‘It Just Feels English Rather than Multicultural’: Local Interpretations of Englishness and Non-Englishness

128

145

In many parts of the world, nationalism has gone underground. It's there, just beneath the surface, underpinning the social order without requiring, or even permitting, much tinkering. This is the realm of the unselfconscious: nationhood not as an object of purposeful manipulation, but as an unspoken set of assumptions about the national order of things. But if the nation is unseen, unheard, unnoticed, how do we know this? Indeed, how can we know this? In this paper, I elaborate a breaching approach for uncovering the ways the nation is taken for granted. I look to the edges of the nation: the places, times and situations where the nation is on the periphery – the edges – of consciousness, lurking just beneath the surface where it might be teased out with a carefully concocted breach. My aim is to explore and exploit these edges to turn unselfconscious suppositions about the nation into explicit articulations of the nation.

Section: The Edges Of the Nationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The edges of the nation: a research agenda for uncovering the taken‐for‐granted foundations of everyday nationhood

Fox

2016

128

145

“…As in Mann's () account of the nation‐ness of local place, the distinctiveness of Porthcawl as a place referred to both the embodied qualities of locals themselves and the characteristics of Porthcawl as a ‘thing’ in itself. In Porthcawl, locals were aware that their town, and by extension themselves as individuals, had certain distinct characteristics or traits which made their ‘type’ of Welshness ‘different’, in this case, Porthcawl's ‘neutral’ accent, which was a recurring theme.…”

Section: Struggling To Belongmentioning

confidence: 99%

Welshness in ‘British Wales’: negotiating national identity at the margins

Evans

2018

Popular interpretations of national identity often focus on the unifying qualities of nationhood. However, societies frequently draw hierarchical distinctions between the people and places who are ‘most national’, and those who are ‘least national’. Little attention is paid to these marginal places within the nation and the experiences of their inhabitants. This article helps to address this by analysing the ‘less Welsh’ British Wales region of Wales, a country that has traditionally possessed a hierarchical, regionally constituted nationhood. The article studies the British Wales region both ‘from above’ – considering how some areas develop as ‘less national’ – and ‘from below’, introducing empirical ethnographic work into ‘everyday Welshness’ in this area. Whilst previous work on hierarchical nationhood focuses on how hierarchies are institutionalized by the state, this article demonstrates how people at the margins of the nation actively negotiate their place in the nation. Whilst people in this area expressed a strong Welshness, they also struggled to place themselves in the nation because they had internalized their lowly place within the national hierarchy. The article demonstrates the importance of place and social class for national identity construction and draws attention to the role of power in the discursive construction of hierarchical nationhood.

“…Condor et al (: 140) argue that reluctance to identify as English among minorities should not be interpreted as a sense of ‘exclusion’, but an ‘autonomous ethnic preference’. A related argument proposes that if Englishness is understood not as a national identity but as an ethnic identity existing under the broader umbrella of a civic Britishness that includes all ethnic groups, then the association of Englishness with whiteness is not necessarily problematic (Fenton and Mann ; Leddy‐Owen ; Mann ). Condor et al (: 152–3) and Fenton (: 15) also caution against the conflation of ‘symbolic’ exclusion associated with national identities and social exclusion, with its attendant material consequences.…”

Section: National Identities Minorities and The Uk Censusesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This would seem to be supported by the negative association between national identification and perceptions of discrimination among people in minority groups (Karlsen and Nazroo ; Maxwell ). Finally, even if we broadly accept that ‘rather than ‘housing diversity’, the category English is treated as one of the many other ethnicities within a multiethnic national space’ (Mann : 125), this leaves some sociological puzzles.…”

Section: National Identities Minorities and The Uk Censusesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sub‐state national identities among minority groups in Britain: a comparative analysis of 2011 census data

Bond

2016

Using data from a new question in the 2011 UK census, national identities across minority ethno‐religious groups in England, Wales and Scotland are compared. The findings not only substantiate earlier work showing high levels of British identification among minority groups but also demonstrate that this does not extend to sub‐state national identities. The extent of sub‐state national identification varies between different minorities, but the nature of this variation also depends on the specific (sub‐state) national context. The findings may be understood in relation to key biographical ‘markers’ of national identity. These markers help explain variations in sub‐state national identities to a much greater extent than British identity, but their effect also varies across the different nations. The analysis demonstrates the importance of examining sub‐state as well as state (British) identities and heeding differences in the ways in which these identities might be conceived and asserted across national borders within the same state.