Page 174 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 167
ference, was likely to disappear in the face of other cultural practices and
identities that were more visible and felt to have more meaning.
For yet others, Englishness was to be actively evaded or escaped. There
was nothing to be salvaged from an identity associated with class and ‘race’
prejudice. In this response to collective identity, all national identities were
seen as potentially negative, particularly if ‘deep-rooted’, but Britain’s impe-
rial history made it particularly unattractive and sometimes oppressive. What
we see emerging in some interviews, and in particular Madeleine’s account,
is a rejection of pedagogical accounts of nationhood and a turn to more fluid
and temporary identifications, for example as ‘Londoners’. This enabled dif-
ference to be embraced as a positive and integral part of a collective identity,
rather than as a threat. Yet there remains some uncertainty as to how this
is to be achieved outside the kinds of explicit attachments that characterise
certain young people’s cultural practices. Madeleine’s critique and then eva-
sion of an English or British identity based on whiteness and class exclusion
was relatively exceptional within this research. Given the ongoing anxieties
about race and national culture, especially those expressed through current
debates around immigration, it would seem that her rethinking of national
identity remains a minority position.
Through the course of the interviews, it emerged that ‘narrating the na-
tion’ can be a means of narrating the self. As such, it is equally gendered,
raced and classed. When Emma and Heather looked back nostalgically to a
‘glorious’ English past, they also appeared to be expressing a sense of loss
in their own lives. This loss was based on sometimes contradictory classed
and gendered experiences. Equally, Helen’s narrative of the disruption in
Englishness marked a point of rupture from her family. To say that English-
ness was changing or fading also marked her difference from her family.
The collective was read through the individual and personal. James Donald
writes of how the nation is the effect of ‘the apparatus of discourses, tech-
nologies and institutions (print capitalism, education, mass media, and so
forth) which produces what is generally recognised as “the national culture”’
(Donald 1993: 167). What is interesting in these interviews is how there was
relatively little mention of these public discourses and technologies. Rather,
the nation was constructed and imagined through forms of living, through
personal histories and everyday routines and consumption. As such, it was
fluid and multiple.