The Cosmopolitanism of Commerce and the Allure of Difference

Abstract

This article engages with postcolonial theorizations of orientalism and challenges assumptions about the pervasiveness of imperial ideologies in Britain at the beginning of the century by exploring the adherence of Selfridges department store to the principle of ‘cosmopolitanism’. The aesthetic and libidinal economy of this popular modernist commercial formation, and the distinctive positioning of women consumers within it, is investigated in relation to two key cultural events promoted by Selfridges in the years before the First World War: the Russian Ballet performance of Scheherazade — based on a story from the Arabian Nights in which the women of the Shah's harem seduce the black slaves of the household — and the tango, which is also associated with a new less constrained sexuality for women and in turn is linked — via Valentino — to the emerging popular form of desert romance. How do these configurations, and the fashionable ancillary merchandise spawned by them, modify our understanding of racialized and national identities? Does the gendered consumption of these exotic narratives and products and their relocation to the intimate territories of the domestic and the body, demand a shift in the way in which commerce is thought of? What are the consequences for conceptualizations of sexual difference? This article, by focusing on the purchase by Selfridges' women customers of culturally other objects of desire, aims to make a contribution both to theorizations of consumption and to the largely unresearched history of the western fascination with difference.