G. Balachandran Discusses Subaltern Cosmopolitanism in the Imperial Metropole

Subaltern cosmopolitanism among Asian, African and the local working poor expressed itself in 19th and early 20th century London, long before more segregated policies of “multi-culturalism” were articulated in the post-war years. G. Balachandran of the Graduate Institute of Geneva develops this idea in a talk titled “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism in the Imperial Metropole: a Prehistory of Racism and Multicultularism?”, as part of the South Asian Studies Council weekly colloquium series.

November 7, 4:30pm • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

The paper on which the talk is based attempts to throw light on the social and spiritual worlds of racially and culturally mixed communities of Britain’s urban working poor in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The subaltern cosmopolitanism I address here was a feature of many parts of the 19th-century world. It was particularly pronounced in port towns big and small on every continent, a port’s relative size and importance influencing its cosmopolitan geographies more than its ethos. While recognizing and touching on this universality, my focus here is on the intertwined lives of Asian, African, and local working poor in London. The lives of racially and culturally-mixed communities of the working poor are only available to us through the prurient gaze of middle-class observers peering through a lens darkly clouded by class, racial, gender, sexual, and political anxieties. The spaces they occupied often lay in the shadows of the state. Populated by people and relationships stubbornly elusive, at least at first, to its disciplinary mechanisms, they were also sites of a precocious but embattled subaltern cosmopolitan sociality that lasted at least through the interwar years. Perhaps it even spilled 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. This paper therefore also narrates discursive projects to progressively cleanse or eliminate such spaces, and establish the authority of a racial and gendered state over them, their inhabitants, and their relationships.

G. Balachandran is Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. He has recently published Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c. 1870-1945 (Oxford, 2012).