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Part I
Introductory
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1. Introduction
Language, Ethnicity and Youth in Late Industrial Britain
During a game of badminton:
Chris ((to Peter)): what you doing
Peter: PLAYING BADMINTON (.)
Chris: could have fooled me
Rich: go on you serve
Peter: ((in Indian English)): ONE NIL
Imran: love- love one
(adapted from Extract III.8)
During detention:
Ms J: I'll be back in a second with my lunch
Asif: NO dat's sad man (.) I had to miss my play right I've gotta go (2.5)
((Ms J must now have left the room))
Asif((Creole influenced)): Il:unch (.) you don't need no lunch not'n grow anyway ((laughs))
Alan: ((laughs))
Asif: have you eat your lunch Alan
(adapted from Extract II. 17)
Listening to Panjabi music during breaktime:
Sally ((calling out)): OH LORRAINE
EH LORRAINE HAS IT GOT
KENOO MINOO ON it
?: you want the other side
AnonA: it's got ((singing)) holle holle
Sally ((sings)): o kennoo mennoo I love-
Gurmit: oh that
(adapted from Extract IV.5)
Concentrating on exchanges such as these, this book studies sociolinguistic processes in multiracial urban youth culture. It draws on ethnographic research into adolescent friendship groups in one neighbourhood in the South Midlands of England, and it focuses on 'language crossing' - the use of Panjabi by youngsters of Anglo and Afro-Caribbean descent, the use of Creole by Anglos and Panjabis, and the use of stylized Indian English by all three. Although linguistic interchange of this kind has been very little researched, it plays an important role in the negotiation of social identity, and serves as a rich point of entry for analysis of the connections between language, ethnic relations, youth culture and the experience of social change.
Due to the diversity of their ethnic backgrounds, the adolescents in this study differed a good deal in their knowledge of neighbourhood languages, In addition, Panjabi, Creole and Indian English had each been the subject of considerable controversy in race politics. But running contrary to potentially divisive pressures such as these, adolescents often seemed to renegotiate the relationship between language and group membership in the course of spontaneous multiracial recreation. How far, and in what ways, were intricate processes of language sharing and exchange turning the resources originally associated with separate ethnic inheritances towards the enunciation of interethnic youth, class and neighbourhood community?
It can be very difficult to obtain accurate reports of these delicate processes, or to simulate them outside the context of spontaneous peer group interaction. But they can be investigated using the methodologies of ethnographic sociolinguistics (Hymes 1972a,b; Gumperz 1982a), combining close attention to the situations, activities and social relationships that promote language crossing, with detailed analysis of the spontaneous discourse in which it occurs.
1.1 Starting points in sociolinguistics and sociology
In a variety of ways, Roger Hewitt's book White Talk, Black Talk (1986) acts as a central point of departure. Looking closely at adolescent social life in playgrounds, streets and youth clubs in South London, Hewitt provides an ethnographic description of the different ways in which white adolescents developed the use of English-based Caribbean Creole in their interactions with white and black peers. In principle, young people of Caribbean descent were generally opposed to what they regarded as an unjustifiable expropriation of one of the vital resources of their ethnic inheritance, and Hewitt explains this opposition in terms of Creole's major symbolic role in the political struggle against race oppression, locally, nationally and indeed internationally as well. Despite this however, certain minimal uses of Creole by whites were quite widely acceptable to black adolescents, and within the relative privacy of interracial friendship, some white youngsters actually used Creole quite extensively. In describing the delicate processes through which these adolescents managed to gain access to Creole, Hewitt provides a detailed view of the ways in which adolescents provisionally renegotiated the political significance that wider patterns of race stratification had for them.
For sociolinguistics, Hewitt's study is significant both in its sustained attention to the politics of interactional language use, and in its comprehensive description of a type of linguistic practice that has received very little attention in the literature. But it is also important as a sociological contribution to the study of race and youth.
Over the last 20 years in Britain, the social relations of young people of different ethnic backgrounds have been researched from a number of perspectives. The links between race, peer relations and school have been studied quite extensively in education, psychology, and social psychology,1 but within these disciplines the emerging descriptions have frequently been limited by at least three factors. Firstly, because the importance of ethnic group membership usually varies a great deal from one interactional situation to another, there are problems of validity for methods built around a fairly brief encounter between researcher and informant (e.g. sociometry and attitude testing). Secondly, adolescents (and indeed adults) often express their group identifications in inexplicit, non-propositional ways, for example through style, activity and accent, and so some of the most important ethnic processes can be missed in studies that rely on the answers given in questionnaires and interviews (Willis 1977:122; Hewitt 1986: 7-8). Thirdly, research in these traditions is usually very limited in what it can say about the ways in which adolescents actually negotiate ethnic difference in interaction with one another (cf Tomlinson 1983:126; Milner 1983:125; Hewitt 1986:2).
During the 1970s and early 80s there were also a number of ethnographic studies of school and peer group culture which attended to ethnicity (e.g. Pearson 1976; J.Taylor 1976; Robins and Cohen 1978; Troyna 1978; Pryce 1979; Kitwood and Borrill 1980; Wright 1984). These generally presented a fuller picture of the youth cultural milieu influencing group relations, but they were overwhelmingly concerned with providing a description of particular ethnic groups: what actually happened in the arena of intergroup contact was seldom empirically addressed. It is only more recently that a number of studies of youth have centred their attention on cross-ethnic interaction itself, and have located this within a broader context of political and economic relations (Gilroy 1987; Gilroy and Lawrence 1988; Jones 1988; Back 1993). Hewitt's research comes as a front runner among these more recent studies, and it is unique in its demonstration of the central role that language plays in adolescent negotiations of race and ethnic difference.
In the chapters that follow, I shall frequently refer back to Hewitt's research. My own work includes analyses of Creole use among adolescents of non-Caribbean descent, it attends to roughly the same historical period, and in a number of respects, fieldwork methods directly replicated Hewitt's. As with other forms of ethnography, critics often accuse linguistic ethnography of a-theoretical butterfly-collecting - "descriptive fieldwork... at the expense of comparative analysis" (Philipsen and Carbaugh 1986:387; Fasold 1990:60-62; also Hammersley 1987, 1992). Taking note of this, my own study attempts to contribute to a properly cumulative, comparative ethnography of communication (Hymes 1980), and in part, it is through cross-reference to the South London research that I try to do so. But in addition, theoretical aspirations are also assisted by the availability of other, more exclusively sociological studies of the socio-cultural terrain that Hewitt describes, and among these, Paul Gilroy's book There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987) is especially helpful.
Gilroy's book is a detailed cultural history of ethnic relations in Britain from the 1970s to the mid 80s, focusing on dominant mass media discourses, municipal anti-racist campaigns, anti-racist popular movements, and expressive youth culture. These analyses are set in a framework of sociological theory that is much more explicit than Hewitt's, and because (a) it provides an important cultural and political map of contemporary Britain, and because (b) I shall draw on several of its key notions quite frequently, it is worth taking a little time to summarize some of its central arguments.
1.2 Competing grounds for political solidarity
Gilroy pays particular attention to the relationship between race and class: he recognizes that the unequal social and material relationships generated around work are important, but rejects any idea that these have an exclusive role in social structuring. Workplace relations and the conflict between capital and labour are no longer central in the subjective experience of inequality: less than 30% of the UK workforce is now engaged in manufacturing; there is mass unemployment and substantial regional inequality; race solidarity often cross-cuts formal economic divisions; feminist analyses reveal major structural inequalities at home. In view of the many kinds of discrimination that exist outside the workplace, it is no longer possible to regard class alone as an adequate basis for political organization:
What is the working class today? What gender is it? What colour is it? How in the light of its obvious segmentation, is it to be unified? Is this unification still possible or even desirable?... The complex experiential chemistry of class, 'race' and gender... yields an important reminder of the limitations of analysis based exclusively on a narrow conception of class. (1987:19)
Gilroy offers no definitive answer to the questions he poses. But he does provide a detailed account of the way in which different kinds of solidarity compete to replace class as central points for political affiliation. For my research, two are particularly important.
One strand can be found in the discourses of nation that feature in formal politics and the mass media. Here with increasing force, an ethnically exclusive idea of British culture and nationhood is put forward as a central basis for political solidarity. With the late industrial crisis in the political representation of the working class movement, people in subordinate material and economic positions are increasingly invited to conceptualize their political situation in terms of nation and ethnicity. Discourses about nation are involved in some of the most obvious forms of racism. But at the same time, there is also a shift away from crude efforts to define nationhood in terms of biological race, towards a view of nationhood in terms of 'culture' and 'way of life'.
This shift accommodates more subtle forms of racism and it finds expression in more respectable political circles. When nationality is understood as 'culture' rather than as biological descent, the boundaries around national belonging become more permeable, there is some scope for assimilation, and there is no longer such an obvious contradiction of the fundamental liberal view that people should be judged by their conduct rather than by their birth. Even so, this new approach continues to have much the same kind of impact as discourses which invoke biological definitions of 'race'. This is because it is grounded in a narrow interpretation of 'culture'. 'Cultures' are seen as a set of discrete, homogeneous and fairly static ethnic essences, and these ethnic essences are regarded as serving as the central influence in shaping a person's character. Gilroy calls this perspective 'ethnic absolutism' (ibid.:chapter 2). It gives to ethnicity an exclusive emphasis which hides all the other social categories which individuals belong to (categories defined in terms of age, gender, sexual orientation, residence, occupation, interests, style, activity, role etc. etc.). It obscures the fact that individuals form complicated and often contradictory patterns of solidarity and opposition across a range of category memberships. And the emphasis on one aspect of identity to the exclusion of all others permits the straightforward division of people into simple dichotomous groups, a division supported by the spurious and idealized notion of unitary 'Britishness'. The possibility of conversion from non-British to British remains, but ethnic absolutism means that any activity showing the traces of non-British roots can be read for signs of disloyalty rather than, for example, as an effort to articulate complex experience in a way that might make sense of life in Britain for a highly heterogeneous population.2 Gilroy argues that in concrete terms, from about 1976, one of the effects of this discursive shift towards a culturalist definition of Britishness has been to draw black cultural and recreational institutions (for example clubs and social events) into sharp public focus, casting them as the alien catalysts of social disruption in British life. These have become the target for heavy police surveillance, as well as a primary site of political confrontation (ibid.:Ch. 3).
This, then, has been one influential and reactionary effort to generate new forms of late industrial solidarity - it makes itself very evident in the press and public media, it is 'ethnically absolutist', equating nation with culture and then culture with ethnicity, and it has coordinated with increased state surveillance of black recreational institutions. Differing from this in almost every respect, Gilroy then draws attention to the political sensibilities emerging from within mixed communities in inner city areas. He suggests that as a potential point of orientation in the organization of (radical) collective action, experiences of multiracial urban community actually compete with discourses of 'Britishness', and in an attempt to define the character of this kind of alternative political solidarity, he draws on the theory of 'new social movements' (Gilroy 1987:Ch. 6; Melucci 1980, 1981, 1985, 1988; Touraine 1981, 1985).
Gilroy's analysis of urban communities as social movements is more tentative than his analysis of the dominant race and nation discourses, and he also suggests that a more robust radical politics can be identified in black music and the modes of consumption most closely associated with it (1987:Ch. 5). Nevertheless, there is a great deal of relevance for my own work in the way in which Gilroy discusses social movements.
A social movement - for example, the women's or the peace movement - is neither simply a pressure group, nor is it a "peripheral phenomenon of deviation or outright conflict" (Touraine 1981:94). Far from being "exceptional or dramatic events, social movements lie permanently at the heart of social life" (ibid.:29), and this is reflected in Gilroy's phrase 'interpretive community'. Seen as interpretive communities, social movements
are not ready-made agents for structural change, but rather "symptoms of resistance to domination". They have their roots in a radical sense of powerlessness and though their resistance may have important effects on cities and societies, they are best understood as defensive organizations which are unlikely to be able to make the transition to more stable forms of politics (Gilroy 1987:231).
Social movements are ensembles of causes, and rather than seeking to conquer political power or state apparatuses, their objective is "the control of a field of autonomy or independence vis a vis the system" (ibid.:226).
Their goals involve the transformation of new modes of subordination located outside the immediate processes of production and consequently require the reappropriation of space, time, and of relationships between individuals in their day to day lives... "The defense of identity, continuity and predictability of personal experience is beginning to cons...
