From: L.J.Connell-AT-sussex.ac.uk (Liam Connell)
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 10:17:35 GMT
Subject: Re: Pedantic Postcolonial Point (fwd)



Forwarded Message:
From: Liam Connell <ebpd0-AT-central.susx.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 10:09:32 GMT 
Subject: Re: Pedantic Postcolonial Point 
To: postcolonial-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU


I am slightly concerned that this line of enquiry is moving away from the 
issue as orignally raised.  It seems to me that what was first expressed 
as a concern that certain national categories - in this instance British - are represented as 
racially ( as distinct from ethnically) homogenious.

Britishness has never been ethnically homogenious as the divisions of 
England/Scotland/Wales and, in a different way, Ireland are only the most obvious examples. 
 A US tendancy to treat English and British as synonymous ( shared to some extent by 
English-British ) goes someway to explaining why these obvious categories are sometimes 
less apparent than they might be.  Nevertheless even within Englishness there has always 
been huge ethnic variety - and the literary programmes which d maruyama cites elide these 
differences as much as any racial identities which might now be said to constitutes England 
(Britain) if not British and English identity.

This is surely the point.  Although Britain is a hugely ethnically and racially diverse 
community, its projection of identity, of nationhood, is constructed around very narrow 
images of a white rural-Englishness.  In recent debates surrounding constitutional change 
John Major talked about Britishness in terms of warm-beer and cricket pitches on the 
village green as if this had anything to do with the majority urban experience.  Yet in doing so 
he was merely extending the trend which developed during the Thatcher years of constructing 
the national image through the medium of a nostalgic rendering of a presumed golden age 
which, surely without coincidence, was before the majority of Britain's racially different 
immigrant communities had arrived.  In this sense the Merchant-Ivory productions are part of 
a Thatcherite attempt to refigure the nation along ethnically (and ethically) anterior lines.  
Stuart Hall has written on this point in _British Cinema and Thatcherism_ (or sometin like 
that).  To that end, even though _The Remains of the Day_ was written by Kazuo Ishiguro, its 
presentation was part of a project that attempts to reconfirm Britishness as racially 
homogenous.

As far as someone like Hanif Kureshi (mentioned earlier) is concerned his attempts to 
complicate this vision of British/Englishness are admirable, I recommend his short story 'My 
Son the Fanatic' in _The Post-Colonial Question_ Chambers and Curti (Routledge, 1996).  
However I would point to an article by Robert Stam in a book on 'Third World' representations 
in the media <can't remember the exact title but it was cited on the list recently> in which 
he treats Kureshi as a 'diasporic Third World' writer.  I have some problems with this 
especially as Kureshi is working within a fairly priviledged position within the British media 
establishment and his work seems particularly address towards British rather than 'Third 
World' (Terrible phrase) identity.

Sorry, I've lost the plot a bit here.  
My point is that it seems to me pointless to talk of US perceptions of British/Englishness 
without recognising the very real and historically specific, political mechanisms that are 
working in Britain to construct a national identity that is white [Norman] Anglo-Saxon.  Of 
course the American tendancy to identify with historical national identities - third, forth, fith 
generation emigrants who think of themselves as Irish, Scottish etc. - doesn't help in this 
regard because it fundamentally relies upon the very historical depictions of these nations 
which tend to exlude racially different immigrants.

liam






     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---