New Geographies of Race and Racism

Caroline Bressey, Claire Dwyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317088417
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

In recent years geographers interested in ethnicity, 'race' and racism have extended their focus from examining geographies of segregation and racism to exploring cultural politics, social practice and everyday geographies of identity and experience. This edited collection illustrates this new work and includes research on youth and new ethnicities; the contested politics of 'race' and racism; intersections of ethnicity, religion and 'race' and the theorisation and interrogation of whiteness. Case studies from the UK and Ireland focus on the intersections of 'race' and nation and the specificities of place in discourses of racilisation and identity. A key feature of the book is its engagement with a range of methodological approaches to examining the significance of race including ethnography, visual methodologies and historical analysis.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Island Geographies: New Geographies of Race and Racism

Claire Dwyer and Caroline Bressey

Island Geographies

This volume of essays exploring the geographies of race and racism in the British Isles emerged from conversations we had, back in the summer of 2003, about absences and presences of race and racism in contemporary geography. Questions emerged in part from our own research interests. For Caroline, a key theme of her work has been to make visible the black presence in British history and to challenge historical memories that imagine Britain as ‘multicultural’ only after the arrival of the Windrush in 1948. For Claire, the emergence of an invigorated stream of ‘new’ geographies of religion (Holloway and Valins 2002; Kong 2001), raised questions about how religious identifications and religious identity politics were considered alongside the more traditional focus of geographies of race and racism. Like a number of others working in different places (Peake and Schein 2000; Schein 2002) we wanted to open up some space for reflecting on questions of race, racism and ethnicity in geography and indeed to urge the enduring geographical significance of racialised discourses, imaginaries and experiences.

At the Annual Conference of the RGS/IBG in 2005 we organised a session ‘New Geographies of Race and Racism’ as an opportunity to bring together researchers and open debates. This volume is, in part, an outcome of the two sessions we had at the conference and includes some of the papers which were originally presented there. However, in putting together this volume we have also commissioned a number of additional chapters to complement and extend our focus on understanding geographies of race and racism within the specific context of the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. While much might be gained from a wider international comparative focus, in this collection we have sought coherence by situating the discussion of race and racism within specific national, historical and geographical contexts. As we suggest below, current discussions of difference, inclusion, exclusion and religious discrimination particularly in the UK, especially post 9/11 and 7/7, are located in discourses of race and racism, even if these terms are avoided in public debates, and this collection offers a timely reflection on the geographies of these discourses.

One inspiration for this collection came from a re-reading of Peter Jackson’s pioneering edited collection of essays Race and Racism: Essays in Social Geography published in 1987. That volume was important in signalling a shift from more quantitative studies of social geographies of ‘ethnic segregation’ to a more politicised, theoretically grounded approach which drew upon Robert Miles’ understanding of ‘race’ as socially constructed discourse producing historically and geographically specific racisms. We are delighted that Peter has agreed to contribute the afterword to this book. A second inspiration, and one which we evoke above in our title for this introduction, is Raphael Samuel’s Island Stories, Unravelling Memory. The second volume of Samuel’s Theatres of Memory was published posthumously in 1998. In it he reflects on British histories, particularly echoes of Empire, and explores how these are reanimated in different ways in the political present. In drawing together this volume we wanted to develop an historicised perspective on the geographies of race and racism which recognised both the legacies of contemporary discourses and imaginaries and the ways in which histories are re-worked in different presents.

This collection was also motivated by a recognition of the significance of race and ethnicity in contemporary British politics. The twin themes of terrorism and migration which dominate contemporary British politics and popular public debate are infused with ideas about race and the practices of racism, even though there is a marked effort by successive political leaders to distance themselves from these terms. A backlash against ‘multiculturalism’ as both discourse and practice and a fear of the mobilisation of right wing political movements produces a careful language of ‘integration’ and ‘cohesion’. However, questions of integration, difference, cohesion and ‘Britishness’ are at the centre of contemporary politics in Britain, questions which both reanimate and re-work previous racialised discourses (Back et al. 2002).

Of particular salience are geographical imaginaries in the political and media framings of the politics of race. For example, explanations of urban unrest in northern Pennine towns in 2001; deaths of young, ‘urban’ Black men involved in ‘gang violence’ in South London and Manchester; or resentment towards migrant workers in rural Lincolnshire are framed by particular understandings of place which deploy racialised imaginative geographies. Alongside this mobilisation of the racialised imaginative geographies is a contested political debate about the geography of ethnicity. The urban disturbances in the cities of Oldham, Bradford and Burnley in 2001 when young white and Asian men fought each other and the police in street battles provoked new policy responses, just as the urban conflicts of the 1980s had some twenty years earlier, generating a new language of ‘community cohesion’ (Home Office 2001). Community cohesion discourses mobilise particular geographies of ethnicity. Thus the concept of ‘segregation’, the cornerstone of the earliest social geographies of ethnicity (Peach et al. 1981), has been reanimated and questions about how segregation might be defined, mapped and measured have brought geographers of ethnicity into the front line of political debate (as the chapters by Michael Poulsen and Ron Johnston, Deborah Phillips and Michael Keith in this volume attest). At the same time, policy debate about how community cohesion might be achieved mobilises a geography of locality and socio-spatial interaction which, while it might draw inspiration from Robert Putnam’s social capital theory, also echoes calls for ‘convivial urban culture’ (Gilroy 2004) or ‘everyday multiculture’ (Amin 2002), evocations of local geographies of multiculture which are explored further in several chapters in this volume. It is clear that contested geographical imaginaries are central to contemporary British politics of ‘race’ and ethnicity.

Debating Geographies of Race and Racism

In this section we summarise some of the key issues shaping new geographies of race and racism. We explore three themes. First, we consider the complexity of contemporary categories of race and ethnicity reflecting both on geographical approaches and shifting political and policy discourses. Second, we reflect on the different geographies of race and racism highlighting the significance of the microgeographies of everyday life in understanding how ethnicity is lived and how ideas of race are made, mobilised and encountered. Third, and building from these two themes, we discuss shifts in contemporary theorisations of race and ethnicity and the possibilities of a politics of ‘post-race’.

Framing Race and Ethnicity

Studies of the geographies of race and racism in Britain have been shaped by an understanding of the social construction of race – that ‘race’ is a discursive category which, although often depicted as natural or biological is ideological, is made in and through particular times and places (Jackson and Penrose 1993; Jackson 1987). Historical geographies have traced the emergence of specific ideas of race and place (Anderson 1987; Anderson 2007) and linked racialised discourses to processes of colonial expansion and to contested geographies of immigration and nation (Smith 1993). Recent work in historical and post-colonial geography has also done much to emphasise contradictions and instabilities in the histories of race and racism which are commonly evoked, tracing for example the significant presence of a Black British population prior to the post-war new Commonwealth immigration (Bressey 2003) and reflecting on how such historical perspectives might change the ways in which ideas about race and anti-racism are articulated or imagined (Bonnett 2000).

Shifting approaches to studying geographies of race and racism can be set within the context of changing political and discursive contexts. Geographical work in the 1970s and 1980s centred on racialised urban inequalities and social unrest realised in particular through conflicts in the housing market (Smith 1989) and policing (Keith 1993) and focused often on the experiences of an urban black British population. Geographers, like urban sociologists, placed an emphasis on understanding the ways in which racism worked through institutional structures and discourses. Alongside other anti-racist theorists their work was marked by a critique of the concept of ethnicity since it could too easily be deployed as culturalist and essentialised. Yet the late 1980s marked a theoretical shift in the deployment of the term ethnicity, initiated in part by Stuart Hall’s call for the recognition of ‘new ethnicities’ (1988), a focus which emphasised both the creative and strategic deployment of different forms of ‘identity politics’ and perhaps a more anthropological engagement with the dynamic ways in which ethnic belonging and boundary making is constructed and contested. While understanding racialised discourses and practices remained central to critical analysis, research also engaged with the ways in which individual and group identities and belonging were produced and negotiated. For example geographers explored processes of ethnic identification through key events like Carnival (Jackson 1988; Spooner 1996) or in contested regeneration politics (Jacobs 1993; Keith 2005). Studies highlighted the ways in which the meaning of neither race or ethnicity is fixed but contextual and contingent. To make them an object of study requires an analysis of the power relations through which differences are both made visible and given meaning. Geographers of race and racism negotiate a tension, as Keith (2005, 6) describes in his analysis of multicultural cities, ‘between languages of belonging and forces of power that make racial subjects visible’.

One site through which this tension is both made evident, and contested, is through the demographic measures used to categorise ethnicity. Analysis of the measures of ethnicity in the census in England and Wales since its introduction in 1991 reveals a shift from categories in 1991 representing individuals by a form of nationality, such as ‘Black-Caribbean’, ‘Indian’ or ‘Pakistani’, to categories based on hyphenated identities, which enable respondents to define themselves as ‘Asian or Asian British’, ‘Black or Black British’. There was a shift too between 1991 and 2001 to expand the category of ‘White’ to include ‘White Irish’ and to include a dedicated ‘Mixed’ ethnic category. In 2001 the introduction of a religion question in the census also reflects an increased emphasis on religion as a key marker of ethnic identity. It seems likely that by 2011 further expansion will allow other groups such as Romanies and Arabs to identify themselves and will expand the category of ‘Asian’ to include the Chinese. It could be argued that this plethora of identities offers multiple ‘ethnic’ identities, while simultaneously narrowing the possibilities of a multicultural identity of Britishness.

The shifting categories deployed in the census can be contexualised against broader demographic processes and shifting definitions of ethnicity. In the 1980s the politics of ethnicity was dominated by ‘moral panics’ surrounding the marginalisation and assumed disaffection of young Black men (Gilroy 1987). In the 1990s young Asian Muslim men became the new ‘folk devil’ (Alexander 2000) with Islam racialised in the context of fears of global Islamic terrorism. New migration patterns reflect a shift from labour migration from New Commonwealth countries to asylum seeker-led migration from the Middle East, the Balkans and Africa as well as post-accession migration from Eastern Europe. Policy debates about institutional racism, provoked by the Macpherson Report (following the failures of the police to properly investigate the racist murder of the teenager Stephen Lawrence in April 1993) or discussions of multicultural Britishness foregrounded in the Parekh Report, have been succeeded in the wake of the 2001 urban conflicts and the terrorist attacks of 7/7 by a policy of ‘Community Cohesion’ variously targeted at ameliorating concerns about Muslim extremism, white working-class racism and tensions produced by new migration.

Geographical work reflects this shifting demographic, political and policy framing of discourses of race and ethnicity. Geographers have sought to unpack the concept of ethnicity and particularly to explore the notion of Whiteness both as a historically and spatially situated discourse (Bonnett 2000; Dwyer and Jones 2000) and as a lived ethnic identity made through intersections of class, place and gender (Nayak 2003; Haylet 2001; see also Byrne 2006). Walter’s (2001) study of Irish women in Britain also serves to fracture the homogeneity of the category of whiteness, as does the work of rural geographers seeking to disrupt the image of the countryside as a homogenous white space, free from racial conflict (see Askins, 2006). Attention has also been given to the racialisation and socio-spatial exclusion of other groups including asylum seekers (Grillo 2005; Hubbard 2005) and travellers (Holloway 2003). As Muslim populations have emerged as central to the politics of race and ethnicity in Britain, geographers have sought to understand both the ways in which Muslimness might be expressed as a situated ethnic identity (Dwyer 1999; Hopkins 2007) and the spatialised politics of Muslim identification in the public sphere (Gayle 2003; Naylor and Ryan 2002).

Geographies of Race and Ethnicity

Evocations of locality are central to current articulations of ‘Community Cohesion’ policy in Britain (even though they might be critiqued for romanticised notions of ‘community’ (Wetherell 2007)). Writing in response to the policy debates provoked by the urban conflicts in 2001, Ash Amin (2002, 959) emphasises the importance of understanding the ‘daily negotiation of ethnic difference’ within ‘the micropolitics of everyday social contact and encounter’. Understanding how ideas about ethnicity are made in and through local and ‘everyday’ encounters has been given renewed focus. Geographers have drawn inspiration from anthropologies of urban youth cultures (see particularly Back 1996; Alexander 2000; Gillespie 1995) which illustrate the nuanced, provisional and contingent ways in which ethnic identities are negotiated. Les Back’s analysis of youth cultures in a housing estate in South London emphasises that national imaginaries are mediated in and through local understandings and that ethnic identities are made through encounter and in place. Urban ethnographies foreground the possibilities and challenges of ‘encounter and contact’ central to contemporary ‘metropolitan multiculture’ (Keith 2005,2). Their insights lie precisely in some of the contradictions and conflicts which these intercultural or multicultural exchanges produce (a poignant example are the skinheads interviewed by Nayak 1999; see also Fortier 2007). It also offers the possibility of understanding geographies of race and racism through ‘extroverted’ (Massey 1994) geographical imaginaries which re-entangle local experiences with transnational memories, networks and identifications.

In Anoop Nayak’s (2003) ethnography of young white masculinities in NorthEast England he traces local place and class based identifications as well as the re-working of transnational Black subcultural styles negotiated through nuanced everyday geographies. Such empirically grounded, place-based studies also offer insights into the inadequacy of ethnic categories particularly for young people variously positioned as ‘mixed race’. While Back (1996) traces contingent and provisional racialised boundaries, Mahtani (2002, 425) suggests the possibilities for ‘complicated performances which … disrupt oppressive and dichotomous readings of … racialised identities’ (see also Twine 1996).

Geographers, like Nayak, are mindful of the dangers of exploring race and ethnicity only through the celebrated, ‘colourful’ or spectacular sites such as Birmingham’s Balti belt or London’s Brick Lane (McGuinness 2000, 225). Watt’s study of young people in the ‘non-place space’ of a Home Counties small town (Watt 1998) and Back and Nayak’s (1999) analysis of racism in the suburbs offer alternative approaches to understanding the intertwining of ethnic identities and imaginaries and place – particularly how white identities are forged. There has also been a sustained engagement both with analysing experiences of rural racism and the exclusion of black people from the countryside (Neal 2002; Garland ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Island Geographies: New Geographies of Race and Racism
• PART 1: RACING HISTORIES AND GEOGRAPHIES
• PART 2: RACE, PLACE AND POLITICS
• PART 3: RACE, SPACE AND ‘EVERYDAY’ GEOGRAPHIES
• Index