Cosmopolitan Modernity: Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of Difference

Debates about cosmopolitanism in the spheres of political philosophy, sociology and criticism have on the whole ignored specific histories of the cosmopolitan and its vernacular expressions in everyday life. This article draws on aspects the urban and often feminised worlds of entertainment, commerce, the arts and the in metropolitan England during the first decades of the 20th century, in which interest in abroad and cultural 'others' increasingly signalled an engagement with the , in order to argue for a notion of cosmopolitan modernity. This should be understood just as a reflexive stance of openness, but also as a dialogic formation - a - part of a psychic and often gendered revolt against the conservatism and of the parental culture.