Page 173 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

166 How English am I?
of the world is almost as important as discovering our own identity.
I think they are in more trouble than we are. So we, in a curious way,
have to rescue them from themselves – from their own past. We have to
allow them to see that England is a quite interesting place with quite an
interesting history that has bossed us around for 300 years [but] that has
finished. Who are they now?
(Stuart Hall 1989 cited in Back 1996: 127–8)

Stuart Hall sets out a clear challenge: not only does Englishness or Brit-
ishness have to be reimagined (particularly by the white British and white
English) in relation to changing social and political contexts, but it must also
be acknowledged that ‘race’ lies at the heart of Englishness. This chapter
has shown some of the different ways in which England and Britain are
imagined and the way national identities are felt and lived. One result of
living the gap between the pedagogical and performative – between the
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nationalist construction of a continuous and seamless connection with the
past and the recursive demands of living nation-ness in everyday life – is an
uncertainty about what Englishness contains. A theme that emerged through
the interviews was a sense of narrowness and/or emptiness in Englishness.
Classic renditions of England as a ‘green and pleasant land’ populated by
historical figures and perhaps even John Major’s spinsters cycling to church
around village greens are clearly raced and build upon a racialised discourse
of national and imperial superiority in which white women play a particular,
protected, role. In the interviews, there were clear echoes of this discourse
in the juxtapositions between England and others, where Englishness was
white, middle class, rural and clean as opposed to the threat posed by dirty
others (such as gypsies or Muslims selling halal meat). The interviews also
showed the insecure basis of imaginings of Englishness. They were disrupted
by urban life, by the presence of differently raced subjects and by the indi-
viduals’ own sense of loss of a class position. Thus, there is an inflexibility in
the formal narration of Englishness, which made it impossible to sustain in
the everyday. Some of this tension was expressed in the difference between
the image of a nostalgic ‘deep England’ and multicultural and multiracial
Britain.
For other interviewees, the everyday, and in particular the domestic as a
space and practice, did not necessarily provide a sense of difference demand-
ed by the nationalist rhetoric. So Englishness and also perhaps Britishness
were experienced by some as an empty or unmarked norm that appeared
to lack content in the face of what was seen as the cultural richness of other
identities and forms of living. Its very whiteness and normality made it invis-
ible. For example, Helen did not feel that she lived Englishness through her
consumption of food or in the rituals of life, although it was in the domestic,
she suggested, that culture might have real meaning, through which ‘roots’
are established. Englishness, characterised by an inflexibility towards dif-