Page 148 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 141
interesting is that, in contrast to whiteness, it is something that interviewees
were relatively willing and able to talk about. Where there are few public
discourses that explicitly focus on whiteness, in contrast, as I have argued,
national identity and belonging (and therefore also exclusion) are widely
debated in Britain.
But what does it mean to position oneself within a national community?
How does one imagine one’s self to be part of a larger collectivity? National
identity involves much more than the simple possession of a passport or
residence in a particular place. It involves ways of being, a sense of place
and belonging, myth-making and narrative construction. There are different
levels at which the question of national identity and its changing nature
and formation can be addressed. National identity is the product of state
intervention in terms of politico-legal definitions of borders, citizenship and
belonging. But it also exists at the level of what Michael Billig describes
as ‘banal nationalism’ – the language and repetition of nationalism in the
everyday (Billig 1995; see also Bhabha 1990a). This national identity, the
sense of belonging to an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991), is a lived
experience involving everyday rituals and practices and acts of identifica-
tion (and sometimes disidentification). This chapter examines this lived and
felt aspect of national identity. The accounts are examined for clues as to
how the ‘crisis’ of identity is being experienced and, in particular, the role
played by race, class and gender in these shifting notions of Englishness and
Britishness. The material points to the largely unconsidered relationship of
the domestic to ideas of Britishness and Englishness as well as suggesting
particular ways in which national identity might be gendered. Finally, the
chapter explores how locality offers alternative spaces for identity and the
possibilities of ‘disidentification’ from nation.
For Perry Anderson (1991: 4 and 5), nationality or nation-ness and
nationalism are ‘cultural artefacts of a particular kind’, created in the eight-
eenth century and now universal: ‘in the modern world everyone can, should,
will “have” a nationality, as he or she “has” a gender’. For those living in the
‘English’ part of the British Isles, this raises the question of which nationality
they have, to what imagined community do they belong? As Bernard Crick
(1991: 90) points out: ‘I am a citizen of a country with no agreed colloquial
name’. This suggests at least some confusions or ambiguities in the imagina-
tion and narration of nation (Bhabha 1990b). ‘Once upon a time the English
knew who they were’ begins Jeremy Paxman in his ‘portrait of a people’
(Paxman 1998: 1) and, after several pages of charting the changes (decline)
in England, notes that ‘apart from at a few football and cricket matches,
England scarcely exists as a nation: nationalism was, and remains a British
thing’. Krishnan Kumar argues that the English did not work on developing
ideas of who they were, as projects of both imperialism without and unifica-
tion within Britain were best served by emphasising an imperial, or at best
British, identity rather than an English one: