Multicultural Britain Research Articles

The Rushdie Affair and the Politics of Multicultural Britain

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.

Indigestible performances: Women, punk, and the limits of British multiculturalism in Nida Mazoor’s We Are Lady Parts

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.

Aesthetics across cultures: implications for practitioners in multicultural Britain

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

ULUSAL BİR SANAT OLARAK ŞİİR: CAROL ANN DUFFY’NİN SARAY ŞAİRLİĞİ DÖNEMİNDEKİ POLİTİK ŞİİRİ

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)

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

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

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.

Standing up for a Healthier Future for the Next Generation

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.

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.

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.

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.

Decolonising psychotherapy. Racism and the psychoanalytic profession

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.

Perceptions, experiences and accommodations of Britishness; an exploration of national identity amongst young British Sikhs and Hindus in London

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

Introduction: In an increasingly multicultural Britain, health workers are encountering steadily more foreign languages amongst patients. The Standards for Maternity Care Report includes reference to interpreting services mandating they should be available for “women where English is not their first language”. [1] RCOG. Providing Quality Care for Women: A Framework for Maternity Service Standards, 2016. https://www.rcog.org.uk/globalassets/documents/guidelines/working- party-reports/maternitystandards.pdf. Google Scholar All NHS Trusts have provisions for some degree of language interpretation but anecdotally we suspect COVID-19 has had a significant service impact.

On Liars, Damn Liars, and Storytellers by Joseph Sobol

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

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

“The man's a man if he is black”: Conrad, Modernism, and Race (Again)

Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus" has played a major role in discussions of modernism's relationship to both race and colonialism, but two of its racial/colonial aspects have gone under-remarked. First, the novel's title character, James Wait, embodies the emergent, fin-de-siecle phenomenon of Black Britishness brought about through colonial immigration. The text's aesthetic stems from the disturbances this phenomenon created amid the traditional, White, seafaring practices of the British merchant marine. Second, the novel's representation of this Black-White dynamic is tied to an additional, third racial category: that of Irishness. The novel's lone Irish character, nicknamed "Belfast," proves central to its portrait of James Wait's revolutionary significance, which equates the egalitarian mindset of an emergent, multicultural Britain to the "sentimental" features of the Irish Celt as defined by Matthew Arnold. Attention to these aspects sheds new light on the novel's modernism, its racial/colonial perspectives, and on larger discussions in Conrad and modernist studies.

Unsettled: Refugee camps and the making of multicultural Britain by Jordana Bailkin

Reviewed by: Unsettled: Refugee camps and the making of multicultural Britain by Jordana Bailkin Lucy Mayblin Unsettled: Refugee camps and the making of multicultural Britain By Jordana Bailkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Contemporary studies of migration have increasingly been criticised for their lack of attention to history. Equally, in the British public sphere, there has tended to be a highly selective orientation to history, with only those which paint the country in a favourable light being popularly remembered. Unsettled contributes both to the scholarly agenda of re-historicising our understandings of migration histories, in this case the vast historical architecture of refugee encampment across the British Isles, and has the potential to also shift popular imaginaries of encampments past and present. As Bailkin explains: "This book is about camps in Britain, but also about their erasure from public memory. This amnesia is selective" (12). In this way, through putting refugees at the centre of the national narrative, this fabulous work of painstakingly detailed archival research is also deeply, though quietly, political. Empirically, Bailkin has drawn on a range of sources including documents from the (British) National Archives, the archives of camps in East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Surrey, a range of oral histories (including from the British Library's Sound Archive, the North West Sound Archive in Lancashire, and the BBC Asian Network's Millennium Memory Bank Interviews), as well as her own interviews with people who lived or worked in refugee camps. Memoirs, photographs and poems are also woven through the book to add "fuller expression to refugees themselves" (13). While Bailkin does discuss the early life of British camps, starting from concentration camps in South Africa, and the troubled categories of the encamped, such as the blurred line between British citizen, subject and refugee, the focus of the book is on camps in the British Isles. This is sensible considering the vast scale of encampment within Britain; Bailkin identifies 96 camps across England, Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man. This impressive body of data would be hard for anyone to discipline into a singular narrative for the purposes of a book, and one of the joys of this text is that it sits with the inevitable complexity and only loosely disciplines it for the purposes of discussion. What are presented, then are a complex set of stories which often unsettle what we thought we knew about refugee camps in the past. Structuring chapters thematically into "Making Camp" (everything you ever needed to know about Nissen huts in one place), "Feeding and Hungering" (on the vital role—symbolic, cultural, religious, nutritional—of food and eating in camps), "In Need" (on refugee care and the kinds of subjects produced by it), "Happy Families?" (on the definition of a family and how encamped families related to contemporaneous ideas about families), "Mixing Up" (on how the encamped interacted with and were responded to by local communities) and "Hard Core" (on those refugees that were deemed difficult to settle after encampment) offers just enough of a scaffold around which to organise this vast body of historical data. The title Unsettled, then, is multi layered in that it refers to more than the unsettling of peoples across borders. Many aspects of the book unsettle easy narratives which seek to simplify experiences of encampment. For example, the camps that Bailkin discusses housed both British nationals and refugees, often mixed together. Many "refugees" were, furthermore, British subjects—citizens of the British Empire. The idea that camps represent the division of citizens and non-citizens therefore does not stand up to historical inspection, even if it is the case today. Bailkin writes "at different moments, camps could signal either the unity of citizens and refugees or their segregation" (1), and rather than taking citizen/non-citizen as her key distinction, it is the settled/unsettled distinction that she focusses her analysis upon. While Bailkin is a historian, and therefore less concerned than a social scientist might be with theorising and generalising from the historical materials that she has found through her research, she explains that "'unsettled' became a way to make sense of—and bring together—the variety of people whose mobility was perceived...

The British State’s production of the Muslim School: A simultaneity of categories of difference analysis

Recently, national populist politics has been translated with the emergence of two overlapping narratives of Islamophobia and anti‐EU immigration media discourses. Such discourses have been made highly visible in the increased spike in hate crimes that have been a hidden cost of the national(ist) debate about Britain leaving the European Union (Brexit). This is the context in which we can trace a remarkable shift in the state representation of the schooling of the South Asian/Muslim community and the reclassification from promoting South Asians as central to the future of a modernised multicultural Britain (1970s) to positioning Muslims as a ‘suspect community’ (2020). This article unpacks two cultural moments in the critical exploration of the State production of the Muslim School within a post‐Trojan Horse era. First, a national dominant image of the Muslim School operating within the State ascribed ‘no‐go’ ethno‐religious Muslim neighbourhoods, as a repository of regressive (extreme) Islamist religiosity; thus, reconstructing their religious belief as racialised identities, as they disconnect from British values. Second, the No Outsiders programme, with the accompanying framing of intolerant (Muslim) parents. In this case, the ensuing tension between ‘homophobic Muslims’ and ‘British values’ sets in place a homogenisation of differences. Deploying a simultaneity of categories of difference perspective, we address an underlying discursive re‐politicising of South Asian ethnic communities as religious communities, which is resulting in a perpetual negotiation of the meanings attached to being Muslim. This will enable an international application of the article beyond the specific focus on the city of Birmingham, identified in the international media as the Jihadi capital of Europe.

Space, Symbols, and Speech in Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’sBehztiand Its Reception

In December 2004, the staging of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre triggered protests by some members of the Sikh community who considered it offensive. By unearthing and exploring tensions in the play’s representation of a Sikh community, this article sheds light on some of the tensions in multicultural Britain in order to complicate and challenge an interpretation of the dispute in terms of a reductive binary of creative freedom versus religious censure and censorship. While, for the liberal secularist critic and proponent of free expression, the explosion of taboos is vital to an expansion of freedom, a hard-line adoption of this position that fails to account for the material specificities of a religious response to a creative work, including the demography of the protestors, can result in a curtailment of the freedom of a religious minority. Reading the play in dialogue with the controversy it generated, this article seeks to ground the outbreak of religious minority offence in its local material conditions and, by doing so, to underline the unequal access to social, cultural, and spatial capital that shaped the controversy. It focuses in particular on religious symbols, space, and speech, exploring how they figure in both the literary and social texts.

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

Jordanna Bailkin<i>, Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain</i>