Subaltern cosmopolitanism in the imperial metropole: notes towards a prehistory of racism and multiculturalism?

This paper attempts to throw some light on the social and spiritual world of racially and culturally mixed communities of Britain's urban working poor in the late-19 th and early-20 th centuries.The lives of these communities are only available to us through the prurient gaze of middle-class observers peering through lens darkly clouded by class, racial, gender, sexual, and political anxieties.To claim evidence for a cosmopolitan sociality in such apparently degraded lives and environments may appear to some as an outrage on cosmopolitan sensibilities.Be that as it may, this paper suggests there is enough evidence on the ground, of a precocious but embattled subaltern cosmopolitan sociality that lasted at least through the interwar years.Perhaps it even spilled over into the post-World War II period before more explicitly targeted and gendered social policies such as 'family unification' from the 1960s helped pave the ground for the more segregated 'multi-culturalist' policies and practices of the subsequent few decades.