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.