Conviviality and Multiculture: A post-integration sociology of multi-ethnic interaction

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.