CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
(White) Britishness and its Racialised Others
Organisers: Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon
(White) Britishness and its Racialised Others I
Weedon, Chris (Cardiff University,
United Kingdom) RESIGNIFYING BRITISHNESS
Contemporary Britain is witnessing a major cultural political struggle over the
meaning of British culture, nation and identity. This is an effect of the
changing face of the UK over the last 50 years precipitated by inward migration,
devolution, globalisation and the end of Empire. Questions of race and ethnicity
are fundamental to this struggle. At the heart of debate are challenges to
hegemonic narratives of history and identity written from white Anglo-centric
perspectives. This paper will examine aspects of this on-going cultural
political struggle-evident, for example, in political debate, history, fiction,
film and TV-in the context of a de facto multi-ethnic, multi-racial and
multi-cultural Britain.
Jordan, Glenn (University of Glamorgan
and Butetown History & Arts Centre, United Kingdom).RACE, CULTURAL POLITICS
AND THE HUMANIST PHOTOGRAPHER'S LENS: 'PICTURE POST' IN TIGER BAY
Photography is serious business, involving issues of morality, meaning, memory
and power: for example, there is always something at stake in the ways Others -
the racially and culturally different, the marginalised and excluded - are
portrayed. Generations of residents and former residents of "Tiger
Bay", the famed, multi-ethnic, docklands community in Cardiff, Wales, have
felt deeply aggrieved about the ways in which "Outsiders" -
photographers, writers, media workers, social scientists and others - have
represented them. With one exception: they like the photographs of them done by
Bert Hardy in the early 1950s for Picture Post magazine. What is it about these
photographs that give them such appeal? Is it something to do with the way in
which "the social eye" of documentary humanist photography
"sees" class, racial and cultural difference? Is it something to do
with the codes and politics of Picture Post's documentary practice -
specifically, that they inscribe a counter-hegemonic notion of
"Britishness"?
Byrne, Bridget (University of London,
United Kingdom) IMAGINING ENGLISHNESS: CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS OF NATIONAL
IDENTITY
This paper explores the contested and racialised nature of Englishness as a
national identity. Based on qualitative interviews of white mothers in London,
the paper examines the different ways in which the interviewees positioned
themselves in relation to concepts of Englishness. National identity involves
ways of being, a sense of place and belonging. It is produced through forms of
myth-making and narrative production which depend on particular constructions of
time and space. This paper examines how nation-ness is imagined and lived by the
interviewees. The paper explores how constructions of Englishness related to
constructions of the self and how imaginings of belongings involved imaginings
of otherness. It also describes how, for some of the interviewees, the domestic,
particularly in notions of cleanliness and dirt as well as food and consumption,
was a key metaphor for explaining their relationship to national identity.
(White) Britishness and its
Racialised Others II
Mohanram, Radhika (Cardiff University,
United Kingdom) THE SEXUAL WHITENESS OF VICTORIA
It is a commonplace to acknowledge that Foucault's monumental work, The History
of Sexuality completely revolutionized the academy in its emphasis on sexuality
as a discursive formation, which demands to be read within a framework of
biopower. Yet although Foucault concentrates on the 19th century, he omits to
script in the centrality of colonialism in the formation of Europe,
Europeanness, and European knowledges. This paper looks at Victorian Britain and
asks: How would our readings of sexuality, race, and the body shift if we locate
colonial discourse at the heart of any study of biopower and sexuality? Can
modern sexuality come into visibility if it is not predicated on visual bodily
differences? Is sexuality itself raced? What is the colour of heterosexuality?
Is a perverse sexuality black? How does Victorian Britain construct of white
sexuality?
Shome, Raka (Arizona State University,
USA) WHITE FEMININITY AND NATIONAL MEDIATIONS: THE PRINCESS DIANA PHENOMENON
This paper explores how white femininity functions in the representational
politics of the nation. Taking the media coverage of Princess Diana' s funeral
and the numerous media commemorations that followed as a case study, this
project examines how intersecting borders of race, gender, sexuality, and,
today, globality are mediated through particular technologies of white
femininity in the construction of national identity. This project places this
discussion in the context of larger struggles over the meaning of Britishness
that marked post-imperial Britain of the 1990s-- in particular, its packaging of
a "New Britain" and its production of "cool Britannia." The
larger goal of this project is to examine how images of white femininity
function to both unwrite and rewrite various borders and boundaries of national
belonging in contemporary Anglo contexts.
Ghose, Sheila (New York University, USA
and Stockholm University, Sweden) NOT-IMMIGRANT. ON BRITISH BIO-POLITICS OF
BELONGING AND THE DELIGHT OF INAUTHENTICITY
I investigate what I call self-bastardization in two Asian British
Bildungsromane: Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album (1995) and Meera Syal's Anita
and Me (1996). These texts forge subjectivities for their Asian British
protagonists that unmoor them from the seemingly inescapable legacy of
British/European racism by highlighting the Bildungsroman genre's ironic
dilemma: the quest for self-knowledge cannot be satisfied as the subject can
never fully know or narrate itself. Irony becomes a liberating tactic allowing
the texts to de-reify racist tropes of family, blood and nation that
de-legitimize the protagonists in the context of British bio-politics of
belonging; the protagonists can assert themselves as not-immigrants. By
acknowledging these tropes' fictional nature, the texts can use literature to
weave a kind of authority that acknowledges the provisional nature of the truths
we live by. The protagonists thereby escape the trap of having to prove
themselves authentic inorder to belong.
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