Life In England Research Articles

“Being / together”: Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other and the Black British Women’s Movement

Abstract This essay locates Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) within the sociopolitical history and written lineage of the Black women’s movement in Britain. It identifies contextual resonances with the 1970s and 1980s praxis of collaboration and collectivity and traces intertextual connections with Evaristo’s own early writing (including theater, verse fiction, and the radio story from which the novel evolved) and the periodicals, anthologies, and organization newsletters of the time. These references illuminate the novel’s structure, lineation, and narrative mode. I argue that Girl, Woman, Other reanimates the rallying call “we are here,” affirming the presence and diversity of Black lives in Britain, while its distinctive “fusion fiction” form actively engages readers, realizing the Black feminist political principle of “speaking out.”

What Rivers Did: a Study of if and how Rivers Shaped Later Prehistoric Lives in Britain and Beyond

Countering the passive representation of rivers in many previous accounts of later prehistory – as static vessels for spectacular deposits, highways for transport and communication, and backdrops for settlement and farming – this paper asks if and how rivers actively shaped prehistoric lives. Rivers have long been hailed as conduits for prehistoric materials and ideas. However, positive archaeological correlates of the processes involved are notoriously difficult to identify and have rarely been scrutinised in detail. Using the example of Late Bronze and Early Iron Age pottery in the east of England (1150–350 bc), we examine in detail how prehistoric pottery-making traditions cohered around river valleys over an extended time period and were thus, to a certain extent, generated by rivers. Drawing on wider evidence for the flow of people and things in this region we build a broader multi-dimensional account of how people, objects, and practices moved in a period of diverse lifeways in which the makeup of human mobility is not well understood. In doing so, we hope to tether abstract arguments about the active role of rivers and other non-human elements in shaping past lives and to approach the often missing ‘middle ground’ – small-scale movements at local and regional scales – in existing archaeological discussions about mobility.

Judaica as Portable Antiquities in England and Wales

This article examines the use of the database of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) for England and Wales, which records archaeological finds made by the public (particularly metal detector users). The PAS database is generally considered a valuable resource for archaeological research, but its use as such is rarely critically examined. In this case study, artefacts related to the specific material culture of the historically-attested Jewish community in Britain are examined as a potential source of archaeological information about a specific historical social group. The article highlights several challenges in interpreting records deriving from information received from collectors and hobbyists as a substitute for data recovered by archaeological methods. Several false leads and misinterpretations have been identified, and the lack of contextual information for the artefacts is especially problematic. The PAS records are of limited utility as a standalone source of evidence, and cannot lead to meaningful conclusions about Jewish lives in Britain. The artefacts primarily serve as material illustrations of existing written records rather than independent sources of information.

Swings and merry go rounds: Transgression and opportunities for fatherhood in pandemic Britain

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on parenting and family life in Britain. While a gendered analysis reveals that mothers have been especially burdened by pandemic mitigation policies, some have suggested that lockdowns have provided a unique opportunity to transgress gendered parenting roles, allowing fathers to spend more time caring for their children. In this paper, I draw from a wider qualitative study about parenting leave take-up in the UK to examine more closely how (and, indeed, whether) these opportunities were taken up by fathers. I concentrate on the narrative of one father, David, to argue that the intersection between race, social class, gender and parenting cultures complicates our understanding and characterisation of this transgression, particularly within a parenting leave landscape informed by maternalism. I suggest that David's lived experience of parenting involves negotiating the transgression of normative messages about modern ‘involved’ fatherhood and economically productive citizenship; a process that is raced, classed and gendered.

Black media nostalgia in Britain

ABSTRACT Drawing on Black media, cultural, and digital studies, this work considers the relationship between nostalgia and the media, cultural productions, and experiences of Black people in Britain. Engaging with Hesse's (2000) work on ‘Diasporicity: Black Britain's Post-Colonial Formations', I explore how media representations of Black Britain and connected production processes have changed since the 90s, in ways entwined with Black nostalgia and generational (be)longing. Since Hesse (2000, p. 97) observed that ‘Black Britishness is a discourse whose increasing currency has yet to be conceptualized seriously', research and writing on Black Britishness and Black life in Britain has significantly expanded. Informed by such work, I delve into some of the details of Black media experiences in Britain to consider how Black nostalgia manifests in and through these contexts. Inspired by Ahad-Legardy's (2021) work on ‘Afro-nostalgia' and how visual culture aids archives of Black ‘historical joy', I consider the digitally mediated, comforting, conflicting, and historical nature of Black media nostalgia in Britain, and Black nostalgia more generally. Such discussion distinguishes between Black people's nostalgic media experiences and Black media nostalgia which centers Black creative expression and the kaleidoscopic gazes of Black audiences. Nostalgia's enigmatic quality cannot be comprehended via empirical analysis, alone. Thus, sculpted by understandings of ‘sociopolitical strategies of presence' (Osei 2019, p. 733), this work conceptualizes Black nostalgia in ways based on key media examples, research interviews, researcher reflections and the possibilities and playfulness presented by influx ponderings. Overall, shaped by Hall's (1993; 1997) work on representation and popular culture, this manuscript yields insights regarding dynamics between nostalgia, media, and Black life in Britain. Such work highlights the need for specificity (e.g., whose gaze(s), geographies, generations) when articulating Black people’s experiences in Britain, and the power of nostalgia in Black media and culture, which spans decades and different devices.

British but not a Briton: Anglophilia and Black British Identity Formation in E. R. Braithwaite

Abstract: This essay re-examines Anglophilia, a quintessential conservative colonial affect, to illustrate how emotional structures that function as modes of psychic colonialism can concurrently produce unanticipated effects. E. R. Braithwaite's best-selling autobiographical novel, To Sir, With Love (1959), is a Windrush account of a Black, middle-class, Caribbean immigrant's life in Britain that, largely due to its explicit Anglophilia, has not garnered much critical attention within a conventional postcolonial framework. I use affect studies to read this text's Anglophilic affiliations as a complicated process of Black diasporic identity formation that questions the simultaneity of race and national belonging. British identity in the mid-twentieth century was understood in highly emotive, racialized terms—such as "civilized," "Christian," or "advanced"—that stood in for explicit references to whiteness. This structure had the effect of appearing to separate Britishness from whiteness in discourses about race and nationality, thus creating a space within which Braithwaite could imagine the possibility of being a Black Briton. Braithwaite's text reveals Anglophilia to be a complex affective structure that, while being invested in ideas of morality, nation, and civilization, can also unexpectedly destabilize prevalent social norms (while reinforcing others) as it participates in the process of denaturalizing automatic assumptions of racial superiority.

An Analysis of Female Roles in Novels

As a realistic novel —Moll Flanders uses the autobiographical form to directly show readers a picture of people’s life in Britain in the 18th century. The author Daniel Defoe reveals the character for us by describing many concrete details. In his novels, there are always thieves, gangsters and other dark forces, which are different from the heroes of the greenwood who rob the rich to feed the poor in Chinese novels of the same period. This article aims to show a deeper understanding of the characters of this marvelous book by analyzing the growth process of the protagonist, at the same time, through the analysis of the era in which the novel is set, experiencing the struggle and difficulty of women’s fate in the patriarchal society.

Black lives and the ‘archival pulse’: the murder of Neil “Tommy” Marsh and other stories

ABSTRACT 16-year-old Neil ‘Tommy’ Marsh was murdered in the Birmingham Pub Bombings. A recent immigrant from Jamaica, Tommy came to Britain to join his family in Handsworth. Now he is the only 1 of the 21 pub bombing victims for whom there is not a single photograph. When pictures of the other victims are displayed, Tommy is represented by a silhouette, or by an image of his mother in mourning at his grave. The absence of material to document Tommy Marsh’s life in Britain speaks to a deeper lacuna of Black British lives within government records, mainstream public accounts and even public histories. Where records of Black lives exist, they are frequently built from foundations of Black people’s encounters with the state, perpetuating structural racism through white recordings of Black lived experiences. This article will use Tommy Marsh’s case to question how the fragmented documentary and community archives of Black life in Britain offer methodological insights into history as/and recovery. It will discuss the extent to which it is possible to construct historical narratives of Black life that acknowledge and speak from that for which government and public records fail to provide an account. Drawing from the work of scholars including Michel Rolph-Trouillout, Saidiya Hartman and Ann Laura Stoler, we will interrogate the processes of archival production and offer a critical examination of archives produced in the aftermath of injury, violence and death. We question the potentials and limitations of the spaces that can be mined by historians, and how appropriate they are for the production of historical knowledge. In doing so, we probe the extent to which alternative archives curated at the individual, family and community level may potentially support the recovery of the histories of Black British communities and individuals.

The British Tribe Next Door (2019): Reality TV in Kaoko, Tourism, and the “Hollywood Himba”

ABSTRACT In 2019 British Channel 4 reality TV programme The British Tribe Next Door putatively compares contemporary life in Britain to a small, sustainable indigenous Himba community of Otjeme in the Kaoko region of Namibia. An actual British terraced house was built and provided with all the modern furnishings. British Reality TV celebrity Scarlett Moffatt and her family would live in the house. The idea was to have a “reverse anthropological exchange” between the Moffatts and the “nomadic” Himba. Critics of the programme called it “racist and exploitative” and “the most immoral show of all time.” Others in the British viewing public praised it for revealing the simplicity of the Himba way of life. But the programme fails to comprehend that “the Himba” is really an artificial construct created by the South Africa apartheid regime for its own racist ideas and then reenforced by advertising, the tourist industry in Namibia, and international media. This essay examines the evolution of that construct and its impact on the Himba. The British Tribe Next Door does reveal the persistence of problematic and condescending colonial tropes as well as the deception of Reality TV. While playing their tourist role, the Himba will pursue their own agendas in the Kaoko, Namibia, and the World.

Negotiating the necessity of biomedical animal use through relations with vulnerability

In the UK, claims are often made that public support for animal research is stronger when such use is categorised as for medical purposes. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of writing from the Mass Observation Project, a national writing project documenting everyday life in Britain, this paper suggests that the necessity of using animals for medical research is not a given but understood relationally through interactions with inherent vulnerability. This paper stresses the ubiquity of ambivalence towards uses of animals for medical research, complicating what is meant by claims that such use is ‘acceptable’, and suggests that science-society dialogues on animal research should accommodate different modes of thinking about health. In demonstrating how understandings of health are bound up with ethical obligations to care for both human and non-human others, this paper reinforces the importance of interspecies relations in health and illness and in the socio-ethical dimensions of biomedicine.

Rose-tinted spectacles: An autoethnography of a lone-mother’s experiences within the COVID-19 pandemic

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused massive disruption and changes to all levels of life in Britain. This article uses autoethnography as a method of research, reflexivity and transformation, to explore the complexities of lone-motherhood during the pandemic. An account is given of how, for myself, the concept of lone-motherhood was socially constructed. Evocative vignettes reflect how I look inwards at my self, as a lone-mother in a pandemic and back outwards at others, hopefully eliciting responses, reflection and dialogue from readers.

‘French lady seeks … ’: finding work as a French governess in late Victorian and Edwardian England (1870–1914)

ABSTRACT While the presence of thousands of French governesses in Britain at any given time between 1870 and 1914 is well-known, and despite the significant scholarly literature examining governesses as well as cross-Channel grassroots exchanges in the Late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, little is known about the realities of these women’s lives. They remain largely invisibilised by stereotypes of sensuousness—if not deviancy—constructed by contemporary literature and the sensationalist press in their portrayals of French governesses. This article lays the foundations of a sociodemographic study of these migrant workers, mapping out their presence across Britain and highlighting the wide range of occupational contexts within which they operated. Focusing on their job search process and challenging narratives stressing their lack of professionalism, the article stresses their skills and agency. It highlights the personal and professional networks which they mobilised in order to navigate life in Britain and gain an understanding of the highly competitive governess labour market. Examining the job advertisements placed by would-be French governesses testifies to their deftness in gauging and trying to meet employers’ expectations—which in turn contributes to understanding these women as skilled intercultural operators.

England's Life of Paradox

England's Life of Paradox

CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK? AN ANALYSIS OF HOME FIRE (2017) BY KAMILA SHAMSI

The current study “Can the subaltern speak? An Analysis of Home Fire (2017) by Kamila Shamsi” is based on the textual analysis and close reading of the novel. The novel is evaluated from the perspective of subaltern by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Spivak gave the concept of subaltern in her essay “Can the Subaltern speak”? (1988) to discuss the marginalized and subordinated group of people. Spivak says subalterns are neglected at different levels such as social, cultural, political, economic, psychological and religious. Subalterns are entitled with different labels like inferior, downtrodden and lower rank people. Thus, due to fallen position subalterns remain forgotten subjects and have no history and no identity in their surroundings. Similar to Spivak`s concept, Shamsi’s novel Home Fire (2017) portrays the position of Muslim British as subaltern. A Muslim family named Pasha Family has been living in Britain for many years and still lives in Britain. Yet their identity is challenged due to the involvement of Adil Pasha (Father) with Taliban and having Muslim identity. Isma, elder daughter of Adil Pasha is interrogated consecutively for two hours at airport of America. The main reason for her interrogation is her Muslim identity and hijab which she wears every time. After that her brother Pervaiz Pasha is murdered in Turkey and his dead body is sent to Pakistan. Because British government is not ready to bury Pervaiz Pasha in her soil as Pervaiz showed connection with terrorists. Therefore, his dead body is not allowed to be buried in Britain. Though all the children of the Pasha Family were born and raised in Britain. This shows subalterns do not have any place in the society. This brutal and violent treatment of one dominant group effects contrary on subalterns. Subalterns accept their fallen status and bow down in front of higher authorities. Keywords: Subalterns, downtrodden, hijab, Muslim identity, terrorists.

Novel Spaces

Novel Spaces

Women’s Agency, Catholic Morality, and the Irish State

Abstract The text reviews four new books in Irish women’s history and the history of sexuality: Mary McAuliffe’s biography of the revolutionary Margaret Skinnider; Jennifer Redmond’s Moving Histories, exploring the discourses about Irish women migrants to Great Britain in the first few decades of the Irish state, and their everyday lives in Britain; Lindsey Earner-Byrne and Diane Urquhart’s The Irish Abortion Journey, which documents the repressive discourses and policies surrounding abortion in twentieth-century Ireland and relates stories of traveling to Great Britain to obtain it; and finally, Sonja Tiernan’s book examining the ultimately successful political and legal campaign for marriage equality in Ireland. These highly readable, well-researched books place gender and sexuality at the center of Irish history; provide insight into the contradictory political, religious, and medical discourses about Irish women, gays, and lesbians; and document the lives of women both in and out of Ireland.

The Big House in William Trevor’s and Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction

The relationship between Ireland and Britain is historically as fatefully entangled as that between Korea and Japan. As a symbol of colonial rule by the British in Ireland, the Big House is close to private life of Irish people, so it can be compared to Japanese-possessed civil houses where Japanese civilians lived in Incheon, Mokpo, Gunsan, and Pohang during the Japan’s colonization over Korea. However, British domination of Ireland took place over a longer period of time and shared the same language, so the remnants of Irish colonization were deeper and more difficult to shake off than those in Korea. Guy Felihmann defines the Big House as “the crucible in which two civilizations failed to melt, and yet became inseparable bound together.” The unconditionally antagonizing nationalism toward the colonizer is likely to make a shadow without acknowledging the other s reality in the Anglo-Irish writer Bowen s view. As an Irish patriot who lived most of his life in Britain, Trevor punishes the British past through the tragic lives of the British Irish landlord family. However, mixed with forgiveness and punishment from an Irish perspective, the lyrical beauty of a harrowing history is found in his fiction, This contemplative and flexible attitude toward the colonization is also a foreshadowing of future transnational discourse.

In Sparkling Company: Reflections on Glass in the 18th-Century British World

This volume In Sparkling Company: Reflections on Glass in the 18th-Century British World is a major publication that coincides with an exhibition held at the Corning Museum of Glass, 22 May 2021–2 January 2022. However, as the subtitle suggests, this book intends to hold a mirror up to the exhibition, which is itself entitled ‘In Sparkling Company: Glass and the Costs of Social Life in Britain During the 1700s’, and explores further the many themes and issues that are perhaps not best expressed through visual displays. In so doing, the book outlines the new parameters for present and future generations of historians of glass and social life of the eighteenth century. As Christopher L. Maxwell states in the introduction, he hopes this publication and its accompanying exhibition contributes to a perceived lack of breadth in specialist studies on glass, of which ‘few have addressed the cultural significance of glass beyond...

Racial warfare and the biopolitics of policing

ABSTRACT In the years since the landmark Macpherson Report (1999) recognised London’s Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist’, senior police officers and politicians in Britain have regularly reduced racism in policing to a problem of the past. This article examines police as a state institution where the politics of racism not only persist but do so coterminous with those of war. In doing so, I argue that policing is a biopolitical institution, that deploys racism as a formal strategy of war in vigorous defence of Euro-modernity. I show how the legacy of the Macpherson Report speaks to post-racial logic, which interacts with liberal myths about policing as non-martial to obscure the police’s racialised and militarised makeup. Challenging this hegemonic framing, I analyse how anti-black and anti-Muslim racisms share common ground, by producing racially coded populations as enemies of revered Euro-modern hallmarks like law and order and national security. I contend that this deeply embedded othering of race as anti-modern rationalises the police’s martial credentials, thus making militarised policing a racialised endeavour. As such, I illustrate how police regulates race through biopolitical strategies of securitisation, pre-emption and disposability, to reveal racial police warfare as foundational to everyday socio-political life in Britain.

Living between two cultures: Muslim Women's Identity in Soueif’s “In the Eye of the Sun” & “Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf: Muslim Woman Seeks the One”

Abstract This study aimed at negotiating the paradoxical representation of Muslim women identity in two literary text; Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun (1992) and Shelina Zahra Janmohamed memoir Love in a Headscarf (2009) in a multicultural British society. These two texts show and explore a third space, reclaiming Muslim identity reconciled with Britishness. The two texts run against Orientalist perspective that respectively represent Muslim women as concubines, harem and other apparatuses of female subjugation and thus gives Muslim women a demeaning identity. Both authors refuse to fit into the conventional categories and stereotypes of subservient Muslim women portrayed by Orientalists. Moreover, they attempt to make sense of being British and Muslim and dispel the assumed irreconcilability between Islam and many key traditional British values. Instead of rejecting their Muslim identity, they reconcile it with Britishness. They belong to a British-based growing group of writers who capture the various moments of their life in Britain as Muslims as well as British citizens. The two texts undermined the dominant narratives of Muslim women as silent victims by means of representations of love, sex, romance in multicultural Britain.