Alienated Cosmopolitans

Casting himself as the protagonist in a 1998 photo series, Diary of a Victorian Dandy, Shonibare and a group of actors constructed five tableaux vivantes in a rented English stately home. Each scene presents a fantasy of opulence and indulgence for the central character. The Dandy rises late, attended by a large and fawning staff. By afternoon, he is the finely dressed centre of attention in his library, where he dictates a letter, encouraged and supported not only by his many friends, advisers, and servants, but by his impeccable heritage, overseen by the worthies looking on in the form of art objects.

Shonibare’s grand genuflection here is to William Hogarth, that most outspokenly English of artists. In Hogarth’s art and period, blacks were not typically central to British society. Hogarth’s racial Others were stock figures, usually servants, exotics, or miscreants. Shonibare updates these stereotypes. He knows that when blacks are rich and famous in the UK these days, they are often sports stars who not infrequently flaunt their wealth in ways that are anything but aristocratic. In Diary of a Victorian Dandy, Shonibare portrays no evanescent celebrity but a member of the landed gentry. Not only does he time-travel to the apex of empire and dare us not to see him as typically English, he projects these images into the current public arena in the form of posters, about a hundred of which were placed in tube stations across London. Enacting the border-crossing passions of the cosmopolite by bringing the realm of high-Victorian privilege down to the level of everyday commuters, Shonibare again challenges us to see him as out of place, as somehow an “extra” in the excess he pictures.

It’s hard not to notice the letters that appear after Shonibare’s name in biographical statements: mbe, or Member of the British Empire, an honour bestowed on him in 2004. For a self-proclaimed post-colonial hybrid, this designation is deliciously ironic. The British government’s website explains that the mbe is awarded for “service in and to the community of a responsible kind which is outstanding in its field; or very local ‘hands-on’ service which stands out as an example to others. In both cases awards illuminate areas of dedicated service which merit public recognition.” Shonibare, an exception among mostly military and sports figures, was cited “for services to art.” In significant measure, Diary records his initially ironic but later actual placement at the centre of contemporary British society.

Turner and Shonibare are of course not alone in rethinking multiculturalism. Their paths intersect with the statecraft of Tony Blair. The British PM is at pains to declare that his recent insistence on “the duty to integrate” and “shared British values” is a redefinition, not a rejection, of multiculturalism. In a controversial speech on December 8, 2006, Blair expounded his vision: “Multicultural Britain was never supposed to be a celebration of division, but of diversity. The purpose was to allow people to live harmoniously together, despite their difference, not to make their difference an encouragement to discord. The values that nurtured it were those of solidarity, of coming together, of peaceful co-existence. The right to be in a multicultural society was always, always implicitly balanced by a duty to integrate, to be part of Britain, to be British and Asian, British and black, British and white.”

How are we to assess Blair’s creed? Perhaps we would do well to look hard at what Shonibare and Turner show us about the downsides of multiculturalism, to think about Turner’s admonition that there are “different levels of Canadianness.” What Blair’s celebration model tends to elide is the insistence on the specifics of place underlined by these artists, Turner by contrasting her urban Toronto home with experiences in North Bay and Lethbridge, Shonibare through his vision of being British in a new way. These artists propose an alternative to official multiculturalism. Their new, critical cosmopolitanism offers the hope of mediation among affinities and affiliations of the multicultural precisely by turning from ecumenism toward local specificity, to inhabit what Kobena Mercer calls “cosmopolitan locales.” Stimulated by the textures of alienation specific to their circumstances in London and Toronto, Shonibare and Turner alert us to what these places might be. What we might think of as an heirloom cosmopolitan would have edited out such peculiarities. The new cosmopolite uses them as a passport.