The English village, whiteness, coloniality and social class

Abstract

This article explores the entwining of discourses of race, class and coloniality within a specific set of racialised discourses articulated by white middle-class and middle-aged residents of a suburban English village. I draw upon Frankenberg’s (1993) analysis of whiteness and the contemporary reproduction of colonial notions of cultural difference to examine whites’ othering of wealthy British Asian (BrAsian) residents and the everyday construction of non-Western others. My contention is that central to the reproduction of the idea of the village as a white and English space is amnesia of the colonial past and its implications for the postcolonial present. I examine how this process of amnesia mediates an aspect of my co-conversationalists’ representations of wealthy BrAsian residents as immigrants, that is, cultural others whose origins are thought to belong outside the village community, the nation and ultimately the West.