The dis/comfort of white British nationhood: encounters, otherness and postcolonial continuities

Abstract

Recent work on the affective dimensions of nationhood, identity and belonging has often overlooked discomfort in favour of positive experiences of sameness and security. Contrary to this tendency, this paper, based on interview narratives produced with white British middle-class people in the suburbs of London, examines the role of discomfort in experiences of nationhood, as well as the nature and meaning of that discomfort. In the first part of the paper, I demonstrate how nationhood becomes in and through uncomfortable encounters with other people, places and objects. Then, in the second part, I show how, for some, the experience of becoming national in encounters with the "other" is itself experienced uncomfortably in the context of a postcolonial Britain where people are expected to 'love themselves as different' (Fortier, 2007). On the one hand, the paper challenges the idea of privileged national belonging as wholly comfortable. Yet, the analysis also exposes the relative comfort of white British people's nationhood. The paper offers important insight into the uneven and hierarchical nature of contemporary nationhood and highlights the value of attending to the entanglement of comfort and discomfort in work on affective nationalism.

The (in)significance of citizenship in white British citizens’ narratives of national belonging

“…The British-English citizen-national dualism thus produced an illusion of inclusion that facilitated exclusion, the idea of open and inclusive British citizenship operating as a façade for the realities of exclusive nationalism. For participants like Karen, this meant that they could present a welcoming and inclusive attitude toward migrants, valued among many sections of London's white middle-classes (Clarke, 2019), while still preserving an exclusive idea of Englishness.…”

Recognising British Bodies: The Significance of Race and Whiteness in ‘Post-Racial’ Britain

“…In this article, I interrogate the relationship between race and nation in 'post-racial' Britain through examination of the informal markers of national 'sameness' and 'strangeness' mobilised by white middle-class British participants during interviews, building on an understanding of recognition as an economy in which people place others by 'reading the signs on their body, or by reading their body as a sign' (Ahmed, 2000: 8). The intention is to produce better understanding of the contemporary significance of race to nationhood through critical analysis of its reproduction among people for whom national belonging is generally taken-for-granted (Clarke, 2019(Clarke, , 2020Skey, 2013;Tyler, 2012). By focusing on this relatively privileged group, the article responds to calls for research to address the reproduction of belonging within 'mainstream' society (Alba and Duyvendak, 2017;Antonsich, 2012;Simonsen, 2016) and to critically examine middleclass complicity in racial nationalism (Bhambra, 2017), thereby adding an important counterbalance to claims that racial nationalism is the preserve of the working-classes.…”