Page 150 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 143
bean. Tariq Modood, for example, stresses the need to understand Britain
as ‘multiracist’, particularly in the context of increasing Islamophobia (Mo-
dood 1997: 160; see also Parekh 2000). As minority identities within the
national space become increasingly complex, but also explicitly narrativised,
the question remains as to what happens to ‘majority’ identities. Anoop
Nayak argues that there has been a de-racialisation of the white English,
while visible minorities are now correspondingly over-racialised: ‘A pressing
question for ethnic scholars may now centre on the identities of the hitherto
under-researched white Anglo majority – who they are and who they may
yet “become”’ (Nayak 2003: 139, see also Bonnett 2000a). For Jonathon
Rutherford (1997: 6), a key entry into understanding white Englishness is to
examine notions of home and motherhood.
This chapter is concerned with how nation-ness is imagined and lived.
This is particularly interesting because it gives access to the question of the
role of collective identities in subjectivity. How can we understand the ways
in which the complexity and collectivity of the national is understood by the
interviewees? What processes of subjection are involved in the construction
of selfhood, which is tied in with nationality? Through what forms of living is
nationhood lived? How is the self imagined in relation to others – both those
within the nation and those outside of it? Who is not English, who is more
English, who is less English? As mothers, do the interviewees have a sense of
‘passing on’ Englishness to their children? How English are their children?
There is no simple relationship between Englishness and citizenship or hold-
ing a passport (particularly as the passport in fact attests that the holder is
a ‘British subject’). Englishness is not a legal status, but a construction of
belonging, an ethnicity. This, however, is sometimes difficult for the English
to acknowledge, as Catherine Hall points out: ‘In England, the recognition
that Englishness is an ethnicity, just like any other, demands a decentring of
the English imagination. For ethnicities have been constructed as belonging
to ‘others’, not to the norm which is English’ (Hall 1992: 205).
Homi Bhabha argues that nations are based on insecure and ambivalent
imaginings that are undergoing continuous transition and mutation (Bhabha
1990a: 1). Individuals who live the idea of nation in their own identifica-
tions are also constantly imagining and figuring the collective – what it is and
how it relates to them. The rest of this chapter examines different ways in
which national identity was constructed by the interviewees. For all of them,
although differently, this imagining proved to be an uncertain process.

England’s green and pleasant land
Patrick Wright in On Living in an Old Country (1985) highlights the im-
portance of nostalgia – as well as ‘vagueness’ – in certain imaginations of
Englishness. In particular, he examines the potency, for some, of England as
rural heritage and idyll: