student presentation

1. A P R E S E N T A T I O N B Y A L E X A N D C A M
Englishness, Britishness and
whiteness

2. Bridget Byrne
 Interested in the distinction drawn between a
'narrow' Englishness and a more 'inclusive'
Britishness.
 Research examining white lives as racialised
 Qualitative interviews in 1997-8 with mothers of young
children living in Clapham and Camberwell on a range of
issues concerning their everyday practices and experiences.

3.  National identity is the product of state intervention
in terms of politico-legal definitions of borders,
citizenship and belonging. But also exists at the level
of what Michael Billig describes as 'banal
nationalism' - the language and repetition of
nationalism in the everyday.

4.  Some have argued that Black British as a political
identity has excluded and/or marginalised those
non-White identities which are not African-
Caribbean. Tariq Modood, for example stresses the
need to understand Britain as 'multi-racist',
particularly in the context of increasing
Islamaphobia.

5. Romantic vision
 “Perhaps I’m being swept away on a story, and perhaps
it’s because I spent seven years of my life in an all girls’
boarding school. And spent my time singing hymns and
going to church and it’s a very special thing to be
patriotic” (Emma, late 20s, Peckham)
 Peckham did not represent Englishness – the loud
multicultural shops in her area clashed with her view of
Englishness being a quaint village shop.
 ‘Englishness was a romantic and nostalgic vision’ that
was in the past – her school life had ended and the books
she had read were fiction.

6. Changing lifestyle
 Other interviewees were in a similar position – a rural
upbringing contrasting with a city life.
 This came with changes, particularly around eating – no
longer sitting together to eat Sunday lunch and eating foreign
food as opposed to just meat and veg.
 Rosalind struggled to make out what being English
represented: “In a lot of circumstances, it’s always the English
who haven’t got a kind of interesting cultural thing to do”.
 Helen put her lifestyle changes from her to her parents down
to travel being easier: “People have more money, it’s easier to
go abroad, you pick up different customs and ways of living
that you like and then you sort of make a patchwork quilt of
what appeals to you” also suggesting that in that situation,
Englishness could not survive.

7. Sally’s story
 Other interviewees saw the Englishness seen as rural and
quiet as not something to look at nostalgically.
 Sally saw the town in Norfolk she grew up in as narrow
and even verging on racist: “I think I was brought up
looking at things through white eyes. I think it was quite,
in some ways, a racist kind of upbringing. There was a lot
of suspicion, a lot of kind of outright derogatory
remarks”.
 She considered it more ignorance than aggressive racism
– her town was a bubble of white English people doing
white English things, anything different was suspicious.

8. English or British
 Heather considered many occasions where ‘British’ was
used to describe something quintessentially ‘English’ as
means of being politically correct – drinking tea is very
‘British’, Monty Python is very ‘British’ humour.
 She contrasted white ‘British’ humour of Monty Python
or The Good Life with black adolescent and German
humour as being three very different things.
 Appeared quite anti-immigration: “It feels like an
invasion to some people… when the nation is struggling,
it sort of gets annoying when it’s people that you might
consider foreign, when perhaps it’s not politically correct
to call them foreign”.

9.  The crisis of identity facing Englishness and
Britishness at the end of empire is likely to be most
deeply felt by white people yet, as Nayak argues
(2003: 139)
 "the striking contradiction is that we now seem to know far
less about the racialized identities of the ethnic majority
(notably English whites) and who they are in the present post-
imperial moment. The 'burden of representation' endured by
visible minorities has unwittingly implied that they have an
ethnicity or a culture whilst others, in particular the white
English have not. This has led to an over-racialisation of visible
minorities at the expense of a de-racialization of ethnic
majorities."

10.  The interviews also showed the insecure basis of
imaginings of Englishness. They were disrupted by
urban life, by the presence of differently raced
subjects and by the individuals’ own sense of a loss of
class position. Thus, there is an inflexibility in the
formal narration of Englishness which made it
impossible to sustain in the everyday.

11.  Englishness and also perhaps Britishness was
experienced by some as an empty or unmarked norm
which appeared to lack content in the face of what
was seen as the cultural richness of other identities
and forms of living.

12.  For yet others, Englishness was to be actively evaded
or escaped. There was nothing to be salvaged from
an identity associated with class and ‘race’ prejudice.

13.  What we see emerging in some interviews, and in
particular Madeleine’s account, is a rejection of
pedagogical accounts of nationhood and a turn to
more fluid and temporary identifications, for
example as ‘Londoners’