Session 9: Cosmopolitan Reflections

5th Global Conference

Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

British South Asian Muslim Women, National Identities and Cosmopolitanism
Fazila Bhimji
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University Central Lancashire, United Kingdom

The paper explores the ways in which second generation British Asian Muslim women express national and cosmopolitan identities. More specifically, I explore how British Muslim women’s religious identities intersect with their national and post-national ways of being. Much scholarly literature has examined tensions between cultural identities and citizenship of second generation immigrants but religious expressions have received little attention in this regard. Expressions of religious practice particularly for women is believed to be limited to the domestic sphere As significant numbers of British Muslim women express their identities through religion it thus becomes essential to explore how religious identities link with more plural ways of being. British Muslim Asian women express their religious selves in multiples ways such as sartorial choices such as the hijab (Islamic headscarves), through regular attendance of Islamic study circles in mosques, discussion of Islam on cyberspace, and through links with their parents country of origin. At the same time, I argue that these women some of them politicized, some of them pursuing higher education at British universities and many of them employed in various sectors of the British sector conform to British and cosmopolitan ways of being. My study demonstrates that several of the women who could afford to do so travel widely, visit their parents’ home countries, and display an openness towards people of varying ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds. . Hence, the paper demonstrates that British Muslim women through religious expressions and understandings actually in many respects conform to national as well as cosmopolitan ways of expression. Data are drawn on interviews of thirty British Muslim Asian women living in northern England.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Cosmopolitan Mythscapes: (Re)Memorializing the Empire in a Multicultural City
Elsa Peralta
Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

Notions of empire, colonialism, or post-colonialism, are often regarded as something which concerns to the colonized rather than to the colonizer. Yet the whole experience of modern imperialism has deeply shaped European national narratives in ways that continue to matter even in post-imperial times. This is the case of Portugal: being the first and the most enduring of European colonial empires, its end, with the concomitant democratization of the country, didn’t erase the self-image of the country as an imperial nation. Although refashioned in a matter of style and updated in what concerns to the discourse, major public representations of the nation’s collective identity remain anchored in the whole experience of the empire. It is then argued that the legacy of the empire, instead of a burden from the past, is rather translated into a multicultural idiom, strategically negotiating the positioning of Portugal in the European cosmopolitan geographies. In this regard I use the notion of ‘mythscape’ to emphasize the negotiated processes by which the myths of the nation are constantly reconstructed and reenacted.

This paper will focus on the way several ‘rhetorical topoi’ memorialize Lisbon, the former capital of the Portuguese Empire and where the representation of the imperial past is most pervasive, as a multicultural, cosmopolitan city, while eliding the inequalities of racialized and classed identities that are inscribed within the urban space. Paying a special attention to the World Exhibition that took place in Lisbon in 1998 under the theme Oceans, an event that totally refurbished the geography of the city, I also intend to explore the ways by which the aesthetization of the past contributes to the sublimation of the colonial wounds present in Portuguese society until today.