This study endeavours to examine the role of hybridity, code-switching and identity in the works of W. Somerset Maugham and Nick Hornby in terms of how the authors depict characters in postcolonial and contemporary British society. The paper focuses on the role of language as a medium of bargaining cultural borders and identity production in multicultural societies. Based on postcolonial theories by Homi Bhabha, and sociolinguistic approaches, this paper looks into how the above authors borrow the concept of hybridity and code-switching in an attempt to solve the problems of cultural assimilation, belonging and how viable or complicated the process of identity formation can be. Comparative research on Of Human Bondage and The Razor's Edge and Hornby's High Fidelity and About a Boy allows us to show how the characters presented by Maugham, before and after the Second World War, sought their way in a world of cross-cultural conflicts and identity crises. It can be concluded that hybridity and code-switching are important narrative devices in describing the struggles of identity in the colonial and postcolonial contexts, as they provide knowledge of the lack of fixedness of identity in modern-day multicultural Britain. The implications of language in the construction of identity are also used in the paper, especially in globalization, migration, and the exchange of cultures.

Shakespeare’s Contested Nations: Race, Gender, and Multicultural Britain in Performances of the History Plays. L. Monique Pittman. London: Routledge, 2022.

The study focuses on the analysis of the depiction of ethnic conflicts and identity crises in Monica Ali's Love Marriage. It examines the tensions and negotiations that arise when individuals navigate multicultural identities in a multicultural society. The project uses a post-colonial critique to draw attention to the issues faced by diasporic people. The prime aim of this research study is to see to what extent ethnic clashes affect the immigrants’ lives whose roots pull them back while trying to deal with a new lifestyle simultaneously. The study is qualitative in nature and uses a lexico-grammatical method. The text is analyzed using an in-depth reading technique, and relevant information is collected through close reading of research articles, books, online sources, and other authentic research materials. The theoretical framework for this study is situated within Postcolonial framework, specifically emphasizing the notion of hybridity as articulated by Homi K. Bhabha. Bhabha's notion of hybridity is crucial for understanding the cultural dynamics in Love Marriage. According to Bhabha, hybridity emerges in the "Third Space," a liminal space where the interaction between colonizer and colonized creates new cultural forms and identities. This space allows for the negotiation and renegotiation of cultural identities, leading to a complex, layered understanding of self. Bhabha's ideas on hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence provide a lens through which the characters' experiences in Love Marriage are analyzed. The cultural clashes and identity crises depicted in the novel are examined through this lens to understand how the characters navigate their hybrid identities in multicultural Britain. The findings of this study demonstrate the complex dialectic of cultural negotiation and identity formation as portrayed in Monica Ali’s Love Marriage.

Abstract The idea of ‘global Britain’ became a centrepiece of Conservative Party rhetoric in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. This article examines how this formulation may evolve in the face of renewed conflict over immigration and identity on the British right. It is argued that, in recent years, British conservatism has faced two principal long‐term challenges: first, the challenge of broadening its appeal in an increasingly diverse and multicultural Britain and, second, the challenge of a national populist insurgency emphasising white British (especially English) identity and hostility to immigration and multiculturalism. In this context, it is argued that the term ‘global Britain’ exists in implied opposition to the idea of ‘little England’ and that this binary opposition has shaped the use and reception of the global Britain concept within conservative politics. It is further argued that the usefulness of the global Britain concept relies on its capacity to be a ‘coalition magnet’ linking liberal internationalist ideas to the more nationalist mood of the contemporary British right.

Abstract It is more than thirty years since Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa (religious decree) calling for the execution of the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, whose third novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988. But the ‘Rushdie Affair’ has yet to be subject to a sustained analysis by historians. Journalists and political scientists continue to focus on the fatwa, despite the fact the protests against the novel in Britain – where The Satanic Verses is primarily set – predated Khomeini’s decree by two months. This article fills this lacuna by shifting attention onto the emergence of the campaign against The Satanic Verses in Britain and in Bradford especially, where a copy of Rushdie’s ‘blasphemous’ novel was infamously burnt by Muslim protestors. It shows how an earlier set of campaigns fought in Bradford by Muslim activists paved the way for the city to become a key site of protest against both Rushdie and his novel. The protests that greeted The Satanic Verses were shaped by the contradictory nature of Britain’s emergence as a multicultural society, I argue, and the political complexities thrown up by the hybridized milieu Rushdie had sought to use his fiction to evoke.

ABSTRACT This article examines the political potential and limits of Muslim punk feminism within the context of multicultural Britain through a reading of the first season of Channel 4’s 2021 dramedy We Are Lady Parts. The show explores how the religious and cultural beliefs of Muslim communities are represented as incompatible with contemporary British values. To situate the cultural politics of the text, the article considers the characters in relation to their exclusion from “legitimate” British society, as well as their original feminist strategies as a subversive and novel response to it. Muslim women are read through a nexus of social factors – international and national. These readings can be viewed as both productive and conflicting: at some times producing important rereadings of the submissive and oppressed orientalized Muslim female figure, while at others challenging the possibility of a stable Muslim female identity as positioned in normative models of British assimilationist multiculturalism.

From rhinoplasties to tanning, and from buttock augmentation to eyelids, this comment piece looks at aesthetics perspectives across cultures and what they may imply for cosmetic practitioners in multicultural Britain

When Carol Ann Duffy became Britain's first female poet laureate in 2009, it was a surprise as Duffy has always been a political poet with very harsh criticism of government policies in her works. However, she made it clear that she would not be writing poems for the monarchy and the royal occasions unless she feels to. In an interview with Andrew McAllister in 1988, Carol Ann Duffy stated that her intention as a poet is "to present it, as it is" (72). She added, "poets don't have solutions, poets are recording the human experience." This manifesto informs her work as her political poems illustrate life in the multicultural Britain of the 1980s and 1990s with a close observation of the underprivileged and deprived in Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), and The Other Country (1990). Duffy's laureate poems also reflect her concern to speak for the unvoiced, as for Duffy "poetry provides an important alternative voice to journalists or pundits or academics as a way of dealing with things that matter to us all" (Wroe, 2014, para 1). Thus, this paper is concerned with the political aspect of Duffy's laureate poems, focusing on her political poetry written during her poet laureateship between the years 2009-2019 mainly targeting politicians and highlighting public concerns. Accordingly, she speaks for the public, to present the social and emotional experience of living in contemporary Britain by way of highlighting public concerns of the British people by targeting her criticism to the politicians.

Shakespeare's Contested Nations: Race, Gender, and Multicultural Britain in Performances of the History Plays by L. Monique Pittman (review)

Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a survivor of Auschwitz, called the twentieth century “the century of the refugee.” In Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain, Jordanna Bailkin demonstrates that in Britain it was the century of the refugee camp. These camps are at the center of her fine study, which sets them in the wider context of the history of encampment and its colonial origins and traces their history from the Belgian refugee camps of the First World War through to the camps for Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s. The voices of refugees thread their way through the book, speaking from the camps or speaking about them after moving on. Sometimes, as these voices testify, moving on—at least initially—was to another camp, and some refugees never moved on. This is a thought-provoking book that raises many questions—about the role of empire in this history, the freedom of refugees, the blurring of boundaries between refuge and detention and between migrants, citizens, and refugees at different moments, and who counted—or counted themselves—as a refugee. It challenges the pervasive forgettings of refugee camps in Britain and the tendency to remember only those aspects of this history that reflect well on the British. Organized thematically, it covers the physical structure of camps and their widespread locations, the organization of mass feeding, the impact camps had on people’s ethnic, religious, and gender identities and on their family life, refugees’ activism—from petitions through refusal to accept the label “refugee” to violence—and the mixing of people of different religions, ethnicities, and social class.

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.

It is evidenced (Purri 2020) that the impact on the British psyche of having ruled so much of the world has neither faded nor has it been faced. British primary schools in the main tend not to teach imperial history, leaving British children lacking detailed historical knowledge of their country’s imperial past. Schools largely steer clear of the subject of the Empire, ‘perhaps because there is no consensus as to whether to present the facts in a positive or negative light, and because neutrality is a difficult stance to adopt, given the intense passions the subject evokes. In multicultural Britain, many families have direct family experiences of being at the receiving end of colonialism. Conversely, when Britons were polled by YouGov (2014) about whether they think of the British Empire as something to be proud of, 59% agreed that it was (Puri 2020, p.75-76).

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.

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.

Food poverty is a real issue in the modern United Kingdom and one that adversely affects children leading to a long-lasting impact on their future health. This has been further complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic,[1] the economic recession and the cost-of-living crisis. Increasing numbers of families are struggling to pay their bills whilst being forced to choose between buying essential food for their children. Many children are going hungry in schools with inadequate provisions for free meals. The concept of eating healthily is understandably low in priority, and healthy, affordable food is scarce. There is the additional element of the impact of an unequal society and inherent biases, which affects families and children from marginalised communities far more. What is our role as young people growing up in modern, multi-cultural Britain? What meaningful contribution can we make to achieving a fair and just society, that we read about in our school lessons? This opinion piece will explore some of the ways we as young people, can make a difference in our own communities and neighbourhoods. There are lessons to be learnt from such role models as young activists such as Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg and Licypriya Kangujam.

From time-to-time concern is expressed within the psychoanalytic community that so few individuals from the black and minority ethnic communities want to train with us and join our organisations. I have come to believe that these discussions many will be familiar with are not only futile but a part of the defensive structures that serve to act against the radical change that is needed. I know individuals change. However, apart from some tinkering, our institutions do not. This paper considers the defensive structures of disavowal within ourselves and our organisations as well as the features of psychoanalytic training that produce a disabling complacency. These work against the radical changes that are required if the profession is to become one to which people of colour can feel they belong and that reflects twenty first century multicultural Britain. I offer some suggestions for ways of working against the racist assumptions behind some of our theories and our structures. The underlying conviction of the presentation is that this is a white problem which white people need to address – not only for the benefit of black colleagues but because it also does us all harm.

ABSTRACT This paper is centred on exploring how young people from Sikh and Hindu backgrounds, who are British born and living in the London area understand Britishness. By utilising transcripted interviews from eighty respondents, this research uncovers and presents the core perceptions and understandings that these young people have about British national identity and the ways in which it is accommodated (or not) alongside other important sources of belonging in their lives. This paper presents the diverse ways in which these young people understand Britishness. In particular, ‘thick' and ‘thin’ conceptualisations of Britishness and the role of family structures in shaping belonging are examined. It is suggested that any discussion of how ethnic minorities relate to national identity requires a better understanding of the diverse ways in which this form of identity is understood and accommodated. This, in turn, will encourage a more inclusive and productive debate on the role of national identity in multi-cultural Britain. This is particularly salient in a post-Brexit Britain where the themes of nationality and belonging have been brought into the socio-political fore once more, and newer immigrants are facing the challenges of feeling included and becoming British.

P.117 Anaesthetist experiences of interpretation services on labour ward

Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2021), pp. 170–176. Copyright © 2022 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 B O O K R E V I E W On Liars, Damn Liars, and Storytellers by Joseph Sobol Michael Wilson Liars, Damn Liars, and Storytellers, by Joseph Sobol. University of Tennessee Press, 2020. ISBN: 978-1-62190-564- 6. Hardback. It is now 22 years since Joseph Sobol published his analytic history of the U.S. storytelling movement, The Storytellers’ Journey: An American Revival (1999), which grew out of his own doctoral research and casts both a celebratory and critical eye on the growth of the contemporary storytelling movement in the United States since the late 1960s and early 1970s. During that time Sobol has himself embarked on his own storyteller’s journey, both physically from Jonesborough , Tennessee, to Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom, and metaphorically in terms of the development of his own thinking in response to changes in the practice of storytelling during the first two decades of the twenty-first century as a reaction to, for example, technological advances (in particular Web 2.0 and social media), the “narrative” and “personal” sociological turns, and “post-truthism .” There has also in this time been a whole new generation of storytellers who have joined the community and since taken on its leadership roles. This volume , therefore, not only comes at a time when further reflection on the state of On Liars, Damn Liars, and Storytellers Wilson Wilson n 171 storytelling is apposite, but it also documents the often quiet changes that have taken place over the past twenty years along with Sobol’s own odyssey through the world of storytelling scholarship. TheStorytellers’JourneyverymuchannouncedSobol’sarrivalasthestorytelling movement’s chief critical commentator in the United States, and its publication gave inspiration to the group of scholars in the United Kingdom and Ireland (this reviewer among them) who were seeking the right critical framework and language to discuss what was happening with British and Irish storytelling at the time. Principally, Sobol gave us permission “to ask the difficult questions” of ourselves that we had not felt confident in asking until that point, such as the issue of cultural appropriation within multicultural Britain. In the last twenty years, Sobol has further established himself as one of our leading thinkers about storytelling, and it is thanks, in large part, to his efforts that the still-growing field of storytelling studies is in such rude health. This volume, a rich collection of essays representing the evolution of his thinking, is, therefore, particularly welcome, timely, and an important addition to the storytelling literature. Liars, Damn Liars, and Storytellers is an eclectic mix of essays, as might be expected, but it also has a coherence that serves it well. In the preface, Sobol, adapting Richard Bauman’s schema, identifies three core themes, or frames, that run through the collection: the narrative frame (that is, the consideration of the stories themselves as artifacts); the metanarrative frame (that is, a consideration of the performer and the performance and how that allows us to understand story as event); and the paranarrative frame (that is, the wider historical and social context in which storytelling takes place). The book itself, however, is divided into three further parts that these themes cut across. What needs to be remembered here is that Sobol is a man with many hats: he is at different times folklorist, performance scholar, a scholar of literature (in particular Yeats), and, most importantly, a performer. He is not simply a disinterested observer of storytelling but is a respected and experienced member of the very community of practice that he observes. Many people have made significant contributions to the literature of storytelling from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, whether that is Rita Charon or Arthur Frank from the medical sciences; Jerome Bruner from psychology; Richard Bauman from socio-linguistics and anthropology ; Maria Tatar, Marina Warner, and Jack Zipes from literature and fairy tale studies; to give just a handful of examples, but Sobol’s unique contribution to this interdisciplinary field is that his scholarship emerges from his extensive 172 n On Liars, Damn Liars, and Storytellers lived experience as a...

Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain. By Jordanna Bailkin