Multiculture and British Cultural Studies

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Multiculture and British Cultural Studies

• Lecture 5
• 17/03/06

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LKJ here to stay ina inglan
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Multiculturalism is a contested and plural idea
across a variety of contexts

• Postcolonial nation states
• Nation states with indigenous linguistic,
  cultural, ethnic and/or religious minorities
• Post-WW2 nation states
• Post-Soviet Union nation states
• Nation states, regions, municipalities and urban
  areas networked through globalised flows of
  migration
• Everywhere, always and ever, more or less

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Does multiculturalism describe a reality, or
propose responses to that reality?

• Description
• Philosophy
• Political and policy practice

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Needs and interests in different practices of
multiculturalism

• Identity
• Belonging
• Legitimacy
• Entitlement

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The postcolonial state of the UK often discussed
now in relation to failure of multiculturalism

• Too much diversity (Goodhardt)
• Lack of a common civic (national) culture
• Multiculturalism as micro-colonial arrangement
• Culture in multiculturalism is essentialised and
  depoliticised
• Failure to appreciate the nature of the racial
  state

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Paul Gilroy There Aint No Black in the Union
Jack (1987/2002)
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Why aint there no Black in the Union Jack?

• The blockages around immigration, war and
  national identity are significant in themselves
  but they can also be interpreted as symptoms of
  deeper difficultieswe are still along way from
  comprehending why Britain has shown itself to be
  incapable of coming to terms with its black and
  other minority settlers, why it is has been quite
  so hopeless and resistant to the possibility of
  adjusting that imperilled national identity so
  that it might be more inclusive, cosmopolitan and
  habitableI would like to suggest that these
  chronic difficulties which periodically produce
  acute bouts of racial and national anxiety arise
  from melancholic responses to the loss of
  imperial pre-eminence and the painful demand to
  adjust the life of the national collective to a
  severely reduced sense of itself as a global
  power
• Paul Gilroy, There Aint No Black in the Union
  Jack (1987/2002 xxxvi-xxxvii)

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Gilroys criticism of British Cultural Studies

• Preoccupation with Englishness and Britishness
• Focus on class obscures intersection of class
  with race (racialised experience), gender,
  ethnicity
• Cannot artificially separate race and
  nationality, and racism and nationalism

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Consequences of focus on class and nation

• (Black communities) were irreducible to their
  class positions because racism entered into the
  multi-modal processes in which classes were being
  constituted. It helps to appreciate that this
  historical predicament was over-determined by
  Britains painful loss of Empire and that the
  countrys communities of strange and alien are
  still at risk of sometimes being engulfed by the
  profound cultural and psychological consequences
  of decline which is evident on many levels
  economic and material as well as cultural and
  psychological

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Relevance of media?

• Our integrity as human beings does not flow
  from our access to material resources, but is
  dependent upon processes of cultural domination
  (being represented as inferior) non-recognition
  (being excluded from the dominant imagery of
  ones culture) and disrespect (being continually
  portrayed in a negative or stereotypical way)
• Nick Stevenson (2003) Cultural Citizenship,
  Cosmopolitan Questions