Conviviality emerges as a process of coping with difference. It does so through explorations of conviviality amongst insiders and outsiders through the prism of the economy and sociality of hair. This thesis uses the concept and practice of conviviality to challenge the continual ‘insider and outsider’ dichotomies that sustain local hostilities towards non-nationals in the labour, social, cultural and political arenas of belonging. This create tensions in complex social life, diverse temporary encounters and shifting multiple identities, where fixed notions of belonging, state citizenship and identity making incite exclusion of migrants especially. Urban life in South Africa as elsewhere in the world is shaped by vast migration, urbanisation and flexible mobility. In the context of the politics of identity, the rights of migrant black African entrepreneurs to claim belonging and national citizenship in Johannesburg and South Africa are heavily contested. The function of hair exchange enables migrants to seek ways of building integration, unity and security in an environment that is hostile to immigrants, through integrational strategies of downsizing and outsourcing identities that foster and naturalise belonging. This study explores how migrant black African entrepreneurs in Johannesburg’s haircare business naturalise their identities as transnational citizens through transactional exchanges in the importation and consumption of hair, in the context of ethnicity, citizenship, gender, entrepreneurship and social life, as factors of belonging in the experiences of life in Johannesburg. It is such social contexts that permit a study of how inter-ethnic and inter-class diversity are truly negotiated from below. Importantly, in the East European context deeply ingrained norms of civility do not protect from outspoken expressions of racism, nor is cultural or social mixing much celebrated.

The notion of social multiculture is therefore introduced along the lines of Paul Gilroy’s “everyday multiculture”. It is argued that the everyday encounter of different social strata in an urban space gives rise to similar tensions as the mixing of cultures and ethnicities. This paper brings post-communist Eastern Europe into the debate through the case study of a street market in Sofia, Bulgaria. To resolve them the debate should move from looking at techniques for living together to the politics of living together. Taking it further afield helps reveal a number of conceptual flaws. However, discussion has been to a large degree limited to the context of the postcolonial Global North metropolis. The notions of conviviality, everyday multiculturalism, ordinary cosmopolitanism focus on how people live together in contexts of cultural diversity. Although this volume takes northern Europe as its focus, the contributors take care to put each situation in historical and global contexts in the interests of moving beyond the binary thinking that prevails in terms of methodologies, analytical concepts, and political implementations. Rather than replacing one concept with the other, the fourteen contributors to this book seek to explore the interconnections – commonalities and differences – between them, suggesting that creolisation is a necessary complement to the already-intertwined concepts of conviviality and cosmopolitanism. Paul Gilroy refashioned conviviality as a substitute for cosmopolitanism, denoting an ability to be ‘at ease’ in contexts of diversity (Gilroy 2004). Ivan Illich envisioned a post-industrial convivial society of ‘autonomous individuals and primary groups’ (Illich 1973), which resembles present-day manifestations of ‘convivialism’. The urgency of today’s global predicament is not only an argument for the revival of all three concepts, but also a reason to bring them into dialogue. This open access book discusses conviviality in relation to the adjoining concepts cosmopolitanism and creolisation. Conviviality has lately become a catchword not only in academia but also among political activists.

Superliminal polite recognition