Bidual renormings of Banach spaces

Given a separable Banach space X with no isomorphic copies of ℓ 1 and a separable subspace Y of its bidual, we provide a sufficient condition on Y to ensure that X admits an equivalent norm such that the restriction to Y of the corresponding bidual norm is midpoint locally uniformly rotund. This result applies to the separable subspaces of the bidual of a Banach space with a shrinking unconditional Schauder basis and to the bidual of the James space.