ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical engagement with neo-marxist approaches to the postwar racialisation of official debates concerned with the politics of immigration control that is, approaches that define the research problematic as one concerned with the analysis of 'racism' and the politics of migration rather than the ideological notion of 'race relations'. It seeks to place the problem of political language at the centre of the debate about the racialisation of black migration in postwar Britain. The chapter argues that the concepts of commonsense and racialisation, developed by neo-marxist sociologists to explain the emergence of political racism in postwar British politics, assume or impute, rather than demonstrate, the relationship between ideology, racism and language involved in achieving this process. Political racism is written through public language and such language is bound up with the representation and legitimation of the social imaginary as an unequal and conflictually experienced social totality.
