Ethnicity, Race and Question of Englishness

Abstract

Robert J.C. Young, Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell Publication, 2008), Page 291, ISBN: 9781405101295. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Over past decade, more specifically since power devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in June 1999, there has been a revival of discourses on and English national identity. Apparently terms such as English or may sound overtly familiar to us; however, their discursive formations are complex and varied, suggesting deeper cultural and historical implications. Is one's English identity synonymous with a common political citizenry of England? Or is it framed in terms of common membership of an ethnic community based on one's affinity with language, religion, history, and blood or 'race'? What constitutes true English national consciousness? Robert J.C. Young's Idea of English Ethnicity (2008) is a remarkable contribution to this renewed debate on issues of and English national identity, which go beyond the challenges of devolution, or even end of empire (1). For him, these issues are an outcome of complex historical and cultural discursive formations, in which Englishness was never really about England, its cultural essence or national character, at all (1). Framing discourse of within diverse discourses of race--in which is evoked variously as concepts of biology, genetics, lineage, physical typology, ethnicity, nation, and so on, Young fascinatingly explores cultural implications of racial discourses of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He avers that English national identity is a diasporic global identity. To explicate cultural aspects of unstable English national identity, Young's book, from very beginning, examines different race theories and contesting ideas of race in English cultural history and science, where term race--more particularly 'Saxonism' or 'the Anglo-Saxon'--is used interchangeably with concepts of both nation and ethnicity. Similarly, he shows a dialectic between English race and Irish race, or Saxon and Celt, as a part of popular racial discourses of nineteenth century. For English as a race was usually conceived and defined in terms of their relationship with Irish as a race. Although Young alludes to different scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses about race, such as notions of Aryan superiority supported by scientific evidence of cranial measurements and similar other practices, main purpose of his book seems to lay emphasis on heterogeneous and dynamic global English identity. In his attempt to define global English identity, what he prefers to call English ethnicity, Young uses lens of a binary dialectic between Saxon and Celt, especially Irish Celts, again and again. Mainly in chapter four The Times and Its Celtic Challenges, he not only discusses different race theories but also shows role of print media in disseminating a dominant racial ideology. …