Contemporary Britain Research Articles

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF “SINDBAD AND THE PIRATES’ PIT”

This Study sets out the author's view of discourse analysis and illustrates the approach with an analysis of discursive “Sindbad and the Pirates’ Pit” movies discourse in contemporary Britain, specifically in higher education. It includes a condensed theoretical account of critical discourse analysis, a framework for analysing discursive events, and a discussion of discursive practices, as well as analysis of samples of the discourse of higher education. The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of critical discourse analysis as a method in social scientific research, and as a resource for social struggle.

The Country Wife, Southall Style: Restoration Comedy and the Multicultural Gaze

Abstract First performed at Watford Palace Theatre in 2004, Tanika Gupta’s version of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) relocates the Restoration classic to twenty-first-century London, reframing its libertine plot as a witty satire on sexual and gender mores in contemporary Britain. In this new setting, Wycherley’s comic masterpiece is revisited from a multicultural perspective, and his merciless exposure of social hypocrisies becomes infused with the adaptor’s keen awareness of diversity and its complexities. This article draws attention to Gupta’s play as a culturally significant intervention in the reception history of Restoration theatre culture. By opening up Wycherley’s comedy to the representation of Britain’s “new ethnicities,” I suggest, Gupta’s work has paved the way for the more inclusive, multiculturally conscious approach to the Restoration canon that is observable in the new spate of revivals and adaptations produced during the last decade or so.

Delving beneath the surface: An interview with Monica Ali

ABSTRACT Monica Ali is widely recognized as a trailblazer for writers of Bangladeshi origin in English. She published her bestselling debut novel Brick Lane in 2003 and went on to write three more works of fiction: Alentejo Blue (2006), In the Kitchen (2009), and Untold Story (2011). In this interview conducted in autumn 2021, she discusses her recent novel, Love Marriage, which depicts two families from different backgrounds in contemporary Britain: Bengali Indian Muslim and white Christian British. Other topics include Monica Ali’s writing process, why she writes, the experience of her dual heritage, her thoughts on feminism, and her exploration of class and race in today’s multicultural Britain. This was Ali’s first interview after writing Love Marriage, which hit the book stands a few months later in February 2022. The novel has been well reviewed and critically acclaimed and looks set to have the popular appeal of her classic novel, Brick Lane.

Brexit, ugly feelings and the power of participatory art in Grayson Perry: Divided Britain

The polarised Leave/Remain positions offered by Brexit hampered opportunities for Britons to articulate the complexity of their affective political allegiances. Turning our focus on Grayson Perry: Divided Britain (2017, C4, Swan Films), we argue that Perry’s role as artist-ethnographer enabled an exploration ‘from below’ of the tensions occluded by deliberative democratic debate in febrile post-Brexit Britain. Intervening in a conjuncture of which Brexit was symptomatic, Perry’s arts documentary with Channel 4 provided the space to articulate newly configured affective and political affiliations in terms both of Britain as place and Britishness as identity. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s conception of agonistic politics, we argue the programme provided a space of confrontation for groups defined as polarised ‘camps’ to contest and debate through their emotional and symbolic differences which exposed the limitations of the ‘post-political’ formation. However, while the programme visualises Perry’s ‘left populist’ strategy of crafting two similar pots through ethnographic listening and interactions with Leave and Remain communities, we argue the focus on predominantly white communities ultimately offers a limited notion of what ‘a people’ with the potential to revitalise democracy in contemporary Britain could be.

Reading an Islamic epistemology into research: Muslim converts and contemporary religion in Britain

AbstractThis paper presents a tentative argument for the application of a unique methodological approach in researching convert Muslims in contemporary Britain. By throwing into relief some of the theoretical limitations of previous studies on the topic, a case is made for a dialectical model of thinking that foregrounds Islamic epistemology and places it into conversation with a critical posture. The article contributes to a wider discourse within academia about the ability of the contemporary study of religion to reflect the increasingly diverse world of religious and non-religious practice found in contemporary Britain. It is critical of the over enfranchisement of secular readings of Islamic conversion specifically, and orientalist framings of Islamic identity generally. I conclude by asserting insider positionality and the primacy of reflexivity as an approach to ensure intellectual rigour.

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

The Uses of Mourning

The Uses of Mourning

Editorial

In our autumn edition in 2014 we published articles from a conference on ‘Writing Jews in Contemporary Britain’. They were guest edited for the issue by Axel Stähler and Sue Vice, the organisers of the conference. In their joint introduction they wrote:Contemporary British Jewish writers are being credited with an ‘attitude’ and their fiction is perceived to celebrate ‘the anarchic potential of the Jewish voice’.It will come as no surprise, particularly given what they quoted about ‘attitude’ and ‘anarchic potential’, that the first Jewish author they mentioned, because of his recent award at the time of the Man Booker Prize, was Howard Jacobson. One of the contributors to that issue was David Brauner writing on ‘Fetishizing the Holocaust: Comedy and Transatlantic Connections in Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights’. When Bryan Cheyette and David Brauner approached the editor of this journal with the proposal to mark and celebrate Howard Jacobson’s eightieth birthday, the editorial board readily accepted the offer. The contents are introduced by Bryan Cheyette, and David Brauner contributes a new interview with Jacobson. The issue also contains a book review by Howard Cooper of David’s recent monograph on Jacobson in the Manchester University Press series Contemporary British Novelists.

Like parent, like child: The impact of parental socialisation on class identity and partisanship

The theoretical foundation of electoral behaviour research is the Michigan model which emphasizes socialisation and the development of partisan identities. In Britain, this was embellished to include class identity. Across Western societies, class voting, working class jobs and strength of party identities have been in decline, but identification as working class has remained high and relatively stable in Britain. This paper develops theoretical models of parental socialisation to identify effects on class and party identities. The empirical analysis reinforces previous findings about the intergenerational transmission of class identity and partisanship, but further shows that there are some moderating effects of occupation on this transmission. Most importantly, the paper finds that parental partisanship has a substantial effect on the formation of class identity. Therefore, it shows that class identity in contemporary Britain is a strong political identity in its origins as well as its effects.

‘The more things change the more they stay the same’: The continuing relevance of Bourdieu and Passeron’s <i>Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture</i>

The publication of Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction had a mixed response. On the one hand the work was criticised for its determinism and pessimistic prognosis of the possibilities of educational change and, on the other hand, praised for its complex analysis of the relationship between education and class inequalities, and the workings of class domination through the educational system. This paper explores the reception Reproduction, and its companion text The Inheritors received before examining the contribution they have made, and continue to make, to understandings of social class inequalities in education. It argues that the work has continuing significance in contemporary England just as it had in 1960s France. As well as examining the relevance of Reproduction for the twenty-first century, it also focuses on the potential of Bourdieu and Passeron’s analysis for enabling animated and agentic conceptualisations of educational and social reproduction by drawing on recent case-study data from English schools. However, it also argues that the lack of sufficient questioning of the dominant educational code, as well as the absence of any moral dimensions of class culture make their study a work in progress which needed the insights of Bourdieu’s later work to bring its analysis to fruition.

Mobilizing for Recognition: Indie Unions, Migrant Workers, and Strategic Equality Act Litigation

Drawing on a broad repertoire of action, including strategic litigation, several new activist unions have appeared that seek to represent the multiracial working class of contemporary Britain. Although the court cases that have drawn the most attention are those that challenge the misclassification of employees or ‘workers’ as ‘self-employed’, another dimension of these unions’ strategic litigation has been the utilization of the Equality Act 2010 (Equality Act) to allege racial discrimination. The contention advanced in this article is that it might be possible to read unions’ increasing use of the Equality Act as instances of them pursuing a politics of recognition. For those of us interested in analysing and assessing the strategies of unions in respect of their multiracial membership, the critical question is why and how race discrimination claims may act to boost indie unions’ efforts to organize diverse workplaces. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s work that asserts a politics of recognition can contribute to a politics of redistribution, this article proposes that recognition claims may be advancing the broader goals of labour organizing by building a worker subjectivity poised for action, and a collective identity undergirded by respect, mutual understanding, and solidarity. Discrimination, Migrant Workers, Legal Mobilization, Recognition, Organizing

Between the Oche and Treble-Twenty: Darts as a “Way of Life” in Contemporary London

ABSTRACT This article serves to answer the question, “What sustains the continued relevance of darts for working-class men in postindustrial Britain?” Darts remains a deeply popular activity and increasingly popular spectator sport in contemporary Britain, with common associations with the social clubs, working men’s clubs, and pubs of industrial Britain. This article addresses the continued place of darts within the context of the deeply destructive process of structural economic change that has transformed the country’s economic, social, and physical landscape and has deeply altered forms of working-class spaces of leisure from pubs to social clubs in long-standing neighborhoods. The author argues that darts is a medium that acts as a form of bridging between the periods of industrial and postindustrial Britain so as to continue working-class modes of socialization and relations that have been altered with the shift to postindustrialism. Darts acts as a mode of orientation and direction—a “way of life”—that mediates and enables a connection between industrial and postindustrial Britain. Moreover, the continuation of playing darts allows for the continuation of spaces of kinship and socialization for working-class men within profound gentrification and the transformation of London into a “Global City” dictated by financial capital. This basis of this article is derived from interviews and observation conducted at a series of amateur darts events across Greater London in January 2016. This article allows for a consideration of the role of leisure and sport within continued institutions and memories of class.

Contemporary Britain in the Works of Russian Scholars

The article is dedicated to major findings of Russian scholars on a broad range of topics in the field of British studies. The works selected are mainly focused on the analysis of political, security and socio-economic models of development and trends in the UK from 1991 to 2021. The topics, which were most elaborated in the 1990s, related to the phenomena of Thatcherism, Third Way, the party-political system, social and economic model, British monarchy. Later the problems of devolution and constitutional reforms, identity politics, Euroscepticism, Brexit and migration, the concept of Global Britain shifted to the centre of attention. The study shows that Russian specialists tend to rely not only on empirical studies and approaches but have accumulated a rich experience in profound theoretical and conceptual understanding of the processes under scrutiny and demonstrate a high degree of critical reflection on the research implemented by foreign experts on British studies. Russian scholars pay interest both to structural and institutional processes and to concrete personalities and subjective factor in history. The undertaken research demonstrates a high degree of net working in cooperation among Russian specialists on British Studies, who represent different academic, educational centres and scientific schools.

Live-streaming the goddess in the times of COVID-19: a digital ethnography of diasporic Durga Puja festivals in pandemic Britain

ABSTRACT Diasporic Durga Puja festivals in contemporary Britain have emerged as focal points in the religious lives of Hindu Bengalis. However, the public health measures introduced because of the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to host in-person indoor Durga Puja festivals in Britain in the autumn of 2020. In response, many UK-based Durga Puja organisers staged small-scale ritual worship of the goddess in private, and then livestreamed it to their members through social media. Based on participant observation of these festival livestreams and remote interviews with Durga Puja organisers from across Britain, in this article I demonstrate that far from being a rupture, these blended Durga Puja festivals mark a development in existing templates of mediatisation of religious practices and are part of the wider continuum of adaptations that characterise diasporic lived religion. I also reflect on how internal hierarchies within the diaspora played out vis-à-vis blended Pujas amidst the pandemic.

Islamophobic and counter-Islamophobic YouTube representations of the British Muslim Communities

Based on David Gauntlett’s Web 2.0 approach of media audiences, this article argues that while Islamophobic discourses may be hegemonic in the British media in general, and the online media in particular, counter-Islamophobic ones have real potentials to subvert the anti-Muslims hegemony in contemporary Britain. Online media users, both as producers and consumers of mass-mediated representations, are empowered to blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual spaces in the construction of different conceptions of their own identities as well as of those of the others. To this end, comparatively, the comments of the users of two YouTube videos are analyzed and critically appraised to identify how they prosumed the different representations of Muslim communities of/in Britain. It is suggested that YouTube users contribute, from their respective subject positions, to the construction of diverse conceptualizations of their own identities and those of others as well. Their prosumed representations both entrench and defy a hierarchy of Islamophobic and Islamophallic images of Islam and Muslims in contemporary multicultural Britain.

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Virtues, values and the fracturing of civic and moral virtue in citizenship education policy in England

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the fracturing of civic and moral virtue within curricular policies pertaining to Citizenship in England since the late 1990s. A longstanding aim of education and schooling, the teaching of citizenship gained a more secure base in the English curriculum with the introduction of Citizenship as a statutory subject for 11–16 years olds from 2002, which owed a great deal to the Report of the Advisory Group on Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (Crick Report). The report drew intimate connections between civic virtue, moral virtue, and personal character. These connections have become seriously fractured over the years since the Crick Report. In charting this fracturing, the paper will examine how the character-influenced direction taken in the early/mid-2000s was replaced by, at first, a more general emphasis on British Values before morphing into a more specific, though no less problematic, concentration on Fundamental British Values. While character education has gained significant policy attention in England over the last six years, the civic dimensions have been at best underplayed, with little connection to education for citizenship. It is argued that without greater clarity and consistency about how the moral – including moral virtues – intersects with the civic in contemporary Britain, official curricular policy (whether for Citizenship education, character education or more generally) will restrict rather than encourage the education of young citizens who are informed, wise, responsible and active participants in their communities.

Immigration Raids and Racist State Violence

This article develops an analysis of contemporary immigration raids in Britain, arguing that they operate ideologically as well as institutionally to sustain the material and political conditions of what is a vastly unequal form of social order (that is also a form of racial order). It suggests that immigration raids are located within and develop understandings of a racial state in contemporary Britain. Drawing on ethnographic work at a migrant charity organization, it explains the raid process and its impact on individuals and families. Raids are rationalized as facilitating removal and more broadly operate as part of attempts to generate fear and encourage people to leave “voluntarily.” However, this is not achieved in many cases, and this article suggests that the real purpose of raids is to dominate and oppress illegalized migrants and those who may be vulnerable to immigration control, as well as reproducing the justification for immigration enforcement. Raids can be understood as inflicting harms and as a form of state-sanctioned racist violence which is utilized to try severing solidarities between communities. Enforcement leads to resistance and the conclusion reflects on resistance to raids, demonstrated for example by the 2021 Kenmure Street protest in Glasgow, and the solidarities such resistance ferments and sustains.

Islam, Marriage Law and the Legal Framework of England and Wales

This article examines Islam and in Contemporary England and Wales, and asks what issues faced by Muslims may reveal about the legal landscape more widely, using marriage law as a case study. It opens with an overview of Religion, Islam and the Legal Framework in England and Wales, before addressing the modern Law on the solemnisation of marriages and current proposals for reform. It then moves to examine the conscious choice of some Muslims to enter into purely religious marriages, and asks what this reveals about Muslim communities and the overarching legal framework. In the concluding section, the piece then addresses what can be learnt about two observable realities from marriage law: 1) the Continued Problematisation of Muslims and Muslim Communities in popular and academic perception, and 2) the significance of unregistered religious marriages for other voluntary adult partnerships outside of the system of state registration.

The Trouble with Literature

The Trouble with Literature