young, old, black and white, people from all over the world who live here in harmony because of the freedoms of the city. This disaster will unite Londoners, not divide them.’ And perhaps on the whole the disaster did unite Londoners. But at the same time it also marked a new and dangerous phase of Islamic separatism and Islamophobia, escalated by the Bush–Blair axis foreign policy of recent years.41 Yet, nevertheless, the poignant and intimate sharing of fortune and misfortune by the residents of London over those dramatic days was also indicative of the reach of this quotidian, local, twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism. It showed us all once more how ordinary is cultural difference in this city. But this urban vernacular cosmopolitanism – this sense of belonging to a cosmopolitan city – does not guarantee a sense of a belonging to the nation or success in Tebbit’s cricket test. And this is the case even for those Londoners born in this country, as I was.42 In the summer of 2006 the World Cup put many of us on the spot in terms of national identification. Which team you back is quite a gut-level affair and exposes a normally below-consciousness register of loyalty and emotion. Moreover, the matches, and therefore the ‘test’, are hard to ignore because they are such high-profile political events and I, like many other non-aficionados, read the sports pages with increasing attention. But the problem was I did not know who to support. I know I have a British passport, that English is my ‘native’ language, that I have been reared on English culture and history, but I have never paid much attention to my national identifications. I am not a patriot and cannot use the ‘we’ of national inclusion. I still avoid the English countryside. I am a Londoner. This is where I belong. Moreover, the England team seemed largely uninspiring. So who to support? The (black) journalist Gary Younge wrote an only partially tongue-incheek series in the Guardian in which he assessed the merit of national teams on the basis of their political regimes. This was one rational way of deciding and usually the one I found myself adopting. In the event, however, when it came to England’s final game, I had a minor epiphany: to my surprise I found myself wanting England to win. This was a very emotional experience for me, like acknowledging finally the depth of a love relationship I’d held at arm’s length and long denied any importance. When England lost I wept with Rio Ferdinand and the other exhausted players, proud that feminism had done its bit to allow masculinity to coexist with tears; proud that antiracist struggles had contributed to an England team with black players; and, perhaps above all, happy to belong. But the euphoria didn’t last. And what is worse, this fleeting sense of belonging and national identification has consequences beyond football; it opens the door to shame. I don’t just feel anger now, as I write, a couple of months later, while Blair supports Bush’s Middle East policy and refuses to condemn Israel’s attack on Lebanon, I feel deeply ashamed. As Alex Danchev (2006) has argued, the collateral

164 • Visceral Cosmopolitanism damage of war and degradation is the shame and degradation of those in whose name atrocities are conducted. I loathe what Britain and the US have been doing throughout the Middle East, what the Israeli government, backed by many Zionist diasporic Jews, has done to the Palestinians and Lebanese. ‘Not in my name!’ I rage. So the sense of belonging to the English nation that surfaced so sweetly during England’s defeat in the World Cup was not only short-lived, it has made me even more offended by the UK’s foreign policy. The connection to my non-Jewish Jewish history, so vivid for me in the writing of this chapter, is similarly undermined as Israel renews its colonising project; I am reminded yet again that there is no simple ‘Jewish identity’ and that I cannot straightforwardly identify with ‘Jewishness’.43 I am not entirely free of national chauvinism, however. In my case it is somewhat circuitously expressed in a conviction, a sense of pride, that Britain’s metropolis, London, my city, is much more comfortable with its cultural and racial mixing, with merger, hybridity and conviviality, with its acknowledgement of difference, its mutuality, its multiple connections to elsewhere, with its everyday ordinary visceral cosmopolitanism (despite the persistence and sometimes escalation of divisions) than is any other city in the Western world. This new London created by us, by both its migrants and indigenous people, is my idealised imagined community. As Anderson (1983) has pointed out, cultural texts and rituals are required in order to sustain these social worlds. Richard Sennett has stressed the importance of the expressive work of acknowledging others and performing mutuality in our lives (2004:59). Ken Livingstone’s 2006 city-wide poster campaign declaring WE ARE LONDONERS is one such performative act. This chapter is my contribution to that symbolic process: my love song to the mongrel city and our mongrel selves.

Notes Chapter 1 Cosmopolitanism, Everyday Culture and Structures of Feeling: The Intellectual Framework of the Book 1. Typical titles were Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature (1899) and The Cosmopolitan Financier (1907). 2. See, for instance, Held (1995) and Archibugi and Held (1995). 3. See most recently British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), March 2006, which also includes a list of about two hundred and fifty references compiled by Beck and Sznaider (2006b). See also Theory, Culture & Society special issue on Cosmopolis, 19(1–2), April 2002; and Breckenridge et al. (2002). 4. See, for instance, Hannerz (1990); Urry (1995); Bhabha (1996); Schwarz (1996); Robbins (1998a, 1998b); Davey (1999); Donald (1999); Sassen (1999); Tomlinson (1999); Hall (2000); Derrida (2001); Beck (2002, 2006); Featherstone et al. (2002); Nava (2002, 2006); Sennett (2002); Vertovec and Cohen (2002); Sharma and Sharma (2003); Walkowitz (2003); Gilroy (2004); Mouffe (2004); Kushner (2004); Skrbis et al. (2004); Mercer (2005); Beck and Sznaider (2006a, 2006b); Szerszynski and Urry (2006); Vieten (2007); and Yuval-Davis (forthcoming 2008) for work on the topic and related areas. 5. The Selfridge Archive was housed in the basement of the store until about 2000 and is now with the History of Advertising Trust in Norfolk. It contains a substantial collection of uncatalogued sources including souvenir books, advertising campaigns and a daily syndicated newspaper column, credited to ‘Callisthenes’ and the Selfridge Editorial Rooms, which ran for thirty years. 6. The project was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and directed by Felix Driver, David Gilbert and Denis Cosgrove, Royal Holloway, University of London. 7. The focus of historians has tended to be on Britain’s traditionalism and insularity, the injuries of its imperial legacy and pervasiveness of its racialised thinking rather than on disjunctures and oppositional strands in English culture (see Hobsbawm 1983; Light 1991; Young 1995; and McClintock 1995). But see Schwarz (1987) for a discussion of the contradictions in English modernity. 8. This chapter is a slightly revised version of Nava (1998). 9. Psychoanalytically oriented explanations explore these semi-conscious interrelationships: see, for example, Rustin (1991); Žižek (1998). 10. Gilroy highlights the links between antisemitism and anti-black racism (Gilroy 2000 and 2004).

165

166 • Notes 11. During those years and until 1967 it was against the law for ‘blacks’ (variably defined) to marry people of European origin in over half the states of the USA (Henriques 1974). Lynching was commonplace in the south until the 1930s (Allen et al. 2004). Even today US record companies discourage the representation of mixed black and white couples in music videos (personal communication with director Jake Nava). 12. See also interview with Horace Ové recorded on the 2005 BFI DVD of his film Pressure. 13. The US critical understanding of race questions has tended to be hegemonic and has led to the assumption that the meanings attributed to epidermal difference in the US are more or less universal; yet, as has already been noted, the social formation of the US has been one of the most racialised and divided in the world. This point is also made by Mercer (1994:27) and Parker and Song (2001:13). See also the discussion of Mexico in chapter 8. 14. Sheila Kitzinger (formerly Webster) in interview with the author, 2 February 2006. Kitzinger’s unpublished research largely confirms the thesis that class and cultural capital, particularly speech, were often more significant determinants of status than pigmentation for African and Caribbean students in 1950s Oxbridge (Webster 1955). This is consonant with David Cannadine’s view that in the British Empire, social prestige and rank often counted for more than race, and that this more ‘individualist’ form of perception persisted in twentieth-century Britain (Cannadine 2002). 15. For instance Trevor McDonald was newsreader of News at Ten throughout the 1990s and Bill Morris was general secretary of the national Trades Union Congress (TUC) from 1991 until 2003. Valerie Amos is Leader of the House of Lords. Although not long enough, the list is long, particularly when compared to other European countries with former colonies and substantial non-white populations like the Netherlands, France and Belgium. 16. See the film The Queen, dir. Stephen Frears, 2006. 17. See also the film La Haine, dir. Mathieu Kissovitz (1995). In US and UK the suburbs represent security and respectability, whereas those of cities like Paris and Vienna suggest deprivation and menace. This was reinforced by the sustained riots in France in 2005.

Chapter 2 The Allure of Difference: Selfridges, the Russian Ballet and the Tango 1. For a discussion of how modernity has been theorised and periodised, see O’Shea (1996a). For its relation to women, consumption and the department store, see Nava (1995 and 1996).

Notes • 167 2. In the early years the store was in fact called Selfridge’s (with an apostrophe), but here I use the later version to distinguish between the store and its owner. 3. One hundred and four full-page advertisements were placed in eighteen national newspapers at a cost of £36,000 (Honeycombe 1984:12). 4. For instance he provided pension schemes and recreational facilities (see chapter 3). In 1910 staff activities included the production of a play called The Suffrage Girl (Daily Sketch, 3 December 1910) 5. For instance in 1909 the ‘Bleriot monoplane’, the first to cross the channel, was rescued by Selfridge from the Dover cliffs and put on exhibition on the ground floor and the store kept open till midnight for the many thousands who wished to see it. 6. The columns were issued from Selfridge and Co. Ltd. (Editorial Rooms) between 1909 and 1939. Although often written by professional writers, they were based on Selfridge’s drafts or ideas. 7. These are held, along with much other material, in the Selfridges Archive, now housed in the History of Advertising Trust. Very many thanks to Fred Redding, the archivist during the time I was doing this research, for his unstinting and knowledgeable support. 8. For discussion about the invention of tradition and empire see Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) and Schwarz (1987). 9. Frank Woolworth, another famous American retailing entrepreneur, was concerned about the lack of confidence in Selfridge’s methods: ‘Many Englishmen think he will fail. There seems to be a prejudice against him’ (Honeycombe 1984:37). Selfridge was not to acquire British citizenship until 1937 after the coronation of George VI and increasingly extravagant displays of support for the monarchy, despite a much earlier application. Some of the parallels with Mohamed Al Fayed are striking: Al Fayed, Egyptian owner of the store Harrods since the mid-1980s (and father of Dodi – see chapter 7), has several times been refused British citizenship. 10. There was no evidence in the Selfridge Archive of support for Empire during this critical period. Imperial themes in the store seem to have emerged only in the mid-1930s. In contrast Selfridge was a very enthusiastic supporter of the monarchy, but the spectacular displays created on the outside of the store for the funeral of Edward VII in 1910 and the coronation of George V in 1911 were considered excessive and too American. 11. I have not been able to discover whether he knew the US millionairess Mabel Dodge, also resident in London at the time and an active member and financial supporter of the Theosophy movement, which was fashionable, yet also in some respects oppositional (see chapter 8). Its most celebrated leader, Annie Besant, was a socialist and supporter of Indian Home Rule, and with the support of Mabel Dodge and Emily Lutyens she brought to Europe from India the young Krishnamurti, who subsequently became the most influential guru of

168 • Notes

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

the century. Fabians, internationalists and pacifists were also linked to the movement at different points (Washington 1996). The text of the advertisement reads ‘All nationalities meet at Selfridge’s and all are welcome’. The image is reproduced in Nava (1998). A further aspect of his cosmopolitan practice – and also a productive commercial strategy – was to advertise the store as a ‘haven for foreign travelers’, ‘a home away from home’ and provide foreign visitors with specially designated French, German, American and Colonial lounges. This was not the practice of competing stores. Some of the texts accompanying the images in the souvenir book are discussed in Nava (1996). Coombes cites the interesting case of merchant James Pinnock, whose progressive views about African customs were based on thirty-five years of trade and contrast markedly with imperial, anthropological and Christian beliefs of the period (1994:29). Sara Mills, in relation to the Indian context, has drawn attention to the way in which, in the colonial domestic space, colonials could be on display to as many as twenty servants, so the private sphere was lived publicly and Englishness performed (‘Imperial Cities Conference’, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2–3 May 1997). See also Stoler (1996) in relation to the situation in the Dutch colonies. That same year, 1911, Joseph Conrad published his novel Under Western Eyes, in which Russia is constructed as the East and the emotional expressiveness of the Russians is contrasted with the constraint of the English. When Selfridges opened in 1909 the new Information Bureau received more enquiries about where Maud Allan was dancing than anything else (Honeycombe 1984:12; see also Bland 1995). Though, as Lucy Bland has pointed out (1995), it does seem to have echoed Maud Allan’s, whose Vision of Salome dance was also erotic and bloodthirsty. Matisse and Picasso were among the painters who acknowledged their indebtedness. The choreography was by Michel Folkine and the music by Nikolai RimskyKorsakov. Devised by Folkine, Bakst and Alexandre Benois. My synopsis is based on Buckle (1980), Robertson (1945) and the 1997 performance by the Kirov Ballet, at the Coliseum, London, intended to be a re-creation of the original. Burton’s ‘literal’ translation was first published in ten volumes between 1884 and 1886. The full unabridged version was printed only in a limited edition and remains to this day on the restricted shelves of the British Library. The 1997 Kirov production in London (which claimed to reproduce the original design and choreography) deleted this visual coding: the slaves were the same colour as the women of the harem.

Notes • 169 25. There have been many translations of these famous tales. Burton’s elaborate Victorian translation with its notorious introductory notes and ‘terminal essay’ differs considerably from others, and most recently from Haddawy’s. For an evaluation and history of the different translations see Haddawy’s ‘Introduction’ (1992). Burton’s own comments, his terminal essay, which is mainly an anthropological analysis of ‘pederasty’ throughout the world, his life as an explorer, consul and scholar and his identification with the orient are all relevant to the discussion in this chapter, but there is regrettably no space to do them justice. 26. Ottoline Morrell was a great fan of his and Keynes admitted to finding him attractive and admiring his legs, though, like Nijinsky, he also later married one of the ballerinas from the company (Garafola 1989). 27. Lady Cunard was mother of Nancy Cunard, who was to become famous in the thirties for her promotion of African-American art and what was then called the ‘Negro cause’ (Cunard 1934 and 1968; see also chapter 5). Beecham’s orchestra played for the Russian Ballet on their 1911 visit to London. 28. Vita Sackville-West, after having seen Scheherazade twice in one week with her lover Violet Keppel (later Trefusis), browned her face, put on men’s clothes and a turban and, attired thus, with a lighted cigarette in hand, walked with Violet down Piccadilly to Charing Cross, from where they took a train to Orpington (Souhami 1997:140). 29. This was also when Jack Johnson, black heavyweight champion from Texas, arrived in England and was made welcome by white women (Schwarz 1996:201). 30. In Sally Potter’s 1997 film The Tango Lesson the English heroine has private lessons with three Argentinian tangueros at once, of whom one is her lover. 31. See photograph from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection, reproduced in Nava (1998). 32. The overlap was symbolically represented in Ken Russell’s biopic Valentino in a fictitious scene in which Valentino teaches Nijinsky to dance the tango. I have found no evidence that this encounter really took place. 33. Selfridge is referring to proposed consumer legislation. 34. Some of the same tensions between patriots and supporters of Empire, on the one hand, and internationalists and cosmopolitans, on the other, existed in the suffrage movement (Tickner 1987). 35. The difference between Europe and America was very significant. As Vera Brittain observed on an interwar visit to the US, ‘One of the things you notice the moment you enter this country is how many men of your own age there seem to be compared with England . . . [America] lost so few’ (Brittain 1939:135). 36. The film, directed by Rex Ingram, is a moving account of the futility of war and the arbitrariness of national identifications. Valentino, who is indeed wonderfully alluring, even to a twenty-first-century eye, is killed fighting for the French in the mud fields of battle, face-to-face with his German cousin.

170 • Notes 37. The genre was much disapproved of by D.H. Lawrence and the Leavises, who called it ‘petty pornography for typists’, yet Lawrence himself was fascinated by ‘otherness’ and his own work, in which the emotional and sexual frigidity of the English, particularly the upper classes, is counterposed to the passion and authenticity of people from the South, could be read as a more sophisticated variant of this genre. 38. During the week after his death, an estimated 50,000 mourners, mainly women, filed past his coffin each day (Botham and Donnelly 1976). 39. Washington, in his book about Theosophy, has suggested that Krishnamurti, whose sexuality was also ambiguous and who of course was also racially ‘other’, became a similar but less vulgar kind of movie star for thousands of European and North American Theosophists in the early 1920s (1996:211). 40. This was argued by, among others, male Black Power activists in the US in the 1960s. 41. This is a problematic term, and I use it loosely to refer to work on the history of colonisation and racial exclusion. There is no catch-all term equivalent to feminism, which signals both focus and debate, that can be deployed here. 42. Homi Bhabha’s dense and classic essay ‘The Other Question’ (1994b) does not fall into this category, but the register it operates in makes it difficult to draw on here. 43. Martha Savigliano’s book on the tango, which in some ways has been useful for this chapter, is an example. For instance, she argues that ‘“exotic” objects have been constituted by applying a homogenizing practice of exoticization, a system of exotic representation that commoditized the colonials in order to suit imperial consumption’ (1995:2) and that ‘exoticism [is] . . . part of a display of imperial power among nationalities disputing hegemony at the core’ (1995:6). According to her, the tango is an aspect of this exploitative exoticisation. 44. The relation of expatriation to the Oedipal revolt and the Lacanian desire for completion has been analysed by Karen Brooks in ‘The Lotus Eaters: Consumption, Desire and Expatriation’, a paper presented at the Objects of Belonging Conference, University of Western Sydney, 10–11 October 1997. 45. See also the film Frantz Fanon, dir. Isaac Julien (1997).

Chapter 3 The Big Shop Controversy: Ideological Communities and the Chesterton–Selfridge Dispute 1. The aesthetes included figures such as Harold Acton and were supporters of Oscar Wilde, the Russian Ballet, artistic modernism and in general revolted against the conventions of Victorian and Edwardian England. 2. For a discussion of the invention of tradition, see, e.g., Hobsbawm (1971), Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), Schwarz (1987) and Joyce (1994). The dynamism

Notes • 171

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

of entrepreneurs has been less attended to by cultural historians, but see brief comments in Hobsbawm (1971:169) and Berman (1983:98). Biographical details are drawn largely from Ward (1944), Coren (1989) and Pearce (1997). Chesterton’s antisemitism was not unusual in literary and even left-wing circles at the time. H.G. Wells was more virulently and ignorantly antisemitic than Chesterton despite claiming to be a socialist and an atheist (Coren 1989, 1993). His elegiac poem ‘The Secret People’ now appears on the British National Party’s website (Wright 2005). Chesterton used the term ‘cosmopolitan’ in his Father Brown stories to denigrate people considered of dubious provenance, so, it was implied, probably Jewish. The main sources of biographical information are Pound (1960), Honeycombe (1984) and press cuttings in the Selfridge Archive. He was a personal friend of the playwright Granville-Barker, who based one of the main characters on him in his 1910 pro-suffrage play Madras House (Granville-Barker 1977) Among the network of stores were John Barnes, Bon Marché and Jones Brothers, which were taken over by John Lewis in 1940. A film of the trip was made by Mr Kattenburg from Jones Brothers. The party included hairdressers and stenographers as well as buyers and trainee managers (Staff Tour Scrap Book, Selfridges Archive). Sales women at Marshall Field’s were paid double the going rate (Benson 1986:136). Quoted in the Hong Kong Telegraph, 30 August 1911. Unfortunately the list of names gives us no insight in to who the women were or what their class origin might have been. It seems likely, however, given the stiff competition for jobs at Selfridges and the store’s highly reputed training schemes for junior and senior staff, that substantially larger numbers were from the middle and lower middle classes than in the retailing sector in general. The authors of the letter were clearly well educated and write as ‘representatives of the women of this house’. The use of the term ‘slave’ both here and in the first ‘Big Shop’ article was also provocative. In the preceding year Chesterton had accused Lever Brothers of running a ‘slave compound’ in their innovative Port Sunlight complex. Lever sued for libel but the case was withdrawn after Chesterton mounted a ‘sociological’ defence about the meaning of slavery. As already pointed out, they were worse in other stores. Hilaire Belloc, who was one of the other speakers, had an even fiercer reputation as a polemicist and public debater (‘a combination of bulldog and bloodhound’) and was even more anti-modernist and xenophobic than Chesterton (Coren 1993:159).

172 • Notes 16. The Selfridge Archive also includes reports on the debate from The Daily Telegraph, Morning Post, Shoe and Leather News and the Marylebone Chronicle. 17. See, e.g., The Spirit of Modern Commerce (Selfridge 1914), a series of posters marking the fifth anniversary of the store, and in particular ‘Where East Meets West’, which carries a message from a German merchant regretting society’s lack of respect for the accomplishments of princes of commerce. Even the sons of business men disdain business, he observes sadly (Nava 1996:76).

Chapter 4 The Unconscious and Others: Inclusivity, Jews and the Eroticisation of Difference 1. Sharma and Sharma (2003) point out that cosmopolitanism is not necessarily free from racist constructions of the other. 2. ‘Passion’ is the term used by Sartre to describe antisemitism in his Anti-Semite and Jew (1948), quoted in Rustin (1991:61). 3. Crossman, writing in the postwar period, made clear that his earlier feelings were contingent: in Palestine Mission: A Personal Record (1946) he distances himself from the politics of the Jewish architects of the state of Israel. 4. Author’s interview with Dolf Placzek, the poet and refugee who later became Struther’s husband, New York, 4 and 5 September 1996. The expression ‘penniless Jew’ was also used by Virginia about Leonard Woolf, as Jan Struther was aware. See also Maxtone Graham (2001). 5. Gedye’s authoritative dispatches were published against the political grain of the Times, which was generally pro-appeasement. Kim Philby, also from the uppermiddle classes, was another figure whose emotional involvement with ‘otherness’ coincided with his politicisation: he met his Austrian communist Jewish wife in Vienna and through her first became involved in clandestine political work. Philby’s biographer tells a story of how Gedye gave Philby six of his own suits to enable Schutzbund fighters hidden in the sewers to escape unnoticed (Cookridge 1968). The suits incident is recounted, though slightly differently, by Mitchison (1979). Philby also met Muriel Gardiner, who didn’t trust him (Gardiner 1983). 6. See chapter 8. 7. Gollancz, Bowen’s publisher, considered the book ‘most un-English’ (Glendenning 1977:97). 8. Anna Freud was an admirer of Gardiner’s: in a letter to her she said that she ‘was quite fascinated, even a bit envious’ of the intensity of Gardiner’s political activities in Vienna. ‘I like my own life very much, but if . . . I had to choose another one, I think it would have been yours’ (Gardiner 1983:179). Gardiner’s story became the model for the story ‘Julia’, by Lillian Hellman (1974), later made into a film of the same name by Fred Zimmerman.

Notes • 173 9. During this period, one of his comrades in the outlawed Social Democrat party was sociologist Marie Jahoda; she was imprisoned and later expelled from Austria, which probably saved her life (see Fleck 2002 and chapter 8). 10. The list also includes, for instance, the heiress Nancy Cunard, whose lover in the 1930s was African-American Henry Crowder, and Edwina Mountbatten, also immensely wealthy, part-Jewish, the wife of Lord Mountbatten, who is alleged to have had a brief affair with Paul Robeson before World War II and had a long relationship with Jawaharlal Nehru after. See also chapters 5 and 7. 11. Jan Struther, unpublished autobiography quoted in Maxtone Graham (2001). As a child Joyce Anstruther (as she was then called) attended the same primary school as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen. According to Placzek, Struther’s second husband, she was in ‘a constant act of rebellion’ throughout her life. 12. The feminisation of the Jew in the interwar period has also been noted by Lassner (1998) and Loshitzky (2002). 13. For a more accessible and wide-ranging discussion of psychoanalysis, creativity and intuitive feminine thinking, see Minsky (1988). See also Wyatt (2004) for a discussion of some of the psychoanalytic questions discussed in this chapter. 14. It is worth noting that although the matrixial is associated with the feminine, its location in the imaginary means that men are not biologically excluded from it.

Chapter 5 White Women and Black Men: The Negro as Signifier of Modernity in Wartime Britain 1. According to Tariq Modood et al., in the mid-1990s 50% of British-born men of Afro-Caribbean descent had white partners (1997:30). The proportion has now increased. This question is developed further in chapter 8. 2. See Andrea Levy (2004) for a fictionalised account. 3. See also the 1998 BBC2 Windrush programmes, series producer Trevor Phillips. 4. This is explored in chapter 6. 5. This was to change towards the end of the 1930s, when a number of literary figures actually visited the United States and favourably described their perceptions (see Brittain 1939; Graves and Hodge 1991 [1940]). 6. There was some overlap, of course: for instance Elizabeth Bowen wrote about the pleasures of the picture palaces (Davy 1938) and about Europe and foreign men (see, e.g., her House in Paris, 1935, discussed in chapter 4). 7. In UK, Alexander Korda, director of some of the most successful British films of the 1930s and 1940s, among them The Private Life of Henry VIII, was also Jewish from Eastern Europe, as were film makers Emeric Pressburger and Karel Reisz. From 1938 the most widely consumed imagery of Englishness in England, Picture

174 • Notes

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Post, was produced predominantly by Central European refugee photographers and journalists. Paul Robeson took a more essentialist line and attributed the development of modern American dance steps and the expressivity of black dancers to the heritage of Africa (Duberman, 1989:179). Cunard’s views were also not progressive in terms of the race politics of today. She argued that the black man should be valued for his difference, for his musical genius, his artistic creativity and ‘the best body amongst all the races’ (1968:108). Selfridges’ advert in the Jewish Chronicle, 17 April 1936. The report included a detailed analysis of the social decline of housing and transport in the surrounding district and a review of the social class of customers based on the coding of addresses and census information about family size. Fifty per cent of customers were estimated to be working class. Minutes, Jones Brothers Board Meeting, 29 July 1936, John Lewis Partnership Archive, Stevenage, no. 604. Les Back has pointed out to me that during this period there was a night bus from Soho to the Holloway Road. It is therefore possible that the banjo players were African-American jazz musicians who worked in Soho clubs and lived in the cheap accommodation around the Holloway Road, to which there was easy transport late at night. Inaugural Lecture, University of Westminster, 17 June 1998. Champly’s ideas about black masculinity echo those of nineteenth-century traveller and scholar Richard Burton (see chapter 2). See chapter 4 for a more detailed examination. See chapter 6 for the 1950s and 1960s. Victoria de Grazia, ‘The Great Detergent Wars of the 1960s: How American Multi-Nationals Stepped Over the Thresholds of European Households’, paper presented at ESRC Research Seminar Series ‘Paths to Mass Consumption: Commercial Cultures: Economies, Practices, Spaces’, University of East London, 20 March 1998.

Chapter 6 Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually: Race in Postwar Fiction, Film and Social Science 1. Vera Brittain, on her return from the US in 1940 observed: ‘An influx of . . . Norwegians . . . were the advance guard of the Dutch, Belgians, French, Poles, Czechs and other foreign nationals who in ten years were to transform England from a compact homogenous island into a cosmopolitan State’ (Brittain 1979:249). This influx followed the migration of mainly Jewish refugees from Central Europe in the 1930s. Preceding waves included the large numbers who came in the decades preceding World War I.

Notes • 175 2. Delaney co-wrote the screenplay for the film of the same name with Tony Richardson. 3. In her Golden Notebook (1962:61), the main character ‘Anna’ says she is ashamed of her first novel because of its illicit charge and nostalgia. 4. As George Lamming the Barbadian intellectual observed: ‘[W]hite hands did nigger work in this country’ (1980:217). 5. Lessing’s autobiography, written thirty-five years, later contains a disagreeable section in which she invokes the myth of black male sexual prowess in order to refute it on the grounds of her own disappointing experience with an African when ‘the sexual contact lasted perhaps three minutes’. As a result, she generalises irrationally when later pursued by another black man, a Jamaican: ‘Remembering my previous experience, I said no’ (Lessing 1998:343–4). This is indeed racism of a vulgar kind; and of course goes against the grain of her earlier work 6. Most celebrated is her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, in which she creates the firstperson narrative of the Caribbean life of Mrs Rochester, the mad Creole woman in the attic of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Rhys 1966). 7. For instance, neither Helen Carr (2003) nor Sukhdev Sandhu (2003) refers to the story, though both write eloquently about Rhys as a Caribbean author. 8. The film of the same name, directed by Bryan Forbes in 1962, hints that Johnny might be in love with Toby (another member of the household, who is Jewish) – so possibly gay as well as black – which would explain the sexlessness of the embrace between him and Jane. This is reinforced in a scene in which Johnny cooks a hybrid meal, a ‘Jamaican–Hungarian goulash’, for Toby and Jane. 9. Among Willis’s many other credits are the film Woman in a Dressing Gown and the TV series Dixon of Dock Green. Baker, the director of Flame in the Streets, went on to make Hammer Horror movies. 10. Littlewood was close to the West Indian community and in 1962 was one of the judges of the Notting Hill Carnival Queen contest (Schwarz 2003:16). 11. Even the two old black women in his book have generic names: Ma and Tanty. 12. Kitzinger’s manuscript is stored at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Landes’ is stored in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institute, US. Violaine Junod, a radical white South African whose work I have not been able to track down, was author of Report on a Study of the Coloured ‘Social Elite’ in London (1952). All this work is extensively cited by Banton (1959), Henderson (1960) and Patterson (1963). Joan Maizels’ report The West Indian Comes to Willesden (1960), written slightly later for Willesden Citizens Advice Bureau, was one of Patterson’s main sources but, sadly, can also not be found. 13. All are likely to have been influenced by J.B. Priestley’s account of his visit to Liverpool in 1933, where he saw ‘[a]ll the races of mankind . . . wonderfully mixed’ (1997:197).

176 • Notes 14. Sally Cole points out in her biography of Ruth Landes that in the US the proportion of women anthropologists in 1950 who wielded influence in the discipline was also tiny, perhaps 2–3% – despite Mead and Benedict (Cole 2003:231). 15. He also refers briefly to John Rex, whose work I don’t include here because it emerged a decade later when the political landscape was already considerably changed. 16. Personal interview, 2 February 2006. 17. See Rich (1990), Barkan (1996) and Kushner (2004) for further discussion of the transformations in thinking about ‘race’ in anthropology and sociology from the 1930s to 1950s. The war itself obviously played a major part in these changes; specifically the opposition to Nazi antisemitism and the encounter with black GIs (see chapters 4 and 5). 18. For instance, he erroneously attributes views to Sheila Patterson about the alleged savagery and violence of West Indians which she makes clear are the ‘preconceptions’ of ‘formidably ignorant’ Britons, and not her own (Patterson 1963:232; Waters 1997:227). 19. It is now generally agreed that the disturbances were triggered by white men who resented the fact that white women were going out with black men (see, e.g., Pilkington 1988). 20. Personal interview with author, 23 February 2006. 21. Front page article in Observer, 16 December 1958. The ‘Kissing Case’ story is recounted in ‘In Memory of Robert F. Williams’ (http://www.rwor.org/a/ firstvol/882/willms.htm). 22. The title (Woman, Fancy or Free?) and the publisher (Mills and Boon, better known for romantic fiction) may have put off serious readers, but this largely unknown though pioneering book contained in embryonic form most of the feminist issues and arguments developed in more detail at the end of 1960s. 23. It is not surprising (though not inevitable), given the growth of antisemitism and fascism, that Jewish intellectuals and refugees should be at the vanguard of the critique of biological theories of race in the social sciences during that period. Marie Jahoda was part of my parents’ social and political circle in Vienna (see chapters 4 and 8). 24. There were many instances of intermarriage between African students and English women. One of the most famous – because opposed by the British and South African governments – was between Ruth Williams and Seretse Khama in 1948; she was the daughter of an English army captain and he, a law student, the chief-in-waiting of the Bamangwato tribe and subsequently first elected president of Bechuanaland (Dutfield 1990). Another noted marriage of 1953 was between Peggy Cripps, daughter of Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps, and Ghanaian Joe Appiah; they were to become the parents of philosopher and novelist Kwame Anthony Appiah, now a professor at Princeton, who in 2006 produced a book on cosmopolitanism (2006).

Notes • 177 25. For a discussion of the underlying dynamic of such feelings, see chapter 4. 26. In interview with Martha Kearney, Women’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, 27 February 2004. 27. In fact both died in the 1990s.

Chapter 7 Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed: Romance, Race and the Reconfiguration of the Nation 1. Nancy Cunard, daughter of London society figure Lady Emerald Cunard, had a long relationship with Afro-American Henry Crowder during the late 1920s and early 1930s (and other blacks also, it is alleged), but because of the social disapproval of her mother and the British public, she and Crowder lived mainly in France and New York (Chisholm 1981; see also chapter 5). Edwina Mountbatten, granddaughter of Jewish financier Ernest Cassell and wife of the King’s cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten, is supposed to have had a brief affair with the celebrated American actor Paul Robeson in the 1930s (though their respective biographers disagree about this: see Morgan 1992, Mountbatten’s official biographer, and Duberman 1989, Robeson’s biographer) and a much longer one with Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1940s and 1950s (though again there is disagreement between Morgan and Nehru’s biographers Jad Adams and Philip Whitehead 1997). The point is that until very recently, although affairs are likely to have been known about and even countenanced within the immediate social circles of those involved, public denial was required in order to protect status and respectability. For a longer discussion of the romance of difference and cosmopolitan modernity, see chapters 2 and 5. 2. Both Nancy Cunard and Edwina Mountbatten had many lovers (see previous note) but this information was not in the public domain during their lives. 3. There was also very high proportion of black and brown faces among the crowd outside the hospital in Paris to which Diana was taken. It seems that there also she had made an impact on those who experienced themselves as outsiders. 4. The sympathetic tone in this passage from the Express is undermined somewhat by the use of ‘Moslem’ rather than Muslim, the preferred term among British Muslims. The Express now uses Muslim. Naseem Hamed was a British boxing champion and celebrity of Yemeni origin. The name Prince was adopted by deed poll. 5. Richard Littlejohn’s phrase in the Daily Mail, 4 September 1997 6. Mohamed Al Fayed, Dodi’s father and owner of Harrods, received, according to his spokesman, sixty thousand messages of condolence. There was certainly plenty of visible evidence of sympathy in the bouquets left outside Harrods. 7. See Christopher Hitchens’ documentary The Mourning After, Channel 4, 8 August 1998.

178 • Notes 8. Despite the tendency for Kensington Palace and Harrods to recruit the more dissenting supporters, it must not be assumed that those outside Buckingham Palace were straightforwardly monarchist and deferential. They appear as much as any other sector to have contributed to the groundswell of discontent about the failure of the Queen to speak to the people. 9. An articulate young black woman interviewed by TV reporters outside Kensington Palace on the day after the accident expressed her support in the following terms: Diana meant a lot to me. She was one of the members of royalty that the nation identified with most. The fact that she did a lot of work for charities really touched my heart. Although I’m not really a royalist I felt compelled to come here this morning to leave these flowers for her. I’m just completely shocked. It’s just so absurd that the best one of the lot had to go first.

10. This point has been explicitly and consistently confirmed by members of the charity groups who knew her personally. 11. Stories of her abandonment by her mother when she was a child have circulated widely and are assumed to have had an impact on her adult life. Similar patterns of relative motherlessness as well as identification with the marginalised were experienced by the historical figures referred to earlier, Nancy Cunard and Edwina Mountbatten. Although one must be wary of reducing adult identifications to these childhood events, there has emerged a pattern of such links (see the discussion in chapter 4). 12. In fact on the programme Bashir looked more Afro-Caribbean than South Asian, in part because of a very short haircut. His appearance was significant because most viewers had not seen or heard of him before. 13. She declared these her favourite photos of herself in her interview with Le Monde the week before she died. This was also the interview in which she attacked the British press for the way it harassed her. 14. In the months after the death, and especially after his public confrontation with Diana’s mother in Paris, his reputation declined still further – but that story cannot be embarked on here. 15. Four months after the accident the American magazine Vanity Fair, already being sued for libel by Mohamed Al Fayed, published a detailed portrait of Dodi from which he emerges as an insecure man with an alleged coke habit who ‘spent recklessly in pursuit of love and status’. The author argues that the Dodi who emerged in the days after his death bore little relation to the ‘reality’ she uncovered in the course of researching her article (Bedell Smith 1997). 16. Dodi’s lifestyle suggests that he was not devout. Mohamed is married to a Finnish woman and there is no evidence that she has converted to Islam. 17. This description is from Michael Cole, Mohamed Al Fayed’s spokesman.

Notes • 179 18. There is a longer tradition of defiance against the protocols of society, as I have already pointed out. Divisions within the aristocracy during the World War I between xenophobic conservative Tories and cosmopolitan modernising Liberals who were relatively unconstrained in their sexual behaviour – or ‘decadent’, as they were described at the time – have been documented by Hoare in a his account of the Maud Allan ‘cult of the clitoris’ trial (Hoare 1997). See also Bland (1998). 19. See, e.g., Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail, 4 September 1997. 20. I have slightly changed the final two paragraphs of this chapter since it was originally published (Nava 1999), firstly because of the persistence, consistency and plausibility of the rumours, and secondly because of the changed global situation since 9/11. The official UK police inquiry, chaired by Lord Stevens, reported in December 2006 that the crash in was a ‘tragic accident’, but this view was contested by Al Fayed, who claimed that many key witnesses had not been interviewed. As this book goes to press, the inquest has still not been heard. The appointed coroner, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, ruled initially that it should be held in private without a jury, but after an appeal to the High Court by Al Fayed, the ruling was overturned. Elizabeth Butler-Sloss subsequently stood down and was replaced by Lord Justice Scott Baker. At the time of writing, the inquest is scheduled to be heard by a jury in late 2007. 21. The Express newspaper has even suggested, paranoia unabated, that if Diana and Dodi were to have had a child it might have ‘skewed Britain’s relations with Israel and, by extension . . . the United States’ (Pukas 2006:19).

Chapter 8 A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves: Cosmopolitan Habitus and the Ordinariness of Difference 1. ‘Actually existing cosmopolitanism’ is a term used by Bruce Robbins (1998a). 2. I make this argument at greater length in the introduction to Nava (1992). 3. See chapter 2 for a reference to the connection between Theosophy, feminism, cosmopolitanism and commerce. 4. However, the appreciation of ‘primitive’ art has also been interpreted as a form of orientalism (see, e.g., Said 1978; Torgovnick 1990). 5. Conforming to the second main tenet of Theosophy, ‘the encouragement of studies in comparative religion, philosophy and science’, she had on her shelves at the time of her death dozens of books about Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity as well as a few about Theosophy. 6. According to White, in 1911 4% of Londoners were foreign-born: ‘London was more cosmopolitan than at any time since the Norman invasion’ (White 2002:103). The proportion declined in the interwar and then rose again. Today it is an astonishing 25–30%.

180 • Notes 7. Emily Lutyens was the wife of the noted architect Edward Lutyens, sister of suffragette Constance Lytton and the daughter of the former Viceroy of India. Annie Besant was a ‘free thinker’, a socialist and a campaigner for home rule for India as well as one of the most influential figures in the Theosophical Society. 8. Gordon Selfridge makes a similar observation about the sons of his German business associates during the same period (Nava 1996:76). The disparagement of trade, in which so many Jews were involved, may have been a factor which led me to study the cultures of consumption. Chapter 3 will probably be the last of my research on this topic. 9. This was to change completely in the next generation. My father and his three siblings had nine children but of their spouses only one and a half were Jewish. 10. In her latter years my mother often told me that most of her boyfriends had been Jewish. 11. Jahoda’s connection to Buttinger and the outlawed Social Democrats resulted in her imprisonment and deportation from Austria to the UK in 1937. 12. The book had various titles: it was called Conspiracy of Silence in the UK; The Accused in the USA; L’Accusé in France; and Hexensabbat in the first German edition. It was republished in Austria in 1993 as Im Verhor: Ein Überlebender der Stalinistischen Sauberungen Berichtet. 13. Before he went, Kiffer asked Alex what he would like from the West. We had predicted he would ask for Levis for the kids but he chose a Geiger counter to measure the effects of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. So much for fantasies about the hegemony of Western popular culture! 14. ‘The File of Konrad Weisselberg’, transcribed by Alex Kharlamov in 1997 from Interrogation Record No. 016138, Kharkov District, Ukraine NKVD Archive, 1937. Interestingly the transcript corroborates Alex Weissberg’s claim that Konrad’s and Weissberg’s association with a Czech physicist named Placzek, considered by the KGB to be a subversive Trotskyist, was the trigger for their arrests. This Placzek, coincidentally, turned out to be the first cousin of Dolf Placzek, Jan Struther’s lover, whom I interviewed for chapter 4. The interrogation transcript was also a useful source for the more routine information about the family history which I have drawn on for this chapter. 15. With the help of Ina Wagner, Gerti Wagner’s (ex)daughter-in-law in Vienna, and Don Flynn of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants in London. 16. Not much of it remains. 17. It was half way between Aldermaston and Greenham Common, then not yet iconic places. 18. One of the evacuees wrote an account of arriving there for the BBC’s People’s War, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/print/ww2peopleswar/stories/76/a4358676. shtml.

Notes • 181 19. From 1968 to 1998 it housed a primary school, of which she was principal until she was eighty-five. 20. Maybe I was partly responsible for my marginalisation. I remember three personae I became at fancy dress events around the age of eight or nine: a gypsy, a negro and a red Indian (in the nomenclature of the day). Each confirmed my otherness. 21. In fact two young women of my own age who hung around with the same group surfaced in my network of feminist intellectuals twenty years later and are part of it still: Parveen Adams and Ilona Halberstadt were both as not-properly English as I was, which in those days was quite rare. All three of us rebelled against the discipline of school. I have lost touch with the artists. 22. A version of his history has been made into a film, Big Fish (1996), directed by Zadoc Nava; script Orson Nava and Zadoc Nava; creative consultant Jake Nava. 23. Spanish has been the first language of the Afro-Mexicans for many generations, unlike the indigenous ‘Indian’ groups, so they have long been more integrated into the mestizo mainstream culture and higher in the social hierarchy. 24. I don’t remember José’s ‘difference’ ever being an issue – in contrast to the response of the liberal parents in the 1967 US film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. 25. The left was always ambivalent and, for instance, voted against being part of Europe in the 1970s. 26. Horace Ové’s ‘mixed’ children Zak and Indra Ové were to become life-long friends of our sons (see figure 11). 27. This was the Tufnell Park Women’s Group, which at the time was composed mainly of US citizens with Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) connections. A year later it had got too large and split into at least three smaller groups. I moved with about ten others to the Belsize Lane Group, nearer my home. 28. The People Show celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2006. 29. I was in the Women’s Theatre Group from 1973 to 1977. 30. Although Fanon had been writing in French from the 1950s (e.g. Fanon 1967, 1986) and was to be a seminal influence on the development of postcolonial theory in the anglophone world, most ‘race’ work in UK during 1960s was produced by white sociologists and anthropologists (see chapter 6). This changed in the 1970s. The key texts of the late 1970s and early 1980s produced by the postcolonial diaspora included Hall et al. (1978); Said (1978); CCCS (1982); Feminist Review (1984); and, later, Gilroy (1987); Bhabha (1994a); and Mercer (1994). 31. There is only one fleeting reference to her in Paul Buhle’s biography of C.L.R. James (1988). 32. See Horace Ové’s film Baldwin’s Nigger (1969) for a discussion of the linguistic transition from ‘negro’ to ‘black’.

182 • Notes 33. In fact it is probably the case that we felt closer to the revolutionary movements in the Iberian Peninsula – we spent some exciting weeks with the kids in Lisbon in the summer of 1975 and memorably travelled through the city in a Copcon (revolutionary army) truck. 34. In 1977 I became part of another women’s group, most of us Ph.D. students in the Department of Sociology at London University Institute of Education. Now, thirty years later, we still meet and cook dinner for each other every few weeks. 35. Among those who passed though it were Chilean refugees, US draft dodgers, an associate of the Angry Brigade, People Show members, Mexicans completing their Ph.D.s, people from Italy, Sri Lanka, Holland, Germany, South Africa, Uganda, Israel, the USA and the UK. 36. José still lives in London and still paints. 37. See Orson Nava’s autobiographical film The Illiterate, 2005. 38. They also provided good feminist education and a venue for girls clubs (Nava 1992). Among the more recent alumni of the school are mixed-race singer Ms Dynamite, and her younger brother, rapper Akala. 39. When I interviewed Dolf Placzek, the writer Jan Struther’s Jewish refugee lover and later her husband, for chapter 4, he told me that Jan’s greatest act of rebellion was to choose to be with him. See also note 14 above. 40. The multiculturalism debate is shifting its parameters daily, and in the context of the ‘global war on terror’ is acquiring new meanings as assimilation resumes a place on the agenda. 41. It is interesting to note, however, that, as Jonathan Freedland reports, a 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 63% of non-Muslim Britons have a favourable opinion of Muslims, barely down on the 2004 figure before 7/7. These attitudes were far more positive than in the US, Germany or Spain (Freedland 2006: 9). 42. As noted in chapter 1, it is estimated that at least one in four Londoners was born outside Britain (Kyambi 2005). The proportion has considerably increased since the expansion of the EU in 2004. 43. I belong, however, to the political group Jews for Justice for Palestinians and the affiliated Faculty for Israeli Palestinian Peace UK – that is to say, among those diasporic anti-Zionist Jews who refuse to support Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories.

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200 • Bibliography

Films Baker, Roy (dir.) (1961) Flame in the Streets, UK (screenplay Ted Willis). Forbes, Bryan (dir.) (1962) The L-Shaped Room, UK. Frears, Stephen (dir.) (2006) The Queen, UK. Ingram, Rex (dir.) (1921) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, USA. Julien, Isaac (dir.) (1997) Frantz Fanon, UK. Kissovitz, Mathieu (dir.) (1995). La Haine, France. Kramer, Stanley (dir.) (1967) Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, USA. Littlewood, Joan (dir.) (1962) Sparrows Can’t Sing, UK. Melford, George (dir.) (1921) The Sheik, USA Nava, Zadoc (dir.) (1996) Big Fish, UK Nava, Orson (dir.) (2005) The Illiterate, UK. Ové, Horace (dir.) (1969) Baldwin’s Nigger, UK Ové, Horace (dir.) (1975) Pressure, UK Potter, Sally (dir.) (1997) The Tango Lesson, UK. Reed, Carol (dir.) (1949) The Third Man, UK. Richardson, Tony (dir.) (1961) A Taste of Honey, UK Russell, Ken (dir.) (1977) Valentino, UK Zimmerman, Fred (dir.) (1978) Julia, USA

Index 7/7 162–3, 182 n. 41 9/11 15, 136 A Taste of Honey 100 Abelson, Elaine 20 accents 9, 88–90, 93, 152, 166 n. 14 Ackerman, Nathan 64 Acland Burghley School 157–8 Acton, Harold 170 n. 1 Adams, Jad 177 n. 1 Adams, Parveen 181 n. 21 Adburgham, Alison 28, 31, 32 African-Americans in UK 9–10, 75–6, 82, 87–8, 90, 98–9, 144, 161 Afro-Caribbeans 9–11, 75, 78, 166 n. 11 Al Fayed, Dodi 12, 121–3, 126–9, 162 Al Fayed, Mohamed 125, 126 compared to Selfridge 167 n. 9 Alexander, Sally 80, 92 Allan, Maud 28, 168 n. 18–19, 179 n. 18 alterity 97, 158 altruism 63, 74 America see United States Americanisation 10, 92–4 Amin, Ash 13, 14 Amis, Kingsley 97, 102 Amos, Valerie 166 n. 15 Anderson, Benedict 41, 164 Angry Young Men 97, 102, 109 anthropology 109–17 Anti-Nazi League (ANL) 156, 157 antifascism 6, 65, 67 see also Anti-Nazi League antiracism 3, 112, 118, 144, 163 affective cultures and 14 hidden history of 7 in education 158 psychoanalysis and 8 antisemitism 7–8, 44, 59, 66, 145 Appiah, Joe 174 n. 24

Appiah, Kwame Anthony 134, 174 n. 24 Arendt, Hannah 65 Atwell, David 85 Auden, W.H. 79 Austria 141–2, 143 Anschluss of 67–8, 139, 142 Ayer, A.J. 149 Back, Les 76, 81, 82, 174 n. 12 Baker, Baron 115 Bakst, Léon 5, 28, 29, 34 Baldwin’s Nigger 181 n. 32 Ballets Russes see Russian Ballet Banks, Lynne Reid 104, 119 Banks, Olive 110 Banton, Michael 110, 116 on black men and white women 10–11, 114–15, 119, 153 Barkan, Elazar 111 Barthes, Roland 129 Bashir, Martin 125, 178 n. 12 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 121, 122, 125, 127 Beecham, Thomas 32, 169 n. 27 Belfrage, Sally 75 Bellamy, Dick 150 Belloc, Hilaire 42, 44, 45, 171 n. 15 Belsize Lane Women’s Group 157 Benedictus, Leo 13 Benjamin, Walter 54, 139 Benson, Susan Porter 56 Berger, Nan 113 Berman, Marshall 5, 41 Besant, Annie 35, 138 Bhabha, Homi 11, 13, 170 n. 42 black identity 9–11, 135, 155–6 see also African-Americans in UK; immigrants, Caribbean; miscegenation; ‘negro’

201

202 • Index Blair, Tony 15, 124, 163 Bland, Lucy 28, 168 n. 19 Bouillabaisse Club 76 Bourdieu, Pierre 14, 135 Bourne, Stephen 87, 91 Bowen, Elizabeth 66, 92, 173 n. 6 Bowlby, Rachel 20 Boyne, Roy 73 Braine, John 97 British National Party (BNP) 171 n. 5 Brittain, Vera 92, 169 n. 35, 174 n. 1 Brivati, Brian 66, 70 Broadwater Farm 160 Bronner, Stephen Eric 65, 150 Brooks, Karen 170 n. 44 Buck Morss, Susan 54 Buckingham Palace 123, 125 Buckle, Richard 27, 28, 31, 168 n. 22 Buhle, Paul 181 n. 31 Burton, Richard 28–30, 168 n. 23, 169 n. 25 Bush, George W. 15, 163 Butler, Tim 14 Buttinger, Joe 68–9, 140 Cannadine, David 166 n. 14 Carey, John 92 Carr, Helen 175 n. 7 Cartland, Barbara 76 Castro, Fidel 151 Chalk, Pete 159–60 Champly, Henry 90 Chaplin, Charlie 55 Chaudhuri, Nupur 25 Chesterton, G.K. 7, 41–5, 137 as antisemite and English patriot 43–5, 59 Selfridge controversy and 45–59 on women 7, 44, 50–1 Chisholm, Anne 9, 91 cinema 80, 83, 88–9 Eckert on 93 women and 15–17, 92–3 see also Hollywood Clare, George 143 class 10, 14, 84, 93, 158, 166 n. 14 race and 114 Cohen, Stanley 8, 99, 136, 145 States of Denial 63 Cole, Michael 113, 117, 178 n. 17 Cole, Sally 175 n. 14

Coleman, Ornette 150 Collier, Simon 33, 34 Communist Party 139, 151 Conrad, Joseph 168 n. 17 conviviality 7, 135, 158, 160, 164 Coombes, Annie E. 24, 25, 168 n. 15 Coren, Michael 44 cosmopolitanism ‘actually existing’ 133 commercial 38 as consciousness 79, 94 contemporary 119 disposition towards 8 Dodi’s 127 domestic 12–15, 134–5 as habitus 14–15, 133, 135, 143 imagination and 6, 74 imperialism and 7 instinctive 69–70 modernism and 20–1, 37–8, 40, 42 publications on 3–4 Selfridge on 4–5, 23–4, 46–7 as structure of feeling 160 transgenerational 135 uses of term 3 values 134 vernacular 3, 12–13, 63, 158, 163 visceral 8, 12, 15, 63, 71, 58, 135 as vision of 37 Woolf and 74 Costello, John 76 Covisa, Isidro 151 Crane, Howard 85 Creed, Barbara 51, 109 Cripps (later Appiah), Peggy 174 n. 24 Crosbie, Paul 127 Crosby, Bing 75 Crossman, Richard 9, 65, 172 n. 3 Crowder, Henry 79, 91, 173 n. 10, 177 n. 1 Cunard, Maud 32 Cunard, Nancy 9, 101, 169 n. 27, 174 n. 8, 178 n. 11 lovers of 81–2, 91, 173 n. 10, 177 n. 1 Negro 7, 79 Cunningham, John 127 dance 81–2 see also Russian Ballet; tango Danchev, Alex 163–4

Index • 203 Davey, Kevin 72 Davies, Greta Wynn 161 Davison, Emily Wilding 35 de Grazia, Victoria 93, 174 n. 17 decolonisation 98, 120 Delaney, Shelagh 97, 100–1, 105 Demetz, Peter 139 Derrida, Jacques 13 Deutscher, Isaac 139 Diaghilev, Serge 27, 30–1, 34 Diana, Princess 9, 12–13, 121–9, 160, 162 Diana of Dobson’s 44, 48 difference allure of 8, 15, 39–40, 64, 69, 91–2, 135 as distance 25 erotics of 36–7, 64 as liberating 34 Dines, Jim 150 Dodge, Mabel 167 n. 11 Dreyfus, Alfred 41–2 du Gay, Paul 8, 54, 55 Duberman, Martin 82, 87, 174 n. 8 Dubois, W.E.B. 22 Duff, Juliet 32 Duncan, Isidora 31 Dutfield, Michael 174 n. 24 Dyer, Richard 80, 89 Eckert, Charles 93 Egginton, Joyce 110, 112, 117 Eisenhower, Ike 9, 76, 144 Elias, Norbert 56 Elizabeth, Queen 127, 173 n. 11, 178 n. 8 Ellington, Duke 82 Englishness 6, 39, 43–5, 66, 82, 90, 92, 145, 159 female 148 eroticism 9, 36–7 Escape to an Autumn Pavement 109 Ettinger, Bracha 8, 73–4 exoticism 26 Faculty for Israeli Palestinian Peace (UK) 182 n. 32 Fanon, Frantz 11, 64, 105, 170 n. 45 fashion 24, 27–8, 31–2, 84–6 femininity 92, 99 feminism 4, 6, 14, 40, 92, 144, 154–7, 163 ‘new woman’ 34 race and 118

see also suffragettes; Women’s Liberation Movement Feminist Review 155 Ferdinand, Rio 163 Field, Marshall see Marshall Field’s 19, 89 Fisk, Robert 129 Flame in the Streets 11, 105–7, 109 flânerie 25 flappers 36 Flaubert, Gustave 26 Fleck, Christian 139, 140, 173 n. 9 Folkine, Michel 168 n. 22 Forbes, Bryan 175 n. 8 Ford, Ford Madox 103 Ford, Henry 43 Forster, E.M. 7, 31 Foucault, Michel 25 Frank, Anne 146 Frank, Mary and Robert 150 Frankfurt School 93 Frantz Fanon 170 n. 45 Freedland, Jonathan 182 n. 42 Freud, Anna 67, 172 n. 8 Freud, Sigmund 74, 139 Friedan, Betty 113 Friedberg, Anne 25–6 Frisco’s International 76 Frosh, Stephen 64 Frost, Dora 66 Fry, Roger 26 Fussell, Paul 78–9, 148 Gabler, Neal 80 Gaitskell, Hugh 9, 65, 66, 67, 70, 140 Gallagher, Ian 123 Garafola, Lynn 27, 28, 30–1 Gardiner [later Buttinger], Muriel 9, 65, 67–71, 72, 76, 98, 140, 144 Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan 70 Gedye, G.E.R. 65, 66, 67, 142, 172 n. 5 Gilman, Sandor 30 Gilmore, Margaret 122 Gilroy, Paul 5, 11, 78, 92, 99, 118, 135, 165 n. 10 Glass, Ruth 10–11, 110, 111–13, 116, 117 Gollancz, Victor 172 n. 7 Goodman, Paul 150 Gramsci, Antonio 43

204 • Index Granville Barker, Harley 171 n. 8 Graves, Robert 81, 89 Greco, Juliette 148 Green, David 25 Green, Jreena 161 Greenhalgh, Paul 25 Grierson, John 80 Gronberg, Tag 51 Gross, Mimi 150 Grossmith, George and Weedon 85 Grosz, George 150 habitus 10, 14–15, 133, 135, 143 Halberstadt, Ilona 181 n. 21 Hall, Stuart 13, 40, 118, 156, 160, 162, 160 Halsey, A.H. 110 Hamilton, Cicely 44, 48 Hannerz, Ulf 3, 8, 21 Hansen, Miriam 36–7 Hardy, Forsyth 80 Harrods 123, 126 Harvey, David 55 Hebdige, Dick 13, 92 Hellman, Lillian 172 n. 8 Hencke, David 125 Henderson, Judith 11, 110, 113, 115–16 Henriques, Fernando 116, 134, 152 Hesse, Barnor 160 Hirsch, Marianne 134, 139 Hitchens, Christopher 177 n. 7 Hitler, Adolf 65, 67 Hoare, Philip 42, 179 n. 18 Hobsbawm, Eric 13, 21, 41, 81, 82, 170 n. 2 Hobson, J.A. 22 Hodge, Alan 81, 89 Holloway Road 85 Hollywood 80, 82, 83, 85, 92 British cinema and 88–9 Holtby, Winifred 89, 92 homosexuality 31 Honeycombe, Gordon 47, 49, 55, 56, 167 n. 3, 168 n. 18 Howards End 7 Hull, E.M. 36 Humbert, Beatrice 34 Humphries, Steve 81, 83 Huxley, Aldous 55, 148 Huyssen, Andreas 51

identity politics 12, 97, 117–18, 120, 155 n. 6 ideological communities 41 immigrants black men and white women 10–11, 112, 114–17 Caribbean to UK 78, 97–9, 111, 149, 153 in fiction 102–5, 119 Ugandan refugees 155 see also Jews; miscegenation imperialism 4, 21, 25, 44–5 Ingram, Rex 169 n. 36 Inhurst House 145, 180 n. 18 instinctive extensivity 63, 67, 71, 74, 99, 136, 145 Islam see Muslims Islamophobia 163 Israel 163–4 Jackson, Alison 128–9 Jacques, Martin 124 Jahoda, Marie 64, 113, 140, 173 n. 9, 176 n. 23 James, C.L.R. 9, 77, 87, 116, 155 James, Selma 155 jazz 10, 81 Jephcott, Pearl 80, 82 Jews 81, 139–40, 142–3, 145–6, 149–50 attraction of 8–9, 66–7 Chesterton on 44 cinema and 80 in fiction 66, 73 ‘non-Jewish’ 139 Selfridge on 7–8, 46–7 see also antisemitism; philosemitism Jews for Justice for Palestinians 182 n. 32 John Lewis 49, 171 n. 9 Jones Brothers 85–6 Julien, Isaac 170 n. 45 Junod, Violaine 175 n. 12 Kapp, Yvonne 66 Karl Marx Hof 65, 140 Karpf, Anne 143 Kearney, Martha 177 n. 26 Kensington Palace 122–3 Keppel [later Trefusis], Violet 32, 169 n. 28 Keynes, Maynard 168 n. 26 Khama, Seretse 176 n. 24 Khan, Hasnat 125, 126

Index • 205 Khan, Imran 126 Khan, Jemima 126, 128 Kharalmov, Alex 141, 180 n. 13, 180 n. 14 Kissing Case 113 Kitzinger, Uwe 113 Kitzinger (née Webster), Sheila 10, 110, 113, 117 Kodicek, Ann 29 Koestler, Arthur 141 Korda, Alexander 173 n. 7 Kracauer, Siegfried 80 Kramer, Stanley 127 Krishnamurti 35, 137–8, 167–8 n. 11, 170 n. 39 Kristeva, Julia 72 Kuhn, Annette 134 Kushner, Tony 7, 9, 65, 76–7, 110, 111, 176 n. 17 Kyambi, Sarah 120, 182 n. 42 La Haine 166 n. 17 Labour Party 121, 124–6, 140, 147, 160 women and 124 Lacan, Jacques 72, 73 Lamming, George 97, 175 n. 4 Lancaster, Bill 49 Landes, Ruth 113, 117 Lane, Christopher 64 Lawrence, D.H. 148, 170 n. 37 Leach, William 20, 22 Leavis, F.R. 170 n. 37 Lebanon 163–4 Lee, Hermione 66 Lemoine, Joy 160 Leslie, Alfred 150 Lessing, Doris 10, 101–2, 175 n. 5 Levy, Andrea 9 Lewis, John Spedan 49 Liberty’s 31 Light, Alison 10, 66, 94 Little, Kenneth 10, 110, 114 Littlewood, Joan 100, 107, 175 n. 10 Livingstone, Ken 163, 164 London 13–15, 162–4 Lowe, Lisa 24, 25, 26, 30 Lutyens, Emily 35, 138, 167 n. 11 Lytton, Constance 35 MacInnes, Colin 97, 105 Mack Brunswick, Ruth 67

Maizels, Joan 113, 117, 175 n. 12 Mak, Geert 146 Makonnen, Ras 11, 92, 99 Mapplethorpe, Robert 39 Marconi scandal 44, 46–7 Marks & Spencer 83, 85 Marshall Field’s 19, 89, 171 n. 10 Mass-Observation 9, 76–7, 110, 145 Matisse, Henri 32, 168 n. 20 matrixial 8, 73 Maxtone Graham, Ysenda 70–1, 173 n. 11 McDonald, Trevor 166 n. 15 Melman, Billie 6, 24, 26, 30, 36 Mercer, Kobena 39, 118, 120, 155, 156, 166 n. 13 Mexico 151–2, 154 Miller, Peter 54 Mills, C. Wright 100 Mills, Sara 168 n. 16 Mirza, Heidi Safia 118 miscegenation 11–12, 75–8, 90, 94, 111, 120, 152 Diana and Dodi 121–9 in contemporary London 160–1 in USA 166 n. 11 sociologists on 114–17 Mitchison, Naomi 65, 140 Mitford, Jessica 42, 91 mixed-race 11–12, 106, 111, 129 modernisation 42, 47, 86, 92 modernism 37–40, 46, 81 modernity 9–10, 19–21, 24–6, 80–1, 83, 85–6, 88, 92–4, 124 Modood, Tariq 12, 118, 156, 161, 173 n. 1 Monckton, Rosa 124 mongrelisation 12, 14, 133, 164 Montefiore, Janet 6 Montessori, Maria 138 Morris, Bill 166 n. 15 Mort, Frank 82 Mosley, Oswald 91 Mountbatten, Edwina 82, 173 n. 10, 177 n. 1, 178 n. 11 Ms Dynamite 182 n. 38 Muller, Dody 150 multiculturalism 160 Muslims 59, 125–6, 129 see also Islamophobia Mynatt, Margaret 66

206 • Index Naipaul, V.S. 97 Napoleon of Notting Hill 43–4 Naughton, Bill 145 Nava [née Weisselberg], Mica [Michaela] 154 autobiography 136–64 Changing Cultures 4 derivation of name 152 ‘The Family: a Critique’ 156 feminism and 143, 154–7 ‘Modernity’s Disavowal’ 20, 41, 43, 51, 82 Nava, Jake 153–4, 157, 158, 161–2, 166 n. 11, 181 n. 22 Nava, José 151–4, 160, 162 Nava, Orson 153–4, 157, 161, 181 n. 22, 182 n. 37 Nava, Zadoc 153–4, 157, 161, 181 n. 22 Nazism 65 ‘negro’ 10, 144, 182 n. 31 see also black identity Negro see under Cunard, Nancy Nehru, Jawaharlal 173 n. 10, 177 n. 1 neoconservatives 150 New York 149–50 Nijinsky, Vaslav 28–9, 30–1, 36, 138 Nuremberg laws 139 nursemaids 9, 69–71 O’Shea, Alan 80, 166 n. 1 Oldenburg, Claes 150 Olympics 154, 162 orientalism artistic 26 of commerce 37, 39 of exhibitions 25 as fashion 24, 27–8, 31–2 of governance 25 as utopian 39–40 see also Said, Edward Orwell, George 148 Osborne, John 97, 102 otherness 8, 25, 40, 51 attraction of 91 eroticisation of 71 Kristeva on 72 Ové, Horace 154, 166 n. 12, 181 n. 32 Ové, Zak 158 Oxford Street 83–5

pacifism 6 Palestine 164 Parker, David 161, 166 n. 13 Passerini, Luisa 6, 65 Patterson, Sheila 110, 113, 116–17, 153, 176 n. 18 People Show 154–5, 157, 181 n. 28 Philby, Kim 172 n. 5 Phillips, Adam 72 Phillips, Caryl 10, 97, 99, 100–1, 107, 108, 109, 115, 119 Phillips, Mike 156 Phillips, Trevor 156, 173 n. 3 philosemitism 7–9, 65–6 Picasso, Pablo 26, 168 n. 20 Picture Post 76–7, 173–4 n. 7 Pilkington, Edward 9, 115, 176 n. 19 Pinnock, James 168 n. 15 Placzek, Dolf 142, 172 n. 4, 173 n. 11, 182 n. 39 Poiret, Paul 31–2, 34 Pollock, Griselda 73 popular culture 92–3 Porter Benson, Susan 55 postcolonialism 6, 10, 39, 118 post-Fordism 54 postmodernism 58, 134 Potter, Sally 169 n. 30 Pound, Reginald 48 Powell, Enoch 155 Pressburger, Emeric 173 n. 7 Priestley, J.B. 82, 92, 175 n. 13 primitivism 26 Pritchard, Wood and partners Ltd 85 psychoanalysis 8, 71–4, 134 Pukas, Anna 123, 129, 179 n. 21 Quakers 140 race in anthropology 111 gender and 117–20 psychoanalysis and 8, 64, 71–4 racialisation 117–18, 156 social studies of 109–17 see also African-Americans in UK; AfroCaribbeans; black identity; immigrants; Jews; miscegenation; ‘negro’

Index • 207 racism 40, 63–4, 75–6, 90–1, 112, 152 Freud on 64 gender and 74, 99, 107 immigrants and 10–11 sexuality and 40 in US 9–10, 75–6, 166 n. 13 see also antiracism; antisemitism; Islamophobia; xenophobia Raditsa, Leo 150 Radstone, Susannah 134, 136 rag-time 32, 33 Rainbow Club 76 Ramdin, Ron 87 Redding, Fred 167 n. 7 Reed, Carol 65 Reich, Wilhelm 150 Reisz, Karel 173 n. 7 Rex, John 176 n. 15 Rhys, Jean 84–5, 90–1, 102–4 Rich, Paul B. 22, 30, 37, 45, 111, 113, 137 Richards, Jeffrey 80, 83, 89 Richardson, Tony 100, 175 n. 2 Richmond, Anthony 110, 114 Riviere, Joan 72–3 Robbins, Bruce 179 n. 1 Roberts, Glenys 127 Robeson, Paul 82, 87–8, 91, 174 n. 8, 177 n. 1 Romilly, Esmond 91 Rose, Nikolas 54 Ross, Alan 89 Rushdie, Salman 133 Russell, Ken 169 n. 32 Russian Ballet 26–32, 34–5, 138 Rustin, Michael 64 Sackville-West, Vita 32, 79, 169 n. 28 Said, Edward 19, 26, 78 critics of 24 Foucault and 25 Orientalism 6, 24 Salkey, Andrew 109, 119 Sandercock, Leonie 13 Sandhu, Sukhdev 103, 108, 175 n. 7 Sartre, Jean-Paul 148 Sassen, Saskia 142 Savigliano, Martha 33, 34, 170 n. 43 Scannell, Paddy 89 Scheherazade 5, 28–32, 34, 36

Scheler, Max 72 Schouvaloff, Alexander 28 Schwarz, Bill 43, 76, 87, 111, 114, 117–18, 120, 165 n. 7, 169 n. 29 on decolonisation 120 Segal, Lynne 135, 156 Selfridge, H. Gordon 4, 7, 19–32, 38, 83–4, 138, 167 Chesterton controversy 45–59 on commerce 57–8 on cosmopolitanism 5, 20–4, 46–7 employment practices 48–9, 55–6 founds store 19–20 modernisation and 47 ‘Russian invasion’ and 26–7 on suffragettes 7, 20, 35, 46 tango and 32–3 on women 38, 46, 51, 84 Selfridge Junior, Gordon 85 Selfridges Archive 4–5, 165 n. 5, 167, n. 7 Selfridges department store see Selfridge, Gordon Selvon, Samuel 97, 103, 107–8 Sennett, Richard 7, 14, 42, 56, 134, 158, 164 servants 9, 69–70 ‘sexual thinking’ 10, 97, 109, 111, 115, 117, 120 sexuality 28–33, 36–7, 40 Sharafuddin, Mohammed 24 Sharma, Ashwani 6, 64 Sharma, Sanjay 6, 64 Shaw, George Bernard 42 Show Boat 86–7 Silverman, Kaja 72 Sklar, Robert 89 Smith, Graham 75–6, 144 Snowman, Daniel 111 social inclusion 56, 58 socialism 136–7, 139 sociology 109–17 Song, Miri 161 Souhami, Diana 32, 79, 169 n. 28 Soviet Union 141 Sparrows Can’t Sing 107–8 Spender, Stephen 65, 67 Spiller, Gustave 137 Spitzer, Leo 139 Stavrakakis, Yannis 64, 65 Steedman, Carolyn 134

208 • Index Steiner, Rudolf 138 Stoler, Ann Laura 25 Strickland, Marguerite 81 Struther, Jan 9, 66, 70–1, 72, 142 suffragettes 7, 20, 35, 46, 169 n. 34 Summerfield, John 92 syncopation 80–1 Szerszynski, Bronislaw 8

van der Voort [later Keus], Miekie 136, 145 Vaughn, Bobby 151–2 Vertovec, Steven 8 Vienna 8, 65, 66–7, 139 Vietnam 153 Vinson, Ben 152 voices 89–90 Voyage in the Dark 84–5

Tabrizian, Mitra 161 tango 5–6, 32–5, 37 Taylor, Elizabeth 104 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 43, 51 Tebbit, Norman 163 technologies of the self 8, 54 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 34, 36 The Golden Notebook 102, 175 n. 3 The L-Shaped Room 104 The Lonely Londoners 107–8 The Sheik 6, 36 The Tango Lesson 169 n. 30 Theosophy 21–2, 28, 35, 66, 136–8, 170 n. 39 Theweleit, Klaus 51 Thompson, Bob 150 Tickner, Lisa 35, 169 n. 34 Tokayer, Sheindi 150 Torgovnick, Marianna 24, 26, 37 Trefusis, Violet 79, 169 n. 28 Trotskyism 141, 151

Wagner, Gertrude 140, 145 Wagner, Ina Walkowitz, Judith 5, 38 Walton, Jean 72–3 Ward, Maisie 43–4, 45, 57 Warde, Andrew 81 Washington, Peter 21, 35, 136, 138, 168 n. 11, 170 n. 39 Waters, Chris 111, 113, 114 WE ARE LONDONERS campaign 13, 164 Webbs 42 Webster, Sheila see Kitzinger, Sheila Weightman, Gavin 81, 83 Weinberg, Greta 143–4 Weissberg, Alex 141, 147, 180 n. 12 Weisselberg, Kiffer 141, 143, 180 n. 13 Weisselberg, Konrad 139–42, 180 n. 14 Weisselberg, Marcel 139, 142–3, 144, 149 Wells, H.G. 42, 171 n. 4 on Selfridge 46 White, Jerry 9, 85, 179 n. 6 Whitehead, Philip 177 n. 1 Whiteley’s 49 whiteness 9, 39, 129 in imagination 97 ‘white paranoia’ 64 Wilde, Oscar 170 n. 1 Williams, Keith 78, 80, 89, 92 Williams, Raymond 37 Williams, Ruth 176 n. 24 Willis, Ted 105–7, 119 Wilson, Elizabeth 31, 41 Winder, Robert 111 Wollen, Peter 21, 30–2, 38, 43 on oriental fashion 27–8 women Benjamin on 54 black men and 9–11, 75–8, 82, 87–8, 90–2, 98–9, 112, 114–17, 127, 144

Uganda 155 United States 79–80 accents and 89 in the imagination 9, 78–80 racism in 9, 75–6, 166 n. 13 see also US Army Universal Races Congress 22, 30, 35, 137 Chesterton on 45 Urry, John 8 US army black GIs in UK 9, 75–6, 82, 90, 98–9, 144 racism in 9, 75, 144 Usborne, Margaret 110 Valentino, Rudolph 30, 33–4, 36–7, 138, 169 n. 36 van der Voort [later Weisselberg], Anna [Ankie] 65, 136, 140, 147–9

Index • 209 Chesterton on 44 as cinema-goers 15–17, 92–3 as consumers 86 cosmopolitanism and 73–4 inclusivity and 9–11, 70, 74, 99, 136 Labour Party and 124 leisure space and 20, 25 machines and 51 ‘new woman’ 34 patriotism and 74 Selfridge on 38, 46, 48–9 as subjects 6, 24, 38 as workers 41, 48–51, 52–4 as writers 99–109 see also feminism; suffragettes; Women’s Liberation Movement Women’s Liberation Movement 154–6 Women’s Theatre Group 181 n. 29 Woolf, Leonard 27, 28, 42, 44, 66–7, 172 n. 4

Woolf, Virginia 65, 66, 74, 92, 148, 172 n. 4 Woolworth, Frank 167 n. 9 Woolworths 83 World Cup 1998 121 2006 163 Wouters, Cas 94 Wright, Patrick 45 xenophobia 7, 13, 45, 63, 70, 79, 98, 114, 119, 128, 145, 157, 160 Yacoub, Magdi 125 Young, Lola 105 Young, Robert 24, 39 Younge, Gary 163 Zimmerman, Fred 172 n. 8 Žižek, Slavoj 64 Zola, Émile 51