ABSTRACT
In October 2000 in Britain, the publication of a report on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (CFMEB 2000) triggered an intense debate that dominated the English press1 for the subsequent four weeks. Against an outlook of impending change suggested by the report’s title, a striking feature of the response to the report was the dominance of declarations that Britain and Britishness are and always have been inherently multicultural. As I explain below, such declarations were aimed at defying the report’s suggestion that Britishness carries racial connotation, which was misread as an accusation of Britishness as inherently racist. The retort was clear: how can ‘we’ be racist if we’ve always been multicultural? ‘We’ are proud of ‘our’ inherent cultural diversity and recognize that it ‘strengthens’ and ‘enriches’ the nation. This position dominated the response to the ‘Parekh Report’, as it is also
known,2 suggesting that the nation is perceived, almost unanimously, as impossible to conceive without taking in cultural minorities. This signalled a substantive shift in public understandings of what it means to be British today. Conceptions of Englishness as inherently multicultural, even hybrid, are not new (Palmer 2002), but this version of multicultural Britain shifts the focus away from Englishness towards a Britishness that is more than the cumulative effect of adding its constitutive parts (England, Scotland, Wales). This is a conception of Britishness that centres on ideas of inherent diversity and mixiture that dissolve differences.3 Mixing is a key principle of multicultural Britain, and is widely hailed as the antidote to segregation, differentialist politics, and the threats of racist violence and hate crimes. When couched in the language of kinship and bloodlines, the discourse of mixing serves to trace the genealogy of the nation’s inherent hybridity and to recast diversity as a timeless characteristic of Britishness. ‘We’re all a little Brit of everything’, as a Daily Mirror headline put it in October 2000, the author adding that ‘[g]enetically, the British are among
the most multi-ethnic races on Earth’ (Furbank 2000). As a ‘nation of immigrants’, in the words of the former Tory leader William Hague (Hague 2000), the Britain of the twenty-first century is one where the capacity to assimilate and absorb other cultures is celebrated. This contrasts with 1990s debates where concerns about immigration ‘flows’ presented the ‘assimilation’ of ‘all other cultures’ as forced upon Britain, and as a threat to ‘our own identity’ (Daily Express 31 May 1993, in Gabriel 1998: 104). Today, rather than seen as being forced upon Britain, assimilation is perceived as a force of Britishness (or Englishness, depending on who is speaking; see Ackroyd 2002).4 That Britain is a ‘Mongrel Nation’5
is no longer a source of concern or shame, but rather of pride. This recasting of British history into a new genealogy of the British present is about re-writing the national same so that ‘we’ could love ourselves as different. Thus the hankering for national greatness endures, but its inflection differs from ideals of ethnic and racial homogeneity as they were articulated in Thatcher’s and Major’s ‘back to basics’ politics. In October 2000, in the face of the inescapable ‘multicultural question’,
as Stuart Hall puts it (2000), advocates of rightist, centrist, and leftist politics recognized that Britain is a multicultural society, and that, as ‘a nation’ it must take stock and contend with the presence of the ‘other’ within its midst. Britain, in this respect, is developing its own version of what I call ‘multiculturalist nationalism’, that is, the reworking of the nation as inherently multicultural.6 Multiculturalism is generally considered in relation to specific national settings, but the predominant theory is that diversity is a disruptive, extraneous element causing a crisis of the nation, conceived as founded on monoculturalism. Similarly, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘nationalism’ are widely conceived as relating to separate and distinct issues: the first with struggles over equality and recognition on the basis of ‘identity politics’; the second, with politics of state sovereignty and exclusivity that are either associated with right-wing politics (such as the British National Party (BNP)) or with separatist movements (as in Quebec, the Basque country, or Northern Ireland). The question posed by the Parekh Report, and cited in the epigraph, resonates with such conceptions by suggesting that multiculturalism is post-national. In contrast, I suggest that in multiculturalist nationalism there is a shift away from linear narratives of nations moving from monoculture and exclusivity to multiculture and inclusivity, in favour of a narrative that posits multiculture and diversity at the heart of the nationalist project. The media response to the Parekh Report suggested a version of British
nationalism that imagines the nation as already inherently multicultural. A neo-ethnic version of national identity emerged: one based as a common hybridity. Gerd Baumann’s remark about the US can be paraphrased here: ‘It is the multiethnic hybridity of many [British] citizens that is used to argue for a shared neoethnic endorsement of national unity. If everyone’s ancestry were ‘‘mixed’’, then everyone’s present identity would be the same:
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superethnically [British]’ (1999: 34). Still primarily ethnicized, the new nation is now re-imagined as the result of a timeless mixing of cultures. This chapter is framed by a wider interest in what happens to the definition of ‘national culture’ when ‘minority cultures’ are not only let in, but redefined as integral to the nation itself (Ahmed 2000: 97). With respect to my immediate concerns, a further question is: who are the legitimate multicultural subjects entitled to belong to the national community and to speak in its name? In addition, what counts as a legitimate speech act? I address these questions through the analysis of the pride politics that
dominated the debate about the ‘future of multi-ethnic Britain’ in the four weeks following the release of the Parekh Report in October 2000; indeed, as I show below, the controversy was overshadowed by declarations of pride and accusations of shame. A key aim of this chapter is to consider the role of emotions – more specifically feelings for the nation – in policing the terms of belonging and entitlement to citizenry. By considering emotions as they are taken up and circulated in the press, I discuss the effects of displays of emotions on the kind of national community, and national subject, that are being imagined. What kinds of affective interpellation are being attempted in the deployment to the registers of pride and shame? In other words, how does the resort to the emotional registers of pride and shame position people in relation to each other, in relation to the nation, and to what it means to a ‘good’ patriotic citizen. In psycho-sociology or in the sociology of emotions, shame is described
as a deeply unsettling experience of the self that may occasion a withdrawal, a turning within oneself that is triggered by a perception of others’ regard of oneself, of how one takes on the view of others as a judgment of one’s moral character (Barbalet 2001; Katz 1999). Others, like Eve Sedgwick (2003) and Elspeth Probyn (2005), draw on the work of Silvan Tomkins (see Sedgwick and Frank 1995) to approach shame as a productive force; indeed, because it forces introspection and self-evaluation, shame can be transformative. What I take from these and others’ scholarship is quite simple: that shame is both social and psychological and that it is fundamentally relational and formative. In the case that is discussed here, shame is conceived as a threat to the
national ‘spirit’. It is about a feeling state that occurs when one – here, the nation – is being judged as unacceptable in some way. What interests me is how the perceived accusation of the nation and its history as being undesirable is refused and rejected through modes of deflecting shame onto the shamer, and of drawing pride back onto the national self. ‘Shame and pride . . . are different interlinings of the same glove’, writes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003: 38). For Sedgwick, shame is ‘theatrical performance’ whereby ‘[p]erformance interlines shame as more than just its result or a way of warding it off, though importantly it is those things’ (2003: 38). Sedgwick, following Tomkins, conceives shame as attaching itself to the sense of self, sharpening it and permanently transforming it. The implication is
‘that one is something in experiencing shame’ (Sedgwick 2003: 37; emphasis original). Refusal of shame is a refusal of the introspection, the self-evaluation that shame brings forth, and of the fragility that it brings about within the self (see Probyn 2005). By tracing how shame is evoked, rejected, and projected onto particular
subjects, I trace how shame is linked to the formation not only of ‘self’, but also of ‘other’, within the national collective. Thus I attend to the act of shaming – rather than to the experience of being shamed – as not only performance, but also as performative, that is as transformative of the national collective as a ‘one’ that should be proud and that should be the object of pride for its citizens. In doing so, the terms of inclusion distinguish those who are proud from those who are not and who are consequently shaming the nation. In this sense, pride is ‘an entitlement’, but not in the sense proposed by Probyn when she argues that ‘pride politics’ such as ‘[n]ational pride, black pride, gay pride, and now fat pride are all projects premised on the eradication of shame’ (Probyn 2005: 2) and on the achievement of the state of pride once that eradication is complete. Pride, here, is rather an entitlement bestowed on those who display the right kind of pride and the right kind of refusal of shame. Pride and shame are indeed interlinings of the same glove that strikes or strokes: the glove that strikes you into shame and that one waves or wears with pride, or the glove that strokes you or shakes your hand in recognition of you ‘doing us proud’, as the English saying goes. The first section examines the role of shame and pride in distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate patriotisms, that is, legitimate and illegitimate forms of attachment to the nation. The pride/ shame debate reveals how the politics of pride seek to eradicate shame via an erasure of certain histories, and to sanitize Britishness under a veneer of tolerance. In addition, the debate revolved around an anti-anti-racist argument that mobilized the multicultural as emblematic of the national character of inclusiveness and tolerance. At stake in such acts of shaming is the creation of intolerant culprits that are necessary for the maintenance of multicultural tolerance. As I was studying the debates, questions of who spoke the multicultural
‘we’ and under what conditions also came increasingly to the fore. Whose emotions – whose pride in Britain – are being appealed to? How are they connected (or disconnected) to particular subjects? In the second section, the analysis centres on the formation of new economies of exclusion/ inclusion and toleration through different acts of calling upon ‘others’ to be seen to speak out as proud subjects of multicultural Britain. The very recognition of ‘others’ as legitimate speaking subjects forms those subjects in a particular way. Their declarations of pride function as personal testimonies, while at the same time the speakers are taken up as exemplary figures of multicultural, tolerant Britain. Their recognition as legitimate speaking citizens reconstitutes them as ‘other’ through a double process of de-racialization and re-racialization that operates through peeling the skin:
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practices of unmarking the black skin, of making it disappear in the process of including proud black subjects within the national citizenry. In this respect, this chapter attends to the skin of citizenship and to the ways in which the politics of national multicultural pride variously and differentially enflesh its citizenry. More broadly, although focused on a very specific event, the material used here provides the basis for a wider examination of the mutual construction of particularism and universalism in the making of national community. The concluding section argues that ‘multiculturalist citizenship’ operates through a visual-oral economy that requires a process of ascription of differentiated identities, indeed of differentiated bodies, to some citizens by way of protecting the sanctity of the universal, invisible, and silent white British subject.
