Urban Cosmopolitanism Research Articles

Commercial transactions and social relations between the Greeks and Turks of Brussels

This article examines how the extent to which Greeks and Turks “live together” in Brussels can be measured by means of commercial transactions. The question is knowing what the impact of monetary exchanges on the symbolic borders between these social groups is and how these exchanges have changed over time. Whereas the market interactions between Greeks and Turks in the years that followed their moving to Brussels were defined by the attitude of affinity (out of conviction or necessity), those that occur today belong more to the framework of an urban cosmopolitanism defined by the attitude of indifference. Even if the commercial transactions constitute an area for hierarchizing the players, they also operate as a place of encounters or confrontation, where each person reinterprets his or her own national past and positions her/himself with regard to the legacy of the Greco-Turkish conflict and its representations.

Jua Cali, genge rap music and the anxieties of living in the glocalized city of Nairobi

ABSTRACT This article seeks to track the emergence of a rap genre dubbed genge, which is rendered in sheng, a type of urban slang, which is a mixture of Swahili, English and other local dialects. Positioning genge within the milieu of cultural expressions that give voice to marginalized urban youths, the article examines how several genge rappers appropriate urban spaces and delineate them as sites of masculine domination, contestation and urban cosmopolitanism within the larger glocal imaginary desires. My analysis makes use of examples from lyrics of songs performed by various artists such as Jua Cali, Nonini and a host of others, to illustrate how their deployment of poetic lyricism romanticizes city spaces (especially in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya) as melting pots of masculine fears, tensions and anxieties.

Urban Alchemy

According to certain scholars, the multicultural (global) city may constitute the ultimate site for the development of cosmopolitan sensibilities. Taken to the extreme, the assumed properties of urban life amount to a veritable ‘urban alchemy’: the belief that diverse and divided populations of urban dwellers may potentially be transformed into one harmonious community of cosmopolitan citizens. This paper presents an analysis of the meaning of urban cosmopolitanism to urban dwellers themselves. Heeding the calls for a more grounded, empirical approach to the phenomenon of ‘ordinary’ cosmopolitanisms, urban cosmopolitanism is defined as those discursive social practices in which people manage to supersede the parochialisms of their own national, ethnic and religious identities through an identification with the city. Data from 16 focus groups in London and Amsterdam demonstrate that the performance of urban cosmopolitanism was unequally accessible to people positioned differently in terms of race, class and residential status, suggesting that conceptualising cosmopolitanism as either a set of skills and attitudes or an abstract philosophy of world citizenship potentially ignores the exigencies of actual, extant cosmopolitan social practices.

A Brief History of the Berlin Mission Society in South Africa

AbstractThe Berlin Mission Society (BMS) was one of four German Protestant mission societies active in 19th and 20th century South Africa. Born out of the tradition of Pietism in Germany and at the time of evangelical revival after the Napoleonic wars, the BMS sent its first missionaries to South Africa in 1834; it was formally disbanded in 1972. After an initial period of hardship and disappointments, it experienced an upsurge in its activities after 1859, which lasted up to World War One. In the latter half of the 19th century, the BMS was moderately represented in the Free State, the Eastern Cape and Natal and had a very strong presence in the northern and eastern parts of the Transvaal Boer republic. Events in Europe between 1914 and 1945 affected mission work negatively and made contact between the Board in Berlin and the missionaries in South Africa difficult, at times even impossible. The post‐1945 period was fraught with problems resulting from the division of Germany and its former capital, Berlin; global challenges resulting from the Cold War and decolonisation in Africa; and lastly, the racial policies of the apartheid government. The BMS was part of the broad evangelical mission movement and was thus barely distinct from other societies. Yet, both its Pietist and Lutheran heritage and its relative distance from the colonial powers that be resulted in its characteristic emphasis on spiritual inwardness, its uncompromising stand on puritanical values such as morality, hard work and self‐discipline and its difficulties with urban cosmopolitanism – and ultimately also in its inability to speak and act decisively against injustice and racial discrimination.

Queering/Querying Cosmopolitanism: Queer Spaces in Shanghai

This article examines different types of queer spaces in contemporary Shanghai together with the various same-sex subjects that inhabit these spaces. In doing so, it discusses the impact of transnational capitalism, the nation state and local histories on the construction of urban spaces and identities. Combining queer studies and urban ethnography, this article points to the increasing social inequalities hidden behind the notion of urban cosmopolitanism created by the deterritorializing and meanwhile territorializing forces of transnational capital and the state. It also sheds light on how these various identities and spaces are lived and experienced by ordinary people, as well as possible ways of resistance to the dominant narratives.

From the outback to the background: Indian films in Australia

ABSTRACTThe rise of Indian film within Australia at the level of production, distribution and exhibition is one of the most important transformations in the Australian cinema landscape over the past decade. Despite Australian efforts to attract runaway Hollywood production, Indian films currently constitute the major international production component in Australia. These films represent notable departures from received notions of Australian film production: they foreground urban cosmopolitanism in Australia rather than rural landscape-based cinema, and they are responsive to state government policies rather than federal ones. The exhibition and distribution of Indian films has also become a major component in any description of Australian national cinema that incorporates the circulation and consumption of films. Indian films currently represent 10 per cent of the films released commercially in Australia. This article tracks the performance of Indian films at the Australian box office and argues that their presence and positioning in Australian cinema challenges traditional notions of the limits of diasporic cinema. Despite this increased prominence, Indian films remain a comparatively small part of Australian cinema consumption, and this article ends by trying to explain the factors that will need to be overcome for a continued expansion of this type of film consumption within Australia.

Sensing the City: Representations of Cairo's Ḥarat al-Yahud

Maurice Shammas (Abu Farid) stands out among writers whose literary works represent Jewish life in modern Egypt. His collection of short stories Al-shaykh shabtay wa-A?ikayat min A?arat al-yahud [Sheik Shabbtai and Stories from a¸¢arat al-Yahud (1979)] and his memoir 'Azza, hafidat nifirtiti ['Azza, Nefertiti's Granddaughter (2003)], written in Arabic, represent not the wealthy cosmopolittans, but rather the poor residents of Cairo's a¸¥arat al-yahud. This article explores Shammas's representations of the city, arguing that for Shammas the city's textuality is not primarily visual or material, but aural. The spaces of the city are defined by the sounds that fill them: Arabic music and the musicality of Arabic, verbal and non-verbal human expression, and the noise of the structures of the city themselves. This article also traces and unpacks the intertwined tropes of nationalism and urban localism, cosmopolitanism and parochialism, language and identity in Shammas's writings.

Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship and the Nation: Minority Elites in Botswana

The build-up of inter-ethnic trust, partnerships and alliances by minority elites is a remarkable accomplishment, in the face of majoritarian fears of 'the takeover' and 'the hidden agenda' -the popular imagining of an ethnic conspiracy consciously directed by the few against the many. This article examines that inter-ethnic accomplishment and the entrepreneurship of nationally prominent Kalanga elites. Mainly former top civil servants turned entrepreneurs, originally from the north of Botswana, they are now the best-positioned minority elites in the capital in the south. The analysis resolves a linked set of apparent paradoxes. The first is that Kalanga elites merge urban cosmopolitanism with assertions of their ethnic identity, linguistic difference, distinct cultural heritage and ties to their rural homes. The second relates to the boundary-crossing legacies in the postcolonial present from the colonial and pre-colonial past: that Kalanga elites, coming from the borderland of Botswana and Zimbabwe, orient their ethnicity towards the nation and also beyond it, internationally. That super-tribalism and nation building in Botswana march ahead together, like moral comrades-in-arms, is the third paradox. More generally for postcolonial studies, the argument relates changes in ethnicity, inter-ethnicity and entrepreneurship to the transformation of the capable African state, tracing these changes through the administrations of Botswana's three presidents: from the heyday of assimilationist yet highly co-optive policy and One Nation Consensus under the first; through the second president's less co-optive rule, which appeared to foster the autonomy of the bureaucracy but, under a liberalisation policy, reduced the insulation between the civil service and the investment opportunities of business and high finance; and finally, under the current president, to the growing pressures for a shift towards greater pluralism in the postcolonial state.

Congolese Rumba and Other Cosmopolitanisms

In this paper I will look briefly at how Afro-Cuban music came to be imported and distributed in the Belgian Congo and I will discuss some of the stylistic borrowing that has given Congolese music a strongly Afro-Cuban flavor. But I am also interested in the way that Congolese rumba has gradually undergone a process of indigenization which has made it the “musica franca” of much of sub-Saharan Africa and an important marker of Congolese national identity. My central argument is that Cuban music became popular in the Congo not only because it retained elements of “traditional” African musical and performative aesthetics, but also because it stood for a form of urban cosmopolitanism which was something other than European. By comparing the appropriation of Afro-Cuban music in the Congo during two distinct historical periods (during the peak of colonialism and several years after the death of Mobutu), I hope to show not only how changes in larger political economies correspond with changing notions of cosmopolitanism in a local setting, but also how popular music mediates at various levels between the local and the foreign.

A culture of urban cosmopolitanism: Uridil and Sindelar as Viennese coffee‐house heroes

A culture of urban cosmopolitanism: Uridil and Sindelar as Viennese coffee‐house heroes