ABSTRACT
Introduction One of the most striking features of contemporary social life is the persistent presence of the Other in consumption and everyday life. The most remote corners of the globe now seem within daily reach when we work, shop, dine, watch television, surf and participate in the internet or walk the streets. Even the most spatially bounded forms of local social life and identity in the neighbourhood community or within the walls of territorial nation states are in part enacted on the premise of global flows, networks and scapes, and legitimized with reference to the perceived threats of the mobility of migrants, crime, terror, diseases, pollution, goods, capital and so on. In a sense we have all become ‘everyday cosmopolitans’ (Beck, 2006). Whether or not people turn their back on it, the Other emerges in the midst of the everyday through a variety of such mobilities. In contemporary discourse ‘the Orient’ has very much emerged as the epitome of Otherness to West European and North American culture, economy and society. To a degree not experienced before, the West and the Orient are woven together in webs of mobilities, corporeal, imaginative and virtual. The Orient has travelled to the West through the immigration of humans and the travelling of objects, signs and ideas. In many European towns and most cities, the Orient is within reach and consumable: one can see, touch, hear, eat, smell and click on it.
