Page 149 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

142 How English am I?
The English did not so much celebrate themselves as identify with the
projects – the ‘mission’ – they were, as it were providentially, called
upon to carry out in the world . . .. the English could not see themselves
as just another nation in a world of nations.
(Kumar 2003: x; see also Crick 1991: 92)

These projects, and particularly the imperial one, while they may not
have been served by emphasising Englishness, did foster notions, not just
of superiority, but of racialised superiority in particular, which it could be
argued played a central notion in the construction of both Britishness and
Englishness (see Cohen 1994; McClintock 1995; Young 1995).
As several feminist texts have explored, the empire was a gendered as
5
well as a classed and raced enterprise. Anne McClintock argues that

controlling women’s sexuality, exalting maternity and breeding a virile
race of empire-builders were widely perceived as the paramount means
for controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial body politic,
so that, by the end of the century, sexual purity emerged as a controlling
metaphor for racial, economic and political power.
(McClintock 1995: 47)

Catherine Hall also argues that middle-class white women played a central
role in articulating national/imperial identity (Hall 1992: 207). As McClin-
tock shows through examination of advertising, the empire was intimately
related to the domestic with imperial ‘bric-a-brac’ cluttering up domestic
spaces in Britain and the domestic playing a key role in the civilising mission
of empire. Through the importation and marketing of soap, the imperial
powers were spreading a particular version of the domestic to colonial sub-
jects, in a similar way in which it was also promoted to the working classes
(McClintock 1995; see also Bonnett 2000a: ch. 3). In this process, English-
ness and Britishness involved the imagination of both racialised and classed
others, with a particular relationship to notions of ‘home’ and the domestic.
Given the end of colonisation, the expanded immigration of post-colonial
subjects (‘we’re here because you were there’) as well as the repositioning of
Britain within an expanded and consolidated Europe, the questions remains
as to what extent the imagination of Englishness and Britishness has adjusted
to this new context.
The enduring racialisation of Englishness in particular can be read from
6
the seeming disconsonance of the phrase black English, as opposed to the
politically struggled for identity of black British. In the context of racial
exclusions to nationhood in Britain, there have been artists, filmmakers and
writers who have staked their claims as black British (see Owusu 2000). Yet
others have argued that black British as a political identity has excluded
and/or marginalised those non-white identities that are not African Carib-