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Abstract:Revisiting Gilroy's After Empire, this article explores how conviviality constitutes a more radical ideal of urban interaction than ordinarily appreciated. Based on interviews and observation 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. Other themes folded into this exploration of what I synonymously describe, turning to the recent work of Amin, as an anti-racist ethos of 'indifference to difference' include: the negotiation of identity mixture and ambiguity, the proximity of conflict to conviviality, and the role played by space in mediating convivial possibilities, or lack thereof. 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. Conviviality and Multiculture: A post-integration sociology of multi-ethnic interactionRevisiting 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 observation 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.

This Introduction first proposes a definitional map applicable to the racial nationalisms currently ascendant in Britain (and Western Europe, more broadly). The paper then outlines the respective contributions to the Special Issuewith an emphasis on the politics of bordering that organizes today so much of nationalism's claim on the state. The second half thereupon establishes a wider conjunctural context within which such analyses can be most productively read. Drawing on Stuart Hall's formative analysis, we argue that it is an understanding of the distinctly contradictory drives intrinsic to recent capitalism that is required. Through mapping the uneasy nation/market bind constitutive of the "Little Englander" political subjectivity that Thatcherism forged, this section focuses on the "disjuncture" that has emerged in the intervening period: a disjuncture, compounded by complementary forms of "postcolonial melancholia", that has seen the various nationalist drives in the body politic obtain today a more pronounced political autonomy.

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