Mapping Changing Identities

New Directions in Uncertain Times

Claire Alexander, Raminder Kaur, Brett St Louis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415726047
• eBook ISBN: 9781000155655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Immigration Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Issues of identity, culture and difference remain central to the politics, policies and encounters of global societies in the 21st century. Changes in the speed, scale, scope and form of international and internal migration, new and resurgent religious and ethnic solidarities, the emergence of 'new' multicultural societies, and the fusions and fissures of 'old' multicultural societies, have challenged and redrawn our understandings of nation and community, citizenship and belonging, exclusion and equality.

This landmark collection, which marks the relaunch of the ground-breaking journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, brings together some of the leading international scholars in the field of race, ethnicity, migration and transnationalism to reflect on the changing landscape of research, theorisation and politics in this challenging contemporary context. The collection includes a powerful and typically provocative article by renowned race scholar Paul Gilroy, along with short 'state of the field' articles, critical interventions and think-pieces, each of which explores different geographical regions, emerging areas of research and new ways of 'thinking' identity in 'uncertain times'.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

‘My Britain is fuck all’: zombie multiculturalism and the race politics of citizenship

Paul Gilroy

This paper uses the 2011 viral video “My Tram Experience” as a prism through which to consider aspects of the contemporary politics of race and racism, immigration and misoxeny in Britain. The release and popularity of that clip is seen in the context of the second trial of the murders of Stephen Lawrence and in relation to technological changes and the emergence of virtual and immaterial racism on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

To put it bluntly – most of us prefer our own kind.

David Goodhart

The last few years comprise a specific conjuncture in Britain’s politics of race. The spectacle of racialised truths and ethnic conflicts endures, but it is being punctuated by a growing sense that the analyses forged in order to make sense of earlier struggles may have reached the end of their use. The need for a successor approach is acutely felt. It should be capable, on the one hand, of rethinking the relationship between race politics, religious identity and neo-imperial international relations and, on the other hand, of factoring in the local effects of economic crisis without resorting to deterministic conceptions of the relationship between race and class. The fact that the cultural mediation of race and nation has assumed new configurations during a period of global counterinsurgency will also have to be taken in to account.

If this overdue change of orientation is to be productive, we will also have to revisit and work through discussions which were muted during the New Labour administrations. That was a time when the bogus proposition that race and immigration could be easily untangled in Britain’s political culture held sway, locked into a dominant position by a mixture of alarmism, spin and the crude manipulations of evidence exposed by Dorling (2005) and Simpson and Finney (2009). The large conceptual adjustment now required is likely to involve the self-conscious importation of approaches informed by racial and ethnic situations elsewhere – not only in north America which has stood for too long as the sole, legitimate measure of Britain’s racial future, but also in other parts of Europe and of the wider post-colonial world. Similarly, a new balance has to be struck between explanations of race politics that focus primarily on structural and institutional factors, as suggested by Sir William Macpherson’s report on the failure of the Metropolitan police in the Stephen Lawrence case (Macpherson 1999), and the need to confront emergent forms of raciology more consistent with the agentic, individuating, rights-based approaches to difference and diversity that characterise neo-liberal dogma and corporate multiculturalism alike (Goldberg 2008). Those formations have been largely content to accept the privatisation, both of racial grievances and of the mechanisms of their amelioration – exercises which have usually been facilitated by the managerial and public relations expertise of specialist consultancies. The resulting arrangement directs intervention towards individual conduct that can be characterised as racist and for which its isolated perpetrators can be held to account legally.

The evolving ideology of the populist, nativist right also have to be examined on its own terms rather than dismissed peremptorily lest its critics take it more seriously than either its adherents or its advocates. Tempered by civilisationism that body of racial and cultural theory is now a transnational phenomenon in which the theme of white victimage has become an increasingly prominent counterpoint to the fears of an Islamic takeover inside Europe and beyond.

All these changes involve calculations about the relationship between past and present. They ask, in particular, about where the boundaries of our contemporary predicament should be drawn – a question that has been answered lately by invoking the everyday use of digital technology and social media which have introduced a number of novel problems. As London’s errant Metropolitan police have found to their recent embarrassment, those technological innovations have torn through the blanket of secrecy and facilitated the shocking discovery of unacceptable if not criminal behaviour all around. With its high tempo and ease of transmission, digitalia has helped to present routine acts of racist commentary and violence from new angles and in unprecedented ways distinguished by the irrefutable authority of video veracity. There are other consequences too. Anyone who has read through the comments posted underneath a YouTube clip or an article published on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free Site can attest that anonymous Internet interaction necessitates a different understanding of tolerance than the variety that is anticipated when contributor identities are verified and trackable. Online, localised racial abuse has been compounded by multinational, white-supremacist crowd-sourcing and is freshly typified in a provocative repudiation of the fashionable, conservative idea that race-thinking has been overcome and might now be consigned to the past (Birbalsingh 2011, Nelson 2011a, 2011b).

Domestically, the contrasting cases of Liam Stacey, a young student jailed for his vile racist tweeting about the ailing footballer Fabrice Muamba,¹ and Azar Ahmad, who found himself indicted for a racially aggravated public order offence after he had posted a message on his Facebook page about how the death of British soldiers in Afghanistan was being reported,² only to have the initial charge replaced by a different offence under the Communications Act 2003, show that new kinds of ‘racial’ conduct have attracted the attention of the criminal law and thanks to the reorganisation of public and private spheres. New interpretative tools, which work better than the sentiment analysis software currently available, will be needed if we are going to evaluate the political impact of these transmissions and comprehend the communicative and psychosocial networks that they assemble or animate. The virtual and immaterial racism routinely hosted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has underscored the difficulties involved in specifying what now constitutes public action and public space as well as what the boundaries of law should be in regulating public order offences and assessing the apprehension of violence and disorder that triggers legal sanction.

Long after racism is supposed to have faded away, racial abuse, like racialised inequality, remains. They may have been intensified by the impact of economic misery and the hopelessness that accompanies it. These conditions have not lessened popular enthusiasm for the idea of free speech which is increasingly presented as an important cultural marker, often bolstered by the ambivalent, liberal and libertarian appeal of a nebulous right to be offensive (Phillips 2006, Younge 2012).³ If those freedoms are increasingly being restricted by government, 30 plus years of anti-racist struggle have rendered spontaneous and reckless outbursts of racist commentary deeply shameful. Nobody wants to be associated with them – not even the murderers of Stephen Lawrence and the precarious leaderships of openly xenophobic and ultranationalist groups like the BNP and the EDL.⁴ However, racist rhetoric is a too-valuable political instrument and to- potent source of populist energy amidst the wreckage of the old political alignments to be completely put aside. It can, for example, easily be recast, ambiguously and productively, in commentaries on security and alterity, culture and religion. If its perlocutionary power is going to be deployed in that way, race-talk must, of course, become respectable and, if possible, it should also be scientific. The aggressive, xenophobic poetics borrowed from the ultra-right has to be therefore modified, massaged, mystified and adapted. The retrospective denials of any racist intent issued from the hub of official politics must sound plausible. There may even be genuine surprise when the unusual, performative force of racist language culminates, as seen in Utøya, in terrible violence.

I propose that we revisit the relationship between the demotic eruptions of racial hatred which have lately emerged as a popular form of entertainment and instruction on our computer screens and the formal political pronouncements of our more recent political leaders –specifically David Cameron – on the subjects of race, multiculturalism and citizenship.

Thirty years on

The 30th anniversary of Britain’s 1981 riots passed like the earlier commemoration of the deadly, epoch-making, New Cross fire, almost without acknowledgement. The rioting of August 2011 provoked a spasm of commentary. Opinion was sharply split over the extent to which the events that had occurred in many of the same areas three decades ago could supply insight into what had just happened. Great effort was expended on distinguishing the latest disorders from the rioting between April 1981 and July 1981 which, by being viewed through the lenses of hindsight, could sometimes be considered as a comprehensible if not exactly legitimate, response to the problems that characterised the departed era of Enoch Powell’s mass popularity, police ‘nigger-hunts’ and the awful figure of the youthful, black mugger as a ‘folk devil’ (Hall et.al. 1978).

The retrial of some of the Stephen Lawrence’s killers after 18 years after his murder focused national attention similarly on the gulf between Britain’s racist past and its present tolerance. Britons were invited to discover via the renewed judicial proceedings how much their country had changed for the better during the intervening period and, in particular, to see where or whether today’s widespread revulsion at open expressions of racism might be used to convey a welcome measure of progress, visible with a rare clarity in the context of chronic economic crisis, gloom and despondency that inevitably recall the bad old days. When the guilty verdict was pronounced on Mrs. Dobson and Norris, it was greeted as proof that the country’s legal system, tainted by unwitting and institutional racism, had at last been seen to have been repaired. The degree to which the race-transcending humanity of Stephen’s long-suffering parents appeared in Britain’s mediascape as a shocking revelation suggested an altogether different and decidedly less affirmative conclusion.

The Lawrence retrial was interrupted by the circulation of the mobile phone video recording of Emma West’s rant which had been filmed a few months earlier on a Croydon tram. Was her outburst evidence that any comforting assumption of national progress in this area had been mistaken? By going viral at a critical point and rapidly acquiring millions of hits, the clip forced the hand of the British Transport Police who duly arrested the young mother and charged her with a racially aggravated public order offence under Section 4 of the 1986 public order act. West was remanded in custody over the holiday period. Her children were taken into care. At the time of writing, her final reappearance in court has been delayed several times. The assessment of Britain’s multiculturalism that is supposedly pending in her antics will no doubt eventually resume in a consideration of how her self-proclaimed victimisation might be weighed against what appears to be her impulse to intimidate her fellow travellers by belligerently offering them her opinions on the fallen condition of the nation and their role in its undoing.

There is much to say about that drama in the tram and the largely patient and tolerant responses of the other passengers in what remains a key public space in the expanding everyday culture of privatisation. But, before we can consider Emma West’s behaviour in detail, we should address her lamentation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Titlepage
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: mapping changing identities: new directions in uncertain times
• 1. ‘My Britain is fuck all’: zombie multiculturalism and the race politics of citizenship
• 2. Seeing through multicultural perspectives
• 3. To stop tip-toeing around race: what Arizona’s battle against ethnic studies can teach academics
• 4. The debate about multicultural Norway before and after 22 July 2011
• 5. From structured invisibility to visibility: is Japan really going to accept multiethnic, multicultural identities?
• 6. Occupier/occupied
• 7. The transnational potentiality of transverse politics
• 8. Intersecting identities and global climate change
• 9. Elite identities
• 10. The ‘trouble’ with the ‘white working class’: whiteness, class and ‘groupism’
• 11. What’s wrong with migration scholarship? A critique and a way forward
• 12. The raptures and ruptures of mobility
• 13. Nigerian London and British Hong Kong: rethinking migration, ethnicity and urban space through journeys
• 14. Situating identities: towards an identities studies without binaries of difference
• 15. For Aïsha: on identity as potentiality
• 16. The structure of afterthought
• Index