Conviviality and its others: for a plural politics of living with difference

Abstract

Over the past 15 years, a range of scholarship exploring how people live with difference in their everyday lives has come to mark a multi-disciplinary ‘convivial turn’. This article suggests that while such work has been generative, there has been a prevalent tendency to imagine the capacity to live with difference in relatively singular terms. This article begins by unpacking two ‘major’ themes within the convivial turn: the negotiated deconstruction of bounded identities, and the cultivation of public civilities. It suggests that despite important differences, both approaches imagine the capacity to live with difference in terms of general orientations towards a generic other. The article draws out the limits of these approaches by interweaving an ethnographic exploration of relations at a community café in the London neighbourhood of Kilburn with a review of various ‘minor’ themes within the convivial turn: boundedness, care and joint commitment, opacity, and interweaving. The article argues that each of these themes, major and minor, characterises a distinctive mode of relating, each marked by its own possibilities and limits. In doing so it argues for a more plural understanding of difference and forms of togetherness, connected to a more expansive politics.