Conviviality and Multiculture

Abstract

Revisiting Gilroy’s After Empire alongside Amin’s recently mooted ethos of ‘indifference to difference’, this article explores how conviviality constitutes a more radical ideal of urban interaction than ordinarily appreciated. Based on interviews and observations in two London locations, it is argued that as opposed to being a concept which simply names everyday practices of multi-ethnic interaction, conviviality speaks uniquely to a sophisticated ability to invoke difference whilst avoiding communitarian, groupist precepts. It is consequently this article’s contention that sociological accounts need and can assume a bolder line in disaggregating contemporary formations of multiculture from the orthodoxies of integration and the normativity of communitarian belonging and identity.