Multiculturalism's Double-Bind (Urban Anthropology) 0754676072, 9780754676072

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MultiCulturalisM’s double bind

urban anthropology series editors: italo Pardo and Giuliana Prato, university of Kent, uK Urban Anthropology is the irst series of its kind to be established by a major academic publisher. Ethnographically global, the series includes original, empirically based works of high analytical and theoretical calibre. All volumes published in the series are peer-reviewed. The editors encourage submission of sole authored and edited manuscripts that address key issues that have comparative value in the current international academic and political debates. These issues include, but are by no means limited to: the methodological challenges posed by urban ield research; the role of kinship, family and social relations; the gap between citizenship and governance; the legitimacy of policy and the law; the relationships between the legal, the semilegal and the illegal in the economic and political ields; the role of conlicting moralities across the social, cultural and political spectra; the problems raised by internal and international migration; the informal sector of the economy and its complex relationships with the formal sector and the law; the impact of the process of globalization on the local level and the signiicance of local dynamics in the global context; urban development, sustainability and global restructuring; conlict and competition within and between cities. Other titles in the series Domestic Goddesses Maternity, Globalization and Middle-class Identity in Contemporary India Henrike Donner isbn 978 0 7546 4942 7 Beyond Multiculturalism Edited by Giuliana B. Prato isbn 978 0 7546 7173 2

Multiculturalism’s Double Bind Creating Inclusivity, Cosmopolitanism and Difference

John naGle University of Ulster, UK

© John nagle 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. John nagle has asserted his right under the Copyright, designs and Patents act, 1988, to be identiied as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Wey Court east union road Farnham surrey, Gu9 7Pt england

Ashgate Publishing Company suite 420 101 Cherry street Burlington Vt 05401-4405 usa

www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Nagle, John. Multiculturalism’s double bind : creating inclusivity, cosmopolitanism and difference. -- (Urban anthropology) 1. Multiculturalism. 2. Cultural fusion. 3. Irish--Foreign countries--Social conditions. 4. Children of immigrants-Social conditions. I. Title II. Series 305.8-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data nagle, John, 1971Multiculturalism’s double bind : creating inclusivity, cosmopolitanism and difference / by John Nagle. p. cm. -- (Urban anthropology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7607-2 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-0-7546-9797-8 (ebook) 1. Multiculturalism. 2. Cosmopolitanism. I. Title. HM1271.N34 2009 305.8009421--dc22 2009018254 isbn 9780754676072 (hbk) isbn 9780754697978 (ebk.V)

Contents

List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction: Multiculturalism’s Double Bind

vii ix

1

1

The Global City, Community and Multiculturalism

23

2

Mobilizing for Multiculturalism

47

3

The Village Hall: Multicultural Community Centres

75

4

the Carnival and status reversals: Multicultural Public spectacles

101

5

Be Counted: Multicultural Census Campaigns

125

6

Multiculturalism’s ‘Indian Summer’ and the Second-Generation

149

Conclusion: The Death of Multiculturalism: Redux

169

Bibliography Index

177 193

In memory of Alice

list of abbreviations

CRE eu Fis Gla GlC IRA ibrG iraG NCM ONS PTA un UNESCO

Commission for Racial Equality european union Federation of irish societies Greater london authority Greater london Council Irish Republican Army irish in britain representation Group irish research advisory Group New Commonwealth Migration Ofice of National Statistics Prevention of Terrorism Act united nations United Nations Educational Scientiic and Cultural Organization

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Acknowledgements If I were a 1970s soul singer I might reasonably begin by thanking God and my hair-stylist (not necessarily in that order); but since I’m a ‘follicly challenged’ atheist, this is not really appropriate. As is the nature of these things thanking all those who made this work possible is an almost impossible task. First of all, a huge thanks to all the staff and students at the Irish Cultural Centre who so kindly tolerated me skulking about the corridors and classrooms of the Centre. Of the tutors, thanks to Brendan Mulkere, Bernard Canavan, J.J. O’Neill and Rory for being so accessible and willing to be harangued by my inquiries. Most of all, thanks to Ros Scanlon, who has been helpful beyond the bounds of reasonable assistance. Thanks also to Tony Murray at London Metropolitan University for allowing me to glean the huge Smurit Archive of materials on the Irish in Britain. A special thanks to all those souls who surrendered precious time to let me interview them for the purpose of this book. I am especially happy to acknowledge Mary Tilki and Seán Hutton from the Federation of Irish Societies. I owe to Peter Aspinall a debt of gratitude for providing detailed information on the Census, as well as providing comments on a early draft of Chapter 5. The ideas expressed in this book were originally germinated in my Ph.D. thesis which was completed late in 2003 at the School of Anthropological Studies, Queen’s University Belfast. I therefore gratefully acknowledge the skilful handling of my more fanciful and unrealistic ideas by Suzel Reily, my supervisor. I owe a debt to my examiners, John Hutnyk and Fiona Magowan, for their enthusiasm towards the thesis. At Queen’s, Hastings Donnan also provided a supportive role. My Ph.D. research at Queen’s was funded by DENI. Thanks to Dominic Bryan, the Director of the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, who assisted my work as Research Fellow in the Institute. I am very grateful to the staff at INCORE at the University of Ulster for their patience and immense support during the book’s writing up period. At INCORE I would particularly like to thank Gillian Robinson, Brandon Hamber, Tom Fraser and Martin Melaugh. Neil Jordan at Ashgate Publishing deserves my undying gratitude for his hard work and encouragement to kick-start this book. I would also like to thank the editors of the journals Ethnicities and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power for allowing me to use material that was published irst in these journals. Outside the cloistered conines of academia lies a tremendous network of support. From my wife’s family: Jim, Alice and Mary accepted me into their family without hesitation. Colleen, Cush and the kids in Liverpool. John and Caroline in

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London and Michael in Belfast deserve my gratitude. A special thanks to Mum and Dad, who have always unstintingly supported me. Last and, of course, not least, this book would simply not have happened without the support of Mary Alice.

Introduction: Multiculturalism’s double bind

Cross-Cultural Exchange or Dialogue of the Deaf? It was a Monday night at the Irish Cultural Centre, a state-sponsored arts and educational complex in west London where I was conducting ethnographic research. As usual, on a Monday night, in one of the rooms on the top loor of the centre, Brendan Mulkere (also known as ‘Master Mulkere’) was teaching Irish traditional music to a group of over twenty students. Only two or three of the students originally hailed from Ireland; during the course of the year a few students proudly proclaimed Irish parents or some form of Irish heritage, while others openly admitted no discernible Irish lineage whatsoever. On this particular night, ‘Master Mulkere’ decided that it was time for the students to learn about the history and cultural richness of Ireland so that they would hopefully come to a greater appreciation of the cultural contribution of Irish migrants in London, of which Brendan was one. At the front of the class Brendan had positioned a stand which held a political map of the island of Ireland for the beneit of the students. After pausing for silence, Brendan began, in extemporaneous fashion, to describe some of the features of Ireland that he believed were particularly salient to its identity. ‘Many of you,’ said Brendan addressing the seated students, ‘will be lacking a knowledge of the people and the place.’ Brendan’s method here was to take the students on a tour across Ireland. Starting the journey on the west coast of the country, Brendan noted that there has always been a propensity for great iddlers in the west Clare region. ‘The “old time singing” is especially prevalent in areas where the Irish language is spoken,’ stated Brendan, as he progressed northwards up the western seaboard of Ireland. Interspersed with facts, Brendan slyly referenced a county like Donegal by explaining that it is home to Daniel O’Donnell: ‘Have you heard of him? He’s a famous singer in Ireland. He’s a great one for loving his ma,’ said Brendan. Inert students denoted their collective ignorance of O’Donnell via perplexed silent expressions. Some students read notated sheets of music arrayed in front of them. Finally, Brendan reached Northern Ireland. It was at the point of arrival at this ‘troubled’ part of Ireland that Brendan was at great pains to emphasize it had much more to offer than the stereotypical media portrayal that had been fed to the general public: bombs, shootings and sectarian killings waged between Irish Catholics and British Protestants. Northern Ireland, pleaded Brendan, was one of the most culturally rich and diverse parts of Ireland. Just as brendan approached

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the pinnacle of his rhetorical low, one student, a middle-aged English woman, sporting Panjabi salwar trousers and Cleopatra-styled eyeliner, interjected, ‘Is it safe to go to Ireland? Personally I wouldn’t go there.’ Instinctively, I stared at the woman presuming she was joking and the class were sharing in the irony of the jest; but as Brendan paused to collect his thoughts, she continued in earnest. ‘It’s just that you hear so many stories of bombs and people being shot.’ Resisting the obvious temptation to dismiss the question as offensive and rather ignorant, Brendan patiently explained, ‘Ireland is perfectly safe. Even Belfast, for instance, is as safe as London, if not safer.’ The woman looked at Brendan sceptically as he proffered up his answer, before declaring, ‘Well, I still wouldn’t go.’ A somewhat bemused Brendan ended the discussion by urging the relieved students through well-worn renditions of the two pieces of Irish traditional music written out in front of them. Brendan’s attempt to promote the cultural beauty of a particular group could be said to be at the very heart of the state-sponsored multicultural project. Members who believe that the identities of the groups they belong to have in some way been misrepresented, distorted or negatively stereotyped, endeavour to gain public resources to help them furnish a counter-representation which evokes feelings of respect, appreciation and esteem from non-members. In this way, proponents of multiculturalism argue that we should all ‘emphasize intercultural dialogue and make it an activating and even a founding principle of multicultural society’ (Parekh 2006: 351). This vision of multiculturalism, continue proponents, is ‘crosscultural and cross-civilizational’: it encourages the ‘development of sensibilities and ways of thinking so that we can understand cultures radically different from our own and thereby evaluate their contribution to human civilization’ (Modood 2007). Multiculturalism, in this perspective, is profoundly ‘dialogical’ (Taylor 1994): it can help transform hitherto problematic relationships between groups, in which the conlicting groups’ deep rooted fear and hatred of each other needs to be dealt with by being germane to the protagonists’ experiential realities which shape their perspectives and needs (Lederach 1997: 24). The point is to not only transform the way that others view us, but by engaging in forms of intercultural exchange we will ‘simultaneously appreciate the varied ways to be human whilst more profoundly understanding our own distinctive location’ (Modood 2007). Yet such optimism regarding the potent power of multiculturalism to positively transform issues of racism or the misrepresentation of particular group identities often falls lat at the level of practice. The ethnographic example of Brendan, in a multicultural setting in London – in an adult educational class – struggling to advance a positive representation of irishness to a group of students elicited ambivalence or even some hostility. One student was unwilling to change her preconception of what Ireland is according to prevailing negative stereotypes. Other students simply did not attend the class in order to learn about the identities of other groups so that they could come to a greater appreciation of the myriad and plural forms of humanity. Many of the students invested the time, effort and expense to come to the class because they enjoyed learning new musical forms.

Introduction: Multiculturalism’s Double Bind

3

Others came because they enjoyed the ‘sense of community’ that was evoked in the shared experience of the class. This is just the tip of the iceberg. This was a recurrent theme that I encountered during ieldwork at numerous sites where state-sponsored multicultural initiatives took place. Defying facile categorization, a huge range of motivations and emotions promulgated people to engage in multicultural projects. It was wrong, I quickly discovered, to assume that people participated in such events purely for the purposes of promoting anti-racist politics. Only occasionally would I meet someone who believed in the axiom that knowledge and profound respect of the ‘other’ arrives by learning to walk in their shoes for a sustained period of time. Multicultural events encompass the involvement of a wide variety of different groups and actors – many of whom represent multiple identities and reasons for participation – and that these events generate unpredictable modes of exchange between these actors. The very ambiguity of state-sponsored multiculturalism at the level of practice does not necessarily signal the failure of it to effectively provide new positive representations of groups, nor does it completely nullify the radical potential wrought by the nascent coming together of actors ordinarily distanced in everyday life. The meeting point of groups within state-sponsored multiculturalism engenders multiple, often unanticipated results; the spectrum varying from important forms of political alliances, social movements and coalitions, which seek to deconstruct essentialist conceptions of group-based differences (Fraser 2000), to those meetings which act to reproduce and maintain hierarchical relations between groups. Yet the analysis of state-sponsored multiculturalism often fails to take into account the very ambivalence, ambiguity and capricious nature of initiatives designed to promote cross-cultural exchange and dialogue between groups. As we shall see, both academic proponents and opponents of state-sponsored multiculturalism, especially those working within political philosophy, tend to reify multiculturalism in terms of whether it either advances or counteracts the struggle of disadvantaged groups to achieve social equality and harmonious coexistence with other groups. Much of the writing on multiculturalism has therefore become either ‘normative’ or ‘institutionalist’ (Grillo 2007). The ‘normative’ operates at an abstract level, with the assumption that ‘philosophical relection alone will provide philosophical solutions to the apparent problems of liberal multiculturalism’ (see Grillo 2007: 981). The ‘institutionalist’ (in the political scientist’s sense) seeks to link and go beyond both approaches by emphasizing the alternative importance of contextualization. Issues surrounding the viability of multiculturalism, however, should not be left to ‘a general theory about the nature of morality or an epistemology’, nor ‘a form of moral or knowledge relativism’ (Modood 2007: 7) concerning the incommensurability of different visions of the ‘good life’. In other words, most literature treats multiculturalism as negotiation of cultural differences in relation to liberal democracy (Nederveen Pieterse 2007: 101). As van Brakel (2003: 146–7) notes:

4

Multiculturalism’s Double Bind The inluential theorists tend to rigidify the issue into one monolithic thing. Multiculturalism is one thing, one problem, for which one ideal universal theory (or universal rejection) has to be found. If alternative theories are recognized, then they are alternative universal theories, which simply clash with their competitors [emphasis original].

The sheer complexity of relationships and identities made and remade in the ‘multicultural milieu’ is lattened out by the harsh unforgiving theoretical methodology of political philosophy. Rather than limiting the analysis of multiculturalism and cross-cultural relations to the sphere of high abstraction typical of political philosophy, in this book I will utilize ethnographic analysis to examine state-sponsored multiculturalism. The point here is to look at the affects that are generated in banal encounters (Leeuwen 2008), in ‘the prosaic moments and daily rhythms of social life that have a decisive impact on racial and ethnic practice’ (Amin and Thrift 2002: 292). Here, Amin and Thrift (2002: 292) demand that the analysis of multiculturalism takes into account ‘the intensity of racial or ethnic coding of daily life’. Their ield of analysis goes wider than those events generated by public resources which are designed to facilitate positive multicultural engagement. What is seen and said in schools, neighbourhoods, streets, shopping centres, workplaces and public spaces, they argue, provide ‘the prosaic negotiations that drive interethnic and intercultural relations in different directions’. My sphere of analysis in this book, however, is largely limited, though not exclusively so, to the remit of state-sponsored multiculturalism, such as arts festivals, ‘community centres’ and census campaigns. It is these spaces and the modes of ritualized activity they spawn that I am concerned with. Put simply, to what extent and in which circumstances might multicultural initiatives lead to actors from different groups coming together to transform each other’s deep seated sense of mutual distrust and animosity into new positive relations? Or, why might a different initiative be the cause of inter-group conlict or simply reinforce the chauvinism of ethnic separatism and negative stereotypes? Why might the same multicultural projects elicit feelings of ambivalence and detachment from participants? Is it possible to go beyond a version of multiculturalism which gives a green light to ethnic chauvinism by moving to one based on ‘ordinary cosmopolitanisms’ (Lamont and Aksartova 2002), deined as the strategies used by ordinary people to bridge boundaries with people who appear different to them? Clearly, as the ethnographic example from the beginning of the chapter demonstrated, the mere act of promoting the importance of cultural identities in multicultural settings does not guarantee mutual respect and reconciliation between members of respective groups. It is therefore important to provide critical analysis and some suggestions regarding why some state-sponsored multicultural projects seem to lounder or are counter-productive, engendering fresh conlict, while others accomplish positive results. Understanding in more depth and insight what seems to work and what seems to fail in terms of creating cross-cultural

Introduction: Multiculturalism’s Double Bind

5

dialogue and alliances can help with the project of formulating a consistent model of best practices and public policies. In this book I provide an analysis of how groups present their cultural forms to actors from other groups in state-sponsored multicultural contexts. As part of this, I assess the role of state agencies – at both national and local scales, including citywide governance – regarding funding and reproducing multiculturalism, and how such varying levels of support translate into shaping the form and content of multicultural initiatives. The meso-level of analysis – suturing global and local modes of culture and governance – in which this book is situated is London, a so-called ‘global city’. Global cities, as we shall see, are characterized by high levels of inward migration, as well as conlict regarding imbalances in power, welfare and status between the various groups in the city. At the same time, global cities are framed by the authorities and the culture industries are profoundly cosmopolitan entities deined by the frisson of different groups and cultures colliding in the ecumene to produce new forms of citizenship. In this synopsis, ‘ethnic’ pluralism and diversity is nourished as part of the city’s self-conscious image, marketed as attaining the capacity to ameliorate fraught relations between groups. The allure of the global city is that it provides a matrix for actors to come into contact and experience different cultures; in its most utopic sphere, the global city releases actors from their preordained identities, allowing them to re-imagine who they are.

The Double Bind of Multiculturalism While an activating principle of multiculturalism in the global city is crosscultural dialogue, it has serious limits as a means to promote harmonious relationships between groups. A key argument proposed in this book is that there is a ‘double bind’ of multiculturalism. Invoking Bateson’s (1973) notion of the ‘double bind’, I argue that multiculturalism is characterized by a paradoxical injunction that limits, but doesn’t completely negate the possibility for ‘ethnic minorities’ to withdraw from their circumscribed status. On the one hand, ‘ethnic minority’ groups are encouraged, within the multicultural paradigm, to make their cultures inclusive and accessible in order to contribute towards a liberalpluralist celebration of ‘cosmopolitan’ diversity and cross-cultural citizenship; on the other, it is forbidden to threaten their ethnic particularism, as to do so would contradict their claim to resources as a distinctive group. This ‘double bind’ hinders the development of a politics of solidarity beyond a recognition that difference is good in itself, which ‘makes it all the more dificult for a serious cross-cultural dialogue to take place, the only action which could overcome the current incapacitating issiparousness of the potential political agents of change’ (Bauman 2001: 106).

6

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What are Multiculturalism and Cross-Cultural Dialogue? It is worth at this point providing a brief description of what exactly is statesponsored multiculturalism and why the idea of cross-cultural dialogue is such an important constituent part of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a heterogeneously expanded portmanteau term that underwrites an assortment of ideological positions, theoretical models and legislative policies (Bhabha 1998: 31, Hall 2000: 209, Hesse 2000: 1). Indeed, as Hall (2000: 210) points out, ‘“multiculturalism” is not a single doctrine, does not characterize one political strategy, and does not represent an already achieved state of affairs’. While there are an almost inexhaustible number of deinitions of multiculturalism (Kymlicka 2007), is it possible to arrive at some form of working deinition without reifying the concept? To start us off, here is a parsimonious deinition of multiculturalism: ‘the way in which cultural and ethnic differentiation may be accommodated in social, political and economic arrangements’ (Festenstein 2000: 57). In this deinition, it could be said that most societies are ‘multicultural’ in that they contain diverse cultures; however, ‘multiculturalism’ takes this premise a step forward by making diversity a goal to be furthered by means of state policy (Joppke 2004). In other words, speciic groups, and their cultural forms, are designated as worthy of oficial recognition, protection and substantial resources. Why then are certain groups and their cultural identities endowed with multicultural recognition? Some theorists have addressed this by demanding that the remit of multiculturalism ought to include all oppressed groups in the US, for instance: ‘women, Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and other Spanish speaking Americans, American Indians, Jews, lesbians, gay men, Arabs, Asians, old people, working-class people, and the physically and mentally disabled’ (Young 1990: 40). For others, this deinition of multiculturalism is too inclusive. One key proponent of multiculturalism, Will Kymlicka, limits the remit to those groups who contain distinct ‘national and ethnic differences’. These groups are further deined by a ‘culture’, which Kymlicka views as ‘synonymous with a “nation” or a “people” – that is, as an intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history’ (1995: 18). This ‘culture’, he continues elsewhere, is a ‘societal culture’, which ‘provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres’. Another proponent of multiculturalism uses a similar ‘culturalist’ analysis to deine which groups should be included in the multicultural model. Bikhu Parekh argues that the cultures of ‘ethnic minorities’ ‘carry a measure of authority and are patterned and structured by virtue of being embedded in a shared and historically inherited system of meaning and signiicance’ (Parekh 2006: 3).

Introduction: Multiculturalism’s Double Bind

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An Empire of Uniformity? Proponents of multiculturalism argue that the cultural identities of ‘ethnic minority’ groups have traditionally been mishandled by the ‘dominant national culture’. For Zygmunt Bauman, the historical practices for managing minorities are conceptualized in two models: the ‘anthropophagic’ and the ‘anthropoemic’. The ‘anthropophagic’ can be viewed as analogous to processes of assimilation, in which the state deals with minorities by consuming and gaining strength from them. The ‘anthropoemic’, alternatively, refers to practices of exclusion, as minorities are conined ‘within the visible walls of the ghettos’ (1997: 18). The challenge today for liberal democratic societies is thus to shun these traditional practices for dealing with minorities within the state. Located within these categories of assimilation and exclusion, as Kymlicka (2007: 96) notes, are a range of undemocratic relations between the majority and minority population, which typically framed the cultures of minority groups as ‘deviant’, ‘primitive’ and ‘unequal’. The current job for nation states is therefore to develop policies that promote liberal multicultural citizenship. To assist with the aim of achieving equal recognition for the cultural identities of ethnic minorities, proponents of multiculturalism may demand that these groups are endowed with some form of group-differentiated rights, such as political autonomy, land claims and legal exemptions (Kymlicka 2007). For migrant groups, who provide the basis for this book, they might demand the adoption of multiculturalism in school curricula, the inclusion of ethnic representation on the mandate of public media or media licensing, and afirmative action in terms of public housing and job allocation (Kymlicka 2007: 74). They also often request funding for their cultural initiatives and access to public spaces to make these cultural forms visible to the wider public. Proponents of multiculturalism, consequently, demand some form of group differentiated rights to help allow groups maintain their distinctive cultural forms without it adversely affecting their status in society. Even in societies which employ a republican concept of a neutral state, enshrining unitary citizenship and uniform individual rights, proponents of multiculturalism argue that this is not enough to facilitate justice and equality or accommodate conlicting cultural demands. Tully (1995: 64) sums up this perspective by arguing that identical treatment is to be contrasted with fair treatment. In a legally and politically uniform society, citizens are ‘treated identically rather than equitably’. For Tully, unitary citizenship is an ‘empire of uniformity’ (1995: 64). Proponents argue that the system of a singular and unitary citizenship, as well as a neutral public sphere, actually creates disadvantage for minority groups who embody distinct ‘ways of life’ to that of the favoured dominant majority group. Although the notion of a neutral liberal state is important – embodying religious toleration, free speech, the rule of law, formal equality and procedural legality and a universal franchise – it is argued that this neutrality only works when it is assumed that there is a broad cultural homogeneity among the governed (Hall 2000: 228). However, rather than the liberal state managing to slough off its ethnicparticularistic skin to emerge in its culturally cleansed, universalistic form, it is

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argued that the pretense of the neutral liberal state was in fact achieved through the formation of a dominant ethnos (Kymlicka 1995, May 1999, Hall 2000, Parekh 2006, Modood 2007). The myth of neutrality ignores the fact that a political culture ‘is a product of history and relects and registers the political consensus prevailing at a given point in time’ (Parekh 2006: 203).1 Indeed, because the ‘state unavoidably promotes certain cultural identities’ it ‘thereby disadvantages others’ (Kymlicka 1995: 108). Another reason why proponents of multiculturalism plead that the various communal cultural forms of migrant groups should be endowed with oficial recognition is because they believe these are crucial to the shaping of actors’ sense of identity. Parekh (2006: 349–50) argues that ‘human nature never exists in its raw form and is inescapably shaped and structured by culture. The latter draws out some aspects of human nature rather than others, gives them a certain orientation, and develops human personality in a particular way’. There is, consequently, no such thing as the ‘unencumbered self’ (Sandel 1982), ‘we are all, to some extent, situated within wider communities which shape and inluence who we are’ (May 1999: 18) [emphasis original]. Proponents of multiculturalism, therefore, place a great deal of importance on promoting the cultural forms of minority groups. Proponents demand that the cultural forms which shape and determine each minority group’s conception of the ‘good life’ should be allowed to lourish under the auspices of state sanction. The struggle for groups suffering from prejudice, consequently, is to gain equal acceptance for their cultural differences because ‘non-recognition or misrecognition can inlict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being’ (Taylor 1994: 25). One proponent of multiculturalism (Taylor 1994: 64) demands that ‘we all recognize the equal value of different cultures; that we not only let them survive, but acknowledge their worth’ [emphasis original]. This struggle to gain equal recognition for the respective cultural identities of minority groups is predicated upon fostering cross-cultural exchange: the nurturing of mutual understanding, intercultural respect and harmonious ethnic relations. In this analysis, prejudice against ‘ethnic minorities’ is assumed to be the result of members of the majority host population lacking knowledge and respect for the identities of the minority group. By engaging groups to learn of each other’s history, cultural practices and contribution to society, proponents of multiculturalism hope that this will contribute to a progressive anti-racist politics. The task is to develop cross-cultural educational curricula that allow individuals and groups to evaluate and interrogate the beliefs of others and themselves. The goal of multiculturalism is thus to spread understanding between different groups so that there is greater awareness of what it means to be part of groups of which 1 The inherent lack of neutrality in the civic realm is exposed not only through the hegemony of a dominant ethnos, but also in its proclivity for androcentrism and heterosexism (Cowan et al. 2001: 15).

Introduction: Multiculturalism’s Double Bind

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we are not members (Taylor 1994). Parekh (2006: 350) argues that ‘by critically engaging in a critically sympathetic dialogue … we come to appreciate the strengths and limitations of our own, become aware of what is distinctive to it as well as what it shares in common with them, and enjoy the opportunity to enrich ourselves by judiciously borrowing their attractive features’. Minorities, argues Modood (2007), ‘are bearers of distinctive knowledge’ and their very different perspective on ‘society, its institutions, discourses and self-image’ holds a critical mirror to the majority society.

‘Groupsicles of Competing Ethnicities’: Against Multiculturalism As we can see, proponents of multiculturalism make cross-cultural dialogue a central feature of state-sponsored multiculturalism, as part of a strategy to ameliorate prejudice and disadvantage suffered by particular ethnic minorities. It is important to note, however, that this is not a view shared by all commentators. This optimistic view of cross-cultural dialogue to assist with the struggle to achieve social equality for minority groups has been heavily critiqued by many self-proclaimed left-liberals and radicals (e.g., Malik 1996, Fraser 2000, Barry 2001, Bauman 2001, Joppke 2004). The criticisms of opponents of multiculturalism are wide-ranging. Leftliberals, in particular, argue that rather than the state accommodating different cultural claims in the public sphere, it should maintain the lofty goals of universal individual human rights, formal social equality and a singular deinition of citizenship. This undifferentiated conception of citizenship is humanist: it cherishes the non-negotiable sameness and the egalitarian nature of all humans. Critics of multiculturalism vociferously argue that only by treating humans as the same will equality be fundamentally delivered; to treat humans as different, as belonging to discrete groups deserving the special charter of differentiated rights, is inherently illiberal by promoting discrimination and intolerant practices. For one critic, multiculturalism ‘represents not a means to an equal society, but an alternative one where equality has given way to the toleration of difference, and indeed inequality’ (Malik 1996: 170). rather than leading to a heightened appreciation of the cultures of other groups in society, opponents also argue that multiculturalism encourages conlict by allowing incompatible group claims to clash in the public arena (Barry 2001). It is not unreasonable that groups, especially religious ones, can clash by fostering ‘zero-sum ideas about the way in which a polity and a society should be organized’, especially when ‘one group seeks to impose its ideas on a territory containing other groups’ (Barry 2001: 24). The solution to this is not for the state to mediate between conlicting and incompatible conceptions of the good life, but to remain intrinsically neutral and leave citizens free as individuals to lead their self-chosen lives in the private sphere.

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Other critics are concerned with the detrimental impact of multiculturalism on national cohesion. In Britain, a range of critics have attributed multiculturalism to expediting the ‘Balkanization’ of British society (Spencer 2006). They accuse multiculturalism of helping to ‘build barriers between the different tribes that make up Britain today, rather than helping to create a new shared sense of Britishness’ (Alibhai-Brown 2000a). Multiculturalism ‘encourages minorities to subdivide without placing a corresponding emphasis on cooperation and integration’ (Bodi 2006). Multiculturalism forces minorities into ‘ethnic iefdoms’ (Kundnani 2002). Multiculturalism is ‘an ideology which holds that people from different cultures must live in separate communities within a country, should not take an interest in each other and must not criticize each other’ (Buruma 2007). ‘Multiculturalism as a political ideology has helped to create a tribal Britain with no political or moral centre’ (Malik 2005). Multiculturalism will always ‘divide the population into groupsicles of competing ethnicities’ (West 2005). State-sponsored multiculturalism, in particular, is seen as engendering conlict between groups rather than modes of intercultural harmony. Opponents often claim that there is a ‘distorted multiculturalism’ wherein increasingly differentiated groups each pursue their own case for attention and resources, while jealously protecting their right not to be criticized by others (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992, Alibhai-Brown 2000b). By merely seeing respect for distinct cultural values as primary questions of justice at the expense of a politics of economic redistribution and equality between individuals (Fraser 2000), multiculturalism is seen as weakening the welfare state by eroding the sense of pan-ethnic solidarity needed to sustain society-wide economic redistribution.2 By promoting cultural recognition over economic redistribution, multiculturalism heads off the ‘nightmare of uniied political action by the economically disadvantaged’. Multiculturalism, agrees Barry (2001: 12), ‘emphasizes the particularity of each group’s problems’. Opponents are also unconvinced that cross-cultural dialogue in multicultural settings necessarily equates to a progressive anti-racist politics. Simply learning about another group’s ‘ways of life’ does not automatically act to terminate prejudice; it can instead reify culture and cultural difference, thus failing ‘to address the central issue of racism within society’ (May 1999: 2). Moreover, simply valorizing and promoting ethnic difference can be as debilitating as the venom of 2 Many left-liberals argue for a redistribution of resources, which includes a system of social entitlements, to achieve ‘equality of resources’. This concept of the welfare state requires us to make sacriices ‘for anonymous others … whose ethnic descent, religion and way of life differs from our own’ (Kymlicka 2001: 225). The argument is that ‘people are willing to make sacriices for kin and for co-religionists, but are only willing to accept wider obligations under certain conditions’ (2001: 225). There must be, consequently, ‘some sense of common identity and common membership uniting donor and recipient, such that sacriices being made for anonymous others are still, in some sense, sacriices for “one of us” ’ (2001: 225). There is also required a high level of trust that sacriices will be reciprocated.

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racial hatred to subaltern peoples. As Back (1996: 8) argues, ‘a multiculturalism that simply celebrates the Other – albeit with liberal intentions – runs perilously close to this syndrome’. The idea that multiculturalism can provide the basis for intercultural dialogue – a process in which ‘individuals and communities “civilize” each other’ (Parekh 2006: 351) – unfortunately appears to reduce cross-community contact to an appreciation of alterity, an encounter with ethnic difference which at best leaves the respective parties with a heightened respect for the ‘other’. For one opponent, ‘Contemporary visions of cultural difference seek to learn about other cultural forms not to create a more rich and universal culture, but to imprison us more effectively in a human zoo of differences’ (Malik 1996: 150). The anthropologist Unni Wikan (2002: 83) also makes a good point when she critiques the premise of cross-cultural dialogue as the basis of multiculturalism. She argues against the commonly-held view that cultures can somehow collide and meet. Cultures cannot meet because they have no agency, she notes. It is ‘people, not culture that can change life for the better’. Therefore, ‘if people “of different cultures” are to meet, it must be as people, as persons, for it is only thus we can meet’ (2002: 84) [emphasis original]. Some opponents have even gone as far as to discount one of the major credos of cross-cultural dialogue: that all cultural practices and varying notions of the ‘good life’ are incommensurable and should be endowed with recognition. Brian Barry (2001: 267), for examples, refutes this conception on the grounds that ‘we are bound to judge that some cultures … are better than others: more just, more free, more enlightened, and generally better adapted to human lourishing’. ‘Some cultures are admirable, others are vile’, notes Barry (2001: 258).

State-Sponsored Multiculturalism: National, Local and Citywide Scales As we can see, academics – especially those within political philosophy and leftliberalism – are divided as to whether multiculturalism can assist with the project of engendering a progressive politics of cross-cultural dialogue between groups. While this book takes cognizance of such debates, it seeks to link their relevance and applicability to public policy and the realm of practice. In this book I largely examine state-sponsored multicultural initiatives in Britain. A crucial nexus here is the role of the state, at national, citywide and local scales, in terms of sponsoring and inluencing the production of multicultural projects, especially those which promote cross-cultural dialogue and alliances. Critics often package state-sponsored multiculturalism as a uniied and coherent ideological programme designed to negate the universalism of class politics in favour of the divisive particularity of identity politics. In a related way, some important critics also frame the state’s role in sponsoring multiculturalism as analogous to processes of colonial rule, especially those modes which utilized ‘divide and rule’. These commentators tend to view state-sponsored multiculturalism as a direct transplantation of colonial strategies to manage

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subjugated groups by dividing them into discrete rival ethnic categories replete with distinctive cultures. Anthias and Yuval-Davies (1992), for example, write that the evolution of state-sponsored multiculturalism in Britain was ‘a model which particularly suited the irst generation of British “race relations experts”’. These experts apparently received their training in the ‘colonial and missionary machine of the British empire; there they ruled through a stratum of local leaders and chieftains without too much intervention in the “internal affairs” of the those they ruled’. According to Gerd Baumann (1996: 28), there is thus a ‘dominant discourse’ of culture, ethnicity and community in state-sponsored multiculturalism, which is analogous to ‘the colonial administration of ethnic groups’.3 Similarly, for another theorist, multiculturalism represents little more than ‘the vicious circle of mutually reinforcing exclusivities’, and the ‘most potent forces conspire … to perpetuate the exclusivist trend’. These forces, he continues, operate by the mechanism of ‘divide et imperia’ (Bauman 2001: 103–4). Rather than assuming that the various levels of the British state represent a coordinated strategy vis-à-vis multiculturalism, I note the heterogeneous and hybrid nature of policies and programmes, and the multiple and contradictory aspects of multicultural spaces, techniques, and subjects. Various British governments have implemented different policies to deal with cultural diversity. Some administrations, as we shall see, have implemented relatively strong assimilatory strategies. They have portrayed Britain as a cohesive nation bound together by a common language and culture, a sense of kinship and common descent, a shared view of history, and a strong sense of national identity. Consequently, assimilation involves identifying with Britain, cultivating love for and loyalty to its way of life, taking pride in its history and abandoning their cultures in favour of the British national culture.4 other administrations have displayed a liberal preference for ‘bifurcationism’: an attempt to reconcile respect for diversity and pluralism within an overall frame of political citizenship (see Parekh 1998). This type of administration was instrumental in the development of the ‘race relations industry’. It has actively sponsored initiatives designed to promote cross-cultural dialogue and a heightened appreciation of the cultural forms of minority groups. The logic here is that racism is the result of people lacking adequate understanding of other groups’ identities and can be overcome by creating better race relations between conlicting groups. The point of the race relations paradigm was to remove the putative strangeness of ‘minority migrant’ groups and to make them more palatable for the host population. 3 Thus for Baumann (1996: 30), the ‘discourse about ethnic minorities as communities deined by a reiied culture bears all the hallmarks of dominance: it is conceptually simple, enjoys a communicative monopoly, offers lexibility of application, encompasses great ideological plasticity, and is serviceable for established institutional purposes’. 4 A whole panoply of supposedly well-coordinated measures and procedures have been advocated to facilitate assimilation, including a nationalist school curriculum, unoficial and oficial loyalty tests for migrants, oficial endorsement of ideologically acceptable black and Asian spokespersons (Parekh 1998: 16).

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The state’s brand of multiculturalism can also change in line with broader global processes. At the time of writing, it is common to read commentators writing of the west undergoing a ‘cultural-diversity sceptical turn’ (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2005), a ‘backlash’ against multiculturalism (Back et al. 2002), or even the ‘death of multiculturalism’ (Gilroy 2004). In the post-9/11 political dispensation statesponsored multiculturalism has come under sustained attack and reversal. At the scale of the British state, multicultural citizenship is now refracted through the lens of ‘unity through diversity’: ‘embracing heterogeneity, while recognizing the importance of national solidarity’ (Hesse 2000: 27). This means that diversity is allowed only in so far as groups connect to each other to forge a common British identity. Suggested solutions by policy makers to the issue of diversity in pluralist societies typically concentrate on fostering a sense of common belonging that is not based on ethnic or cultural roots, but rather on a shared commitment to the political community. This emphasis can be seen, for example, in a report (Beunderman and Lownsbrough 2007) commissioned by the Commission for Racial Equality to provide strategies to deal with ethnic division in Britain. The authors of the report state that a ‘vision of living together’, by forging ‘common belonging to a citizenship that can embrace diversity but still engender solidarity is crucial to twenty-irst century Britain’.5

Multiculturalism and the Global City The current ‘retreat of multiculturalism in the liberal state’ (Joppke 2004: 237) demonstrates the contingent character of the multicultural project. However, there are other important scales of government power which continue to exercise a tremendous degree of inluence regarding the viability of multiculturalism. As I will illuminate throughout the book, the dominion of local government in Britain has profoundly shaped the development of multiculturalism and how it is practised in particular settings. The implementation of anti-racist and race relations policies has mostly been devolved to the scale of local government (Solomos 2003). The local government is also responsible for the allocation 5 There is a neo-liberal lavour to this form of ‘multiculturalism’. No longer is multiculturalism embedded in the liberalism of social democracy and the Keynesian welfare state, with ‘minority ethnic’ groupings endowed with substantial public resources to assist with anti-racist struggles and structural inequalities. Instead, the denial of equality and social justice is increasingly deined in terms of the denial of opportunity: equality of outcome is less important than equality of opportunity. The emphasis placed on citizenship forms part of a wider UK government belief in the interdependence between the state and citizens, and an activist state. There is a contract between the state, which provides rights, and citizens who have responsibilities. These responsibilities include, inter alia, the duty to work and cooperate with others for the greater good. If citizens fulill their responsibilities they have rights to public services, such as welfare, education and health services. In other words, ‘communities’ are meant to take responsibility to make things better.

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of public resources to minority groups resident in their authorities, as well as promoting ‘equal opportunities’ in regard to the allocation of public housing, schooling and employment. Crucially, local governments can also, in certain circumstances, set limits on who can and cannot join the exalted club of groups deined as ‘ethnic minorities’ in the multicultural paradigm and thus eligible for precious public resources. It is therefore important to be cognizant of the fact that although the national government may be generally adverse to multiculturalism, local government authorities have attained a degree of autonomy to promote multiculturalism, if they so desire. This, as I note during the book, can create a capricious milieu for multiculturalism to lourish. While a local authority may be supportive of multiculturalism, furnishing substantial funds for initiatives and groups, a change to an administration more leery of multiculturalism may result in the removal of patronage. Alongside national and local scales of multicultural governance exists the meso level of citywide authorities, some of which have been very proactive in their advocacy of multiculturalism. In this book I examine state-sponsored multiculturalism in the context of London from the early 1980s onwards. In London, substantial support for multiculturalism has occurred when there has been a citywide government authority, the Greater London Council (GLC) and then the Greater London Authority (GLA). Under the leadership of Ken Livingstone, who was citywide mayor, the GLC and the GLA often endorsed multiculturalism as part of the city’s primary identity and as part of strategies to foster a rainbow alliance of minority groups to support the administration. The promotion of forms of cross-cultural exchange has also been encouraged by Livingstone’s citywide government to try and help promote a civic city identity while simultaneously respecting cultural diversity. Writing in 2005 Ken Livingstone stated: London’s model of multiculturalism works … We can celebrate our diversity and make it a great source of creativity and dynamism, or we can ight it, as in the clash of civilisations thesis, and turn our cities into zones of fear and conlict. London’s choice is clear. We celebrate diversity. We aim to give every community its fair stake in our city’s politics, prosperity and culture. We want every community fully represented in our police service, teaching profession, boardrooms and politics (Livingstone 2005).

Like New York City and Tokyo, London is often included within the category of a ‘world’ or ‘global city’. London is not categorized as a ‘global city’ only because of the size of its population; the criterion upon which London’s membership of this elite club rests largely on how it is one of the ‘key spatial nodes of the world economy, the localized basing points for capital accumulation in an age of intensiied globalization’ (Brenner 1998: 2). These cities are thus ‘command centres’ from which the international economy is regulated and controlled. In order to overcome the limitations of an economy linked to the scale of the nation, global cities are hosts to the world’s leading transnational corporations, especially

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in inance. Analysts of global cities (e.g., Brenner 1998 , Sassen 2001) have typically sought to relate the dominant socioeconomic trends within these cities to the emergent world urban hierarchy and the global economic forces that underlie it. Such socioeconomic trends include rapid deindustrialization, the expansion and spatial concentration of inancial and producer services industries, labour-market segmentation, and class and ethnic conlict. Apart from its exalted position within the world’s economy, London is often self-consciously branded a ‘global city’ because it hosts a ‘cosmopolitan’ and vibrant ‘culture’, which ranges from high art to ‘street culture’. In one document by the citywide government – the Greater London Authority (GLA) – it is claimed: ‘In global terms, London is in direct competition with New York for the accolade of world cultural capital, both being cited as the leading global cities. The challenge is to continue to develop London’s role as a global cultural leader’ (GLA 2004: 65). As part of this marketing of the city as a major purveyor of a ‘global culture’, the ‘cultures’ of the city’s ‘ethnic minority’ groupings are included as the sine qua non of its global city status. The cultural forms of ‘ethnic minorities’ are framed as reasons for tourists to visit the city and experience diverse identities. Multiculturalism is therefore loosely imagined by the citywide authority as an indispensable part of the city’s identity and economic proile. This is, in essence, the double bind of state-sponsored multiculturalism: that while the global city promotes culture as a means to enhance intercultural dialogue, cosmopolitan diversity and knowledge of various minority groups, at the same time it is dificult for groups, within the state-sponsored multicultural model, to challenge the idea that they belong to discrete, bounded and unchanging cultural forms and communities.

Ethnic Mobilization and Recruitment The state does not therefore represent some sort of monolithic entity replete with a coordinated and uniied bundle of strategies concerning multiculturalism. There is no such thing as a ‘dominant discourse’ (Baumann 1996) of statesponsored multiculturalism. There are various scales of state power, ranging from the national, local and citywide authority. These actors rarely, if ever, gel to provide a consensus regarding multicultural governance; there is more likely to be disagreement and divergence between and within each scale of governance. The speciicities of these various scales of governance have a profound impact regarding how multiculturalism is practised and performed. Equally important to note is that these multiple scales mean that groups demanding oficial multicultural recognition have to channel their precise claim-making procedures to the relevant authorities, especially those they believe will reciprocate and give them support. It is fair to say that each group requesting multicultural recognition and resources is in competition with other groups. Each group has to therefore cultivate a strong base of support within claim-awarding government organisations. This support

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can be garnered in a number of ways, including gaining political patronage from a powerful political igure or a political party who wish to count on the votes of the particular ethnic minority group; another crucial way a group can gain support is by proving that they are particularly disadvantaged in speciic areas of society. This means the group has to conduct research and collate large datasets which empirically prove widespread evidence of prejudice against the group. Within state-sponsored multiculturalism, the group needs to invoke the claim of ‘most need’, that they are deserving of public resources to help contest negative stereotyping and also to ameliorate the unequal status of the group in society. ‘Leaders’ of ethnic mobilizations often use emotional appeals to its constituency as well as to the key gatekeepers of multicultural awarding public organizations. This process of groups demanding recognition and inclusion within the statesponsored multicultural model has been framed as exacerbating inter-communal conlict over cross-community solidarity. This ‘politics of difference’, argues Barry (2001: 21): is a formula for manufacturing conlict, because it rewards the groups that can most effectively mobilize to make claims on the polity, or at any rate it rewards ethnocultural political entrepreneurs who can exploit its potential for their own ends by mobilizing a constituency around a set of sectional demands.

As such, it is wrong to assume that any speciic group naturally exists as an ‘ethnic minority’, deserving of multicultural acknowledgment and substantial resources. In many cases, it is highly disputed, even amongst members of the group itself, whether the group is an ethnic minority and if they should be allowed entrance into the multicultural model. This point is especially salient concerning historically long-standing migrant groups, which largely share the same skin colour and language with the host population. Although prominent members of this group may feel that they are disadvantaged due to their ‘distinct’ ethnicity, there may be a high degree of scepticism about their claim to be a distinct ethnic minority. An example of this type of group is the London Irish. The Irish in the capital city are – though by no means exclusively – white and Christian. Indeed, the 2001 UK Census revealed that of all the groups recorded in London, the ‘White Irish’ are the most Christian of all groups surveyed (Greater London Authority [GLA] 2005: 26).6 The Irish also largely share the same language as the host-nation, there has been a long-standing historical presence of irish settlers in london for hundreds of years, and although often problematic, there is a lasting legacy of close relationships between Britain and Ireland. Such degrees of similarity have also made it possible for the Irish to appear an ‘invisible’ group; the metonym of white skin colour and Britishness, especially, can be made to signify whether a group achieves ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ status in Britain (Walter 2008). Due to 6 Census 2001 recorded that 84.3 per cent of white Irish were Christians, compared with 58 per cent of all Londoners (GLA 2005).

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the fact that the Irish can often appear indivisible with the host-nation, they have struggled to gain formal recognition within state-sponsored multiculturalism, which has, since the 1960s in Britain, been typically based on a so-called ‘black/ white binary’ (Mac an Ghaill 1999), meaning that resources have predominantly been targeted at non-white migrants. There are also many members of the LondonIrish who feel that they are a group who have also been subjected to forms of prejudice and socioeconomic discrimination in the capital. The mission of these ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ is to convince both members of their own group and the relevant authorities that they are indeed an ethnic minority grouping. To try and take into account the way that a group – like the London-Irish – may seek to become institutionally categorized as an ethnic minority in the statesponsored multicultural model, I analyse such activity as demonstrative of social movements. Rather than restricting the analysis to speciically deined diasporas or migrant ‘ethnic communities’, treating groups as social movements, replete with speciic aims and demands for resources, provides a more nuanced way of understanding how groups relate to the multicultural milieu and how they relate to different groups. Interestingly, however, ethnic mobilizations do not only create conlict between groups but can, in certain circumstances, facilitate attempts to cross-cleavages with other groups. In this book I am particularly interested in how a group uses forms of cross-cultural exchange as part of their attempt to mobilize. They may utilize such intercultural dialogue because it not only provides an opportunity to promote a positive representation of their cultural identities to non-members, but it also allows scope to try and recruit new members to the collectivity. In order to maximize their claims to multicultural resources, the ‘ethnic’ social movement is required to show that it has a substantial constituency which needs to be served. It does this by demonstrating to the relevant agencies the number of participants at their multicultural initiatives or the number of people who ticked their box at the census. This is the ‘multicultural numbers game’. The task of the ethnic social movement is thus to ensure that they make their cultural forms alluringly inclusive to as wide a range of people as possible. As this book will illuminate, the ethnic social movement tries to ethnically recruit new members, especially people who are interested in experiencing the cultures and sense of community which ethnic minorities are often portrayed as embodying in antithesis to a fragmented and rootless contemporary society. By promoting expressivism, emotion, belonging, symbolic totemic identiications often associated with the otherness of non-modern lifestyles, the ethnic social movement frames their cultural expressions to appear oppositional to the inauthentic, disenchanted instrumentality of interpersonal relations embedded in a routinized everyday life. By looking at the mobilization of the London-Irish, in particular, I trace how this movement has sought to promote Irishness, not as an ascriptive identity – an identity the result of external enforcement and the restriction of choice – but as the result of ‘lifestyle’ afiliation. In this way, many of the people who have become involved in Irish multicultural initiatives are not actually Irish but are interested

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in experiencing alternative and new identities. This inclusive representation of Irishness, furthermore, as I will explore in this book, provides an opportunity for London-Irish welfare groups to ‘ethnically recruit’ new members.

Urban Anthropology in the Global City Providing an ethnographic analysis of state-sponsored multiculturalism in a place like London requires ieldwork to be multi-sited or multi-locale . This ethnographic focus is different from an older view in which a ‘formative, exclusive engagement with a single ield is of course at the base of the enduring power in anthropology of the prospect, or experience, or memory, or simply collectively both celebrated and mystiied notion, of “being there”‘ (see Hannerz 2003: 202). In this methodology the anthropologist ensconced themselves in a speciic, single location (typically the small rural village of a so-called ‘primitive’ group), where they would try to apprehend the holistic, unchanging culture and social structure of the group they lived among. The development of urban anthropology, especially since the 1980s, however, has been more attuned to the fractured, luid, stratiied and mobile ways that actors and groups construct their identities and how they relate to others. Instead of just ‘being there’, the urban anthropologist needs to ‘be there … and there … and there’ (Hannerz 2003). The ethnographic research that underpins this book was conducted during a number of ieldwork periods from 2002–8. My primary research interest was in the spaces that state-sponsored multiculturalism occurred and hence with the socio-spatial relations that are manifested in parades, festivals, community centres and even Census campaigns. These are places and activities which are purposely funded and even constructed for promoting multiculturalism. Due to the multiple ieldwork sites that an urban anthropologist encounters, they typically draw upon the numerous research methodologies that are at their disposal. This book thus does not limit itself to just ethnographic data; historical and archival material is used to provide greater context; Census data is further analyzed because of its central position in debates surrounding state-sponsored multiculturalism. My interest as an ethnographer with multiculturalism in a ‘global ecumene’ (Hannerz 1996) is not so much to illuminate the process in which a ‘diasporic community’ seeks to fashion an alternative public sphere, as a means to counter racism and to build a ‘home from home’. My ethnographic interest in this book encompasses not only the experiences of the ‘minority’ group, but also those of the often self-consciously ‘cosmopolitan’ non-members living in the ‘global city’ who are interested in experiencing the cultural forms and ‘communities’ of other groups. These people, as part of their experience as urban dwellers, are often embroiled in state-sponsored multicultural projects as much as the members of the minority group. While the ‘global ecumene’ may provide a platform for coalitions, networks and alliances between members of groups it is nevertheless also problematical. As we shall see, the terms on which ‘minority’ groups make their cultures and

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identities inclusive for others are often unclear, at least, as to how far they add up to a progressive anti-racist politics. Indeed, the desire for ‘otherness’, which can characterize the relationship between the majority host population and its minority groupings, in certain circumstances can legitimate difference and existing social inequalities (Banerjea 2000). It is here that I should, as the ethnographer, provide some context regarding my interest in the book’s subject and my experience in the ield. My own personal background elicits some perspective as to why I have an interest in multiculturalism more broadly and the London-Irish speciically. Born and raised in west London to a Catholic mother from Belfast and an English father, I can both claim to be a member of the Irish second-generation as well as a Londoner. Growing up, however, my Irish identity was not particularly important. I did not attend Catholic school – de facto Irish schools in west London – nor did I attend church, although I was born a Catholic. Neither did I, like some other Irish children in my local area, attend Irish community centres to learn Irish traditional culture. At school, I was made vaguely aware nevertheless of a multicultural society. It was often noted by the school’s head, for instance, how multicultural the makeup of the pupils was. At one point, I remember the head mentioning that at least 120 languages were spoken at home by pupils. Although I left school with few qualiications, I gained admission to university in my early twenties via an ‘access’ qualiication. After inishing I gained the opportunity to go and live in ireland as i enrolled on a Master’s degree at Queen’s University Belfast. Undergoing training as an anthropologist my research interest originally was in bhangra music in west London (see Chapter 6). This research ignited an interest in the themes of multiculturalism and the global city. Although at irst my instinct was to carry this research on bhangra into doctoral research, my time in Belfast and Ireland had awoken an interest in the complex ways that Irish identity is represented. This interest in ‘Irishness’ led me to pursue an ethnographic study of the London-Irish in 2001–2. Although born and raised in London, because I was not really part of the London-Irish scene, so to speak, I had to build up a network of ieldwork sites and informants from scratch. Since I had never gone through the process of learning Irish traditional culture, such as music, sport and language, it was important to immerse myself in some of these aspects. For instance, for research at the Irish Cultural Centre, I attended many of the classes in the same way as the students. As such, this participant-observation helped me not only understand the rudimentary elements and history of some of these forms, but also some of the processes of identity formation that may underpin their transmission and reception. In a sense, this research provided me with a strange liminal position. On the one hand, as someone who could claim a London-Irish identity, I could be something of an insider, part of the community, trying to learn about their ‘identity’ like other London-Irish members; on the other, because I never really felt part of that identity, I could also be an ‘outsider’ alongside with the other non-Irish who went to multicultural initiatives to learn about the different groups in the global

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city. However, this book is not only about the London-Irish; it also encompasses other groups and individuals in the global city. For this, I drew on ethnographic research conducted at the same time as research on the London-Irish.

Book Structure Chapter 1 begins to explore multiculturalism in the ‘global city’, paying particular attention to why some people in these cities seek to engage with and even adopt the identities of some of the city’s ethnic minority groupings. I note, here, while contemporary life in the global city may endow some subjects the freedom to relinquish the identities they were born into, the dislocated and rather individualistic nature of city life drives these subjects to ind a sense of security in new forms of communal membership. In the global city, ethnic minority groupings can be framed as possessing the paradoxical capacity to generate both an exciting alternative to a routinized everyday life and a refuge from modes of anomie characteristic of modern day living. I link this to structural changes in the political economy of the global city. Chapter 2 will explore how groups who have hitherto been excluded from the state-sponsored multicultural model, mobilize to gain inclusion. To illuminate this, the chapter looks at the London-Irish, a group with a historical presence in the city for hundreds of years. The chapter considers the problematic way in which Irish settlement in London has been represented. From there, it considers how in the 1980s London-Irish groups mobilized to demand inclusion as an ethnic minority group with rights to multicultural resources. The chapter moves on to explore why and how Irishness in recent years has become a much more popular identity. This nascent visibility of Irishness has provided scope for the London-Irish to imagine new, inclusive concepts of ‘community’ in their multicultural initiatives. Chapter 3 takes the reader into state-sponsored community and arts centres. It considers the role that community centres, arts and culture groups, even museums and adult education classes have in multicultural policy and in ideas about promoting intercultural understanding. Inspired by the values of critical pedagogy, multicultural practitioners have often sought to establish adult educational classes as a means to empower working-class people to challenge prevailing bourgeois ideology and to promote a new popular critical anti-racist consciousness. Chapter 4 examines contemporary state-sponsored multicultural public spectacles, like the South Asian Mela, St Patrick’s Day, the Notting Hill Carnival and Chinese New Year. The performance of multiculturalism and ethnicity in public spectacles, like parades and festivals, is fraught with ambivalence, lying uneasily as it does in between an important politics of recognition, a dangerous reiication of culture and ethnicity and the reduction of identities to a fetishized surplus value (Nagle 2005a). Chapter 5 explores how groups mobilize for inclusion as an ethnic minority in the UK national Census. Being identiied as an ethnic minority enables the group

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to demand vital and precious funds to deal with issues perceived to be salient to the group. Proving that they are a discriminated or ignored group, ethnic entrepreneurs try to gain resources for their community on the basis of most need. Chapter 6 looks at the second generation and their involvement in multicultural initiatives. While there is an extensive corpus of research which considers the narratives of migrants – the factors underlying their migration and how they adapted to their place of settlement – conspicuously less is known about the crucial role of the second and third generation in creating, performing and leading mobilizations concerned with state-sponsored multicultural initiatives.

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Chapter 1

The Global City, Community and Multiculturalism

The Global City, Community and Multiculturalism As much as any other major international city, the contours of London have been profoundly formed and moulded by persistent waves of inward invasion and migration. Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans were all belligerent and formative invaders and settlers. Arriving later on were Jews in the thirteenth century; as many as 50,000 French Huguenots since the late eighteenth century; as well as Irish, Chinese, Italians and Poles (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: 47). Dutch, German and the Mediterranean Sephardic and northeast European Ashkenazi Jews also arrived in number (Block 2006: 46). There has also been a ‘black’ presence in London since the sixteenth century and a South Asian presence since the eighteenth century (Hall 2000: 218).1 At present London is a city containing a population over eight million people in its metropolitan urban area. Census 2001 revealed that the ‘host’ white British population made up 58.2 per cent of the population, leaving just over 40 per cent (nearly 2.9 million) who are identiied as belonging to various ‘ethnic groups’ (GLA 2005: 2). Figures from the Ofice of National Statistics (ONS) show that, as of 2006, London’s foreign-born population is 2,288,000 (representing 31 per cent of London’s population). These migrants have originally come from over 160 different countries. Census igures reveal that London’s ethnic minority population has continued to grow, from 2.14 million people in 1991 to 2.88 million in 2001. This igure is projected to rise. Using established measures of segregation, there are no ethnic segregation wards or ‘extreme polarized enclaves’ in London as of 2001. As we shall see, since the early 1980s politicians, and through the policies of local government authorities, ‘multiculturalism’ has often been lauded as an integral and even proitable part of the city’s identity. These actors have also promoted multiculturalism and cross-community relationships as a speciic way to address issues of racism that impacted upon the city’s settler population. For partly these reasons London is often called a ‘global’ or ‘world city’. Although theorists often determine a city’s membership of elite global cities in terms of its exalted position as a command centre in the world economy (e.g., 1 African slaves, servants and sailors were brought to Britain from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. As many as 50,000 Africans may have been in Britain during the mid-eighteenth century (Block 2006: 47).

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Brenner 1998, Sassen 2001, Purcell 2003), others have also looked to how such cities are ‘fairly durable sources of new culture’ (Hannerz 1996: 43). Global cities are active producers of the symbols and ideas that move the world today. Global cities, due to their economic vitality, attract a disproportionate number of migrants. Alongside low paid migrants who come from the poorer parts of the globe seeking a better life, these cities also attract long term tourist types (such as international celebrities), the movers and shakers of the new economic order, who come to provide their expertise, and more modest professionals, such as budding actors and writers, as well as students and academics (Block 2006: 43). Block (2006: 43) argues that because of the scale and consistency of the migration they receive, ‘global cities are the sites of international and cosmopolitan cultures’. The multiplicity of lifestyles realized inside them are ‘drawn more from outside than inside the national culture’ (2006: 43); the cities have hence reached a point in their development that they are increasingly framed as de-nationalized in regard to lifestyle and point of reference. This representation of London as a ‘world city’ is thus a core way that London is marketed to tourists. ‘Visit London’, the oficial tourist website for London, brands ‘multicultural London’ thus: ‘London is a truly global city. Explore the culture of London’s diverse communities today and you’ll ind a wealth of fascinating things to see and do’ (see ).2 Global cities are places which are portrayed as containing an identiiably successful ‘multicultural’ image. Ethnic diversity is actively celebrated as part of the city’s self-conscious identity. People are attracted to the global city because it is here they can experience and partake in a rich array of identities and cultures. Forms of cross-cultural dialogue, mixture and exchange are particularly salient to the global city. Global cities are framed as sites of cosmopolitan and post-national citizenship, which offer their inhabitants an opportunity to go beyond the petty chauvinisms of competing nationalisms and ethnicities. Yet, such cities are also hosts of disputes concerning profound imbalances in power, welfare and status between groups. Such disparities, especially in terms of socioeconomic status, are revealed by the fact that a disproportionate number of London’s low paid workers are foreign-born thus creating a new ‘migrant division of labour’ (Holgersen and Haarstad 2009). In this chapter I explore the relationship between global cities and multiculturalism in a speciic way. In particular, on the one hand I explore the way in which ‘global cities’ may offer opportunities for new forms of cosmopolitan encapsulation and imagination. On the other hand, I also illuminate how ‘global cities’, mainly due to their size and the dislocated modes of living that characterize urban settings, create counter-demands for actors to search out ‘authentic’ communities and identities. The 2 London attracts more overseas visitors than other European cities and more than Las Vegas, New York and Sydney combined, and beats other popular cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau and Dubai. In 2000, London attracted 13 million overseas visitors who stayed for 82 million nights and spent nearly £7 billion (GLA 2004).

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cultural forms and communities of ‘ethnic minorities’ are often much sought after because they are represented as ‘things’ that simultaneously provide excitement and security for the global city’s inhabitants. Providing ethnographic data, I go on to investigate the different actors who explore the cultural identities of others.

The Nation Rescaled: The Global City To begin exploring the global city and its relationship to multiculturalism, it is important to irst provide a working deinition of such cities. I argue that in order to understand ‘global cities’ it is necessary to examine the linkage between modernization, globalization and the rescaling of the nation-state. This rescaling is seen in the way in which global cities are now the primary sites for coordinating transnational economic operations – and networks have been established among global cities involved in similar coordination functions.3 The fact that ‘global cities’ are more closely networked to other global cities – especially in terms of inance and banking – than the rest of the nation has led some theorists to speculate about the transnational rather than national character of global cities. Purcell (2003: 568), in particular, has argued that contemporary nature of global cities is evidence of the erosion of ‘the national scale as the privileged scale at which economic and political activity are organized’. As a consequence, Purcell continues, citizenship is being reoriented away from the nation as the predominant community. Recent shifts in the organization of capital accumulation have deprivileged the national scale. The intensiication of the transnationalization of production and inance since the 1970s has expanded the ‘scale at which investment, production and information lows are functionally integrated’ (2003: 568) and global cities coordinate these transnational processes. it is not only at a global scale that the discreteness of the nation-state is being reformulated; in an interlinked way the nation-state is simultaneously being downscaled to local and regional scales. This is especially true in regard to how more forms of political autonomy are handed over to global cities to ensure their global economic competitiveness. In this way, global cities are typically marked by a move away from centralized and bureaucratic forms of governance (Purcell 2003), to those featuring various forms of managerialism, privatization policies and thus the consolidation of the ‘mixed market’ in local public service provision, along with more networked governance arrangements. In London, for instance, 3 The City of London is one of the world’s three largest inancial centres (alongside New York and Tokyo) with a dominant role in several international inancial markets, including cross-border bank lending, international bond issuance and trading, foreign exchange, fund management and foreign equities trading. It also has the world’s largest insurance market, the leading exchange for dealing in non-precious metals, the largest spot gold and gold lending markets, the largest ship broking market, and more foreign banks and investment houses than any other centre.

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since 2000 political power has been devolved to a citywide government, the Greater London Authority (GLA). The process of devolution, as states hand over forms of political and economic power at citywide and regional level, is also geared towards creating competitive regional spaces through institutional state forms that it more closely the scalar structure of the changing economic geography of the area.4 In London, for instance, there has been talk of a shift from an ‘industrial’ to a ‘post-industrial city’, which represents a wholesale decline in manufacturing and its replacement with jobs in the business sector. As part of this change, there are also a huge number of redevelopment projects that often rely on constructing a branded localism and idea of ‘community’, designed to draw on ‘indigenous identities and histories’. The combination of local and global scales of economic production in ‘global cities’ has led some theorists to speak of processes of ‘glocalisation’ (Swyngedouw, 1996), as the old model of economic activity coordinated and contained at national state scale is deteriorating. As Smith concedes: ‘in strictly economic terms, the power of most states organized at the national scale is eroding’ (Smith 2002: 433). In the most optimistic analyses ‘global cities’ are places where it is said citizenship is undergoing a process of reorientation such that the nation is no longer the primary community that deines political identity and political loyalty. Stripped loose from their one symbiotic relationship with the nation-state, global cities are increasingly important functional hubs in the world’s economic geography. In this synopsis, citizenship is being reterritorialized, meaning that the nation-state’s territorial sovereignty has been thrown open to question and contestation. Taking this precise view, Purcell (2003) argues that the rescaling of the nationstate to allow the emergence of global cities provides potential to furnish new conceptions of identity unfettered by its subordination to the nation. For Purcell, the re-territorializing of state power not only challenges national sovereignty but it allows new progressive and multiple forms of post-national and cosmopolitan citizenship, including a greater focus on human rights and other transnational notions of rights and responsibilities (2003: 565). Sassen (2001: 32) similarly argues that ‘[g]lobalization and digitization have brought with them an incipient unbundling of the exclusive authority over territory and people we have long associated with the nation-state’, and that ‘the most strategic example of this unbundling is probably the global city, which has emerged as a partly denationalized platform for global capital and for the most diverse mix of people from all over the world’. Sassen continues by arguing that global cities provide ‘operational and conceptual openings for the participation of non-state actors in trans-boundary domains once exclusive to the national state’. These actors, she states, can include 4 Erik Swyngedouw (1996), for instance, has shown how the process of devolution in Belgium is part of urban/regional restructuring efforts to produce globally competitive spaces. Analysing the dismantling of heavy industry in the Flemish province of Limburg, Swyngedouw examines the subsequent programme of urban regional redevelopment which largely concentrates on creating large-scale tourist projects.

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non-governmental organizations, irst-nation peoples, anti-globalization activists, migrants and refugees. The idea that global cities are places which provide opportunities to go beyond the conines of national identity to allow new forms of cosmopolitan citizenship is appealing. It summons up the hope that such places can engender a new postrace politics, where ethnic or national encapsulation are no longer deining fault lines running through the city. Yet rather than dissipating, race and ethnicity are central themes regarding how the ‘global city’ is branded as part of its self-image as vibrant, diverse and cosmopolitan. Ethnicity is also something that is generated to endow actors in the global city with a sense of roots and communal association in a place typically prone to individualism, dislocation and fractured living. ‘Multicultural’ forms of cross-community exchange, consequently, are promoted as inextricable parts of life in the global city. Rather than limiting the analysis of multiculturalism and cross-cultural relations in the global city to the sphere of political economy, this chapter progresses by providing some ethnographic analysis. While anthropologists would agree that context (i.e. structural changes to the political economy) is important, they would also emphasize the crucial use of understanding what happens ‘on the ground’: a crucial aspect of which is the subjective dimension, the ideas, models, projects, deinitions, discourses etc that actors bring to bear on a situation, sometimes very hesitantly, often seeking to work with (or clarify) concepts that are dificult, opaque, elusive, and with multiple contested meanings (Grillo 2007: 981).

What ethnographic and anthropological research provides is the capacity to explore the ‘everyday’ ‘fuzzy’, ‘ambiguous’ and almost always complex ways that subjects understand, engage with, and actively use the ideas and resources which emerge from state-sponsored multiculturalism.

Putting Your Mind To It: Cosmopolitanism One particular way to begin exploring the issues of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in the ‘global city’ is to look at how some people engage with the identities of groups they were not born into. During my ieldwork in London, I often noted how many multicultural initiatives were engendered to help nonmembers develop an appreciation of the cultures of minority groupings. Often these multicultural initiatives encouraged very inclusive experiences of the ethnic minority grouping. Ironically, these everyday encounters of ‘difference’ could potentially allow non-members the opportunity to engage in ‘alternative lifestyles’ and cultures, to even experience communitas, a momentary journey away from a routinized and mundane everyday life. It is pertinent here to provide two examples of what I mean.

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*** an article in the Irish Post (2006a), an English-based newspaper for the Irish in Britain, enthusiastically provided a portrait of how contemporary Irishness could accommodate people who supposedly wanted to be Irish, even though their connection to the identity was slim. The article featured a man called Andrew Edwards, a Londoner who had changed his name to the Irish language version: Aindriu MacEadbhaird. Born in England with only very distant Irish roots, and a government worker at the UK Home Ofice, Andrew ‘was granted Irish citizenship through his wife … and has been busy embracing his new-found Irishness ever since’. ‘I feel Irish. I am learning the Irish lute, I go to the Irish centres in Hammersmith and Camden and I am reading up on the Famine,’5 stated Andrew. He continued to speak of his home in Hammersmith, west London, the location of a sizeable Irish population. ‘The Irish community in Hammersmith is a whole mixed community and some of them aren’t Irish at all. Everyone loves the Irish music and culture. I work in the Home Ofice and they were actually quite interested in my feelings of being Irish.’ *** It was a Wednesday night in November 2001. After the Irish songs and singing class had ended at the Irish Cultural Centre where I was conducting research in west London, the class members made the perennial, weekly, short dander to a nearby pub, punctuated only by goodbyes for those who decided to trudge home after a long day. Without discernible notice, in imperceptible degrees the persuasive pull of alcohol loosened lips, letting the conversation low in relaxed, even rhythms of noisy banter which told of a group comfortable in mutual company. One of the women, a regular participant at class and pub alike, confessed to me that she had absolutely no genealogical links to Ireland. Before she had enrolled for Irish singing the woman was a regular at a London-Welsh Community Centre, partaking in Welsh choral singing. At irst, she revealed, she felt alien in the Welsh Centre, believing she was impinging upon a culture she was neither born into nor immersed within; she had no tales of life as a child in the valleys of South Wales to retell, or a father who worked boy and man as a coal miner and played at ly half in rugby. The cultural inventory needed to denote her intrinsic understanding of what Welshness is, as far as she was concerned, was empty. I asked how she got over her ‘crisis of identity’; mimicking a Welsh accent she reminisced, ‘One of the tutors just come up to me and said, “Don’t worry, love, you can’t help not being Welsh. But the thing is, as long as you put your mind to it, you can be as Welsh as the rest of us”’. *** 5 The Irish Famine was a period of starvation and emigration in mid-nineteenth century Ireland.

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These observations about how it is easy to become Welsh or Irish as long as you ‘put your mind to it’ are reminiscent of Hannerz’s observation about ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the global city. For Hannerz, ‘cosmopolitanism is a perspective, a state of mind’ (1996: 102). These people’s ability to form an identity that is ‘betwixt and between without being liminal … participating in many worlds, without becoming part of them’ (Friedman 1994: 204), could be seen as a ‘cosmopolitan’ outlook (Vertovec and Cohen 2002: 13–14). Their capacity to explore different cultures and even assume new identities marks them out as ‘migrants of identity’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998): people who possess the cultural and economic capital needed to consume and understand the unpredictability of different cultural settings (Chaney 2002). In this scenario, cosmopolitans are intellectual voyeurs, lâneurs, cultural tourists, migrants of identity consuming the ‘other’ whilst being incapable of forming commitments to places and social bonds (Featherstone 2002). The idea of the cosmopolitan, in this sense, provides a classic theme in the global city. As we saw in the introduction, the global city has been framed by theorists as a place which affords an occasion for actors to imagine nascent identities that are not tied to the nation. For instance, Peter Berger (1977) wrote of New York City – an archetypal global city – as a place of ‘transcendence’, a metropolis which represents the literal embodiment of a vital human freedom. This freedom is enshrined in the ability of reinvention, in which actors can ‘transcend’ who they are by taking on brand new encapsulations. The very unpredictability of the global city, for Berger, eluded simple processes of comprehension adding to its bewilderment and excitement. There are a range of issues which need to be explored further here. Why do ‘cosmopolitan’ actors feel the need to explore and even adopt different identities? Can cosmopolitanism be viewed as a positive process which facilitates progressive relations between members of different groups? Or does such an interest in the identities of other groups represent a form of ‘imperial cosmopolitanism’, in which privileged elites consume various ‘ethnic’ identities without the process challenging hierarchical relationships? Why are particular ethnicities distinctly inclusive and attractive? Furthermore, to what extent do groups encourage an inclusive experience of their cultural forms in order to accommodate nonmembers? We have asked many questions here, which we will attempt to address in the following sections. Voluntary Community In an attempt to explain the reasons underlying why actors are able to engage in new identities, Zygmunt Bauman (2001: 149), in particular, has argued that contemporary society has released us from many constraining features of old traditions, especially the ‘ascribed, inherited and inborn determination of social character’. We are now free as ‘liberated consumers’, he continues, to make our own choices regarding where we can feel ‘at home’. Such freedom allows us to seek out new contexts, forms of voluntary communities or what he calls

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‘modes of togetherness’. Similarly, Lash and Urry (1987) note the contemporary preponderance for ‘new communities’, groups and networks which people are not born into, but must make through their own choices and actions. Beck (1992) also argues that as individualism deepened its hold on the western imagination during the latter part of the twentieth century it has resulted in a shift wherein old loyalties to intuitions have been replaced by the self as the primary agent of meaning. Day (2006: 216) sums up this trend: ‘more and more, people take up their identities and social meanings from groupings which they have elected to join, thereby implicitly reserving the right to leave again if circumstances change ’. Yet while traditional forms of communal identity seem to be disintegrating, there is a correlative rise in discourses, both from the left and the right (Giddens 1994), that proclaim the importance of community regeneration. As Hobsbawm (1994: 428) caustically remarks, ‘never was the word “community” used more indiscriminately and emptily in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to ind in real life’. In seeking to account for why the concept of community has become potent in recent decades, Bauman (2001) suggests that by creating a modern society underpinned by the values of individual freedom and lexibility we have lost our sense of security. Inlected by lexible forms of work, informational war, and de-territorialized politics and economy (Beck 1997), our lives are seen to be framed by pervasive ‘risk’ and ‘ontological insecurity’. The practicality of traditional modes of safe and secure communal afiliation are being continually ruptured by forms of economic restructuring, state deregulation, the proliferation of new technologies and the mobility of goods, capital, people and symbols. Societal structural changes may provide us with increased opportunities to make identity a palimpsest upon which any number of biographical lifestyles, afiliations and voluntary associations can be penned; such changes do not, though, provide us with the feelings of trust, connectivity and solidarity that we believe community endows us with. The idea of community, says Bauman (2001: 14), gives us ‘warm and cosy’ feelings, a sense of ‘security, a quality crucial to a happy life’. As Lash and Urry (1994: 3) note, in times of social disorganization and uncertainty, people can opt ‘to throw themselves into community’. For this reason communal regeneration has been suggested as a panacea for pervasive social fragmentation, excessive individualism and atomisation which blight contemporary society (Giddens 1994).6 If the modern search for community is one to fundamentally reconstitute our sense of security and sanctuary from a risky society, then it has a ‘dark side’. Harvey (1989: 351) worries that the modern tendency for individuals to lee to shrunken, undifferentiated cultural communes,

6 As I write a report has been released, ‘Changing UK’, which claims that ‘[c]ommunity life in Britain has weakened substantially over the past 30 years’. Utilizing ‘loneliness indices’ – to highlight those areas people had a ‘feeling of not belonging’ – the report’s authors state that an ‘increase in anomie weakens the “social glue” of communities’ (see:< http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7755641.stm>).

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as they seek to protect themselves from pluralism and lexibility, results in an inevitable slide into ‘parochialism, myopia and sectarianism’ (Day 2006: 203). Multiculturalism and Community In a global city where do people go to experience or even become part of a community? Interestingly, state-sponsored multicultural initiatives are places in which ‘community’ is evoked as a benign force which enriches urban living. Unquestionably, the discourse of community is central to proponents of multiculturalism. Migrant groups are often portrayed as embodying such fully-constituted communities, and are thereby even celebrated by politicians as enshrining that ‘sense of community modern society is supposed to have lost’ (Hall 2000). Another related importance of community is that our identities and sense of self are seen to be shaped by the communities we belong to, as well as the range of cultures which mediate humanity. It ‘is only through having a rich and secure cultural structure that people can become aware, in a vivid way, of the options available to them, and intelligently examine their value’ (Kymlicka 1989: 165).

The Urban Global Village The existence of the ‘urban global village’ is an indispensable part of the global city. Ethnic minority groupings, by dint of supposedly possessing fully-formed communities, are sometimes lionized for ensuring that the global city is an ‘urban global village’, a place which gives actors an opportunity to re-imagine their identities as well as allowing feelings of security. Yet, this idea that the ‘communities’ of ethnic minorities provide a niche within the global city belies a complex process of post-war economic restructuring in London. In this process, as we shall see, the areas of migrant settlement have been transformed from being portrayed as ‘foreign incursions’ that threaten the very moral ordering of Englishness, to places which now enshrine the core identity of the global city. As such, these areas, which were once deined by racial violent conlict, are now promoted as spaces which engender cross-cultural dialogue and exchange. From Diaspora to Urban Village One of the interesting characteristics of London is how the city is often called a collection of villages and communities. One reason for this is the expansion of the city during the Victorian era when a number of small villages were absorbed in the process of industrialization. Another reason is the large number of migrant groups who have settled in the city. These groups have typically congregated in speciic locations throughout the city. As we shall see in the next chapter, the most intense period of inward migration to London occurred after the Second World War.

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The scale of the local ‘community’, especially in London, has had a profound impact on the way that racism was articulated. For instance, much of the racist discourse regarding migrants involved their supposed negative effect not only on national identity but on the local community. Post-war migrants were portrayed by politicians, most infamously Margaret Thatcher, as ‘swamping’ local neighbourhoods. As Thatcher pointed out, ‘small minorities can be absorbed – they can be assets to the majority community – but once a minority in a neighbourhood gets very large, people do feel swamped. They feel their whole way of life has been changed’ (Observer, 25 February 1979). Notably, many post-war migrants settled in suburban districts. The suburbs, often portrayed as the very bastion of ‘little England’, were constituted as the heart of English urban life during the heady reorganization of England from a rural to urban nation during the nineteenth century. In opposition to the inner city, which is often characterized as a façade, foreign and distinctly ‘un-English’, the suburbs are depicted as the ‘moral order of Englishness’ (Chambers 1986: 26). The presence of migrants in the very heart of the genteel suburbs appeared to threaten the spatial ordering of Englishness (Shields 1991). Rather than trying to conform to the bland conservatism of ‘little England’, migrants have sometimes preferred to reconstitute the local as a resilient ‘home from home’. Southall, for instance, a suburb in west London, contains a substantial Panjabi settlement, who have renamed the town as ‘Chota Panjab’ (‘little Panjab’) (Baumann 1990) and ‘desh pardesh’ (‘at home abroad’) (Ballard 1994: 5). The implantation of cultural, social and economic ‘roots’ in places like Southall provided the ‘community’ a relatively uniied focus to become relatively selfsuficient and tangibly less dependent on what they have viewed, at times, as antagonistic and racist ‘British’ institutions (Baumann 1996). These migrants, such as Sikhs from the Panjab, who settled in local districts like Southall after the Second World War, often worked in the heavy service industries of the city’s waning industrial heritage. Many migrants in the 1950s and 1960s were employed in Southall’s rubber factory, where they worked 60 to 80 hour weeks, often in hot or damp conditions, doing monotonous tasks, and for lower than average wages, often with little or no job security. In response to this perceived de-anglicisation of the ‘local’ came attempts to stem the tide of migrants. In Southall in 1963, for instance, hundreds of angry white residents called for ‘peace and not Indians’. The white residents mobbed the local authority to demand that it ‘stop the silent invasion’ by compulsory purchase of vacant houses to prevent migrants from moving in. Another example of an attempt to reassert ‘white control’ came in 1979 when the local authority provided permission for the neo-Nazi National Front to hold a march down Southall Broadway. The strategy of white racists at the local scale is to ‘purify’ and maintain control of speciic spaces. This process of puriication involves the construction of clear boundaries to ensure that non-whites are distinctly made unwelcome. Although writing about the US in particular, Colin Flint (2004) has described ‘spaces of hate’,

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enclosed or sealed paces which create groups necessarily characterized as being either ‘in’ or ‘out’. Creating and maintaining cultural difference and separation through the control of space is the politics of territoriality, deined as ‘the attempts by an individual or group to affect, inluence or control people, phenomena and relationships by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area’ (Sack 1986: 19). Underpinning the politics of territoriality is the presentation of ‘fear’ by racist entrepreneurs. The discourse of fear is orchestrated to enhance spatial practices designed to mark out moral geographies that exclude and exile feared social groups (Shirlow 2003: 78). These spatial practices aim to create puriied and homogeneous spaces which provide legitimacy to a series of discursive activities and social group practices. In certain instances, the articulation of group fears is tied to the enclosing of space and the marginalization of alternative representations and dissenting voices. Right across London there have been historical attempts by the city’s migrant groups to establish areas of settlement characterized by dense population networks and self-help organizations. Often, these efforts to create a sense of locality and ‘community’ would come under sustained attack. In 1936, for instance, a legal march of the British Union of Fascists into Cable Street, in the East End of the city, was deliberately designed to provoke the area’s substantial Jewish population. In 1958 the district of Notting Hill in the west of the city was the focus for ‘race riots’ as groups of whites seeking to ‘Keep Britain White’ attacked the local migrant Afro-Caribbean groupings. De-industrialization and the Global City One of the more notable features of global cities is how the areas of migrant settlement are no longer seen as foreign or distinct from the host grouping’s national identity. Nor are these areas necessarily framed as places wrought by ethnic tensions and conlict; they can also be portrayed as exciting, cosmopolitan places of intercultural mixing and exchange, and, as such, indispensable parts of the city’s self-image. These spaces are also often subjected to processes of urban regeneration, gentriication and niche marketing, which represents the portioning of the city into ‘cultural quarters’, an almost identikit regeneration scheme which draws on a sanitized version of local identity.7 Unquestionably, the shift in how areas of migrant settlement are portrayed relects London’s central position as a global inancial hub and the way in which it has changed from an industrial to a post-industrial city after the end of the Second World War. Certainly, as one publication by the GLA – the citywide authority – makes clear, ‘[f]inancial and business services are London’s jobs powerhouse. 7 Ironically, such processes of inner city regeneration, rather than encouraging new forms of creativity and mixture, are typically creating ‘homogenized spaces, sanitized gilded cages’. In Berlin and Paris, ‘unruly, disorderly and heteroclite forms of life have been excised and domesticated’ (Keohane 2002: 42–3).

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Employment in this sector rose by 643,000 between 1973 and 2001, compensating for job losses in other areas, most notably manufacturing’ (GLA 2004). The other major area of job creation in London, the same publication notes, is ‘“personally orientated” services, in particular entertainment, leisure and creative industries. Between 1973 and 2001 these industries created 180,000 jobs in London. It is expected that there will be a further 178,000 jobs created in this sector by 2016’. One area of London which seems to be particularly symptomatic of changes in London’s political economy is the East End of the city, particularly around an area known as Brick Lane. The East End of London has been hit hard as manufacturing and other forms of production have relocated to other parts of the globe, where cheaper labour costs could guarantee higher levels of proits (GLA 2004). In an effort to regenerate parts of the East End there has been an attempt to use culture and ‘creativity’ – deined as any type of business, other than ine art, that deploys elements of creativity – as the main engine of local economic revitalization. The area of Brick Lane, amongst other districts in the East End, has become an important host for the emergence of these new creative industries. To help facilitate the presence of ‘creative professionals’ the area has undergone processes of ‘gentriication’ replete with the opening up of a variety of cafes, bars and exhibition spaces and expensive new housing. Although this process began in the late 1990s, within a few years Brick Lane’s vernacular landscape was ‘transformed through the insertion of a “creative community” and its ways of life’ (Mavrommatis 2006: 499). Notably, many of these ‘creative professionals’ are not originally from London. The same place – around Brick Lane – is renowned as a place where many migrant groups were historically located. The seventeenth century witnessed Huguenot settlement, followed by Irish migrants and Ashkenazi Jews. Today there is a substantial Bangladeshi population. The borough of Tower Hamlets, which contains Brick Lane, was estimated in 2005 as containing a Bangladeshi population of over 63,800 out of a population of just over 209,000 people in the whole borough (GLA 2005). In relation to the 1991 deprivation index, Tower Hamlets was ranked as the ifth most deprived borough in London and as the seventh within Britain (London Research Centre, 1996: 180, Mavrommatis 2006). In the account provided by Mavrommatis (2006) regarding how the new creative professionals viewed the Brick Lane area where they live and work, it is notable how this group constructed a narrative which emphasized the cultural diversity of the area. By noting how the area was historically and continues to be ‘a highly diverse ethnic milieu’, the ‘creatives’ were seeking to portray the area as a natural host to their creativity. Such places, like Brick Lane, are thus places where subjects can encounter and even immerse themselves in the cultures and identities of others. They are places which further allow people scope for reimagining their identities. One of the creative professionals interviewed by Mavrommatis called the area a ‘frontier’:

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a space, where you have another culture around, challenges you, in a sense, you start to think, who am I, or what’s me in a sense, because someone looks different or somebody is doing something differently, and maybe you don’t think necessarily like that at the time, but I think, there is a sense that you are in a space where anything can happen (Mavrommatis 2006: 513).

At the same time, many of Mavrommatis’s informants noted how the area provided a sense of community or a ‘little world outside London’. One informant noted, ‘I mean you would be just ive minutes’ walk from the City and you have people on the streets and you hardly hear English spoken on the street and that has its charm’ (Mavrommatis 2006: 504). However, as Mavrommatis points out, such places do not necessarily contribute toward a progressive politics of solidarity and alliances between groups; instead, the narrative of ethnic diversity promulgated by the ‘creative professionals’ is limited to an aesthetic perspective. Cultural difference for the ‘creatives’, in this synopsis, was something to be gazed upon or even felt. Yet there was no attempt to go beyond this representation of the ‘other’; ethnic boundaries between the creative professionals and the local ethnic minority groupings remained, though to some extent the two groups shared the same space. The Double Bind In the ‘global city’ the cultural forms and identities of the city’s minority groupings can be seen as ‘things’ which facilitate new experiences and different modes of being. Their contribution to the global city is judged in terms of how they are a niche product to be consumed and enjoyed. One way that ‘ethnic minorities’ can contribute to the economy is in regard to how their supposed cultural diversity can attract people to come to the city. A GLA publication outlines this precise position: To succeed as a world city and continue to attract people to the city, London must ensure that its full diversity is manifested in cultural excellence. London needs a range of world-class attractions including diverse and cosmopolitan cultural activities which satisfy the international community and Londoners. Both culturally speciic activities and the many new cultural forms which have developed because of the merging of different communities have a legitimate part to play in how London presents itself. For example, there is a signiicant population of Indian descent in London which makes an important economic contribution to the city and constitutes a large potential audience. Indian culture, as demonstrated in the commercial success of Indian ilm or bhangra, has recently become very popular and should be both highly valued and sustained (GLA 2004: 55).

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Multiculturalism’s Double Bind

This theme is thus a recapitulation of the ‘double bind’: the ‘global city’ is a place of imagination which facilitates the meeting and collision of different groups to hopefully engender a ‘cosmopolitan culture’; at the same time, ethnic minority groups must preserve their cultural practices so as to ensure that the ‘global city’ remains a place of hyperdiversity and excitement. Furthermore, while the cultures of ‘ethnic minorities’ are framed as places where subjects can explore new encapsulations and ‘ways of life’, ‘ethnic minorities’ are presented as bearing modes of community which can provide a sense of ixity and security in a milieu often characterized by constant change, dislocation and anomie. Certainly, in terms of the ‘exciting’ qualities of ‘ethnic minorities’, the role of the commercial culture industries is key. In certain respects, ‘[e]thnicity is in. Cultural difference is in. Consumption of the Other is all the rage’ (Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma 1996:1). As bell hooks (1992: 21) argues: The commodiication of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.

The commodiication of ethnicity in the ‘global city’ can also be packaged as forms that facilitate positive cross-cultural dialogue, interculturalism and multicultural relations between groups. This theme is tackled in Koushik Banerjea’s (2000) article on the commercial popularity of South Asian dance music in late 1990s London. Banerjea’s article looks at how South Asians are represented at a club night called Anokha at London’s ‘Blue Note’, which is located in a district called Hoxton. Located just a few streets away from Brick Lane, Hoxton is another area which was once the site of small industries. The post-war process of deindustrialization in the area has been followed by attempts to re-imagine it by regenerating many of the industrial lofts for use by artists, and attracting many media companies and other new creative industries, especially dot-com companies. As part of the regeneration of Hoxton, a number of highly trendy clubs opened up in the area adding to the image of the area as exciting and alternative. At the Anokha club night during the late 1990s a new subculture was called ‘the music of the Asian Underground’. According to Banerjea, Anokha offered ‘a primarily middle-class constituency a sanitised encounter with an imagined Asian other’ (2000: 65). The abundance of ‘fetishization’ of South Asian identities at the club, ‘marked by the ready appropriation of bindis, saris, incense and the more narcoleptic aspects of Ravi Shankar … allow for white folk to rub shoulders with a carefully constructed “exotica” and for the perpetuation of the myth of multiculture’ (2000: 65). At Anokha an encounter of the ‘Other’, ‘becomes a kind of licentious cultural playground where voyeuristic clubbers not only get to taste the other but to eradicate his/her presence altogether. It is quite literally cool without the coolie’ (2000: 76). Predictably, then, the reproduction and mainstream promotion of ‘Asian Kool’ disperses the ‘angrier sounds of Asian marginality’

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(2000: 76) thus disguising the fact that ‘we might still be riven by endemic racism and class division’ (2000: 65). Although in the ‘global city’ ethnic minority groupings provide ripe pickings for the forces of commercialization and processes of ‘exotica’, it is salient to explore what opportunities are afforded to groups to mobilize within the state-sponsored multicultural model. Moreover, seeing that ‘ethnic minority’ groupings are framed as simultaneously possessing ‘spice’ to enhance the diversity of the ‘global city’ and the capacity to provide communal roots, can groups utilize their ‘attractive’ features to provide an inclusive sense of community? Furthermore, how can groups who are dwindling in population size and increasingly de-territorialized in the ‘global city’ imagine a new sense of community? To begin this analysis, it is worth quickly looking at the example of the contemporary London-Irish, a group who are not typically included in analyses of multiculturalism nor the ‘global city’ (cf. Hickman 1998, Mac an Ghaill 1999, Gray 2000, Nagle 2008a).

The Death of the Community Introducing me to ‘Irish-London’ in 2002 an informant revealed that the environs surrounding the mile and half stretch between the Holloway Road and Archway underground tube stations in north London were once the centrifugal point of the London-Irish ‘community’. The London-Irish were identiied with speciic areas of London, especially the northwest of the city; the district of Kilburn in the northwest was endowed with the epithet of ‘County Kilburn’ by Irish migrants to make it sound more a part of Ireland than London. It was in these spaces that people told me a ‘vibrant Irish community’ had stood. For fans of Irish traditional music, especially, there were a number of bars and dancehalls in the area where the ‘community’ congregated, like ‘The National’ on the Kilburn High Road, ‘The Galtymore’ in Kentish Town and ‘The Round Tower Ballroom’ on the Holloway Road. When I conducted research in the area in 2001–2002 people told me that in the space of a few years the area had witnessed the closure of an Irish book shop, an Irish community centre, an Irish record shop, a number of Irish dancehalls, the closure of at least ive traditional Irish pubs and a noticeable reduction in the number of Irish accents in the street. The bars that were once the exclusive property of Irish labourers and builders were frequented by Polish and other east European migrants who now also occupy the types of employment once illed by the Irish. It was said to me that ‘the Irish community was dying’ and some of the remaining Irish in the area appeared fearful that they no longer knew who their neighbours were or that they no longer felt the district was in their possession. After some sterner investigation a ‘community’ undergoing profound change became more apparent. A more upwardly mobile community in recent years, many Irish have moved into the leafy suburbs on the outskirts of London. The rate of migrants arriving from the Republic of Ireland, especially, has dropped off signiicantly since the early 1990s, most particularly in the wake of rapid and

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exponential economic growth in Ireland. The suspicion that the Irish are a waning ‘community’, and are spatially de-concentrated, is borne out by Census igures. According to Census 2001, the white Irish population of London is 220,488,8 forming 3.1 per cent of the city’s population. Irish emigration, which during the 1950s to the 1980s could witness thousands of Irish people moving every month to London, has slowed down to little more than a trickle.9 While London’s ethnic minority population is rising, and is predicted to keep rising for a number of decades, the London-Irish population shows the steepest loss of all groups in the city. In the period 2001–6 the London-Irish population declined by 0.6 per cent.10 if that is not enough, Census 2001 further revealed that the Irish are very much a territorially dispersed group. Although the percentage of white Irish people in the population of each London borough ranges from 7.0 per cent in Brent to 1.3 per cent in Newham, they are much more evenly located than every other ethnic minority group recorded. With an average of 3.1 per cent Irish across London, nearly all boroughs were just one or two percentage points different from that igure (GLA 2005). This trend has long been predicted. A report on the London-Irish in 1984 noted, ‘as the traditional areas of Irish settlement become integrated, the tightly-knit communities dispersed and the focal point of the parish become increasingly irrelevant, new methods of ensuring the survival of London’s Irish community will have to be developed’ (Greater London Council [GLC] 1984a: 3). Census 2001 also showed that in comparison to the rest of the population of London as a whole, the white Irish population is an older population. It was recorded that 6.8 per cent of white Irish people are under the age of 16 years, compared with 20.2 per cent of London’s population as a whole. A igure of 20.2 per cent of the white Irish population is aged 65 or older, in comparison with 16.4 per cent of the population as a whole. The white Irish population is an ageing population – a larger proportion of the population are older (over 64) than are younger (under 25). As one Irish welfare organization – the Federation of Irish Societies [FIS] (FIS 2007a: 13) – notes, ‘a population of this structure will shrink as the numbers who die are not matched by those born, unless migration patterns change the general trend or unless there are changes in how sections of the population perceive their ethnicity’. For Irish welfare organizations, like 8 This igure seems to show a marked decline. The 1971 Census, for instance, revealed that 283,395 Irish born were resident in London. Notably, also, the percentage of Brent’s population which was Irish was 7.9 per cent, 22,065 out of a population of 280,655. Brent also contains the highest proportion of people who are ethnic minorities (70.8 per cent) of all London boroughs (GLA 2005: 19). 9 Of those people in London who described themselves in the Census as Irish, 66.4 per cent were born in the Republic of Ireland and 6.3 per cent were born in Northern Ireland; 31.3 per cent of those who described themselves as ‘white Irish’ were born in Britain. 10 It was estimated that the London-Irish population had shrunk from 3.1 per cent in 2001 to 2.5 per cent in 2006, a reduction of 36,000 people.

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the FIS, campaigning for state-sponsored multicultural resources, the declining London-Irish population represents a serious problem. Put bluntly, the declining London-Irish population equates to a situation where Irish welfare organizations are granted less multicultural resources. Is it therefore possible to change ‘how sections of the population perceive their ethnicity’? Perhaps there are changes in motion. The erasure of community centres, book shops and bars representing everyday Irish diasporic life and cultures owned and run by the Irish, has occurred at precisely the time when mass produced cultural representations of Irishness (‘Riverdance’, the ‘Irish theme bar’, Irish theatre and major St Patrick’s Day parades) emanated to make Irishness much more visible in London. There is also a marked difference in the type of Irish migrant to London. Once the typical Irish migrant was working-class and derived from a rural background, often found employed in construction or the health professions. Since the 1980s a new numerically smaller group of Irish migrants have been identiied. This group are largely professional, high-skilled, university graduates, and they were even given their own distinctive typologies to differentiate them from the traditional Irish migrant type: ‘emigrant aristocracy’ and the ‘Ryan air generation’11 (Gray 2000). Their pattern of migration was typically shortterm compared to the embedded and permanent form of previous generations of Irish migration. Problematically, while this new generation has helped provide a misleading image of the Irish in places like London as young, highly mobile and even cosmopolitan, they also expose the fractured notion of an ‘Irish community’. These new migrants, as Mac an Ghail and Haywood (2003) note, have sought to create boundaries and distances between themselves and the older workingclass generation of migrants and their second-generation children. The new selfproclaimed ‘emigrant aristocracy’ ‘embody different geographies of power, as they exchange class-based cultural capital in the hi-tech service sectors of the British economy’ (Mac an Ghail and Haywood 2003: 391). These new types of Irish economic migrants to London have been at the forefront of providing a new brand of inclusive Irishness. Where so-called ‘spitand-sawdust’ Irish bars – whose clientele consisted mostly of Irish labourers and builders – once stood in Cricklewood, Kilburn and Camden, there are now trendy Irish cocktail bars. One late-night members’ cocktail bar, called ‘Anam’12 in Islington, north London, has been constructed on the site of an infamous old Irish bar. Anam is replete with an interior that proclaims to subvert Londoners’ perception of what constitutes an Irish ‘watering hole’. Images of young bikiniclad women cavorting next to Celtic crosses vie with depictions of cowboys wandering in the ruin of a medieval Irish castle. The owner of the bar has stated: ‘I don’t serve cheap drink. This is for people who appreciate quality’. While the old Irish bars, according to the owner of Anam, ‘are not nice places to meet people’, his new bar is ‘cool, young, funky and up to date’. His bar is ‘representative of the 11 Ryanair is an Irish airline. 12 Anam means ‘soul’ in Irish.

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new wave of Irish … at the moment we [the Irish] are the strongest entrepreneurs in the UK; we’re the most aggressive’. Another sign of change is seen in nearby Cricklewood Corner, which was once renowned as a place where unemployed Irish labourers would queue at 6am in the hope of being collected for a day’s work. ‘There are no more McAlpine’s vans collecting twenty men in donkey jackets on street corners. The young Irish work for Goldman Sachs now’, states one Irish business owner.13 Kilburn, the most populous of all Irish districts stretching back to the nineteenth century, which hosted a mainly poor working-class Irish population, has been rebranded: ‘Kilburn is a little bit edgy. It’s like what downtown New York was twenty years ago’, claims a bar owner. In this marketing exercise, the ‘Irish heart’ of London is portrayed as hosting an image that is both young and ‘alternative’ – in antithesis to its statistical proile as ageing, declining and territorially dispersed. Alongside this paradoxical shift in identity is a change in the ‘traditional caricature of Irish sexuality, marked by both its fecundity and the uncivil’ to one that foregrounds ‘youthful adventure, bodily pleasure and vitality’ (Mac an Ghaill and Haywood 2003: 388–9). The decline of what was once identiied as a territorially-based community has offered new opportunities for the constitution of alternative and inclusive modes of belonging and encapsulation. This framing of Irishness as part of a ‘lifestyle choice’ opens up new possibilities for the notion of ‘community’ to be viewed as less ascriptive or bound by a territorial boundary. This change in how ‘community’ is deined and celebrated in the global city can be seen, to some extent, in the short ethnographic snippets provided earlier in the chapter. Think back to the beginning of the chapter and the ethnographic portraits of the women who had attended cultural classes at the Welsh Community Centre before going to the Irish Cultural Centre in west London and Aindriu MacEadbhaird, a man who now proclaims an Irish identity. These ‘migrants of identity’, who are interested in exploring the cultural forms and identities of other groups, can become the focus for ethnic recruitment. In this process, minority groups, like the London-Irish, who are competing for resources with other groups in the state-sponsored multicultural model, may also compete with other groups to recruit these ‘cosmopolitans’ by drawing them into their multicultural initiatives. In essence, this is all part of the ‘multicultural numbers game’, in which minority groupings try to expand their numeric size so that they can claim an increased share of public resources. However, this process of ‘ethnic recruitment’, rather than necessarily providing a basis for people to create forms of political dialogue and alliances to counter essentialist representations of ethnicity, can instead act to reproduce and maintain ethnic hierarchies.

13 McAlpine refers to a construction company, which was a notable employer of postwar Irish migrants. A famous ballad, ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers’, depicted the tough experiences encountered by Irish migrant labourers in England during the 1950s.

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Banal Cosmopolitanism or To Rebecome the Other? As we can see, in the global city opportunities proliferate for actors to immerse themselves in the identities of various groups they were not born into. While this is true, it does not quite explain the totality of relationships and reasons which make people seek out the cultural forms of groups they ordinarily do not belong to. While structural changes to the political economy of the global city may invoke a branding of city as excitingly cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse, at the level of agency it is important to illuminate some of the reasons why people are propelled to encounter and investigate other groups. Thinking back to my informant from earlier in the chapter who stated that one can become Welsh or Irish as long as you ‘put your mind to it’, her light-hearted, even lippant remark, actually reveals the ambivalent relationship some people may have to state-sponsored multiculturalism. During my ieldwork, I had managed to speak to this particular informant on a number of occasions and had got to know her fairly well in social settings. At irst glance, in many ways this person appeared to be the classic archetype of a cosmopolitan. The person was white, well travelled and comfortably middle-class. She worked as a freelance journalist who wrote a weekly column in a national newspaper. She was the type of person it is often assumed that possess the cultural and economic capital needed to consume and understand the unpredictability of different cultural settings (Chaney 2002). John Urry (1995) has written of the cognitive and semiotic skills, the linguistic, cultural openness and willingness to take risks required in order for the cosmopolitan to consume international cultures. The relexive cultural competencies which enable the cosmopolitan to manoeuvre within new meaning systems, whilst remaining culturally and emotionally detached, means the experience is perceived to be largely limited to Western intellectual elites. Yet my informant was no simple ‘boutique multiculturalist’, a person characterized by trips to ‘ethnic restaurants, weekend festivals and high proile lirtations with the other’ (Fish 1997: 378). Her attendance at the Irish cultural centre, for instance, was mostly due to its proximity to her home in leafy west London. Nevertheless, during my time at the Irish centre, which was almost every night it was open for over year, I noted that she was the most vigorous in her attendance of classes at the centre and she seemed to participate in more classes than anyone else. Her popular presence could be counted at the Irish set-dancing class,14 Irish language, Irish singing, Irish tin whistle and drum, Irish literature and Irish drama classes. She would also act as self-designated events organizer for the socializing activities that occurred outside of the centre. On occasion, when I had the opportunity to speak to her during a quiet moment at the Irish Cultural Centre, I would gently try to press her on her attendance at the Centre. Why did she, as someone with no professed roots in Ireland, give up so 14 A class frequented almost exclusively by middle-aged women who were forced to dance together as partners due to the lack of males.

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much of her leisure time to learning about Ireland and participating in Irish cultural classes? At irst, I assumed the answer was because she, as a middle-class white person, wanted to position herself as a ‘minority’. The logic here is that expressing marginality, difference and an afiliation with victimhood is a predominant theme in contemporary life. Irishness can certainly evoke such narratives, especially the recurrent leitmotif that throughout a history of English colonization and anti-Irish prejudice the Irish are, even today, an oppressed and victimized group. This logic has been favoured by some commentators to account for why Irishness appears a popular identity for some non-Irish, especially in the context of the US (Negra 2001, 2006, Egan 2006). For them, Irishness is rapidly becoming the white ethnicity of choice, a means of claiming an ethnic identity while maintaining the beneits of whiteness. Egan (2006) argues that for Irish-Americans, those of whom are unwilling to accept that they have shifted from ‘a past history of oppression to a present history of assimilation and power’, the maintenance of Irish identity re-evokes narratives of Irish oppression, a desire to ‘rebecome the other and deny their past and present participation in the white power structure’ (2006: 23). Yet, when I rather unsubtly pressed my informant on whether she came to learn about Irish history and culture because she sympathized or identiied with a so-called victimized group like the Irish, she laughed. She explained that she didn’t think the Irish had particularly been historically oppressed by the English, certainly no more, she continued, than the Highland Scottish15 during the eighteenth century or even the position of English working classes during particular periods of English history. What, then, was her motive for going to the Irish Cultural Centre and participating in so many classes? She patiently explained to me that her attendance was due to a number of factors: the proximity of the Centre, the inclusive aspect of the Centre, the fact that here she felt at home and had made a great number of friends. She also loved performance and the Centre provided a nourishing milieu for her theatrical instincts as well as her capacity to organize events and people. Thus, perhaps hidden in the current fashion to stereotype people like her as indicative of prevailing insecurities about ‘whiteness’, and the search some individuals may initiate to ind ‘authentic’ white ethnicities, is the rather quotidian and banal cosmopolitanism that drives people into multicultural initiatives. This banal, everyday cosmopolitanism is not so much concerned with consuming or 15 Interestingly, some aspects of Scottish traditional culture have become somewhat popular in London in recent years. In particular, ceilidh dancing in scottish Cultural Centres is particularly fashionable, attracting a substantial body of young scots interested in getting in ‘touch’ with their national roots and a range of other people. In London, Scottish ceilidh dancing attracts some media attention, which lavishes rather exotic status on the dance. In one newspaper article, ceilidh dancing was depicted as a ‘frenzy … similar to a rave, except the revellers don’t seem to be relying on chemical enhancers – or music to feel the beat. I spot a group of nymphs jumping up and down with Arcadian excitement before the band has even started’ (Jaeger 2002: 45).

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even becoming the ‘other’, but has more to do with the chance encounters, everyday meetings and the prosaic acts of socialization which can structure relations between members of different groups. In this sense, Ulrich Beck’s deinition of a ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ (2002: 28) refers to how people are integrated into experiencing global processes and the cultures of others. Rather than demanding the oft-quoted set of intellectual competencies and cognitive facilities to experience a diverse range of cultures, banal cosmopolitanism is primarily enunciated in ‘quotidian, unrelexive acts’. These acts are broadly seen in mundane, everyday practices which gain ontological prestige through constant reiteration and repetition (Edensor 2002). In this sense, a ‘mundane cosmopolitanism’ is part of many people’s everyday experience, as they are world travellers, either corporeally or via the TV in their living room. Sensations of other places, especially facilitated through ‘channelhopping’, and programmes simulating ‘channel-hopping’, may thus create an awareness of an interdependent world. Such is the ordinariness of these encounters with otherness, that members of different groups may not even think that the encounter is representative of a structured relationship between their respective groups. Indeed, the presence of my informant at an Irish set-dance class is not necessarily read by the participants as an example of cross-cultural exchange. In this particular instance, the relationships between the participants are more based on their commonality as middle-aged women dancing with each other rather than members of different ethnic groups coming together. This is not to say that ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ is somehow immune from either reproducing or challenging ethnic hierarchies. In some ways it can be seen to be annulling, or at least eschewing debate and dialogue over the performance of ethnic cultural identities in multicultural settings. At the same time it could possibly be argued that an absence of such debates represents a tacit acceptance of the shared humanity of the participants, that race and ethnicity does not have to be referred to as salient could possibly negate the essentialization and reiication of these identities. ‘It’s the Umbilical Cord that We’ve Forgotten All About’ When I irst conducted research on multicultural initiatives I was surprised at the array of people from different groups who were happily participating in the cultural practices in some form or other. It quickly became clear to many of the participants – whether they were ‘multicultural educators’, students or just an occasional lâneur – that I was concerned to ind out why so many people made the effort to learn about the cultural forms that they were not members of. In order to counteract my assumptions, on some occasions people were quick to explain their ‘innocence’. In other words, these people, rather understandably, felt defensive at my prying into the nature of their identities and would proffer a range of reasons which accounted for their presence at multicultural initiatives. I remember, on one occasion, asking a French woman why she took part in Irish dancing at the Irish

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Cultural Centre. She explained to me that learning traditional Irish culture was a conduit for attaining a healthy, beautiful body. For example, after the strenuous, physically demanding Irish step-dancing class, the French woman told me, ‘Irish dancing is perfect as it allows me to eat anything without putting on any weight.’ I asked another dancer, a woman in her forties, as she went to get a drink of water, if she was out of breath. She nodded her head and said, ‘I missed last week’s lesson; it’s like missing the gym for one week.’ This example also pertinently points to how culture and identity are inscribed in what Brian Turner has called ‘somatic society’, the body in modern social systems has become ‘the principal ield of political and cultural activity’ (Turner 1992). In our ‘late capitalist’ consumer society, the body is trained, disciplined and orchestrated to enhance our personal values. That the body is a bearer of ‘personhood and social identity’, and is a site of struggle over the ‘social relations of personal production’ (Turner 1994: 27–8), means it is strictly a work in process serving ‘the purposes of social mobility’ (Csordas 1994). Strictly speaking, in a ‘somatic society’, obsessive concern about the presentation of the body manifests itself most obviously in the ‘body beautiful’ – a particularly obvious example of how the body becomes a means to articulate and attain progressive social positioning. The manipulation of the body through plastic surgery further highlights the portrayal of the self as an image which is representative of the self’s arbitrary essence. Whilst constructing an elaborate image of the body to showcase the self is one important facet of contemporary imaginings of identity, the body can become foregrounded as a bearer of identity in more unrelexive, unconscious ways. In other words, multicultural initiatives may provide a context for actors to improve their sense of identity through performative practices which focus on the shaping of their body. Although, in one sense, the participation of the French woman at the Irish dancing class is not indicative of her desire to take on a new ethnic identity but to gain a new body form, in another, it may also be representative of how the reproduction of ethnic identities are also essentially performed with a strong emphasis on the correct use of the body. The point here is that convincing interested actors that you possess an ‘authentic’ identity can be contingent on the adequate performance of that identity. Nevertheless, my preconceived notions about why particular people joined multicultural projects and initiatives were often challenged by people. Instructors at multicultural educational classes, for example, stressed that the people who came to their classes and events were not engaging in a search to ind their ethnic roots or to embrace an identity they had not been born into. I noted in my ieldwork diaries one particularly awkward encounter. *** It was another Wednesday night with Rory’s singing class. Pausing in-between songs, Rory, all-knowing, cast a mischievous grin at me ensconced comfortably at the back of the class, aware of my self-designated role as the all-seeing,

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anonymous, would-be ethnographer. Rory, the tutor, addressed the class: ‘I wonder how many of you have no connection with Ireland, in the sense that you weren’t born there or raised there, or that you haven’t got uncles, cousins, aunts and grandmothers and small dogs?’ Students laughed. A number of students raised their arms in acknowledgement of the question, and then looked around the room to survey those who were likewise. Rory continued, ‘And how many of you were born in Ireland?’ A long silence. Rory laughed sarcastically when no one managed to reply afirmatively. ‘And how many of you have immediate family, meaning your uncles, your mother, father, or (a) a mother or (b) a father that comes from Ireland?’ A few students raised their arms. Undaunted, Rory continued on. ‘And how many of you are second-generation, third-generation? By irst-generation, I mean you were born in Ireland, by second-generation I mean that you were born in England of Irish parents and so on. How many of you have connections in that?’ Slightly fewer in number than those who answered the last question made their acknowledgement known in a desultory fashion by murmuring or awkwardly raising their hand. Rory continued onwards, ‘Can I just ask the people that come with no connection whatever, maybe you’ve seen ‘Riverdance’,16 how many of you come to the music because you like it?’ A number of students rather truculently hoisted arms. ‘And I take it nobody here has come to look at the music particularly because it is Irish culture and they want to be Irish?’ Ignoring the muted response of a slightly perplexed-looking class, Rory continued onwards, ever more ironic in tone, ‘It’s the umbilical cord that, you know, we’ve forgotten all about. That’s what some of the academics say when they write about this. No, I’ve never come across anybody who did come [to the Irish singing class] to have the umbilical cord reattached. Never, never. See people like Noel and Catherine [two second-generation Irish students in the class], being the nearest things to authentic Irish, you don’t come here particularly because it’s Irish music. It’s because it’s a piece of music that stands up on its own. Because you ind so many people who want to latch on to traditional music who think that people latch on to it because it’s Irish, is nonsense. In all my years, I’ve never come across anybody who came to the Irish Centre for that purpose.’ *** Rory’s impromptu survey of the class was designed to prove a simple point: he wished to correct my assumption that people came to the Irish Cultural Centre, and to his class speciically, to strengthen their Irish identity or awaken their hidden ethnicity. For Rory the pure poetic beauty of Irish traditional song was in itself enough to entice people into his class. Yet, while there may be some truth to Rory’s improvised poll of his students, conducted for my beneit, it did not allay my nagging concern with the presence and performance of ethnicity at many 16 ‘Riverdance’ is a highly popular commercial version of Irish traditional stepdancing.

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multicultural initiatives and celebrations. On St Patrick’s Day, for example, it was almost impossible to ignore the sheer number of people with no self-proclaimed irish identity resplendent in three foot high furry green stovepipe hats, and even leprechaun suits, who spent the day drinking copious amounts of Guinness and other Irish related alcoholic beverages. On these occasions it did not seem realistic to downplay the salience of ethnic identities no matter how much some of those involved tried to do so. In order to try and elicit some of the motivations which propelled people into participating in multicultural settings, especially for St Patrick’s Day, I designed a survey. One informant who completed the survey was an estate agent from east London. He explained that on St Patrick’s Day his local bar provided ‘Free Guinness hats when 5 pints inished’ and he had ‘consumed about 10 pints of Guinness over a 7 hour period’. Notably, he expressed a desire to purchase ‘more understanding of what the day stands for. Sorry for my ignorance’. Rather than annulling ethnicity, this ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ can actually conirm the salience of ethnic difference. It shows that in some contexts and settings ethnicity becomes visible and enacted through ritualized performances, even like heavy alcohol consumption, a key stereotype of Irishness. The point here is that actors, especially those who dwell in the global city, often come into contact with what are presented as the cultural identities of ethnic minority groupings in the city. This contact can often be rather banal and even unthinking, such as consuming pints of Guinness on St Patrick’s Day, or even the regular trip to the ‘ethnic takeaway restaurant’. These encounters are not always benign. Such settings, as David Parker (2000) has shown in the context of the local takeaway Chinese restaurant, can provide an interface which structures ethnic relationships and hierarchies. These settings are not necessarily state-sponsored multicultural initiatives; they can be framed by commercial factors. Yet, statesponsored multicultural initiatives designed to promote interculturalism and an awareness of the cultural identities of various groups can also often provide a matrix for rather different outcomes than those intended and hoped for by the organizers. People may participate in multicultural events because they enjoy the socializing that typically surrounds it or they are merely interested in performing music and dance. However, this is not to say that such modes of ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ are not indicative of wider processes of ‘race relations’ and the structuring of ethnic identities that occurs both in contemporary ‘multicultural society’ and the global city.

Chapter 2

Mobilizing for Multiculturalism

The Broken Windows Thesis: ‘Race Attack’ On an early Monday morning in late April 2001 a brick was thrown through the downstairs windows which were neatly arranged behind the ground loor reception at the Irish Cultural Centre in west London where I was conducting ieldwork. The windows, prior to being shattered into indistinct shards, were an indispensable, visible symbol of the Centre’s physical and cultural presence and continual commitment to sponsoring contemporary Irish art; on the glass panes were etched a thin white, delicately mapped outline of the counties of Ireland, which had been especially commissioned to mark the opening of the Centre in 1995. Now that the windows had been brutally smashed the broken glass pieces were another symbol of the Centre’s presence in the local district. The Centre stood as a symbol both of being victim of and as a site of struggle against the continuing occurrence of antiIrish sentiment and discrimination in the capital city. The damage was estimated as costing £50,000. During the previous two months, the Centre had already alarmingly been subjected to threats, arson attacks, daubed with anti-Irish grafiti and suffered a number of broken windows. On one occasion the National Front, a far-right racist organization, chanted anti-Irish obscenities outside the Centre while a vigil was held inside to commemorate Irish people killed by British soldiers in Northern Ireland. The local council, Hammersmith and Fulham, dubiously observed that it was unsure if the attacks were linked, but it was something which ‘is being currently investigated’ (Hammersmith Chronicle, May 2002). That same Monday evening when I arrived to join the traditional music class on the irst loor of the Irish Centre, upon noting the cardboard substitute covering the hole left by the broken panes, I asked the security person on the reception desk what had happened. He shrugged his shoulders and told me someone had hurled a brick through the window, probably in the early hours of the morning when the Centre was empty. I asked him if any motive had so far been suggested. Again he shrugged his shoulders in a quizzical repose, and together we momentarily indulged in some genial banter by suggesting it was the handiwork of an irate ex-student choosing a particularly violent means to express their dissatisfaction with the educational classes. Shortly after, when I asked Ros, the Centre’s cultural director about the attack, she stated that as far as all the staff were concerned the attack was both cowardly and racist in orientation. Quick to disclose these suspicions, shortly after the windows were smashed, the Centre’s website stated: ‘Race Attacks at Irish Centre: Fears vandalism and attempted arson could be part

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of an anti-Irish campaign’ (see: ). Commenting on the attacks on the Centre, the Commission for Racial Equality [CRE] stated: ‘The violence against members of the Irish community and centres is a problem. It is extremely unfortunate’ (Crowley 2002). The experience of what are perceived to be violent acts of racism and prejudice directed at minority groups provides a strong stimulus for the production of forms of state-sponsored multiculturalism. To reiterate a fundamental point from the introductory chapter, multiculturalism has often been framed by proponents as a philosophical perspective which elaborates a view of society in which different groups and their cultures harmoniously collide, crash, meet, melt, and become sutured and inally reconciled in a warm embrace. The essential point of such a ‘dialogical’ emphasis is so that respective group members can learn about and incrementally gain an appreciation of groups they may have thus far viewed with suspicion, fear and even large doses of odium. The cultural forms of the concerned groups have thus been utilized to articulate ‘pollution’ and ‘danger’ as a means to create an immutable boundary between them. Racism, in its purest form, does not merely relegate groups to racial and ethnic properties frozen in aeternum, thus acting to keep the groups in a perpetual relationship of difference; racism seeks to strip away the individual humanity of group members. Reconciliation, consequently, looks at forging relationships by engaging the protagonists to view each other in terms of a common humanity, ‘as humans in relationship’ (Lederach 1997: 24). As Lederach (1997: 26) explains, ‘acknowledgement through hearing one another’s stories validates experience and feelings and represents the irst step toward restoration of the person and the relationship’. The mission of the minority group who believe that their cultural identities have not been endowed with suficient ‘recognition’ by more powerful groups is to have their sense of selfworth and humanity restored and respected. This belief in the almost healing powers of culture is elaborated, for instance, by some of the state-sponsored multicultural Irish Centres in London. The mission statement for the Camden based London Irish Centre in north London, makes it clear that it seeks to ‘celebrate and promote Irish culture and counteract the negative discrimination the Irish people face as an ethnic minority’.1 The mission statement for the Irish Cultural Centre asserts the Centre’s programme of Irish arts and education is instrumental in how it ‘promotes a positive Irish identity’ [emphasis original].2 In an almost mutually sustaining relationship, the Irish centre legitimizes its brief by providing social and cultural services for an under-attack, discriminated, stereotyped and disadvantaged Irish ethnic minority;3 the thug(s),

1 The London Irish Centre: 46 Years of Frontline Service. Annual Report 2000/01. 2 Bold type used in the original. 3 The London Irish Centre explains that its primary function developed out of an era where ‘newly arrived emigrants had to live in poor quality accommodation and ... had to accept employment in poorly paid jobs. Many also were the victims of negative stereotypes

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on the other hand, who perpetrated the destructive acts, presumably viewed the centre as an unwanted presence of a despised Irish community. The collective experience of racism, socioeconomic disadvantage and prejudice is therefore a powerful trope which legitimizes the presence of the minority group within the state-sponsored multicultural paradigm. Yet, it is not always the case that such grievances and inequalities are enough in themselves to provoke groups into action to demand multicultural recognition. Indeed, systemic strain is often constant (see Crossley 2002). Perceptions of grievances are fundamentally rooted in cultural standards and hardships can be endured by groups if they view them to be just; it is when hardships go beyond their shared deinitions and level of normal expectation that mobilization becomes possible. There is often dissension, lack of clarity, ambivalence and contradictory narratives within the group as to whether they are a victimized ethnic minority grouping. The appearance of consensus, at least, has to be manufactured. In the ‘global city’, how do groups become ethnic minorities which merit substantial funding and resources to challenge their perceived inferior status? The issue of gaining inclusion in the multicultural model is particularly problematical for groups that appear highly similar to the ‘host population’, in so far as they are primarily, though not exclusively, ‘white’, they share the same language and are closely connected through long-established periods of migration and colonization. Despite appearances of mimetic similarity, members of such groups may claim that they are disadvantaged ethnic minorities, clearly culturally differentiated from the host grouping, and hence richly deserving of public multicultural resources. The salient issues, therefore, concern how these groups strive to become oficially accepted by both the relevant state agencies and members of their own collectivity as ethnic minorities suffering from racism and socioeconomic disadvantage. To illuminate these precise issues, it is worthwhile briely exploring how the state-sponsored multicultural model was developed to speciically deal with particular categories of groups thus excluding others. From there, I go on to explore the contested narratives and complex political processes surrounding the mobilization of the London-Irish to become a recognized ethnic minority grouping which qualiies for substantial public resources. Yet, while a group like the London-Irish mobilize on the basis of what they claim to be their disadvantaged proile, what happens when global and local processes transform the status and esteem in which the group is held? In a transforming milieu, in which a group’s identity becomes increasingly commercially popular and wellliked, how does the social movement change the focus of the mobilization in order to maintain the position of the group as an ethnic minority?

developed through the centuries of history, propaganda, ignorance, racism and prejudice’ (see: ).

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Legislating Multiculturalism: ‘Control Without Integration is Indefensible’ The UK began the post-war years with an assumed sense of national cohesiveness; and this self-image was bolstered by the relative invisibility of the non-white population, which numbered only 30,000 (Hansen 2000: 3). This national and ethnic self-image came under sustained pressure as between 1948 and 1962 an estimated 500,000 primary migrants entered the country (Hansen 2000: 19). Although in 1962 Britain ‘shut the door’ and ended a period of open immigration – and it now operates one of the strictest migration policies in the west (Hansen 2000) – Britain approached the end of the twentieth century with a ‘non-white’ population of over three million. Many of the migrants who settled in Britain between the period of 1948 and 1962 are known as ‘New Commonwealth Migrants’ (NCM). This epithet is basically called upon to distinguish migrants who derive from non-white ex-British colonies (principally the West Indies and South Asia) from migrants of ex-colonies identiied as being primarily white (New Zealand, South Africa and Australia).4 A particular date identiied for heralding the beginning of NCMs was the arrival in england in June 1948 of the Empire Windrush, a boat carrying 417 Jamaicans who had been encouraged to come to England after a newspaper advertisement offered free passage for anybody who wanted to work in England. The British government had not expected the ship and the then incumbent Minister of Labour, Sir George Isaacs, told Parliament that he hoped ‘no encouragement will be given to others to follow their example’ (cited in Hansen 2000: 57). The then British Prime Minister’s description of the Jamaican migrants as an ‘incursion’ instigated a recurrent theme in which post-war migration is portrayed as a form of attack on Britain, resulting in invasion, war, contamination and loss of identity (Gilroy 2004: 15). It seems likely that at best the British Government envisioned a migration scheme little different to the German Gastarbeiter (guest worker) system. Accordingly, although the British Nationality Act 1948 enshrined the idea of ‘civis Britannicus sum’ (‘I am a British Citizen’), there was no attempt to initiate a statesponsored multicultural melting pot. As Joppke (1999: 642) notes, when NCMs began to steadily arrive in the 1950s, ‘it was not presumed that they would become “British” or “English” in any way’. Indeed, as Parekh (1998: 13) notes, cabinet records show the incumbent British government had wanted white migrants. For the government, the assimilation of NCMs was simply not an option, because ‘an 4 These NCMs were attracted to Britain by a combination of low wages at home, the post-war economic boom and expansive programme of rebuilding in Britain. Sections of british industry and public services, especially the national health service and the transport system actively recruited NCM workers to work in sections of employment that the ‘host population’ failed to ill. In 1946 the UK Government carried out a survey in which they estimated the labour surplus to be somewhere between 600,000 and 1.3 million people (Hansen 2000).

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inlux of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned’.5 In 1962 the door was effectively shut on mass migration by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act.6 From its peak in 1961, when 136,000 migrants entered Britain, the British government’s turn to restrictionism cut the igure of newly arriving migrants in half (Hansen 2000). Good Race Relations? The Jenkins Formula If initially the British state neither wanted the migrants nor wished to make good Britons out of them, from the 1960s onwards, at the level of public policy, they expressed a commitment to enforcing anti-racist legislation and social equality. Beyond enacting legislation designed to curb immigration, statist attempts to deal and consequently problematize NCMs included a number of initiatives at national and local level. These initiatives ostensibly had two objectives: (1) to create equality in the sphere of employment, housing and the welfare state; (2) to improve ‘race relations’ between the white ‘host population’ and NCMs. At the national level, a series of legislative acts were established in order to eradicate ‘racial discrimination’.7 The British state’s attempt to combine immigration control with legislative acts aimed to eradicate ‘racial discrimination’ was elaborated by the politician Roy Hattersley: ‘integration without control is impossible … but control without integration is indefensible’ (cited in Hansen 2000: 26). In essence, this formulation was predicated on two underlying assumptions. First, the sheer number of NCMs in Britain was a problem; the second related assumption was that the solution included a process of assimilation or integration, in which the migrants’ ‘strangeness’, including that of their children, would gradually be eliminated leading to the disappearance of racism (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: 158). Hattersley’s analysis of ‘good race relations’ was hence based on a ‘numbers game’: the fewer the number of NCMs would make it more likely that a strategy of assimilation could succeed (Solomos 2003: 81). In so doing, the correlative 5 Letter to Clement Attlee, signed by eleven Labour MPs, 22 June 1948, two days after the Empire Windrush landed (cited in Skellington 1992: 51). 6 The Act restricted settlement only to those who were either in possession of a British passport or government-issue employment vouchers, whereby migrants would be allowed into the country according to their level of skill and the state of the British economy, or if they had a speciic job to go to (Hansen 2000: 102, Solomos 2003: 58). 7 These include the Race Relations Act 1965, which made discrimination, on ‘grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins’, unlawful in public space. The Race Relations Act 1968 made it illegal to refuse housing, employment or public services to people because of their ethnic background. The 1976 Race Relations Act sought to provide a statutory duty on public bodies to promote race equality, and to demonstrate that procedures to prevent race discrimination are effective (see Solomos 2003).

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introduction of new immigration controls and Race Relations Acts could be presented as a package designed to promote ‘good race relations’. The premise of good ‘race relations’, engendered through processes of integration, was based on the notion of fostering good relations and ‘racial’ harmony between groups. The British government feared that not only were the number of NCMs in Britain enough to cause conlict between groups, but that racial and cultural differences between NCMs and the ‘host population’ would provide a source of unending conlict between groups. To try and ameliorate conlict, the state placed some emphasis on helping the host population to understand the immigrants’ culture thereby overcoming their prejudices (Solomos 2003: 97). This attempt to rhyme ‘integration’ with multiculturalism was vividly outlined by Roy Jenkins, the British Home Secretary, in 1966: ‘I deine integration, therefore, not as a lattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance’ (cited in McGhee 2008: 87). This so-called ‘Jenkins formula’ was based upon ‘integration plus’ (Grillo 2007). It was ostensibly a ‘weak’ form of multiculturalism, in which cultural difference was recognized (to a varying extent) in the private sphere, with acculturation in many areas of life and assimilation to the local population in employment, housing, education, health and welfare. As we can see, at the level of the national government, as part of limited antiracist strategies, the evolution of multiculturalism in Britain was strongly founded on promoting forms of cross-cultural exchange as an important means to engender ‘good race relations’ between groups. This emphasis on ‘race relations’ performed a vital function for the national government to the extent that it justiied both a restrictive approach to inward migration and the limiting of issues of ‘cultural difference’ to the private sphere. The formulation of the ‘race relations’ model, however, was predicated on what has been termed a ‘black/white binary’. In other words, the multicultural model, at state level, was designed to manage putative problems concerning the arrival of largely non-white Afro-Caribbean and South Asian NCMs in the post-war decades. Yet how did groups who were de facto excluded from inclusion within the multicultural paradigm mobilize to demand oficial recognition? To illuminate this, I turn now to exploring the case of the London-Irish.

Discourses of Racism and the London-Irish When I began research on the Irish in England, and London more speciically, a key debate was whether the Irish represented a group which had for hundreds of years been the abhorred victims of systematic venal hatred in England. This debate has certainly busied the minds of a number of scholars. One of them, Mary Hickman (2000) argues that the Irish in Britain have been ‘racialized’ by the host nation to the extent that they have provided an inferior ‘binary opposite’ identity to Britishness. Hickman (1998) further states that contrary to the view

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that racism and exclusion has primarily impacted upon non-white groups, the Irish in England have historically been portrayed as inferior and alien. The argument advanced is that just because the Irish are ‘white’ and administratively forced within the nation’s collectivity, they have not been unproblematically assimilated and undifferentiated (Lloyd 1995: 31). The contention that the Irish have been the unfortunate sufferers of discrimination requires more contextual analysis. At this point, it is worth providing a cursory overview of Irish settlement in London. Early Irish Settlement Until the advent of post-war migration into Britain, it is recorded that ‘the Irish were the largest ethnic group in Britain’ (MacRaild 1999: 1). Looking at London, speciically, it is noted that the close geographical proximity between Ireland and Britain has for many centuries induced waves of Irish migrants into London, as the capital has traditionally provided greater opportunities for work. Although statutes in 1243, 1413 and 1629 sought to proscribe irish beggars and vagrants from London (MacRaild 1999: 44), and the Census of 1450 recorded that the Irish were among the 4 per cent of aliens identiied just outside the city walls, the Irish began to form a permanent settlement in London during the Elizabethan period (MacRaild 1999). In 1792 , the newly opened St Patrick’s Church became a focus for the London-Irish. During the irst seven decades of the nineteenth century it is estimated that circa ive million people emigrated from Ireland (MacRaild 1999: 9). Whilst the 1841 Census put the Irish population in England, Wales and Scotland at 289,904 (Solomos 2003: 38), by 1851 there were more than 800,000 Irish-born people in Britain, with the second-generation swelling the igure to over two million (MacRaild 1999).8 The Famine, Navvies and Imperial Racism The steady drip of Irish migrants into London escalated in the wake of the Irish famine. The mortal failure of Ireland’s staple food, the potato, during the mid1840s reduced Ireland’s population from being circa eight million at the beginning of the nineteenth century to somewhere around four million by the end of the century. The ensuing inlux of starving Irish into Britain meant by 1861 there were over a million Irish-born people in Britain.9

8 The rapid social change wrought by the industrial revolution led to a demand in Britain for new sources of labour (Miles 1982: 50) and it was Ireland that nascent industrialists looked to for workers. 9 Revealingly, the majority of Irish in Britain were women, and since 1871 when records irst started, more Irish women have migrated from Ireland (see Hickman 1998, Walter 2001). It is estimated that during the 1990s Irish women were the largest ethnic minority element in London’s workforce (Hickman 1998).

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It was during the mid-nineteenth century that anti-Irish sentiment emerged in force. A number of important and related contexts helped to perpetuate and sustain this prejudice. To begin with, it was at this juncture that British imperial culture had reached its height of inluence, with a substantial part of its hegemonic strength lying in its self-appointed cultural and physiological superiority over those it colonized or even the different groups within the British Isles (Stocking 1968, Kuklick 1984, Cohen 1988). Science, in the form of ordering, taxonomy and the prescribing of racial characteristics, could be misused in order to create a hierarchy of humanity. In some racial hierarchies, the English Anglo-Saxon was placed at the top of the evolutionary scale, with the Celtic Irish somewhere near the bottom. The Anglo-Saxon was ‘said to be industrious, thoughtful, clean, lawabiding’ (Curtis 1984: 55); the Celt, according to the eminent Scottish anatomist and occasional anthropologist Robert Knox (1950: 27), was characterized by ‘[f]urious fanaticism; a love of war and disorder; a hatred for order and patient industry; no accumulative habits; restless, treacherous, uncertain: look at Ireland’. At its most extreme, anti-Irish prejudice saw the Irish, in comparison to the AngloSaxon English, ‘collectively igured as racial deviants, atavistic throwbacks to a primitive moment in human history’ (McClintock 1995: 43). Anti-Irish sentiment was also profoundly inlected by British political control in Ireland (see Curtis 1984, GLC 1984a). In this scenario, Irish nationalist resistance to British rule was portrayed in derogatory terms which combined images of the violent and irrational Irish, attributes which precluded them from self-rule. Again, Robert Knox typiied this genre: ‘As a Saxon, I abhor all dynasties, monarchies, and bayonet governments, but the latter seems to be the only one suitable for the Celtic man’ (1950: 27). Another factor underlying anti-Irish sentiment was that approximately 75 per cent of Irish migrants were Roman Catholic. Their arrival in England, a deeply Protestant and anti-Catholic country, marked them out as both distinctly different and unwanted (Hickman 1998). Post-War Migration Irish settlement in London continued into the early part of the twentieth century (Ryan 2003, 2007). The colossal programme of rebuilding post-war Britain, which brought NCMs to London, also precipitated a new generation of Irish workers into the capital. At this point, the Catholic Church provided the irst port of call for the mainly Catholic migrants. Catholic organizations such as the Irish Chaplaincy Scheme, founded in 1957, sought to provide self-help for the incoming Irish. The objective of the chaplaincy scheme was to help single Irish men and women ‘integrate into their new environment and their new community’.10 The fact that the Irish Chaplaincy Scheme told Irish migrants to integrate revealed the ambivalent position of the Irish in England. Under the auspices of the 10 The Irish Chaplaincy in Britain Presents: St. Patrick’s Festival. Wembley Conference Centre. 3 March 1980. Festival Programme.

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British Nationality Act (1948), Irish people born in the Irish Republic but resident in Britain were automatically granted the same treatment as British citizens under British law (Hickman 1998, Gray, 2000).11 despite their inclusion as de facto British citizens, as well as their oficial portrait as being of the same ‘race’ as the inhabitants of Britain, Hickman (1998: 288) argues that the immediate postwar generation of Irish migrants experienced ‘racialization … problematization and discrimination’ in a similar fashion to NCMs, as noted earlier in the chapter. In order to gather evidence of Irish ‘disadvantage’, researchers began to try and detail anecdotal tales of Irish migrants being denied access to boarding houses or precluded from equal treatment in regard to employment. The most systematic attempt to document the proile of the Irish is contained in a report by Hickman and Walter (1997). The report concluded: ‘There is an extremely strong resistance to recognition of the distinctiveness of Irish experience in Britain which results in the lack of acknowledgement of Irish needs and rights, but that at the same time there is widespread, and almost completely unquestioned, acceptance of anti-Irish racism in British society’ (1997: 62) . The single most important post-war issue that detrimentally impacted upon the Irish in England was the instigation of civil conlict in Northern Ireland in 1969. The London-Irish were directly situated in the matrix of this confrontation because a number of IRA bombs were detonated in London and across English cities, some of which caused a number of deaths. Consequently, the Irish were rendered a ‘suspect community’ (Hillyard 1993), prone to excessive panoptic surveillance and distrust by the authorities and media. The most visible manifestation of regulation was the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). By introducing the PTA in 1974, the UK government sought to increase its powers to combat IRA bombing campaigns in England. One of the remits of the PTA was to give police powers to arrest persons without warrant and detain them for up to 48 hours, which could be extended to seven days by virtue of an order made by the Secretary of State. For the London-Irish, the PTA was a form of harassment which deterred members from political activity by making Irish nationalist persuasion indivisible with Irish republican militancy. A London-Irish report into the impact of the PTA stated: ‘apart from the hurt and the damage to individuals so unjustly detained, it has created an atmosphere of fear among the Irish community. It has fed the ires of suspicion and discrimination against Irish people’ (GLC 1984b: 4). Have You Heard the One About the Englishman, the Scotsman and the Irishman … A corollary of the backlash against the Irish in England was the lourishing of anti-Irish sentiment, iltered in particular by a complicit media only too willing to 11 Despite the fact that Ireland had left the British Commonwealth in 1948 and declared itself a republic, the british nationality act ensured that irish people resident in Britain were automatically subject to the same treatment under existing laws as all British citizens, including the right to vote.

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portray crude stereotypes and jokes of the ‘stupid and violent Irish’ (Curtis 1984). The Irish joke was a staple diet of some of the British media and some ‘comedians’, whose repertoire mainly consisted of making pejorative remarks about a number of ethnic minority groupings.12 In their analysis of ‘ethnic humour’, Chapman et al. (1977: 177) wrote that ‘the most pervasive humour theme in Britain today, almost certainly, is centred upon the supposed simple-mindedness of the Irish population … The success of most Irish jokes depends upon a salient stereotype concerning the low intellectual prowess of the Irish’. Liz Curtis stated that these jokes create ‘an instantaneous association between Irish nationality and stupidity. It has reinforced and made socially acceptable chauvinist attitudes to the Irish and their political objectives’ (1984: 94). In the 1980s, Irish groups, like the Irish in Britain Representation Group [IBRG] contested the racism of this humour. They argued that Irish jokes acted as a justiicatory trope for British ‘plunder and oppression in Ireland … the relegation of the Irish to the limbo of the sub-intelligent and subhuman is a device which justiies anything and everything that is done to us’ (cited in Curtis 1984).

Experiences of Racism There is thus a long historical narrative, which has survived well into the late twentieth century, which speaks of the Irish in England and London as a group who have suffered from pervasive and perennial examples of prejudice. It was on this basis, that London-Irish groups began to mobilize to demand inclusion in the multicultural model of the 1980s. When I conducted research on this group I often sought to tease out from members whether they had encountered any experience of prejudice and disadvantage. A complex picture quickly emerged when I began to collect their responses. Their attitudes towards anti-Irishness ranged from conirming its existence through relaying to me direct and indirect experience, to denying/rejecting that it occurred, or a more contextual/ambivalent attitude to its possible presence. Direct/Indirect Experience Some of the people I quizzed informed me they had in some form been victims of anti-Irish sentiment, whether it was wrongful arrest under the jurisdiction of the PTA, or subjected to verbal abuse or even physical attack. In one case, an Irish male recounted being spat on and called an ‘Irish bastard’ when he participated in a march in support of Irish nationalism in the 1990s. Another Irish person remembered – in the aftermath of an IRA bomb in London – when they went 12 For the Irish, this type of humour could be traced back to the Victorian era when magazine cartoons lampooned the Irish as ‘drooling, half-crazed Fenian monkeys or wild Frankenstein’s monsters’ (MacRaild 1999: 156).

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to a shop how the shopkeeper slyly commented to a customer to ‘watch out for IRA bombs being placed under the counter’. Similarly, when I spoke to Mary Tilki, the chair of FIS, about her own experience of moving to London in the late 1960s to work as a nurse, she commented on how she and other Irish felt distinctly uncomfortable at publicly expressing their Irish identity: I came here in the late 1960s and I certainly didn’t feel part and didn’t want to be part of an Irish community then. It was a very dificult time to be Irish then in England, and I lived in London. To speak with an Irish accent or to take out an Irish newspaper on the train caused you grief. As a young Irish nurse working on the ward, I got an awful lot of lak from the patients. I kind of, like many others, kept my head low. I expressed my Irishness with my family or with friends, but very privately and not in any public domain; we just did not attract any attention to ourselves (Interview with Mary Tilki, 11 November 2008).

In regard to the question whether the Irish can be seen as an ‘ethnic minority’ grouping suffering modes of disadvantage, this response was proffered by a london-irish activist: I think that ethnicity is pretty much about how you see yourself and how other people see you and there is a tendency with ethnicity to presume all Irish people are the same or that all Asian people are the same. I think the ethnicity is around how you see yourself and how you’re seen. I think the minority bit is about minority status, and if you are not having equal opportunities, and if you are being discriminated against very overtly or in more subtly institutional ways, I think that’s what makes an ethnic minority group. So I would say the Irish are an ethnic minority group because of their culture and because of the discrimination that signiicant numbers of the community experience (Interview with Brian, 2 February 2002).

Some members of the second-generation Irish also revealed their anger at encountering what they perceived to be anti-Irish feeling; one young woman, of an Italian and Irish heritage, told me sometimes that work colleagues told Irish jokes oblivious of her Irish heritage and the hurt such jokes caused. Denying/Rejecting Racism When I was present in the Irish Cultural Centre conducting research I occasionally tried to ind out if students and tutors had experienced anti-Irish hostility. Often the reaction was almost to blanch, as if I was suggesting they had deserved racist abuse. Regarding experiencing prejudice, some students said it ‘never’ occurred because they never sought to ‘ghettoize’ themselves as they thought many other Irish migrants had done in London. Many afluent, middle-class Irish business people I spoke to were particularly vehement in their opposition to the claim. A

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discourse typically espoused was that the Irish were not a ‘race’ – certainly not distinguished from the ‘white English’. For these people, the idea that the Irish were an ‘ethnic minority’ to be granted substantial public resources was the result of mischief making from sections of the London-Irish. These ‘trouble makers’ had effectively brought on the spite of the host population because they had sought to differentiate the Irish. When I posed the issue of discrimination against the Irish, Rory, one of the tutors and an Irishman originally from Belfast laughed and told me, ‘I’ve had nothing but positive experiences living and working in London … English people are always complimenting me on my accent. In my line of work as a singer, being Irish has always helped me progress.’ Contextual/Ambivalent Racism Some respondents I spoke to emphasized the contingent and contextual bases for anti-Irishness. In other words, prejudice against the Irish could occur, but this was more the result of a misinformed individual, rather than a product of a wholesale culture of rancour embedded in the English psyche. In this way, these people stressed, the Irish were not a ‘distinctive race’, but at certain moments, such as when IRA bombs were detonated in London, they could be framed by the media as a disliked ethnic group. Talking about Irish jokes with two students from the ‘history and culture’ class at the Irish Centre, one student relected, ‘I suppose it’s OK to do an Irish joke if it’s told by an Irish person; it sort of diffuses the racism.’ Deliberately being provocative, I suggested that an Irish joke is racist no matter who tells it. For the two students it had seemed utterly incredulous to consider with any depth that Irish jokes were racist or that the Irish suffered any tangible degree of racism or discrimination. The very multiplicity of discourses sheds light on the contradictory narratives possessed by many actors regarding whether the Irish are an ethnic minority grouping that has been victimized through racism. Such uncertainty, ambivalence and contingency concerning the Irish experience provides concerted practical problems for members of these groups who seek to frame the group as an ethnic minority warranting forms of multicultural recognition. This begs the question about how interested actors might create the appearance of consensus within the group and how they might build links with other groups and state agencies to assist with their claim to multicultural inclusion.

Becoming an Ethnic Minority: The London-Irish Social Movement Apart from recent attempts to raise an Irish voice in the multi-culture … debate there is no history of an Irish dimension in this current issue. The whole subject has been almost exclusively in terms of colour – i.e., racism as it affects Asian and Caribbean culture. We wish to broaden this debate to include racism and

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prejudice as it affects the Irish who are after all the largest ethnic minority in Britain (GLC 1984b: 12).

Looking back at the introduction of the PTA in 1974, a state-funded London-Irish report of 1984 stated that at that point ‘there was no Irish community capable of mounting a campaign against anti-Irish racism let alone mobilising the community against the government’ (GLC 1984c: 7). The reason for this, the report continues, was because the London-Irish ‘kept their cultural and political activities well within the conines of their own community or alternatively denied their nationality as completely as they could and integrated’ (GLC 1984c: 8). Seeking to provide an answer to why the London-Irish had mobilized in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, a 1984 report stated: One of the reasons is of course the growth of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic awareness by minority groups in Britain and the realisation by Irish people that there was a place for them in this new, theoretically pluralist, society-inthe-making. But this awareness of identity, and the realisation that it was not necessary to reject Irish culture in order to be equal, brought with it a growing sensitivity to the indiscriminate arrests of community activists and ordinary lawabiding, A to Z, Irish citizens (GLC 1984c: 8).

An incisive way to further understand ‘how’ and ‘why’ multiculturalism affords opportunities for groups like the London-Irish to mobilize as a ‘community’ is through social movement theory.

The How and Why of Social Movement Emergence Examining ‘how’ and ‘why’ movements develop at speciic historical junctures, the extent to which they are able to further sustain themselves, even in periods of prolonged ‘latency’ (Melucci 1995), and how they affect the world around them, has long been a focus of theorists (see Meyer 2004). The question, thus, is how the London-Irish begin to organize as a social movement to demand inclusion as a ‘community’ in the emerging ‘race relations’ model. Theorists have often conceptualized social movement evolution in three heuristic ways: ‘political opportunities’, ‘mobilizing structures’ and ‘cultural framing processes’ (see McAdam et al. 1996: 2). Simply deined, ‘political opportunities’ refers to how ‘changes in the institutional structure or informal power relations of a given national political system’ helps or hinders activists’ prospects for advancing particular claims and mobilizing supporters (Meyer 2004). The tactical and organizational forms of the social movement are therefore developed by activists optimizing strategic opportunities in pursuit of particular claims at a particular time (Tilly 1978). ‘Mobilizing structures’, alternatively, refers to the meso-level groups that exist prior to social movement emergence and who provide the tangible

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and intangible resources required for mobilization. ‘Cultural framing processes’, inally, explains mobilization in terms of how activists work together to formulate ‘shared meanings and deinitions that people bring to their situation’ (McAdam et al. 1996: 5). In this scenario, objective structural changes or grievances are not in themselves required to engender mobilization; it is more important that activists collaborate to deine opportunities in a process that McAdam (1982) termed ‘cognitive liberation’.13 Although ‘political opportunities’, ‘mobilizing structures’ and ‘cultural framing processes’ have often been used separately by theorists to account for social movements, there is now more of a willingness to synthesize the three processes. Political Opportunity Structures To begin with, it is worth illuminating what political opportunity structures were present for the London-Irish to mobilize in the 1980s. Outlining some of the variables that contribute towards a political opportunity structure, Doug McAdam (1996: 27) lists: • • •

the openness or closure of the institutionalized political system; the presence or absence of elite allies; the state’s capacity or propensity for repression.

In terms of a changing or open institutional structure, a major political opportunity structure available for the London-Irish to mobilize was the selection in 1981 of Ken Livingstone as a left-wing leader of London’s then citywide government, the GLC. Under the leadership of Livingstone, the GLC sought to develop an institutionally multicultural proile as part of his commitment to nurturing municipal socialism in the city. In an era of ever-dwindling public expenditure and increasing tax cuts, from 1980 to 1984 the annual funding of voluntary organizations by the GLC rose from £6 million to £50 million. In July 1981 the GLC introduced the Ethnic Minorities Committee and provided it with a budget of £2.9 million. The GLC also declared that 1984 was to be the ‘year against racism’. Elaborating their commitment to multiculturalism, Paul Boateng, the vice-chair of the Ethnic Minorities Committee wrote in 1983: London is a multi-cultural and multi-racial and society, but it is a sad fact that some races and cultures are discriminated against. Our committee’s aim is to support particular minority groups who want to eliminate racial disadvantage in London. We see their efforts as an important contribution towards promoting the welfare of ethnic minorities in London (GLC 1983).

13 Cognitive liberation refers to the process in which a group of people are persuaded to change their minds by viewing a particular authority igure as unjust.

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Importantly, the GLC were willing to support groups who had hitherto been invisible within the multicultural paradigm. These groups included women’s, disabled, gay and lesbian and anti-war mobilizations. Livingstone’s desire to forge a ‘rainbow coalition’ of minority groups in the capital also provided ‘a signiicant impetus for the increased activism of the Irish in London by recognizing the Irish as an “ethnic minority”, thereby legitimating the funding of speciically Irish welfare and cultural projects’ (Gray 2000: 71). The London-Irish could thus count on ‘the presence of elite allies’. Although Ken livingstone declared no individual irish heritage, he personally had a vested interest in supporting London-Irish initiatives. Livingstone was also an MP and his constituency, Brent, contained 28,000 Irish families, which meant that courting their votes was extremely important. In 1983 the GLC appointed an Irish liaison oficer to work with local government councils. In 1984, the strategic policy unit produced three policy reports on the Irish community. By 1985 there were in the region of 30 Irish funded projects in London and by 1988 over £3 million had been provided by the GLC to fund Irish ‘community projects’ (Curtis 1987: 20). Livingstone often took a direct interest in London-Irish affairs. In 1984 livingstone said: The racism and conditions that the Irish community face today are deeply rooted in British history … As a community representing one in six of London’s population, the needs of the Irish community cannot be ignored any further by the GLC or other institutions committed to racial harmony (Paddington Times 10 August 1984).

livingstone’s support for the london-irish could lead his opponents to accuse him of ‘clientelism’. For instance, in February 1983 it was announced that the GLC’s Ethnic Minorities Committee was to provide £300,000 towards a new Irish Cultural Centre in Brent. A member of the opposing Conservative Party stated in response, ‘this is a crude political bribe, lacking subtlety or inesse’ (Willesden and Brent Chronicle, 11 February 1983). The third variable in McAdam’s elaboration of ‘political opportunity structures’ argues for the importance of the ‘state’s capacity or propensity for repression’. Although as we can see, at the level of the local state, the GLC was extremely open to the claim-making of the London-Irish, at the scale of the state, many London-Irish groups believed that their capacity to mobilize was repressed by the introduction of the PTA in the 1970s. The PTA made Irish political mobilizations in London indivisible with support for militant Irish republicanism. The fact that at different scales there was openness and repression for the London-Irish to mobilize conforms to the idea that political opportunity structures have a curvilinear character (Tilly 1978). That is, social movements are less likely to emerge in closed/repressed systems or systems with ample institutional access. The curvilinear approach posits that mobilization is more likely to occur in ‘opening’ systems where there is a space for toleration by a polity and when claimants are neither suficiently

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advantaged to obviate the need to use dramatic means to express their interests nor so completely repressed as to prevent them from trying to get what they want (Meyer 2004). I asked a former London-Irish activist of the 1970s and 1980s about the impact of the Ken Livingstone led GLC on the mobilization of the London-Irish. He said: The GLC, particularly Ken Livingstone, was tremendously important to the Irish in London. I mean, before then nobody really cared about us. I would go to meetings about racism and race relations in London and that. I’d try to speak up about the Irish, but we were practically laughed down or ignored. They thought because we were white we were perpetrators of racism and not the victims. When Ken came along things began to change. They [GLC] basically gave us a green light to get involved. He [Livingstone] basically made the minority status really inclusive – women, gays. Maybe it was too broad. He understood that we were as much victims of discrimination as black people. You know, it wasn’t just the authorities we had to win over; it was the other ethnic groups – blacks, [South] Asians. I remember in the late 1970s, I think it was Southall [west London] that Caribbean and Asian groups were calling themselves ‘black’, because that was the colour of the discriminated groups. They thought that racism only affected them. It wasn’t just that we needed to get resources to challenge the PTA or show how badly the Irish were affected by prejudice; it was that other minority groups wouldn’t accept us. When the GLC supported us, we could go to local councils and ask that they make sure they were monitoring the Irish in recruitment and in health. There were other important things. We could draw on the idea that the Irish have been an ethnic minority for a long time. We could say in some ways we’re ‘black’. You know, the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the 1960s said that Irish nationalists were like ‘Ulster’s white negroes’. We reminded people that we had been colonized and oppressed just like the black groups (Interview with Seamus, 22 May 2006).

The mobilization of London-Irish groups for state-sponsored multicultural funds is clearly dependent upon the backing of oficial institutions. These political opportunity structures not only provide the group with access to speciic resources, but they give an oficial legitimization for their claim-making and appeal to ethnic minority status. If other ethnic minority groups had hitherto denied the validity of the Irish claim to ethnic minority status, the oficial demarcation of the Irish as an ethnic minority helps to challenge their invisibility from the multicultural paradigm. To further help the Irish propagate that assertion that they are an ethnic minority, they draw upon other Irish campaigns, such as the Northern Irish Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.14 However, the attempt by the London14 Some members of this movement famously claimed that Irish Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland were discriminated against in an analogous way to African-Americans in the segregated states of the southern USA.

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Irish to break the so-called ‘black/white binary’, upon which multiculturalism and the ‘race relations industry’ in the 1970s and 1980s was based, was founded on a somewhat paradoxical rhetoric. The claim that the Irish are racialized analogous to black people is made by rendering Irishness a form of blackness. In this sense, rather than breaking down the ‘black/white binary’, to gain inclusion with statesponsored multiculturalism the London-Irish conirmed its salience. Mobilizing Structures While the availability of political opportunities is important for groups to mobilize in order to achieve collective aims, social movement theorists also point to the importance of mobilizing structures to help a movement get off the ground. The theory here is that movements ‘grow out of pre-established networks, communities and organizations, and that movement formation will be more common among tightly networked groups than in situations of high social atomization’ (Crossley 2002: 93). In other words, a range of groups, institutions and organizations exist prior to mobilization, which provide resources and the bonds of solidarity out of which a movement can grow. For instance, it has been well documented that the black churches provided a critical mobilizing structure for the formation and development of the African-American civil rights movement (McAdam 1982). In a similar fashion, theorist Tilly (1978) has written of a ‘catnet’ factor. Where a group of people are in close associations and networks, he argues, the historical record suggests that they are far more likely to mobilize around an issue of shared grievance than groups who are not networked this way. For the London-Irish, a range of organizations provided a strong network to mobilize and demand inclusion within state-sponsored multiculturalism. These organizations included the Irish Chaplaincy Scheme, which ran programmes to help migrants; cultural organizations, such as Irish music and dance associations; and Irish political organizations, like the Irish in Britain Representation Group (IBRG). FIS was another important organization. Established in 1973, FIS continues to act as an umbrella organization ‘which draws together Irish clubs and societies in Britain. It promotes the interests of Irish people through community care, education, culture and arts, youth and sports activities and information provision … It campaigns for consistent ethnic monitoring, with an Irish category, by local authorities and service providers’ (see: ). Its chair in 2008, Mary Tilki, explained to me the origins of FIS: The Federation has being going 34–35 years now and it was started initially as a way of bringing disparate groups all over England to meet and discuss issues that were relevant to the Irish community at the time. There were a number of groups around at the time and I think probably what had happened was that Irish people felt the need to set up local groups. Some of them originated as church groups and clubs and people felt the need to meet other Irish people, to socialize with them and to express their culture, but there was also a need then

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politically to address issues of discrimination. Although maybe then that wasn’t the language that was used at the time, the Federation originated in that notion that there was a need for a voice for the Irish community (Interview with Mary Tilki, 11 November 2008).

Cultural Framing Movement formation is not just a matter of agents coming together; it is a matter of agents who are already together transforming their network into something different (Crossley 2002). For this to occur there needs to be something done so that a group is made to see that they have common goals and aims that are best achieved collectively. To illuminate the process by which these groups come to fashion a collective identity social movement theorists have utilized the idea of ‘framing’. The verb ‘framing’ has often been used by theorists to explore the schemata of interpretation used by activists ‘to locate, perceive, identify and label occurrences within their life space and the world at large’ (Goffman 1974: 21). By using framing strategies, ‘movement actors are viewed as signifying agents actively engaged in the production and maintenance of meaning for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders’ (Benford and Snow 2000: 613). Framing thus denotes an active, processual phenomenon that implies agency and contention at the level of reality construction. It means that ‘movement activists interpret political space in ways that emphasize opportunity rather than constraint; they may stimulate actions that change opportunity, making their opportunity frame a self-fulilling prophecy’ (Benford and Snow 2000: 613). Forms of so-called ethnic mobilization have been noted as having more chance for success than class-based movements because the former ‘has the advantage that it can often call on the powerful resources of strong ethnic bonding, whereas a class has the more dificult task of uniting its members through far less emotional appeal’ (Rex 1991: 121). In particular, some theorists have noted the widespread presence of what is called an ‘injustice masterframe’, ‘an interpretation of what is happening supports the conclusion that an authority system is violating the shared moral principles of the participants’ (Gamson et al. 1982: 123). The ‘injustice masterframe’, in particular, facilitates expressing indignation over a perceived outrage; importantly, it also works by inding some agency to blame for the transgression. In other words, the purpose of an ‘injustice masterframe’ is that activists are able to identify both a problem that aflicts the group and an agency responsible for their misfortune. Framing ensures that a group begins to collectively attribute problems to a designated opponent who can be contested and defeated. To understand in a broader context how groups ‘frame’ issues for the purpose of mobilization, it is useful to deploy two related elements to framing: ‘diagnosis’ and ‘prognosis’.

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Diagnosis Framing One of the irst steps required for mobilization is ‘diagnosis’ framing. The diagnosis stage refers to activists working together to identify a set of circumstances as being particularly unfavourable to them as well as labelling the culprits responsible for their misfortune. The point of ‘diagnostic framing’ is to demonstrate that social problems exist only to the extent that certain phenomena are interpreted as such by people. This ‘diagnostic framing’ can be seen in a policy report on the LondonIrish in 1984, which outlined the marginalized position of the London-Irish: The overall picture of London’s Irish community in this report indicates a community poorly housed, and suffering from a disproportionately high incidence of mental illness in relation to its size. It is a community baited by the media, suffering constant attacks on its cultural and social identity and deterred from political mobilisation by the threat of imprisonment and exile under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The root of these problems lie in racism against the Irish, a factor yet to be acknowledged as a major problem in British society (GLC 1984a: 11). The ‘diagnostic frame’ complements Melucci’s (1996) observation that social movements are often concerned with information, which has a dual meaning: the social movement tries to gain information on ‘things’, and it also challenges erroneous information by contesting hitherto ‘social facts’. This emphasis on trying to gain information could be seen in how the London-Irish sought to collate statistical evidence to demonstrate instances of discrimination and disadvantage.15 Prognosis Framing The second framing stage – the ‘prognosis frame’ – involves the planning of tactics to remedy the problem. For the London-Irish, a considerable amount of energy was expended on devising initiatives to counteract what they perceived to be anti-Irish prejudice and negative stereotyping, like erroneous information about the Irish in the media. In a London-Irish report to the GLC it was requested that ‘Irish culture’ should be taught in London schools. The report argued that since it was ‘historically necessary to denigrate the Irish’ as ‘stupid and intractable in order to justify the British occupation of Ireland’, against this backdrop ‘we 15 A report into the impact of the PTA on the London-Irish in 1984 showed that of the 1,072 individuals arrested in London, only 30 were ever charged of any offence (GLC 1984b: 4). The London-Irish also collected information on homeless Irish in the capital, noting: ‘in London out of every seven people sleeping rough two are Irish’ (GLC 1984a: 6). Research was also conducted into the position of the Irish in regard to public employment. One report claimed that ‘only 4 per cent of the London-Irish are employed by councils even though an estimated one sixth of the capital’s population is Irish … the Irish do worse than Asian employees and almost as bad as black employees in local government employment’ (GLC 1984a: 7).

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must examine the cultural/educational needs of the Irish in Britain’ (GLC 1984b: 11). The London-Irish also instigated state-sponsored multicultural initiatives, such as festivals and educational classes instructing Irish history and culture. This was done to increase their visibility in the capital city as well as to combat the symbolic violence of stereotyping. Alongside cultural events, the London-Irish suggested practical measures to help ameliorate perceived inequalities. Such measures included requesting the termination of the PTA; that the London-Irish be included in local government employment ‘ethnic monitoring’ procedures; and that resources to tackle Irish homelessness in the city and mental health issues should be increased. An important part of ‘prognosis framing’ was challenging the validity of the ‘Irish’ joke.16

Cultural Outreach: A Taste of Ireland As part of the campaign to manoeuvre the London-Irish into the remit of statesponsored multiculturalism, there was an attempt to promote forms of crosscultural dialogue between the Irish and other groups in the capital. One of the earliest attempts to create ‘a positive Irish identity’ by using Irish culture to create linkages with other groups was the ‘Sense of Ireland’ festival, inaugurated in 1980. Hosted at the prestigious Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the festival boasted over 90 events in Irish music, theatre, literature, the visual arts, ilm, crafts, dance, photography, architecture and archaeology. Writing of the festival’s aims, the then Irish ambassador to Britain, Eamon Kennedy (1980), stated that it was ‘to increase understanding and friendship between these two islands [Britain and Ireland]’. The glossy, expensive brochure produced to accompany the festival featured an introduction by the festival director, which noted: ‘the name of this festival represents our aspiration, that by providing a sense of what is happening today in the arts in Ireland, we may help to make some sense to our english neighbours of what we are as a people’ (Stephenson 1980) [emphasis original].17 16 One particular newspaper cartoon in the 1980s evoked the ire of London-Irish groups. In October 1982 the London Evening Standard published a cartoon by Jak, in which the Irish in the poster were depicted as fang-toothed ghoulish sadists wielding knives and bombs. A branch of the IBRG in London sent a letter of complaint to Ken Livingstone, who in his capacity as chairman of the GLC’s Ethnic Minorities Committee, agreed that the cartoon was ‘atrocious’ and recommended that the GLC stop placing adverts in the Evening Standard until a published policy appeared, on the basis that the cartoon was ‘likely to stir up racial hatred against the Irish community’. The Evening Standard refused to apologize and the ban cost the paper an estimated £2 million in lost advertising revenue (see Hosken 2008: 185). 17 While the ‘Sense of Ireland’ festival was an innovative attempt to build bridges between the Irish and the host population it was strongly critiqued by more clearly radical Irish nationalist organizations in London. One publication condemned ‘Sense of Ireland’ for supposedly presenting ‘a rose tinted picture of Irish culture’ (Curtis 1987: 13).

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If ‘Taste of Ireland’ was largely a top-down attempt to provide a new representation of Irishness, then as Liz Curtis (1987: 15–16) notes, a number of alternative events were developed elsewhere. These events were organized by groups who sought to constitute ‘a new progressive, locally oriented, community, rooted, ethnic minority community of London-Irish people’ (Curtis 1987: 16). Thus in the 1980s, Irish activist groups such as the ‘London-Irish Commission for Culture and Education’ (1987) were propounding the importance of Irish cultural classes and arts festivals as a means not only to instil cultural awareness in those of Irish descent, but also to create a political alliance with other ‘ethnic minority groups’ by ‘reach[ing] out to other communities in the capital’ to allow a dialogue on ‘matters of common historical experience’. ‘Recognizing the common plight of immigrants’, the Síol Phádraig london-irish arts festival of 1987 stated that the aim of the festival ‘is a genuine attempt to reach out and bring together other communities of diverse origins to share in our festival’ (London-Irish Commission for Culture and Education 1987). Similarly, it was also important to reach out to the host community in order to enhance the respectability of Irish cultural heritage and forge a new era of rapprochement between the Irish and the British. A GLC sponsored ‘Irish book fair’ in 1986 was hosted because it ‘allows indigenous Londoners and those from other cultures to become aware of the richness of Irish literature, the variety and quality of which challenges and discredits the negative stereotypes attributed to Irish people by the British media’ (GLC 1986). Advancing ‘cultural pluralism’, a London-Irish report of 1984 argued: ‘if treated with equality and respect this ferment of cultures can only have an enriching effect. Thus cultural pluralism will rehabilitate white and non-white guest communities and create a medium for interethnic community and respect’ (1984b: 12). Writing in the 1980s, Curtis (1987: 6) sums up the importance of what she saw as the ‘strength of culture’ for the london-irish: In recent years, Irish people in London, both irst and second-generation have been ‘ighting back’ against anti-Irish prejudice and the hostility emanating from the British establishment. They have been enthusiastically asserting their identity through a wide variety of cultural initiatives. This trend is contributing to a growing conidence in the Irish community generally. It is also helping to build links with Londoners from other cultural backgrounds, and is encouraging increasing numbers of non-Irish people to sweep away their accumulated misconceptions to join in the task of working to build a new future.

This attempt to use Irish ‘culture’ as a means to encourage a ‘positive Irish identity’ and to reach out to other ‘communities’ in the capital bears a striking similarity to Charles Taylor’s (1994) ‘recognition’ thesis explored in the Introduction. Taylor’s argument is that it is highly necessary for groups to gain from others ‘recognition’ and ‘equal respect’ for their identities. For Taylor, genuine ‘recognition’ can only come through substantive and prolonged cross-cultural dialogue. By understanding

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the myriad ways there are to be human and the role that culture plays in fashioning individuals and groups, we come to understand both the limits and horizons of our own identity. Nevertheless, this emphasis on the meeting of cultures as an antiracist strategy is limited. Cross-cultural dialogue and recognition is a troublesome process because it is premised upon the notion of fully formed cultures learning to respect the validity of each other. However, is there any beneit to the process? One important facet of intercultural dialogue is that it provides an initial space for groups to come together. Its logic also supposes that ‘community boundaries’ or the fear of the ‘other’, which separates groups, can be tentatively made more malleable or amenable to some form of critique. Cross-cultural dialogue may get us this far, but this isn’t very far at all. More to the point is to analyze the different levels and forms of ‘cross-cultural dialogue’, to help understand why groups seek to fashion links with other groups. There are different levels and strategies governing the way in which a group may cultivate ‘cross-community dialogue’ and alliances within state-sponsored multiculturalism. On one level, dialogue can be invoked by groups seeking to demonstrate shared histories of colonization, displacement, and racialization with other minority groups; this can form the basis for political coalition, just as the ‘anti-Thatcherite alliances of ‘“black Britain” ... mobilized Africans, AfroCaribbeans, and South Asians’ (Clifford, 1997: 260).18 The London-Irish were de facto excluded from this particular social movement because they are largely white. However, in their attempt to challenge this exclusion, which rested on a perceived ‘hierarchy of oppression’ (Hickman 1998: 289), the London-Irish forged alliances with black and South Asian groups. The London-Irish argued that discrimination is not purely an issue of ‘white’ versus ‘black’ power relations, but largely the reproduction of the colonial experience. This mode of cosmopolitanism is often witnessed in theatre productions, music and dance collaborations where groups come together to explore similar migrant experiences and possibilities for outlining political action. In 1987, for instance, the Irish-Nigerian playwright Gabriel Gbadamosi’s play No Blacks, No Irish, premiered under the aegis of the state-sponsored multicultural Síol Phádraig (Festive Gathering) London-Irish arts festival, told of a Nigerian man and his Irish wife facing racial hostility when looking for lodgings in an English seaside town in the 1950s. On another level, as we have seen, London-Irish groups strived to build linkages with the ‘white’ host ‘community’ to aid with the project of facilitating better mutual understanding between the groups. A London-Irish activist wrote in 1987:

18 In the context of Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s ‘black power’ provided a context for Afro-Caribbean and South Asian groups to create alliances to mobilize on the supposed ‘common colour’, it was also subsequently critiqued for homogenizing the diverse experience of various settler groups while subsequently privileging Afro-Caribbean groups in the coalition (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992 ).

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The London-Irish community today is very irmly rooted here and feels itself to be one ethnic minority among many. Today’s Irish community is more conident and assertive of its rights than ever before. It has developed links with local government and other agencies to improve the Irish community’s situation and to work to build a coalition with black ethnic minority and working class people in London to deine common interests and achieve common goals (O’Keeffe 1987: 21).

As we can see, during the 1980s the London-Irish social movement aimed to forge coalitions and alliances with ethnic minority groupings as well as members of the host population. The London-Irish social movement mobilized by arguing that they were a disadvantaged group in a similar way to non-white NCMs. Yet, the argument that the Irish, like NCMs, were an ‘ethnic minority’ belies the complexity and speciicity of the Irish migrant experience in England. Nor does it necessarily explain how the movement sustains itself as political and social circumstances change. In fact, what happens when the socio-economic proile of a particular minority group generally improves or selected aspects of their identities become popular with the host group? Does the minority group necessarily lose its claim to an ‘ethnic minority’ status and thus its right to multicultural resources? Or can the social movement reframe the nature of the mobilization to encourage inclusivity, so as to bring in non-members interested in learning about the ‘cultures’ of the group? In order to begin exploring these questions, it is necessary to show how the proile of the London-Irish has undergone change since the 1980s.

Same Differences: Celticism and Plural Communities As we have seen, the London-Irish social movement mobilized in the 1980s on the premise that they were disadvantaged group. There are also a number of writers who have emphasized what they have identiied as the long history of prejudice suffered by the Irish. Although it is said that the Irish in Britain are represented as a ‘binary other’ to Britishness (Hickman 2000), this does not do justice to the fact that the Irish in certain circumstances have been viewed by the ‘host community’ as of the same ‘race’ or at least mimetically related. Certainly, the fact that most Irish are white skinned, predominantly share the same language, are Christian and are settled in London for a number of centuries provides a basis for familiarity with the host population. One way to look at the complex and contradictory way that Irishness has been portrayed, especially in England, is through the prism of the Celt. Originating as a form of representation in the eighteenth century by the Romantics, Celtic identity oscillated between the atavistic epithets of the celebratory: ‘natural’, ‘creative’, ‘spiritual’ – to the abusive: ‘superstitious’ and ‘violent’ (Watson 1994). Pittock (1999: 2) argues that the speciically English discourse of ‘Celticism’ was developed for the exigencies of portraying the ‘Celtic’ peoples like the Irish as

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tamely ethnocultural rather than threateningly territorial in the form of coveting independence from English rule. The supposed irrational, ‘other worldly’ character of the Celt, their propensity for emotional instability and violence, appeared to render them unit for self rule and hence made them the needy beneiciaries of guardianship from ‘mother England’. Certainly, the negative aspects of Celticism have often been applied to the Irish when they have sought national independence. Irish republican violence, for instance, is viewed as part of the Celt’s mindless capacity for violence; the myth of the drunken Irish fulils the stereotype of the Celt lacking self control, the attribute required for political rule. The more celebratory aspects of the Celt have coexisted with the abusive. The Romantics’ critique of modern society was that of alienation resulting from the Enlightenment’s totalizing vision of order and control (Hetherington 1998: 77). The Romantics turned their gaze to the Celt, a igure they believed represented authentic lived experience, a sense of belonging within an organic community, and conditions of harmony with others and with nature. In an era undergoing rapid industrialization and social transformation, the Celt was a primordial presence whose apparent eternal rusticity ‘proved a cultural counterweight to the modernization and rationalization of society encompassed by the Enlightenment’ (Pittock 1999: 36). Ever since, the image of the Celt has provided a focus for the existential goal for self, and a preference for Celtic marginality over stolid metropolitan respectability is an attractive badge for the artistic poser (Pittock 1999: 73). Celticism, as a form of primitivism, also persists as raw product for the culture industries; it is a catch-all marketing category synonymous with ‘New Ageism’. The ability of Celticism to morph into a raft of alternative lifestyles sells this mythical ethnicity. Celticism its neatly into the contemporary ‘cultic milieu’ (Edensor 2002: 4), where perceived ‘vernacular’ cultural elements lourish; it offers a critique of instrumental rationalism in favour of spiritual and expressive forms of understanding derived more from feelings than rational calculation (Hetherington 1998: 74). Having ‘a touch of the Celt’ in one’s ancestry has, since the eighteenth century, been a frequently desirable ‘designer accessory of Britishness’ (Pittock 1999). Although not explicitly mentioning Celts, in terms that recapitulate the discourse of Celticism, journalist Jack O’Sullivan (1998) explains why Irishness is a much sought after identity in England. He states that ‘Hibernia is hip’19 in england, because ‘in an age seeking spiritual values, Irishness has something for which Britishness, located in the dry legacy of philosophical empiricism, thirsts’. In this synopsis, Britishness is portrayed stereotypically as almost emotionless, reserved and even sexually repressed. Mac an Ghaill and Haywood (2003: 388), argue that Irish men, in particular, have been ontologically positioned as the ‘signiicant other’ for centuries, the longest standing representation of what British masculinity is not and cannot be’. Nowadays, they continue, the increased media and spatial 19 ‘Hibernia’ is the word that the Romans used to deine Ireland and is still used an alternative way of describing Ireland.

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visibility of young Irish men means they have joined ‘black men and gay men at the postcolonial periphery as objects of desire of English heterosexuality as part of a wider crisis in the Anglo-ethnic majority’s sense of post-imperial loss and disenchantment’ (Mac an Ghaill and Haywood 2003: 388). For one secondgeneration Irish writer, Brendan O’Neill, the visibility of aspects of Irish popular culture in contemporary British cultural life bears testimony to how much ‘they [the British] love us. They love us so much it almost makes you sick’ (2002). It is not only Englishness that desires the Celt; a selective vision of Irishness has become a globally visible and hugely marketable signiier. Explaining why the Irish are so popular around the world, Pete McCarthy (2000: 14) writes ‘To be Irish today, is to be welcomed almost anywhere … The Irish are perceived as young, eloquent, romantic, tuneful, mystical, funny, and expert havers-of-agood time’. The Irish dance show, ‘Riverdance’, for example, has garnered box ofice success in London, New York, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto. St Patrick’s Day parades and celebrations, as discussed in Chapter 4, have also emerged in places like EuroDisney, Singapore, Gabon in Africa, Omote–Sando Avenue in Tokyo and Moscow’s central thoroughfare of Novy Arbat. In speciic regard to the London-Irish, a number of often related factors have assisted with the emergence of an appealing sense of Irishness from the late 1990s onwards. An important dynamic has been the emergence of the Northern Irish peace process which witnessed the signing of a peace agreement in 1998. The Good Friday Agreement facilitated a tentative power-sharing government between Irish nationalists and British unionists, acts of paramilitary decommissioning and a vast reduction of violence. This has particularly impacted upon the London-Irish because there is no longer the threat of Irish republican bombs being detonated in the capital. The London-Irish are no longer a ‘suspect community’; this particular tag has now been placed on the Muslim population (see Commission for Racial Equality and the University of Birmingham 2006). A further important development is the growth of the Irish economy since the 1990s. In particular, the ‘Celtic Tiger’, a phase of economic growth which has transformed the image of the Irish Republic from one of the poorest nations in the EU to one of the wealthiest in the world, has become a model for a range of small countries in Europe. This growth has been fuelled by a range of factors – low corporate tax rates to stimulate inward foreign investment, EU subsidies and unfettered access to the export markets of the single union, and the Republic’s investment in higher education to provide a highly skilled and qualiied workforce (see O’Hearn 1998). A survey in 2005 ranked the Republic of Ireland as the ‘best place to live in the world’ in terms of ‘quality of life’ and wealth (see: ). The Republic’s putative harmonious combination of wealth and traditional values furnished the conditions to make its citizens happier than anywhere else on the globe. As such, the Celtic Tiger has largely helped promote a new brand of Ireland as successful, prosperous, entrepreneurial and vibrant.

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The emergence of the Celtic Tiger has engendered complex ramiications for representations of Irishness. One major change has been an increased acceptance, especially within Ireland, that Irishness is a globalized identity. At one time, Ireland denied (Hickman 2000) or ridiculed its émigré population – the Irish diaspora – because its presence represented the nation’s inability to feed and shelter its own people. The economic boom of the Celtic Tiger, however, has precipitated oficial recognition of the contribution of the diaspora.20 This process has allowed for greater validity of the idea that Irishness and Irish culture can exist outside of the conines of the island of Ireland. For Fintan O’Toole (1994), ‘Ireland has escaped from itself’. The greater appreciation of the Irish state for its migrant population, particularly in england, has led to it providing substantial funds and resources to Irish multicultural initiatives in England. In recognition of the fact that Irish émigrés helped give birth to the Celtic Tiger by sending remittances back to Ireland, the Irish government, through the mechanism of the Díon committee,21 now fund a great many Irish welfare organizations and multicultural initiatives across Britain. The growth of the Celtic Tiger has also reversed the long-standing historical trend of Irish migration to England, as for the irst time it has been recorded that the net amount of immigration favours people migrating from England to Ireland. What were once perennial waves of Irish migration into London have now been drastically reduced. As noted in Chapter 1 the type of Irish migrant moving to the capital has also changed. Since the 1990s a more upwardly mobile, professional migrant has come to London from Ireland. This cleavage within the London-Irish means that the concept of ‘community’ has limited coherence for some LondonIrish welfare activists. In the course of interviewing these activists, I typically asked them to describe the London-Irish community. A typical answer came from one leading member of an Irish welfare organization: I probably wouldn’t describe them as a community. I would say there are a number of communities, there are different groups; it is very stratiied and perhaps even more so in recent years. There would be an older generation, who probably could be one of those communities. Those that came here in the 1950s, 60s and 70s were mostly located in Camden, Cricklewood and Kilburn and places like that – that would be one community that is now quite an old and very vulnerable and much smaller group than it was. I think there has always been a group of people, even people who came at that time, who didn’t it in with that 20 in her inauguration speech as President of the republic of ireland robinson stated: ‘beyond our state there is a vast community of Irish emigrants … which has provided a home away from home for several Irish generations’ (Robinson 1995). 21 Díon is The Irish Government’s Emigrant Advisory Committee. The Committee, in particular, gives advice on the welfare needs of the Irish people in Britain. In 2007, grants amounting to €11 million (£8 million) were approved for Irish organizations in Britain (see: ).

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community, either by choice or by design, or didn’t want to identify with it and they kept very much to themselves. There was another group who came in the 1980s, who were highly educated or were skilled trades people and they would not have been very keen on the old spit and sawdust pubs and the traditional music and set dancing. They would have moved in different circles. They would have been proud of their Irishness but not of that old kind of traditional style (Interview with Anne, 11 February 2002).

The prevalent depiction of a fashionable and well-liked Irishness, however, elicits new prospects for London-Irish groups to mobilize within state-sponsored multiculturalism. Certainly, in London, many Irish welfare agencies struggling to gain multicultural based public resources are aware of how the nascent popularity of speciic representations of Irishness can be both enabling and constraining. It is enabling because it provides an opportunity to build relationships with different groups, and at its most fruitful the new image can ameliorate the old pejorative stereotypes. Some multicultural initiatives, especially the Irish Cultural Centre and St Patrick’s Day festivals, as will be explored in later chapters, purposely link to commercial and globally successful renderings of Irishness. The Irish Cultural Centre, for instance, runs an extremely successful traditional Irish ‘step-dancing’ educational class, which is labelled for marketing purposes as ‘Riverdance’ in order to draw in a wide number of people. Also, the FIS told me that they now get a lot of calls from Londoners without a discernible Irish heritage, asking them for Irish names, like Seán and Siobhán, because apparently they have become extremely popular names for children. It can also often be a constraining force. Such modes of Irish popularity, especially cultural industry led, can be supericial or counter-productive, often obscuring some of the problems still experienced by the London-Irish. For instance, research continues to show that the Irish in London continue to suffer from poor health, especially poor mental health (see Ryan et al. 2006), in comparison to other groups. A health worker explained to me the problems that can be created by the disjuncture between contemporary cultural positionings of Irishness and the poor mental proile of many Irish: I think that’s one of the issues we have to grapple with here, because I think this image of the Irish as fun, party people, very laid back and all the rest of it is at odds with many of our experiences. I have certainly found in the health sector a lot of people feeling that they have to be upbeat and dancing on the table when really they want to sit down and cry (Interview with Tracy, 14 March 2002).

The new image of the Irish as successful, professional, smart, fun-loving and creative is thus constraining because it makes it harder to project the idea that the London-Irish are an ethnic minority grouping who should be allocated public services. This appeal of Irishness has, however, provided some new opportunities for London-Irish groups to mobilize for multicultural resources. As subsequent

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chapters illuminate, cultivating Celticism and ‘difference’ for the London-Irish has been a foundation on which to achieve inclusivity by accommodating nonIrish people interested in ‘authentic’ and ‘alternative’ senses of community. This focus on cross-community collaboration is part of a strategy adopted by London-Irish political and cultural agencies to contest what they view as antiIrish prejudice and negative stereotyping. Ethnic difference, instead of being an indicator of boundaries dividing ‘us’ from ‘them’, can appear an attractive identity for individuals seeking to engage in alternative lifestyles and cultures.

Chapter 3

the Village hall: Multicultural Community Centres

Introduction: Multicultural Community Centres Community centres, arts and education classes, museums, heritage centres and schools are all spaces which host, represent and perform state-sponsored multiculturalism. They are also spaces where cultures are made visible. Things are put on display for people to gaze and even marvel at; they are also spaces where multiculturalism comes alive, embodied in performative action. Community centres, in particular, have two broad interlocking functions. First, they have an inward function, which affords ‘minority’ groups room to preserve and nourish their ‘cultural traditions’, to furnish group members with a secure milieu to learn about their ‘heritage’ and feel pride in their identity. As with the notion of ‘community’ explored in Chapters 1 and 2, the idea that it is beneicial for people to learn more about their cultural traditions and history remains a central part of UK government policy. Through such initiatives it is hoped that citizens are able to combat feelings of social isolation, anomie and poor selfesteem pervasive in modern society by alternatively engendering civic activity and pride. This inward looking function can certainly be seen in the mobilization for multiculturalism of some London-Irish groups discussed in Chapter 2. During the 1980s, educational and cultural centres were identiied as fundamental conduit, as a brochure for the Brent Irish Centre (1986) argued, for ‘the social cohesion of the Irish community in what is often a menacing environment … entertainment will be used as a medium to express and reinforce cultural values’. ‘Music, song and dance should be provided for under the provisions of multi-cultural education’, stated one report, so that the Irish are enabled with the conidence ‘to take their place in society’ (GLC 1984b: 13). Second, these spaces also often have an external function: providing a means to promote knowledge and awareness of the minority’s cultural forms to nonmembers. They are sites in which non-members can happily enter to engage with the minority group to further cross-community relations and intercultural respect. Surveying a range of ‘multicultural’ centres in the London area it is possible to discern the remit of inclusivity that typically informs their ‘best practice’ and policy statements. The Jewish Community Centre (JCC) in London states that its celebration of ‘Jewish culture … is inclusive: it’s for anyone interested in Jewish life … an important part of our vision is to create better understanding between different faiths and cultures’ (see). The Barnet Multicultural Community Centre (BMCC) ‘aims to promote and develop opportunity and participation for the whole community in order to promote integration and inclusion and reduce isolation and deprivation, within a social, informative, celebratory, multicultural setting’ (see:). The Bernie Grant Arts Centre in north London ‘is a home for black and culturally diverse performers and multicultural audiences … We have created exciting spaces for creative experimentation, where collaboration between art forms and cultural differences are the dominant themes’ (see: ). This chapter explores further the role of multicultural ‘centres’. Illuminating how such spaces seek to simultaneously encompass different constituencies (the ‘local’ minority group and ‘cosmopolitan’ non-members) as part of inter and cross-community dialogue, the chapter explores the contradictory and even conlictual relations between different groups that are often engendered in such places. To help with this, the chapter uses Foucault’s (1986, 1997) notion of the ‘Heterotopia’. The Heterotopia is an ‘other place’ characterized by uncertainty and incongruity, a space that subscribes to a vast range of alternative discourses and practices. Utilising the concept of Heterotopia, multicultural ‘centres’ can be seen as unsettling places which have the capacity to simultaneously reinforce essentialist notions of community and ethnicity while providing modes to challenge and deconstruct forms of reiication. The chapter also examines how these Centres function as forms of community – slices of the ‘urban village’ – in the global city by providing dislocated actors an opportunity to ‘feel at home’. Principally drawing on ethnographic research in the Irish Cultural Centre in west London, this particular space provides a lens to explore the role of community centres in contemporary state-sponsored multiculturalism.

Welcome to the Irish Cultural Centre Nestled comfortably close to the Hammersmith Broadway, located on the Blacks Road, the Irish Cultural Centre proclaims to be the ‘heart of Irish west London’. Oficially opened by the Republic of Ireland’s then Tánaiste Dick Spring1 in November 1995, the Centre is a two-storey multipurpose building, expensively furnished and complete with green carpet throughout. Horseshoe-shaped and neatly painted brown on the outside, the front of the building contains large emerald green neon capital lettering bearing the Centre’s name, which at night can be clearly seen from a distance. Above the main entrance doors to the Centre is written the traditional Irish greeting ‘Céad Mile Fáilte’ (‘One Hundred Thousand Welcomes’). Once inside, the visitor is greeted with glass cases on the walls containing Irish musical instruments, books penned by prominent Irish writers and assorted bric-a-brac connected with Ireland. Inside, the main reception area 1 the Tánaiste is the Vice-Taoiseach, equivalent to deputy Prime Minister in the UK.

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reveals a spacious atrium, which if lucky is illuminated with bright sunlight during the day. At all times the cream painted walls of the reception area are adorned with artwork by notable Irish artists. Behind the reception desk are seven window panes bearing artwork of a map of all the 32 counties of Ireland, etched by John Carson, a renowned Irish artist. To the left of the entrance, as you walk in, is the main concert hall, a spacious auditorium with a main performance stage, state-of-theart stage lighting and sound system, one of the largest TV screens in London for showing ilms and live sports matches, and the obligatory public bar. Importantly, the concert hall was described to me by the Centre’s director as: A village hall, no matter what way you look at it; it’s glossy, but it is a village hall, it is designed like a village hall. So our greatest success is that out of the village hall we have kept this place going, and it has become a vibrant focal point in London for so many hundreds of thousands of people who have passed through that door to enjoy Irish culture; and they have gone home having loved it (Interview with Ros, 10 November 2008).

The upstairs landing hosts the Centre’s loaning library: sixteen cases illed with 1,500 books on all aspects of Ireland from Terry Wogan to Oscar Wilde. Upstairs, also, is where the support and advice Centre is located. Open during ofice hours, the support and advice Centre provides information and referrals for newly arrived Irish people and the Irish in west London on housing, beneits, homelessness, employment/training, mental health and HIV/AIDS, hostels and other temporary accommodation. Recounting to me the protracted origins of the Centre, Ros Scanlon, the Centre’s artistic director since it opened in 1995, explained that the location was important. Hammersmith and Fulham, she said, was ‘the heart of Irish west London’. It was in the environs surrounding the Centre that not only a sizeable Irish population lived, but where a number of Irish dancehalls were located, and ‘wherever the Irish congregated there seemed to be a dancehall start-up’. Such locations, consequently, had an identiiable Irish migrant proile. These sites were not just entertainment venues, but places of self-help for migrants. A member of the original committee who lobbied the local authority to fund and build the Centre explained: The ‘Hibernian Dancehall’ in west London, in Fulham Broadway, was packed every Saturday night with show bands and ceili 2 bands. Hundreds and hundreds of Irish people would gather. There was a ‘Garryowen’ on Hammersmith Broadway – that was another Irish dancehall and it relected the community’s spot where it gathered and congregated, and they would come to certain areas where the Irish were staying. One man would help another man ind a start in a pub; another woman might be running a lodging house and would recommend that you go ind somewhere to stay. So they helped each other out and stayed 2

Ceili is a type of Irish dance music.

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Multiculturalism’s Double Bind together and gathered together and socialized together in the pubs, bars and the dancehalls (Interview with Seamus, 21 March 2008).

For various reasons, in the 1970s and 1980s the Irish dancehalls in Hammersmith closed down. Many of the Irish in the local area felt they needed to create a new venue to convene. Although there were some Irish centres already in existence in London, these centres were largely managed by the Catholic Church and they operated a membership policy. The Irish in Hammersmith, alternatively, wanted to develop a centre which was secular in focus, politically independent and open to anyone. From here, they began to lobby the local government authority, Hammersmith and Fulham, to pay for and build an Irish centre in the district. Ros described how the Irish lobbied the local council: What they did was say, ‘Look here’s the amount of Irish people that live in the area, we are people that have been paying their rates and taxes in this area, and these are community charges for so many years that we paid and contributed to this borough, and we have worked hard in this borough’. There are lots of hospitals in this area. Most of the nursing staff is Irish; the builders are Irish. ‘This is what we have done for the area,’ they said, ‘we have helped build it, we have helped service it, we have paid our taxes, we have opened up businesses, and now we want a tribute to all we have done.’ They gathered together and approached the local authority and said, ‘All these people vote for the local administration.’ I think the local authority recognized the contribution made by the Irish people to the borough and they thought, ‘We do have to pay tribute to this and build an Irish centre.’ But it took a long, long time. They were canvassing for twenty years and eventually got the building (Interview with Ros, 10 November 2008).

When the local authority eventually agreed to support the formation of the Centre they provided the huge igure of £6 million towards the construction of a new build. Notably, the Centre is located on a prime site in terms of accessibility to the centre of Hammersmith and the local transport system, as well as its proximity to central London. Indeed, such is its desirable position, when the local government changed from Labour (who funded the Centre) to the Conservative Party, the new administration attempted to close down the Centre and sell off the land. Since opening, the Centre most obviously prides itself in the range of cultural and arts based services provided. In advertising its cultural services, the Centre’s ‘mission statement’ is not boasting by claiming to offer ‘a wide-ranging programme of free and affordable community activities, alongside an innovative programme of high proile events, the Centre’s aim has always been to present the very best of Irish culture’. Nor does the epithet of ‘London’s premiere Centre for Irish arts’, which was granted by London’s Time Out listings magazine, seem unduly exaggerated.

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Timetable for adult educational classes at the Irish Centre 2002

Monday

tuesday

Wednesday

thursday

traditional Music 18:30 – 21:00

Bodhrán and tin whistle 18:00 – 21:00 riverdance 19:00 – 21:00

irish songs and singing 19:00 – 21:00 irish language (beginners) 19:00 – 21:00 irish language (advanced) 19:00 – 21:00 Irish Drama Course 19:00 – 21:00

set-dancing 19:00 – 21:00

irish history and Culture 19:00 – 21:00

irish literature 19:00 – 21:00 london Uilleann Pipers club 19:00 – 21:00 irish language (intermediate) 19:00 –21:00 irish Culture discussion Class 19:00 – 21:00

The community activities the Centre promises largely refer to the programme of irish education courses for adults and children. For a twelve-week term of classes in 2002, an adult learner could pay anything from £35 to £65 (concessions available). Price is not the determinating factor for students choosing to participate in a particular class; and in terms of choice for the discerning customer the full variety of Irish traditional cultural selection is on offer. On a Monday afternoon is the Irish ‘Aran’ knitting drop-in class; in the evening is Irish traditional music for adults. Tuesday hosts the bodhrán (drum) and tin whistle; Irish ‘Riverdancing’ with Lisa Delaney’s Dance Academy;3 Irish history and cultural studies. Wednesday witnesses Irish songs and singing; intermediate Irish language class; ‘older Irish women’s’ drama group. Thursday hosts Irish set-dancing; uilleann (traditional Irish pipes) pipers club; beginners’ Irish language; and Irish literature and art. The Centre also hosts the Irish Community Drama Company, which produces new and classic Irish dramas, including successful commercial shows like the musical ‘Molly Malone’ which played over the Christmas period of 2002–3 in a nearby theatre. On the inal Friday of each month a folklore evening took place, featuring an especially selected storyteller versed in Irish myths, legends and tales. Children’s classes largely mirror the adults’ classes: Irish music on a Saturday; Irish dancing on Mondays and Thursdays, geared towards preparing the children for festival competitions4 and public performance. For children there is also a two3 Registered with An Coimisiun le Rinci Gaelacha (Irish Dancing Commission). 4 Feiseanna.

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week summer school with music and dance during the irst week, and drama and storytelling for the second week. Tír na nÓg (‘the land of ever young’) is an ‘Irish language and culture club’ for children between the age of ive and twelve. The club includes learning games, arts and crafts and storytelling. Even for the very youngest, there is a weekly ‘carers and toddlers crèche’. For Irish elders there is a ‘tea dance’ on the irst Thursday of each month. Equally popular for Irish elders is the Monday afternoon ‘Irish workers group’, where retired Irish can avail themselves of free tea and newspapers and engage in quiet discussion. At the end of each term, those from the music, singing and dancing classes, regardless of age, can perform for an audience at an ‘end of term party bash’ in the Centre’s spacious performance hall. The ‘high proile’ events mentioned by the Centre relate to the plethora of music concerts featuring the best contemporary performers, book readings and literary evenings, music nights,5 set-dances on the third Saturday of each month barring august, singing contests, the ‘Young Irish Traditional Musician of the Year’ competition, ilm premieres and documentary screenings, antiquarian Irish book fairs and writer workshops, seanachaí – three-day festivals of Irish storytelling, and art exhibitions showcasing works on sale for many hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds. Unlike some of the older Irish centres located in London, the Irish Cultural Centre does not have any formal links with the Roman Catholic Church. The London-Irish Centre in Camden in north London, for instance, was set up in 1955 and guided by the vision of Fr. Tom McNamara. Today, the London-Irish Centre still retains its bond with the Roman Catholic Church. The Irish Cultural Centre, in contrast, is proudly secular in vision, independent from receiving any inancial support from the Catholic Church. Up until 2007 the Centre garnered its funds from its courses, events and from Hammersmith and Fulham Council with assistance from The Irish Youth Foundation and The Ireland Fund Great Britain. Until there was a change of local government administration in 2007, Hammersmith and Fulham Council provided £275,000 of funding per annum, a considerable commitment of public resources in a neo-liberal era deined by ever dwindling public expenditure.6 Nor is the Centre exclusively for the use of groups connected to Ireland; the only precondition that Hammersmith and Fulham Council placed on the Centre, as Ros explained, was ‘inclusivity, equal opportunities. That was all. They didn’t demand that we run it in a certain way. They were very open to what the programme 5 Organized by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (Music Association of Ireland). 6 This support ended in 2007 when the Conservative Party took control of Hammersmith and Fulham Council and promptly, in a series of cutbacks to public spending, ended its funding of the Irish Centre. They threatened to close down the Centre to sell off the land. The government of the Irish Republic, however, stepped in to fund the Centre. The name of the Centre has subsequently changed from the ‘Hammersmith and Fulham Irish Centre’ to the ‘Irish Cultural Centre’.

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would offer. In regard to programming, they just trusted that the Irish community knew what they wanted to do’. The Centre, accordingly, willingly hires out the hall for private functions and parties, academic and trade union conferences, Socialist Workers Party meetings and local council staff training days. When it requested funding from the council, the Centre emphasized not only that it provides important cultural initiatives for the local ‘minority’ Irish community, but in an open door policy in that the Centre is fully accessible to the non-Irish. This is elaborated in the ‘mission statement’: ‘the Centre sets out to encourage new people and new audiences to experience Irish arts and culture for the irst time’ (Hammersmith and Fulham Irish Centre 2006). This is also relective of the GLA’s commitment – outlined in the Mayor’s ‘Cultural Strategy’ (GLA 2004: 56–7) – to identify and support initiatives, and that ‘raising the proile of these events can bring new audiences, building bridges between London’s different communities ... promoting greater understanding and tolerance’. As the self-proclaimed ‘heart’ of the Irish in west London, above all things, the Centre is a place where one experiences Irishness in all its cultural and aesthetic varieties. The Centre’s ‘mission statement’ makes this clear by ensuring the Centre is available for ‘everyone of all backgrounds and cultures who want to enjoy, share, experience and participate in quality Irish arts, education and culture’. When I asked the Centre’s director what made an Irish Centre particularly inclusive so that it could accommodate a wide range of users, she said: Irish people and arts are very welcoming and other cultures always feel that Irish people are very welcoming and they have a big heart. The Irish have a lot of joy in their art, they have a lot of fun playing their music, there is always a smile, there is always a joy, and there’s a sense of welcome. I think that’s the reason a lot of non-Irish people take that step through the door because they know we’re welcoming people. It is very inclusive and joyful, and I think there is so much joy to be had and people come to enjoy themselves, and then that might inspire them to want to learn, and think, ‘Oh, gosh, I can learn something here: they are encouraging me to learn now’ (Interview with Ros, 10 November 2008).

The Cosmopolitan Habitus As we can see, the Irish Centre strives to accommodate both the ‘local’ Irish population and the non-Irish. At this point, the Irish Centre can be seen as a ‘cosmopolitan habitus’, a space which is a conluence of a diversity of ‘economic, political, cultural and psychic processes … where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested and disavowed’ (Brah 1996: 208). The cosmopolitan habitus is the formation of a space where ideas, dispositions, practices, material objects (Bourdieu 1977) and bodies from different places intermingle. In the sense of a ‘pathways’ metaphor the Centre gives room for social action and connections

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in urban life. It is important to give a lavour of these connections between pathways. Many of the people I met at the Centre had hardly any connections to Ireland. By the end of the irst week of term for education classes in 2002, I had spoken to Japanese accordion players, German tin whistle players, French speakers of Irish, Spanish ‘Riverdancers’, Dutch people in the singing class, and people from India in the Irish history class. I could go on. The very visibility of this ‘rainbow alliance’ of people in the Irish Centre learning aspects of Irish culture, at irst, seemed to me to contradict the whole raison d’être of what I had expected of an Irish Centre. I remember, prior to arriving in the Centre reasonably expecting that its main function would be a literal centre for Irish-born and subsequent generations of Irish people, to learn about, maintain and instruct Irish culture in a holistic and vibrant Irish community somewhat analogous to those sites typically cast in diasporic literature which grimly seek to relocate home and alternative ‘public spheres’. There were, of course, many Irish people who had come to the classes in order to strengthen their cherished links to Ireland. Also, during the weekends and summer holidays parents would coerce their children into attending the traditional music classes, the drama workshops, or the singing afternoons. These children were often those of Irish-born or second-generation parents who wanted their children to learn about their roots back ‘home’ in Ireland. The parents, as a teacher revealed, were more interested in pursuing their Irish heritage through the children rather than doing it themselves. Brendan Mulkere, a renowned teacher for over thirty years of Irish music in London, told me that the irst London-born children he had taught were now the people running the London traditional Irish music scene. The will of the parents had seemingly worked. Apart from the children, who are occasionally forced to come to the Centre, all participants have one binding commonality which draws them into the Centre, enabling them to hand over good money for cultural instruction: an interest in various aspects of Irish culture. Even so, there were tangents of reasoning that drew people to the classes which were driven by a sense of how resourceful they thought Irish culture could be in embellishing their social and professional lives. Realizing the need to promote the Irish Centre as an educational forum which provided ‘life skills’ in the employment market, the Centre actively encouraged the idea that Irish educational classes contained tangible provisions for practitioners. Some participants came to the Irish language class because they required Irish verbal and written skills in order to acquire a prestigious job in the Irish civil service where basic Irish language qualiications were required. A few members of the traditional music class came because the class provided tuition that complimented the rigorous syllabus demanded for the graded Royal Irish Academy of Music/ Comhaltas Ceolteórí Éireann (Music Association of Ireland) exams for traditional Irish music at the nearby London College of Music. One of the ‘Riverdancers’ for the Tuesday night class conided that she hoped to become a proicient enough dancer versed in many styles . By doing so, she believed that this would enable

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her to gain funding from sponsors to start a ‘Celtic/Caribbean Crossings’ fusion production for the commercial stage. A few arrived at the creative writing class clutching tomes which they hoped through guidance could be fashioned into to commercial publications. Other self-serving interests motivated other students. One earnest man had come to the singing class because when he was on holiday in Ireland, and there was a singing session underway in the local pub, he wanted to know all the words of the songs in order to seam effortlessly into the fun and not be marked out, in his mind, as just another ‘sour-faced English tourist sitting demurely in the corner’. Many of the set-dancers gave up their Thursday evenings because it was as good a way as any to keep it, and they renamed the class ‘sweat dancing’. Another singer came to the singing class because he had set himself a deadline of one year to learn how to sing and play on guitar a number of Irish songs for his mother and father’s 50th wedding anniversary party in Dublin. Many of the ‘Riverdancers’ came because they had seen ‘Riverdance’ either on stage or on the television and were inspired to take up this globally popular form. Of course, this is just the surf of the wave. As many came, as they had done for years, because they enjoyed the hedonistic pleasure of learning something they loved. Through the company of their fellow students and tutors, a communal world of friendship was formed based on social outings to the theatre and dinner parties which carried on outside the Centre. Conversely, there were countless numbers that arrived and peremptorily abandoned an educational class after one or two sessions. For many of these people the class simply did not it into their preconceived notions of what they expected or hoped for at the outset. For example, one young second-generation Irishman left the Irish history and cultural studies class simply because the tutor’s rendering of Irish history did not conform to the nationalist version the young man wanted to hear conirmed by an Irish historian. Before leaving, the man made his feelings abundantly clear during the class by remonstrating with the tutor on his account of history. Others meekly left without furnishing a reason. Nor did the Centre expect them to do so. Of those who passed by the building but never thought about entering, Ros told me it was nothing to do with the Centre purveying Irish culture. Instead, it was more to do with the perception it is an ‘arts centre’ and ‘art’ is something ordinary people were not supposedly allowed to engage in. For this reason, Ros told me, since some people may feel excluded from an arts centre because the arts are not supposed to belong to them it is important the Centre brought art in from the outside ‘community’.

The Local and the Global: The Two Constituencies of the Irish Centre? Ros told me that the Centre happily incorporates two broad but different types of constituencies. This schema involves the local Irish who seek to form a ‘community’ by imbuing themselves and their children with a ‘positive sense of

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Irishness’; then there are those who have little or no connection to Ireland but are interested in experiencing alternative and ‘authentic’ cultures like Irish traditional culture. Almost in binary opposition, the two constituencies are marked out. The local Irish supposedly have a narrow view of Irish culture as asserting Irish pride and community, which derives, Ros said, from ‘their experiences of settlement in the 1950s when they came across a lot of racism’. Ros explained to me why the Centre was so important to this constituency: I think Irish people went through terrible struggles, obviously through the time when they settled here in London from the 1950s onwards. When a people have gone through a struggle what they do is hold on to their culture, their words, their music, their language, they hold on to it really strongly, so when you leave a country and come to another country that becomes all the more meaningful for you. Traditional music for people learning here is so important because people want to hold on to their roots, the past, the heritage. It’s a way of holding on to your history. That’s what makes it so important (Interview with Ros, 10 November 2008).

Alternatively, the non-Irish have a ‘broad vision’, stated Ros; they are interested in ‘experiencing different parts of the world and Irish culture is part of that. Young people are much more interested in not just their part of the world, but they’re looking to look after the environment and to look after the global concerns.’ By global concerns, Ros meant traditional Irish culture engaged those people who were interested in protecting the environment and cultivating indigenous and ‘authentic’ cultures from the machinations of capitalism before they were extinguished for ever. Through its marketing strategies and campaigns the Centre purposely sought to recruit non-Irish people to attend events in the Centre. The Centre does this by advertising in places that are not exclusive to Irish people, such as the citywide press. Certainly, the attempt to include a substantial non-Irish constituency of users at the Centre was successful and the Centre aimed to provide a particular part of the ‘global city’. Ros explained that for its music concerts on a saturday night: About 40 per cent might be Irish, and the rest are non-Irish, and they come from the different nationalities that are living in London for a while. There’s Londoners, there’s English people, there’s people coming from outside London, but they’re not necessarily Irish, they might be music lovers. For the dances we are getting families coming who aren’t necessarily Irish (Interview with Ros, 10 November 2008).

One of the by-products of the inclusive remit of the Centre is that it has even helped to encourage tourism for Ireland. Ros noted that:

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I do think it’s important to enable people to come and enjoy Irish culture so that people realize that Ireland’s a lovely place to go. By coming to the Irish Centre, you want to go to Ireland and have a holiday there. If you have a nice experience here, people want to go to Ireland, so it increases tourism for Ireland (Interview with Ros, 10 November 2008).

My own survey of people who attended the educational classes over one week in November 2008 also revealed a wide range of users. I surveyed 91 students who attended the classes at the Centre. Of those, 43 (47.2 per cent) declared that their national identity was Irish; six of those were born outside of Ireland. Five people (5.5 per cent) stated that their nationality was ‘British-Irish’; all these people declared that they were born in England. The survey recorded that 33 people (30.3 per cent) stated that their nationality was either ‘British’, or more speciically, ‘English’ or ‘Scottish’; one of these people declared that they were born in Ireland. One person stated that their nationality was ‘British-Italian’. Nine students (8.19 per cent) were non-Irish or British. Of those surveyed, accordingly, only 38 respondents (34.58 per cent) were actually born in Ireland. The survey also provided an ‘ethnicity’ question, in which a blank space with no options was provided for the students to declare their ethnicity. Interestingly, just 27 (24.57 per cent) deined their ethnicity as ‘Irish’. Many respondents mentioned to me that they were confused about what ethnicity was; indeed, a number of Irish and British people put ‘white’ as their ‘ethnicity’. Of the 43 people who declared some form of ‘non-Irish’ nationality in the survey, 16 (14.56 per cent) said that they had at least one Irish parent, while 11 people (10 per cent) had at least one Irish grandparent. This means that 70 informants (63.7 per cent) expressed some form of Irish heritage, whether they were born in Ireland or had Irish parents/ grandparents. In terms of age-range, 59 students (53.69 per cent) were between the ages of 25–45; 43 (39.13 per cent) were over the age of 45; six (5.46 per cent) were between the ages of 18–25. It would be tempting to see the incorporation of the ‘global cosmopolitan’ and the ‘local’ Irish at the Centre as a resolving of a contradiction – a dialectic in the perceived schism between the local and the global. In this analysis, a Batesonian dialectic of schismogenesis works to incorporate a globe deined simultaneously by cultural luidity and local spaces of cultural compression (Rapport and Dawson 1998: 25–6). ‘Glocalization’, the universalization (globalism) of the particular (local) and the particularization of the universal (Robertson 1992), works as a contradictory threat to the holistic existence of each state independent of each other. If globalization is a non-linear, dialectic process where the global and the local do not exist as cultural polarities, but as mutually implicating principles (Beck 2002: 17), within the space of the Irish Centre, the differing needs of locals and non-Irish are complimented perfectly. It is complimented not through both sets of groups being totally oppositional, but in a dialogical relationship characterized by mutual beneit. Certainly, the local Irish have always sought to use traditional culture to engage in a reciprocal dialogue with other cultures and groups in London. The

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analysis of the impact of glocalization, however, has instead tended to prioritize the transformations, normally hybrid, of indigenous or local cultures adapting to the universalist ethos of western popular culture. In terms of the Irish Centre, I would argue the Centre and the local Irish actively negotiate globalism by reaching out to other communities and inducing a cosmopolitan experience of Irishness.

Arts and Educational Classes: Radical Spaces? Although the Irish Centre attracts a broad number of people to its arts and educational classes, can it be seen as a radical and/or a progressive space? The idea that arts and educational classes attain a radical potential is two-fold. First, since the end of the Second World War, some British socialists have advocated educational classes as a means to empower working-class people to challenge prevailing bourgeois ideology and to promote a new popular critical consciousness (see Mayo, 2000: 16–17). Of a less radical mind, since the mid-1990s, there has been growing recognition by the British government of the contribution of the arts, sport, and cultural and recreational activity as part of wider strategies, including strategies to promote regeneration and to combat social exclusion in Britain (Mayo, 2000: 16–18). Second, since the 1980s, multicultural approaches to education ‘put a lot of emphasis on developing curricula, in which different ethnic cultures … were taught in school, for the children both to learn to be proud of “their heritage”, and to respect other ethnic minorities’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992: 160). The assumption underlying this anti-racist strategy is that prejudice results from cultural ignorance and attitudes can be ameliorated by an appreciation of difference and cultural pluralism. Governed by these ideas, the Irish Centre seeks to include local Irish and nonIrish. For the local Irish, educational classes in traditional Irish culture provide a ‘positive self-identity’ of the Irish. The determination of the Irish Centre to raise cultural consciousness and self-esteem indicates a willingness to confront the manifestations of inferiority, such as poor health. This perspective resonates with Freire (1972), the Brazilian educator, for whom informal and conversational education provided a means for people ‘to get the oppressor out of their own heads’. As one teacher at the Centre stated when I asked him what he meant by saying the educational classes provided a ‘positive Irish identity’, it was to create positive images of Irish people, meaning that they’re proud to be Irish and we’re not living in a time now where people felt ashamed to be Irish in Britain. There was a time in the early 1970s when people were afraid to admit they were Irish. People felt it was a negative thing to be Irish at that time. Now, however, it’s a time to be proud of your Irishness; it’s a positive thing and not just keeping your head down (Interview with Jo, 4 February 2002).

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Educational classes are also used to reach out to the non-Irish. The Centre hopes it is helping to build links with Londoners to sweep away their accumulated misconceptions, to join in the task of working to build a new future beyond division. However, the critiques of this form of multiculturalism, predicated on the axiom that knowledge of the ‘other’ is attained by learning to live in each other’s shoes, are legion. Cohen (1988: 12–13), for example, states that ‘the multicultural illusion is that dominant and subordinate can somehow swap places and learn how the other half lives whilst leaving the structures of power intact’. The problem with many forms of multicultural education, especially in schools, was that they placed too much signiicance on curricular change and a lack of emphasis on the structural impact of racism on students’ lives (May 1999: 3). Multicultural education is thus seen as an approach which reiies cultural difference, and which fails to address the central issue of racism within society. A particularly scathing attack on multicultural education came from the anti-racist left in the 1980s. They disparagingly wrote of the ‘3 Ss’ version of multiculturalism: ‘saris, somosas and steelbands’ (Troyna 1993). In response, radical proponents of a ‘critical’ multicultural education, like May (1999: 27), look for an alternative which acknowledges group based differences while at the same time holding on ‘to a non-essentialist conception of culture’. May further asks whether it is possible to ‘incorporate a recognition of power relations in the structuring of ethnic and cultural identities and the choices that ensue from them’? (1999: 27) Rather than arguing that educational classes are radical and empowering spaces, or they are spaces in which unequal power relations between groups are conirmed, it is better to look at them as profoundly ambivalent arenas in which a number of perspectives, identities and political positions can be mapped on to. On one level, this should not be too surprising, since those who attend and use the educational classes are diverse: men and women, majority and minority groups, able, disabled, academics, adults and children. The people within these groups will also differ from each other, they will have widely divergent views, and each person will have a very personal sense of self and identity. Indeed, this divergence of perspectives and range of users was welcomed by the Centre. One non-Irish student in an educational class explained to me: I think the Centre is non-hierarchical. You can go into the history class and it will be very intellectual, interesting and cultural, but the man who will be sitting across from you might be a builder and someone else might be running a corporation or something. But it doesn’t matter when you are round the table talking and having a cup of tea and a biscuit and sharing your histories – everybody’s contribution is valued. Everybody’s contribution is as valued as everybody else, but people’s stories are part of what makes history (Interview with William, 16 April 2002).

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Remaining Neutral One important reason why the Irish Centre should not be seen as a particularly radical space is because the remit of the Centre is generally apolitical. Within both its formal mission statement and cultural policy, there was no explicit political agenda to speak of in the Irish Centre. The Irish Cultural Centre, on the other hand, always sought to maintain itself as a neutral political space. As Ros informed me: We try to avoid politics deliberately, so to speak, and yet we allow groups to meet which might have a political point of view to have a discussion. We have never closed a door on anybody but we’ve never lagged up anything and said we support a particular cause … We remain artistic and the arts allow voices. If the voice is through art and then it’s ine. If you put on a play and it has a political slant, and it’s through art and then that’s ine, but we are an arts and culture centre. We are not here to go down one road politically; we are here for everybody, for all political views within Irish culture and hopefully we serve that (Interview with Ros, 10 November 2008).

Furthermore, the tutors chosen to teach the cultural classes, for example, were chosen purely for their ability to instruct the technical aspects of cultural forms. Nearly all of the tutors were full-time professional teachers or musicians and teaching at the Centre was another proitable source of income. None, as far as I was aware, had any major agenda to promote the politics of Irish nationalism. As if to illustrate that tutors with political agendas were not welcomed by the Centre and students, a few years ago one Irish tutor was forced to leave the Centre. Her banishment was mostly due to the protest of students, after she was perceived to have been too reverent in her espousal of Irish language as inextricably linked to Irish nationalism. According to those I spoke to, the tutor had exclusively viewed Irish as a language that only the Irish should utter and attempted to censor nonIrish students by ignoring them during the class. One English-born woman who had been a student in that class told me the tutor had been rude to her until she found out her surname was ‘Byrne’ – an Irish name. The teacher was subsequently prohibited from teaching at the Centre. Sometimes the tutors weren’t even Irish. Quite disconcertingly for some students, on one occasion, the replacement tutor for the bodhrán (drum) and tin whistle class was German, and when taking the class register he struggled pronouncing some of the Irish names. For some students it was all too incongruous and they could not hide a smirk when the tutor asked in his broad Bavarian accent: ‘Another jig, ja’? Restricting the political meaning of the cultural forms taught was one prominent way the Centre remained neutral. Political songs, particularly, have often been viewed as an intrinsic repository of Irishness by encoding, implicitly or explicitly, resistance against English rule. This argument was made by Diarmuid Breatnach

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(1988) from the IBRG: ‘When Irish people get together and sing freely for a while, it will not be long before an overtly political song is heard referring to some incident in the 800-year struggle against foreign domination’. The singing tutor at the Centre, however, always managed to annul such references. Once when the class were talking about the politics of anti-war opposition in the context of the song ‘The Band Played “Waltzing Matilda”’ (a song introduced into the Irish song repertoire by the London-Irish band, ‘The Pogues’), one student, a secondgeneration Irish woman, stated she quite liked ‘rebel songs’.7 the class agreed, and said they wouldn’t mind trying to sing some to ‘get the blood rushing’. Rory rebutted the proposition by arguing that ‘singing rebel songs may be all well and good at an Irish republican club in Belfast, but not so relevant for west London on a rainy Wednesday night in February’. Once when we were chatting outside the class, Rory told me he had little time for the politics of Irish nationalism and thought it was not an appropriate subject for the singing class. Once in the Irish language class when the tutor taught the class the words and melody of a song composed by the Irish nationalist poet and soldier Patrick Pearse8 the tutor abjured from providing a cultural or political signiicance to the song. The tutor’s sole focus was making students perfect in their pronunciations. The tutor’s earmarking of the song for the consideration of students was because it appeared relatively simple to learn in terms of melody and words, and singing furnished an especially advantageous resource to facilitate learning the rudiments of Irish. When I asked the tutor at the end of the class how they approached instructing Irish, she reminded me of her background as a multi-linguist and that teaching Irish was no different to instructing French or German, which she did at an expensive public school nearby. Principally, the reason why the politics of nationalism are implicitly and at times explicitly negated is because of nationalism’s symbolic power to conlate peoplehood, territory and state in a totalising political community. Nationalism is a plural construction – nationalisms: a body of knowledge organized with respect to the criteria of group membership and principles of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Nationalism involves cultural and social homogenisation when it claims a collective historical destiny for the polity and/or its ethnically deined members (Hutchinson 1987). The Centre, in striving to ensure that a broad constituency of groups and individuals felt entirely comfortable there, largely steered away from dealing with political issues; their main focus was on providing the necessary technical skills for students to learn Irish music, history and language to the best of their ability. The commitment to neutrality enshrined by the Irish Centre and some other Irish initiatives has been attacked by some Irish nationalists. One igure, John Fitzpatrick (1989), a trade union leader in Hammersmith, argued that a 7 ‘Rebel songs’ refer to those Irish songs that celebrate and mark the various heroes and rebellions against hundreds of years of English rule in Ireland. 8 Patrick Pearse was a leading Irish republican, part of the nationalist struggle for independence during the early twentieth century.

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multicultural campaign, like the ‘quest for council grants … provides a mechanism for the integration and corruption of Irish community organizations … by insisting that any such groups are “non-political”‘. In other words, the British state only funded Irish multicultural initiatives on the condition they were politically neutral and were thus prohibited from providing space for projects which would criticize British rule in Northern Ireland.

The Importance of Cultural Preservation If the Irish Centre sought to remain neutral from the politics of Irish nationalism was any politics was present? When I asked Ros whether the revival of Irish traditional culture in London during the last few years was a political movement – particularly in light of the mission statement stating that the promotion of Irish culture was important to counter prejudice – she said it was ‘a natural not a thought out thing. So in that respect it’s not political’. ‘Natural’, in this sense, referred to what is perceived to be a very unconscious and organic movement; participants are drawn to the Centre by a love of Irish culture rather than any pedagogic need to engage in political activity. The most important role for the Irish Centre was cultural preservation. Irish traditional culture had to be retained and cultivated because the Irish still laid claim to their national, traditional culture, unlike the English who, Ros said, had ‘lost their sense of culture’. Preserving Irish culture is extremely important, Ros told me, in a global world dominated by the extinction of indigenous ways of life. The Centre often attracted people who wanted to ‘change things’; people interested in looking after the environment and preserving Irish traditional culture were what could be loosely thought of as radical chic ‘cultural environmentalists’. Preservation has become an important signiier throughout the Irish culture industries as they market claims to authenticity without fear of contradiction (Graham 2001: 70). Thompson (1995) has also noted the ‘theme-parking of Ireland’. Irish tourist board advertisements for the US market in the 1990s portrayed Ireland with ‘images of a fox hunt, a country dance and a horse drawn wagon’ (Negra 2001: 89). The campaign’s tagline – ‘Ireland: the Ancient Birthplace of Goodtimes’ (2001: 90) – highlights that Ireland is an eternally unchanging place, a rustic retreat from industrialism. Pertinently, however, these representations of ‘Heritage Ireland’ are perhaps more complexly articulated. ‘Heritage sites’, in particular, are forms of ‘artful trickery’. Their claim to authenticity relies on the ability to ‘make what is to be visited not modern, new Ireland but authentic Ireland made old and new’ (Graham, 2001: 70). At the same time, heritage sites are also typically replete with very modern applications, including visitor centres and souvenir shops. Similarly, although the Irish Centre is not an explicitly commercial enterprise, its function is to assist with the preservation of Irish heritage and culture. This enterprise of preservation can be seen as a having a speciic purpose in contemporary

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multicultural society. In the context of ‘multicultural Britain’, Britain appears to have lost its national culture in the mire of modernity and the Irish play a vital role by providing a pre-industrial culture that contributes to the nation’s heterogeneous fabric. The supposed primordial authenticity of Irish culture reveals the terms of alterity that characterize the role ‘minorities’ are allowed to nurture within Britain. Bhattacharyya’s (1998) observation that multiculturalism was transformed in 1990s Britain as a part of a liberal version of the ‘heritage industry’ is witnessed in how ‘minorities’ are ‘invoked as representing that “sense of community” that liberal society is supposed to have lost’ (Hall, 2000: 221). The idea that the Centre was a receptacle of indigenous culture and of a distinct community was a discourse I often encountered in the Centre. This emphasis on cultural preservation was elaborated by Ros. When I asked her what the Centre’s greatest success is, she said, ‘The Centre keeps the arts alive and breathing and we have a commitment to the real disciplines, not just to the arts, but we have had a commitment to the real disciplines of learning, proper Irish culture, and putting on the best quality artists in a real small space’ (interview with Ros, 10 November 2008). The Centre strives to be a space which can magic up the very aura of community, thereby endowing ixity and social connectivity to dislocated and rootless subjects in a metropolis like London. Again, Ros explained to me regarding the Irish Centre: It’s a holder of something, it’s the heart of something, it has its own character, and it has a distinct character. That’s why we need community centres. What really frightens me is that they are getting shut down everywhere. Everything is so fast now and people forget that with technology you need community. Everybody needs community and that’s why we need community centres for people, we need to keep them going … In London people live alone, they don’t communicate, the extended family is not there, communities are being broken down by technology and everything is getting so fast. You make a telephone call to your doctor’s surgery and you get an automated answering service rather than a real person. Everything is getting chipped away, especially that sense of community. It’s just being chipped away at and we need somewhere to go to be part of a community, and that’s why I think adult education is so important: we can go and be with other people and share learning and share growth and share our stories (interview with Ros, 10 November 2008).

The representation of the Centre as a location which evokes themes of organic and vernacular gemeinschaft community links with the search for authenticity in an artiicial modernity. This theme was embodied in the Centre’s spatial design and praxis. As noted earlier, the Centre’s concert hall and auditorium was purposely constructed to represent a ‘village hall, a ‘focal point’ where multiple users can congregate and experience ‘life in the multicultural city’.

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Looking towards accommodating the two broad constituencies who use the Centre, the Centre deliberately provides a mode of communal experience for the local Irish and the ‘cosmopolitan’ non-Irish. The Centre furnishes a home for the London-Irish who are going through a distinct change: The Irish are more dispersed. I think it’s because we’ve gone into our third generation and I think that a lot of the Irish second-generation have done really well and they have bought houses outside of London or moved on to work in other countries. The irst generation – you don’t see many Irishmen on the streets now, that generation aren’t around anymore. The Centre certainly wants to cater for the generation that came over in the 50s and make sure that it’s providing a service for them. The Irish pubs have all gone; they’re all Irish theme pubs now. The Centre is somewhere where they can come to the tea dances and meet their friends (Interview with Ros, 10 November 2008).

Crucially, because the Irish are perceived as having a clear and identiiable national, ‘traditional culture’ – expressed through music, dance, drama and literature and storytelling – the Irish Centre is seen to be attractive to the non-Irish, especially the local ‘English’ population. Ros illuminated this perspective: I think Irish people know what their culture is. I think some communities … I don’t know if the English are clear cut about what their culture is. Irish people know what their culture is, it’s very clear cut. People come here because they are unsure of their culture and they want to feel part of a community. These people are often probably middle-class (Interview with Ros, 10 November 2008).

This discourse of community is neither benign nor uncontested. Politicians, not exclusively located to the right, have countered multiculturalism by framing it as the resignation of citizenship and privilege to minorities to the cost of the majority white British population (Hesse 2000). According to this discourse, the pendulum has swung too far as ethnic minorities manage to ingratiate themselves with the best economic and cultural resources from the British government. The host population, alternatively, are doomed to suffer cultural impoverishment as the liberal state dissolves around them into the nether world of pluralism. The suspicion that the validation of cultural heritage had become exclusive only to ethnic minorities, like the Irish, whilst the indigenous, liberal in outlook British had forgotten to love and preserve their own cultural forms, is a discourse I encountered during research. I remember one evening in a local bar speaking to a student born in England who went to an Irish singing class at the Irish Cultural Centre. She came to the singing class because she loved singing, and since the Irish Centre was local to her home it seemed as good as anywhere to participate in singing. She noted, however: It’s funny; I would love to go to an English community centre if there was one. I love English folk song, but there aren’t any centres in the local vicinity. The

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English are quite tolerant really. They allow Irish, Indian and West Indian centres to thrive over here; but people would never want to have an English cultural centre. It’s like the English are incredibly liberal when it comes to allowing Muslim mosques, but we are less vociferous when encouraging Christianity (Interview with Sharon, 11 March 2002).

The Heterotopia the irish Centre thus contains a range of discourses and concepts about multiculturalism, cultural preservation and politics. To improve our understanding of how the Irish Centre is able to do this it is worth employing Foucault’s (1986, 1997) notion of the ‘Heterotopia’. A Heterotopia is a space or site which is able to juxtapose: In a single real place several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible … they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory … or else on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed and jumbled. The latter type would be the Heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation (Foucault 1986: 25–6).

This space of ‘compensation’, accordingly, can include ‘Heritage Centres’, which try to compensate for our loss of ‘organic memory’, especially our fractured ‘communal memories’. It can also incorporate ‘community centres’, spaces in which community becomes experienced for a short while. One of the reasons why theorists have been drawn to the concept of Heterotopia is because it ‘enables … a form of discontin[uity] … a status which, in turn, gives each the ability to transgress, undermine and question the alleged coherence or totality of self-contained orders and systems’ (Genocchi 1995: 37). The Heterotopia is seen as challenging our sense of ordering because it can represent an ‘other’ place, a space where experiences may be had in the present and in-situ of a real location manifesting the experience, but where those experiences are not of that time and often geographically misplaced. a characterising feature of the heterotopia is the special nature of its time. Foucault (1997) notes that the Heterotopia exhibits a ‘pure symmetry of heterochronisms’: it is linked to ‘bits and pieces of time’, and it enables visitors to enter ‘a total breach of traditional time’. The ability to generate altered senses or perceptions of time within its domain is another quality by which we might identify the Heterotopia. Heterotopias, thus, are spaces of contrast whose existence sets up unsettling juxtapositions of incommensurable objects, spatial

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arrangements and even time lows that challenge the way we represent and the way our representations are ordered (Hetherington 1998: 133). Another important aspect of the Heterotopia is that it operates a system of opening and closing. Foucault was particularly concerned with how a place is open or closed to public entrance, and how it maintains boundaries, barriers, gateways and disallows thoroughfare, loitering or anonymous entrance. This question of access is not just maintained vis-à-vis the presence of physical barriers; it can also be symbolic, delineated by discourses of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’. It is in this dimension of space that power becomes, arguably, most palpable, and Foucault (1997) is adamant that all Heterotopias involve a system of opening and closing that, at the same time, isolates them and makes them penetrable. Indeed, one does not generally access a Heterotopia purely by the force of one’s will alone; access is accompanied by a form of submission or by a variety of a rite of puriication. Theorists have thus often applied the concept of ‘Heterotopia’ to contemporary museums and heritage sites because of their capacity to bring together heterogeneous collections of unusual things and periods of time, without allowing them to settle into a deinite unity of meaning through direct resemblance to some anterior reality. Indeed, Foucault (1986: 26) wrote of museums as possessing ‘the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes … a place of all times that is itself outside of time’. To what extent, then, can the Irish Centre be seen as a Heterotopia? To begin with, the claim to ‘authenticity’ and the Centre’s self-designated role as a site which preserves traditional Irish culture is partially contradicted by how it juxtaposes different slices of time as well as incommensurable objects and functions. The term ‘preserve’ to describe the Irish Centre’s role is crucial, implying ‘authentic’ Irish culture is newly available in the Centre. Contradicting this, the strange combination of the old and new – emphasized by glass cases on the walls containing old Irish musical instruments, books penned by prominent Irish writers and bric-abrac connected with rural Ireland – confuses a sense of ordering, belonging and a settling into a unity of meaning through direct resemblance to some reality of what is ‘authentic’ Irish culture. The aura of ‘authenticity’ is further challenged by the Centre’s location in the urban heart of London. Despite its location, the Centre is a space where people visit to experience Irishness, and this makes them even want to visit and explore Ireland as tourists. Another interrelated incongruous element is the portrayal of the Centre as a communal space. The epithet of a ‘village hall’ to describe the concert auditorium in the Centre makes it appear that, in contrary to the reality of the metropolitan experience, a welcome refuge from a bewildering modernity can be found and explored. A further aspect of the Irish Centre which bears similarity with the Heterotopia is the simultaneity and uncertainty of opening and closing practices which demarcate access to the Centre. The Centre is made as fully accessible and inclusive as possible to many ‘communities’, groups and individuals. This is an important part of the Centre’s self-designated remit to broaden knowledge and respect of Irish cultural identity as well to foster harmonious relations between groups. At the

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same time, the boundaries of inclusivity are tacitly enunciated. Politics, especially Irish nationalism, while not verboten identities in the Centre, are strictly regulated and typically neutralized. The epithet of an ‘arts centre’ can also, as the Centre’s director pointed out, act to exclude those who feel that ‘art’ is a property solely the possession of the middle-classes. Such ‘distinctions’ are reminiscent of Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1990) concept of ‘cultural capital’: the use of skills and education to demarcate social differences. To elaborate this Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) spoke of how art has become enshrined in the ‘pure gaze’; art is abstracted from social function to become intellectualized, which requires complex faculties of comprehension to understand its meaning. Such processes often occur in spaces which seek to ‘museumize’ culture. Stocking (1985) notes that museums are the ‘archives of material culture’ in which market processes determine the representation of the objects of others so that they come to be regarded as ‘ine art’ and thereby undergo ‘processes of aestheticization’. The Heterotopia can also be seen in how the Irish Centre stimulates inclusivity by hosting ‘cross-cultural’ fusions. Alliances are fashioned between the music of ‘Celtic’ peoples in, for example, an ‘Irish Spanish Gaeletic Crossings’ performance at the Centre. I also met a dancer who told me she was from ‘Afro-Caribbean and Irish parentage’, and that she wanted to start a ‘Celtic/Caribbean Crossings’ dance show, which imagined a political afinity between two ethnic minorities. This alliance provides a narrative in which racial discrimination in post-war Britain is not exclusively retold as a story conined to ‘black’ or South Asian migrants and that the experience of British discrimination is not restricted to skin colour, but is germane to migrants’ shared histories of dislocation and discrimination. Also, every year the Centre hosts a collaboration between the ‘acclaimed Cuban, Caribbean and Jazz musician Keith Waithe and his band “The Macusi Players” with the dynamic Irish traditional band “Hooley” to bring a night of Irish AfroCeltic musical fusion’. Importantly, by rendering the Irish experience in Britain as generally analogous to that of other ‘minorities’, it helps make the Irish visible in debates on ethnic minority funding when it has been assumed that this status is wholly conined to minorities of ‘colour’. These collaborative fusions and hybrid arrangements are a central part of the Irish Centre’s cultural outlook. I asked Ros if these new ‘hybrid’ forms threatened the Centre’s project to preserve traditional culture. Ros explained to me that while it is essential for them to concentrate on traditional culture as the ‘essence’ of Irish culture, for fear it may be lost forever, it was ‘possible to fuse these forms and give them a contemporary edge; but it is important to always recognize your absolute roots and your roots are where the traditions are’. Ros continued to explain the importance of the Centre, as a place where diverse groups and individuals could meet: I think if you can enter another person’s cultural centre and enjoy it and feel that you want to go back, an element of trust builds up. We’ve had people from Arab states come and enjoy music here and they have a wonderful time and it’s

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Multiculturalism’s Double Bind wonderful to have them here and to enjoy social events with them and for them to come and enjoy our music. We have nights where Irish music fuses with Arabic music. All of those experiences are about people building heart trust, meeting heart to heart, through your music, through your arts and forgetting all the wars that are going on and the stuff that people intellectualize. It’s all about being with other people, one world. I think that’s what these centres can do: bring people together through the arts, because the arts are healing, because the arts are immediately about the heart. If you’re not Irish but you’re enjoying a piece of Irish music and it reminds you of your country and a piece of music from your country then you have a shared dimension that we are all together as one through links. There’s always links through art, there’s always links through poetry and there’s always links through literature and there’s always links and bridges through music and dance … There’s so many links and bridges (Interview with Ros, 10 November 2008).

Hybridity and Multiculturalism: ‘Coalitions of Analogy’ It is worth at this juncture moving from the concept of Heterotopia to another tricky concept which is frequently a part of multicultural discourse and practice: hybridity. Multicultural practitioners and proponents often espouse the idea that not only should cultures meet and learn from each other, but that it is equally good if two or more cultures can actually come together to forge a new form containing the best elements of each. While this sounds an eminently good idea, and one which offers the potential to eradicate or deconstruct cultural boundaries between groups, it is a highly problematical concept. In particular, theorists debate if hybridity represents a novel and radical politics which opens up space for new forms of cultural identity which challenge reiication and essentialism. Or, alternatively, does hybridity actually reinforce such forms of containment, a type of ‘tranquillising hybridization’ (Canclini 2000: 48): a panacea for putting up with socio-economic disparities (Hutnyk 2005). The celebratory rendering of hybridity largely derives from the Russian Marxist theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), who applied the concept to the use of language. For Bahktin there existed two forms of hybridity: the ‘organic’ and the ‘intentional’. ‘Intentional hybridity’ is seen as ‘enabling a contestatory activity’, a politicized setting of cultural differences against each other dialogically’ (1981: 358). An intentional hybrid is thus a ‘conscious hybrid … an encounter, within the area of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor’ (1981: 358) [emphasis original]. In ‘organic hybridity’, on the other hand, the ‘unintentional, unconscious hybridization is one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of languages … [Yet] such unconscious hybrids have been at the same time profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant

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with potential for new world views, with new “internal forms” for perceiving the world’ (1981: 358). At its most optimistic application, in terms of multiculturalism and ‘race relations’, hybridity has come to be seen as possessing ‘the capacity to shock through deliberate conlations and subversions of sanctiied orderings’ (Werbner 2001: 134). Hybridity is lauded for supposedly being able to ‘subvert categorical and essentialist ideological movements – particularly, ethnicity and nationalism – and to provide, in so doing, a basis for cultural relexivity and change’ (see May 1999). In the politics of hybridity, it is hoped that ‘ethnic absolutism’ has no place and ‘ “race” will no longer be a meaningful device for the categorization of human beings’ (Gilroy 1993: 218). Hybrid cultural practices thus act as a harbinger of a plural society in which no culture or identity dominates. Indeed, some have even seen in ‘hybrid cultural diasporic practices’ the capacity to contribute to the process in which European nations are becoming ‘mestizo, bastard, [and] fecundated by formerly victimized civilizations’ (Goytisolo 1987: 37–38). For others, hybrid cultural practices can suture ‘traditions’ that have hitherto been seen as oppositional or clashing. Critics of such ‘hybridity talk’ offer a number of reasons to view the concept with scepticism. Some critics have traced the provenance of the term hybridity in the racialized discourse of nineteenth century evolutionism (Young 1995, Hutnyk 2005). Anthropologists also have much to be wary of when writing of hybridity. The work of Franz Boas (1911), who strove to demolish the racial underpinnings of evolutionary racism, concluded that racial prejudice, especially against AfricanAmericans, would be ameliorated through ‘racial mixing’. On the other hand, some subsequent anthropologists’ interest in syncretism – the blending together of seemingly incompatible belief systems – stressed the inherent vitality of social groups to adapt to processes of colonialism (see Hutnyk 2005). What is further problematical about the hybridity concept is that it presupposes before the mingling of forms the cultures were somehow unadulterated. As Gilroy notes: ‘the idea of hybridity, of intermixture, presupposes two anterior purities … I think there isn’t any purity; there isn’t any anterior purity … that’s why I try not to use the word hybrid … Cultural production is not like mixing cocktails’ (Gilroy 1994: 54–5). Rather than challenging ixed categories of race and culture, the discourse of hybridity, in fact, perpetuates an essentialist conception of culture because it assumes that there are such things as pure and whole cultures in the irst instance. As we have seen, ‘all cultures are heterogeneous, arising out of cultural mixture’ (May 1999: 23). By concentrating on hybridity, as a radical form of identity politics, this not only ignores ‘resistance to speciic structures and institutions’ but also ‘the almost inevitable hegemonic incorporation of random creativity through diffusion and dispersal of difference and its marketability’ (Hutnyk 2000: 32). Hybridity as a type of identity politics should not be viewed as particularly progressive vis-à-vis rupturing essentialist concepts of culture and identity. Hybridity, however, does provide a context for new social relations to be forged and for groups and individuals to explore commonalities and alliances. For the woman

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who said she had Irish and Caribbean parents, the idea of a ‘Celtic/Caribbean Crossings’ dance show would enable an exploration of the relationships between both aspects of her cultural heritage. Similarly, for other performers and for the Irish Centre, such collaborative efforts provide a forum in which it is possible to forge alliances between minority groupings in the capital who share histories of colonization and migration. For the Irish, in particular, such ‘coalitions of analogy’ afford another opportunity to include the mainly ‘white’ Irish visible in representations of multiculturalism and anti-racist initiatives. It thus potentially renders the Irish experience as comparative to other groups, mainly black and South Asian, who are more conspicuous in debates concerning multiculturalism and anti-racism. Cultural fusions, such as those between the Irish and other ‘Celtic’ groups, such as Bretons, Scots and those from Galicia, builds a common ground between groups who see themselves as deriving from similar cultural roots. The process also engenders scope for individuals from the host nation to engage in relations with the minority group. More recently, in 2008 the Irish Centre has been attempting to forge links with the local Polish community in west London. As part of a new and recent generation of economic migrants to London – mainly white east European migrants – the Poles are in some ways, as an Irish welfare worker explained: living the same story as the Irish because they have come over and they’re doing all of the building jobs which the Irish once did. You ind that a lot of the Polish work extremely hard and they’re going to save up and send money home so that they can buy a house back home. It’s the same story really as the Irish a generation before. There’s a few Polish that are on the streets living homeless. For years it was Irishmen homeless on the streets and now when you walk up Hammersmith High Street you’ll see that it’s Polish people on the streets – young Polish men. It’s the same story as ours (Interview with Seamus, 21 March 2008).

Looking at hybridity in terms of social relations, rather than as a vacuous form of identity politics, does not mean that power differentials between groups are absent. Far from it, the idea that it is the ‘cultures’ of minority groups, and not the ‘host community’, which should be made hybrid in effect makes abstract the fact that the identity of the ‘host’ is equally as plural and heterogeneous. Placing the stress on minority groups to be hybrid and accommodating to others is a de facto way of viewing minority groups as normatively defensive formations that seek to retreat to the conines of a hermetically sealed culture and community. In other words, while ethnic diversity is tolerated by the UK government, state-sponsored multiculturalism encourages groups to engage in intercultural contact and crosscommunity dialogue in order to disseminate core British vales and the virtues of community cohesion. The main enemy of this emergent model of citizenship, notes McGhee (2005: 164), ‘is loyalty and commitment to communities, cultures, traditions and identities which are not open, lexible, and that are detached and hostile to others’. What this model of ‘cosmopolitan’ citizenship manages to

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articulate is that the solutions to social problems, such as ‘defensive communities’, are ‘too focused on transforming minority groups (especially ethnic minority, migrant and established migrant groups) and not focused enough on transforming the hostile defence of monolithic … ‘host’ identities and communities’ (McGhee 2005: 164). Hybridity, rather than a radical politics of pluralism, is thus in one sense a central part of the bureaucratic demands placed on minority groups under state-sponsored multiculturalism to be open and less defensive.

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Chapter 4

the Carnival and status reversals: Multicultural Public spectacles

St Patrick’s Day Parade and Festival St Patrick’s Day 2002 was eagerly anticipated by many London-Irish; that year the Irish Saint’s Day was to be commemorated with the irst ever major publicfunded parade routed through central London. Normally, St Patrick’s Day parades in London were sheltered away from public scrutiny, cloistered away in districts containing considerable Irish populations, like Willesden in northwest London and Lewisham to the south of the metropolis. It was said by some people that in previous decades the ‘Irish community’ were fearful of expressing their Irishness publicly in St Patrick’s Day parades during the height of the IRA’s bombing campaign in England (Hutton 2006). As a sign of emerging Irish conidence, Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester, other English cities host to substantial Irish populations, had in recent years developed huge St Patrick’s Day parades, with Manchester claiming to muster as many as three hundred thousand attendees.1 in Birmingham, the parade organizers stated ‘you don’t have to be Irish to join in – Chinese dragons, bhangra2 drummers and Carnival costumed walkers too. All are welcome to join in this big celebration’. Encouraging inclusivity, the organizers of the london parade stated: The Irish in London have always played a key role in many facets of society. There could never be a better time to celebrate the rich tapestry of life in our multicultural capital and we would like to extend a warm invitation to all Londoners to join the Irish community in celebrating this special day (GLA 2002).

‘Sharing a Common Heritage’ Public spectacles, festivals, carnivals and ‘mega-events’ are a central platform to perform state-sponsored multiculturalism. Certainly, such spectacles were a 1 . 2 Bhangra is originally a Panjabi music form which has been adapted in the South Asian diaspora to become a globally popular music form (see Chapter 6).

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fundamental constituent of the GLA’s ‘cultural’ remit under the leadership of Ken Livingstone. The GLA’s sponsorship of public events was detailed in a policy report by its Cultural Strategy Group. The document, entitled London Cultural Capital: Realising the Potential of a World Class City (GLA 2004), views culture as a means to provide diverse communities with ‘social capital’. The document points to how funding the cultural initiatives of London’s socially excluded groups helps them to become ‘sustainable organizations’ and to address ‘dificult social issues’ rooted in ‘inequality’ (2004: 10–17). The report also encourages crosscommunity dialogue by laying stress on how culture ‘can bring together people with different backgrounds, transcending barriers and celebrating difference’. (2004: 18). For this reason, the report states, St Patrick’s Day is funded and promoted alongside other London ‘multicultural celebrations’: Chinese New Year, Mela, Black History Month, Mardi Gras and Liberty (2004: 57).3 The ‘double bind’ is seen to be in operation here. Though the report encourages the building of alliances between groups – ‘culture as a means of coming together, of sharing a common heritage’ (2004: 18) – particularism, the unique cultures of the city’s minority groups, is ultimately guaranteed. this chapter provides an ethnographic account of the Gla sponsored london St Patrick’s Day parade and music concert in 2002. Utilizing ethnography, I want to interrogate the assumption held by many of the prominent London-Irish cultural and political agencies responsible for organizing the parade and for garnering public and private sponsorship to fund the festivities. At the heart of this assumption was that routing a parade and concert through central London would provide a focus for the London-Irish community to gain visibility, inclusivity, and recognition within London cultural life. Such prominent visibility represented for many London-Irish groups a formal acceptance of the contribution the Irish endow to ‘multicultural’ London, when for many years the Irish have been rendered invisible by being framed as a ‘suspect community’. The importance of visibility was that it might allow the Irish a space to provide a positive representation of Irishness, culminating in the host community attaining a much higher regard for Irish people and thus a public focus to gain precious government funds and more beneicial social polices. London’s St Patrick’s Day parade, GLA leader Ken Livingstone subsequently acknowledged, was seen as something that helped people with ‘no Irish roots … come away with a better understanding of the contribution the Irish have made to London’ (Murphy 2005: 18). In 2004, the Irish Post (2004a), Britain’s largest Irish weekly newspaper, said of the annual London St Patrick’s Day parade: ‘It strongly promotes Irish culture and heritage and presents the community in a positive light’.

3 Mela refers to South Asian festivals; Mardi Gras is the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender celebration; Liberty is a ‘disability rights festival’.

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Resistance or Co-option? Examining the 2002 London St Patrick’s Day festival, in this chapter I wonder whether such multicultural public spectacles assist with the project of helping minority groups mark their welcome presence in contemporary society. Do these rituals provide a literal space for minorities to perform a positive identity and therefore challenge a history of negative stereotyping and invisibility in the public sphere? As such, do the celebrations manage to expedite inclusivity and a model of successful contemporary intercultural relations? Or alternatively, do these spectacles more likely reduce minority identities and cross-community contact to a form of cultural and ethnic reiication? A partial answer concludes that it is important to steer away from either valorizing such spectacles as important avenues for demonstrating a politics of resistance or denouncing them as sites of incorporation. In terms of London’s St Patrick’s Day, resistance and radicalism appear to be optimistic epithets given the central role of local government and multinational corporations sponsoring the celebrations. Furthermore, many of the Irish organizations involved in hosting the festivities did not view them as sites of political resistance. Instead, they could be viewed as: ‘a myriad of shifting, interwoven alliances’ seeking to ‘pluralize existing society rather than revolutionize or dominate it’ (Gerstin 2000: 297). If Britain’s narrative once told of a discrete, homogeneous, and autonomous culture, characterized by racial violence and exclusion, the Irish agencies organizing the festivities believe they are contributing to the notion that cultural interchange and pluralism provide new models of interaction. For this reason, many of the Irish agencies taking part in the parade were willing to include some representations of Irishness that played on alterity: representations that include forms of Irish traditional music and dance that are connected to visions of Celticism. In a postcolonial sense this is problematic in that rather than traditional culture providing a source of counter-hegemonic struggle against the imposition of an inferior Irish identity it can represent the conirmation of essentialist notions of difference. In other words, though the Irish organizers may think that Irish traditional culture represents a positive identity and provides pluralism, the ‘colonial gaze’ operates as the once-colonized ind their authenticity prescribed, hierarchized, and fetishized as cultural surplus value (Hutnyk 2000, Graham 2001). Another pertinent explanation of why a model of incorporation should be elided in this instance is that there is no single locus of dominant power in society to which resistant cultures can be opposed. Instead, there are a plethora of points at which power is momentarily located, none containing the power to swallow up en masse oppositional cultures. Prospecting the London St Patrick’s Day parade and festival, it is impossible to identify an incorporating dominant power; the varied roles of local government funding the event, multinational corporations providing sponsorship, and the mass media portraying events mean it is certainly too simplistic to argue that these institutions represent a monolithic coalition that

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can be contained within the catch-all discursive formation of ‘dominant culture’ (Baumann 1996). The connections between these institutions are tenuous and characterized by luidity. One example of this situation involves Ken Livingstone, the leader of the GLA, who is often portrayed by the media as a hard-line socialist; dubbed ‘Red Ken’, he is more often characterized as opposed to the free market and pandering to the London-Irish. The context in which the GLA inancially supports the festivities is to advocate multiculturalism and inclusivity as part of its commitment to anti-racist policies and instilling a shared sense of London identity. As the GLA (2004: 56) states: ‘revealing the hidden stories of London’s diaspora communities is central to the Mayor’s commitment to equality and to promoting mutual understanding’. If theories of appropriation/incorporation or resistance are not satisfactory models, what is? One model would be to look toward those models that emphasize the ‘liminal’ and subversive potential of rituals like the carnival. The ‘liminal time’ represents the transcendent in-between period of a ritual, which facilitates the abandonment of forms and the dissolution of ixed stereotypes and categories, where the familiar is ‘stripped of its certitude and conventional politics and economics transcended’ (St John 2000: 35–6). People and groups ordinarily distanced from each other in common life are placed together to provide commensality and to imagine social alternatives. Such a model is useful for spaces such as the carnival which, for a leeting moment, represents ‘life turned inside out, the reverse side of the world … laws, prohibitions, and restrictions … are suspended’ (Bakhtin 1998: 251). Contemporary St Patrick’s Day celebrations are partially liminal or carnivalesque spaces. By this, I mean celebrations are typically promoted by advertisers and sponsors as places where subjects go to participate in experiences often presumed to be ‘other worldly’ or the reverse side of modern day life characterized by ennui, repression, and routine. The copious consumption of alcohol to induce out-ofcontrol drunkenness and the fact that above all one is supposed to engage in hedonistic fun plays neatly into the idea that the celebrations are a space in which to abandon one’s self to the ‘Celtic primitive’. Problematically, however, the ‘liminal time’ does not include formal rituals and invented, mostly staged, statesponsored, ceremonial spectacles, which rely on strict rules governing normative behaviour, costume, body comportment and participation. In this conspectus, such spectacles represent the victory of structure over the transcendent power of the anti-structure liminal. The emphasis here is placed on constructing the illusion of ixity and common purpose; ambiguity and improvisation are curtailed, as the failure to carry out the prescribed enactions result in harsh censure. Characterized as rites devised to enforce shared cultural values, this offers a static concept of culture, erasing agency and negating room for subversion and social critique. Events such as the London St Patrick’s Day parade and festival are problematic because they are anomalous and conspicuously fail to be neatly categorized as either liminal and transcendent, or ceremonial and thus the negation of social critique. The parade and festival contained elements of both. On the one hand, there was no real themed structuring of the parade, and anybody could take part

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and represent a brand of Irishness they deemed it. On the other hand, the route of the parade, the venue of the music, and the choice of acts taking part were all ixed. Such spectacles are thus ‘multidimensional’, including a range of motivations for why participants come along; they are also polysemic: one organization cannot control the meaning of the festivities. By providing an ethnographic description of the festivities, I want to show how the remit of inclusivity encouraged in the parade made it politically ambiguous, combining voluntary and ascribed behaviour, spectator passivity and participation. Oscillating between genres, the festival can be interpreted and contested in multiple ways, varying between global, nationalistic, religious, ethnic, and local celebrations. Its very contradictory, even schizoid character, deies the simplistic categories of incorporation or resistance. Understanding ritual as a dramatic political performance which reveals the complex relationships between groups in society (Bryan 2000, Kertzer 1988), the chapter considers how multiculturalism is conceived, enacted and contested through public spectacle.

The Parade: Everybody is Irish on St Patrick’s Day The premise of a major St Patrick’s Day festival had appeared attractive to a number of Irish groups for a few years. The festival was partly inspired by the example of the Afro-Caribbean organized Notting Hill Carnival, which had developed from being a small carnival based on the one in Trinidad to one of the largest ‘multicultural’ festivals in the world (Cohen 1994). The origins of the Notting Hill Carnival were signiicant, acting as a comparative model for the Irish. Notting Hill, an area comprising many post-war Afro-Caribbean settlers, had often been characterized by vicious race riots, with the Afro-Caribbean community coming under attack. The instigation of carnival had ushered in a focus to foment and display pride for the Afro-Caribbean population across England. Currently, the Notting Hill Carnival comprises two whole days at the end of August. Covering a bank holiday, ‘carnival’ regularly attracts upwards of two million festivalgoers from all around the world. Carnival has also been oficially sponsored by a multinational company who make izzy drinks (Nurse 1999), and is now roundly celebrated in almost all quarters as evidence of the ‘exotic’ contribution the black Afro-Caribbean community endows to cosmopolitan London, thus providing a successful model of multiculturalism. Not only has ‘carnival’, as it is now simply designated, to some extent heightened the prestige of the Afro-Caribbean community, it is also a lens through which the community can mark itself out as an ‘ethnic minority’ deserving of precious public funding and resources. This visibility has often been negated to some extent, because incidents of violence and crime at the carnival have been seized on by elements of the media, highlighting such occurrences as putative evidence of the criminality of the Afro-Caribbean community (Cohen 1994).

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Taking inspiration from the example of the Notting Hill Carnival, there had been a campaign by London-Irish groups for a public-funded St Patrick’s Day for a number of years. The campaign was given added impetus when Ken Livingstone was elected London Mayor in 2000. In 2001, Livingstone held a meeting with around 90 Irish community organizations to outline a joint strategy to garner support from Irish businesses and community organizations in London for a festival. It was agreed then that for 2002 a St Patrick’s Day parade was to be organized by the GLA, in conjunction with a private partner, Smurit Communications, and over one hundred London-Irish community organizations led by the Council of Irish Counties Association. The GLA provided a gross contribution of £135,000 towards the overall cost of £235,000 for the celebrations. Smurit Communications, who gained a tender from the GLA to design the show, raised the remainder from charity donations. If that alone did not dismiss any remaining suggestion that the Mayor’s sponsoring of the event was half-hearted, Ken Livingstone appeared on the Sunday morning to lead the march from its starting point outside Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales. When Livingstone irst appeared that morning outside Westminster Cathedral, the throngs of Irish milling outside waiting for the parade cheered and called out to Livingstone, recognizing he had always been a good friend to the Irish in London. There remained a few cynics who were willing to suggest with polls showing over 30 per cent of Londoners espousing some form of an Irish heritage, the Lord Mayor was not doing his future electoral chances any damage. In the weeks leading up to the day, some dissenting voices could be heard. A member of the centre-right Conservative Party, Graham Whitton, had managed to garner a bit of publicity for himself by stating the GLA should not be sponsoring the Irish when no money was afforded for the celebration of St George, England’s Saint’s Day. The English are the biggest community in London, the politician pointed out. His comments were reiterated by the ‘Save Our Sovereignty’ campaign, which organized a St George’s Day march on 21 April, a month after St Patrick’s Day. The march attracted only a few hundred, dominated by a single issue: criticising Britain’s status within the EU. Elsewhere, the state funding of St Patrick’s Day caused further consternation. In 2005 the Irish Post newspaper printed a letter demanding to know why St Patrick’s Day was funded and St George’s Day was not. A reader wrote into explain what they saw as the difference between the two celebrations: Irish people have always held thousands of St Patrick’s Day parties all over the world, and have given millions of people of all nationalities the opportunity to share the craic.4 Unfortunately St George’s Day up to now does not have the same spirit of joy and inclusiveness. It is a tragedy that many people cling to the

4

‘Craic’ is an Irish expression for ‘fun’.

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outdated attitude that you can only demonstrate pride in England by attacking another community (Irish Post, 6 April 2005)

The most virulent comments regarding public funds being furnished on the London’s St Patrick’s Day celebration came from Julie Burchill, a national newspaper columnist. In an attack on what she identiied as the propensity of statesponsored multiculturalism to fund intolerant and illiberal groupings, such as Irish Roman Catholicism, she wrote: Who can forget the recent example of Mayor Livingstone who contributed hundreds of thousands of pounds of Londoners’ money to celebrate Irishness last St Patrick’s Day? To celebrate, that is, almost compulsory child molestation by the national Church, total discrimination against women, who wish to be priests, aiding and abetting Herr Hitler in his hour of need, and outlawing abortion and divorce (Burchill 2003).5

Despite some populist critique regarding the use of public funds for the 2002 St Patrick’s Day parade, on the morning of the parade many people congregated inside Westminster Cathedral to celebrate a special St Patrick’s Day mass with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. After mass, the congregation spilled out into the square, which is the entrance to the Cathedral. A considerable crowd had begun to build up, milling around and engaging in excited chat as the various loats and groups made last minute preparations before the parade commenced. Vendors selling Irish tricolours and sprigs of shamrock cashed in while from inside Westminster Cathedral a 30-foot elongated papier-mâché snake operated by children emerged into the square closely followed by the Cardinal, who lailed his arms to shoo away the snake. The symbolism of the theatrical performance was clear for all to divine; the Cardinal was recreating the legendary occasion in Irish mythology when St Patrick delivered his most famous act: driving the snakes out of Christian Ireland. With the snake expelled from Westminster Cathedral, the parade was ready to embark. Ken Livingstone, as London Mayor, attended by notable dignitaries from the Irish community, including the Irish Republic’s ambassador to Britain, Edward Barrington, headed the march alongside a gigantic Irish wolfhound, the parade’s mascot, handled by a man in a green kilt. An elderly woman sporting her green afro-wig, who was standing with the London-Mayo association group, turned round and said to me, ‘That’s one thing us Irish always do well: get a grand dog for a parade.’ Following behind was the band of the Royal Irish Guards, a regiment in the British army. As the Irish Guards started to march, their band struck up Bill Hayley’s classic tune, ‘Rock around the Clock’. Four other bands followed. Irish 5 The reference to ‘aiding and abetting Herr Hitler in his hour of need’ presumably derives from the fact that during the Second World War the government of Ireland remained neutral rather than siding with the allies.

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members of the London Metropolitan Police and London ireighters, furnished neatly in their ceremonial uniforms and green sashes, followed in the slipstream heading towards the Houses of Parliament. A lotilla of decorated vehicles (there were ifteen altogether) began to motor off at a steady speed just above walking pace. There were loats from many of London’s traditional Irish music association branches, mostly illed with children playing the tunes learnt over the duration of the term. Many London-Irish community centres sponsored loats with workers dressed up, for instance, as characters from Father Ted, a popular Irish comedy show on television about Catholic priests. One loat was bedecked with people dressed as famous Irish historical igures and characters from Irish myths ; one participant came as a banshee with de rigueur demonic red-eyed stare and scrawny unkempt black hair, which folded under her feet. Leprechauns on stilts followed. They were cheered one and all with gusto. Thinking this was the extent of the parade, I followed. Within a couple of minutes of walking down Victoria Street along the parade route it became apparent that I was marching under the banner of the ‘London County Mayo Association’. Judging by the cheers and applause of the revelers lining the parade, I was taking part in the parade. Obviously, unlike the most famous St Patrick’s Day parade – in New York City – there was no discernible strict and contentious vetting of who took part in the parade, and no barriers and police to stop the crowd from running on to the parade path. Anyone who fancied the fun of marching could do so and all seemed welcome. In the parade were hundreds of families, with parents pushing children in pushchairs, who, if old enough, waved a miniature tricolour as they moved towards Parliament Square. Some of the parents played a bodhrán (drum) or a tin whistle while children sang. Behind us were young children, as young as three, dressed in their elaborately sewn step-dancing dresses and suits, stopping every few minutes to perform a brief jig, often at the behest of parents. Behind them marched the Irish republican ‘Wolfe Tone Society’. The rear of the parade was made up with multitudes not associated to any organization. One group was bedecked in mountainous papier-mâché costumes designed to represent members of the Irish rock band, ‘U2’. In the midst of the throng was a van adorned with loud speakers, booming out a thunderous bass pulse that sent a sonic shudder through the parade. Perhaps most incongruous was a contingent from the ‘Pioneers Association’, a group of individuals who had made a lifelong pledge to abstain from alcohol marching behind a series of people costumed as life-sized pints of Murphy’s Stout in a marketing exercise. The usual ire-eaters and jugglers were positioned somewhere in the middle of the parade. Organizers later estimated that in the region of 8,000 people walked along the parade route. The parade sauntered past the Houses of Parliament on to Whitehall, and we were shocked to witness crowds lined four and ive deep at the side of the road, nearly all waving tricolours or perhaps dressed in their emerald green Irish soccer jerseys. The police estimated that at least 20,000 people lined the route. Educated estimates beforehand suggested that perhaps a few thousand would turn up if lucky.

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It almost seemed strange walking down Whitehall through the kernel of what could easily be described as the centre of the British political establishment. For located in this environment is the Ministry of Defence, the Cenotaph (including the tomb of the ‘unknown soldier’), and not least of all Downing Street, the residence of the UK Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Wolfe Tone Society, marching in the parade, slowed down as they approached Downing Street, and the band struck up with renewed and augmented lourish a song stating in no uncertain terms: ‘you will never defeat the IRA’. The political point of the act, directed as it was towards the British government, was unambiguous. If the crowds along Whitehall were impressive, as we turned into Trafalgar Square to complete the parade the sight of tens of thousands of well-wishers congregating inside the square and on top of every vantage point from where people could get a view of the concert stage directly under the gaze of Nelson’s Column was astonishing. Though the police reported 30,000 had descended upon Trafalgar Square, nearly everyone I spoke to guessed nearer double the igure seemed more realistic given access to the square was now impossible due to the crowd. The organizers afterwards claimed there were 50,000 in Trafalgar Square with over 100,000 taking part in all the festivities. The crowds had become so congested at the entrance of Trafalgar Square that the parade participants had to march single ile. Walking up towards the National Gallery on the far side of the square, I spotted two women from the ‘Riverdance’ class at the Irish Cultural Centre; both were tailored in their step-dancing dresses embroidered in a complicated Celtic design. Armed with a compact disc player and speakers, the two dancers, both born and brought up in London, danced a well-rehearsed jig they learnt at the Irish Centre on a Tuesday evening. A crowd gathered round the dancers clapping in time and shouting in appreciation. The following Tuesday night I spoke to one of the dancers and asked her why she had decided to perform a public routine at Trafalgar Square. She explained to me the performance was sponsored by Smurit Communications, the huge Irish publishing company and owners of the Irish Post newspaper, who were acting as one of the main sponsors and organizers for the parade and concert. The opportunity for the two women to dance at such a public spectacle could only further increase their proile as future professional dancers. All the other organizers and corporate sponsors could be clearly seen. Murphy’s, the Irish stout brewery, for instance, had their own private enclosure covered with a specially erected marquee for the day just to the side of the stage, with admittance restricted to card-holding VIPs. Many of the London-Irish social help and cultural agencies had tents: Cara irish housing association, brent irish advisory service, the Council of Irish County Associations, etc. Altogether, there were more than one hundred Irish community groups represented at the parade. ‘The Porterhouse’, an Irish theme bar in nearby Covent Garden, employed people to walk around handing out glossy promotional lealets advertising its products. The perfunctory assortment of stalls ‘showcasing Irish food’ (champ and Irish stew), ‘crafts and culture’ (typically commercial vendors selling ostentatiously priced Donegal

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tweed caps, shawls and Aran jumpers, Celtic style broaches and replica torques), were clearly visible.6 A children’s play area catered for face-painting, stilt-walking and storytelling. For the 2004 St Patrick’s Day festivities, partly relocated to the prestigious Southbank complex on the River Thames, the organizers offered: a variety of entertainment from Irish music, song and dance to rock and pop acts. You can catch performances from some of Ireland’s leading acts’. A second stage located in front of the National Theatre will feature some of London’s inest Irish traditional and folk acts as well as music … There will be several marquees along the Queens Walk area showcasing Irish food and drink, Arts & Crafts, Music and dance workshops and a tourism Ireland village. There will also be several bars and food outlets and also a Children’s Zone.7

After the completion of the parade, the music concert began at 3pm. One after another a host of Irish music acts, mostly lown in for the afternoon, performed for 30 minutes. First was ‘Belleire’, quickly followed by ‘No Way Out’ – two girl groups performing their latest songs. The Wexford Male Choir took centre stage to perform choral versions of popular Irish songs. The procession was continued by ‘Celtic Feet’, a step-dancing troupe from the Midlands of England who were highly reminiscent of ‘Riverdance’. The inal hurrah was provided by the ‘legendary’ ‘Dubliners’, an Irish folk group singing all their classic hits, many of which were known word perfect judging by the crowd singing along. By this point the rain had returned. Seeking out a different form of moist relief, we entered an Irish ‘theme bar’ in nearby Covent Garden. Walking into the entrance, I was astonished to see plastered on to the loor a Guinness advertisement especially manufactured for St Patrick’s Day. The advertisement consisted of footprints; printed on each foot was a label, (‘left’, ‘right’), and there was also an accompanying statement: ‘to help the Irish remember their left foot from their right’. The joke, supposedly an ironic play on age old ‘anti-Irish’ humour, is founded on the equally old stereotype that the Irish are inherently stupid and prone to irrationality. The Irish person in such jokes, as Edmund Leach (1979) pointed out, ‘is not so much a igure of fun as an object of contempt merging into deep hostility’. The anti-Irish joke, historically pervasive in sections of British popular culture, became particularly visible in popular culture after the instigation of the Northern Irish ‘troubles’ in 1969. This humour formed a crescendo on national television in the 1970s when ‘comedians’ would base a substantial part of their ‘comedic’ repertoire laughing at the Irish. Nobody as far as I could see appeared to be taking much of an exception to the Guinness advert. After all, it was 2002 and it was supposedly seen to be ironic; it was the Irish – Guinness being an Irish company and attaining iconic Irish cultural status – laughing at themselves, and if the Irish can’t laugh at themselves, then who could? 6 a torque is the heavy gold necklace worn by Celtic chieftains. 7 .

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Yet the performance of traditional culture is often a place where stereotypes are enacted and the body becomes fundamental to the process of constituting and articulating self/national identity. For example, in Carol Trosset’s (1993) analysis of the Welsh cultural festival eisteddfodau, she identiies a particular performance style associated with eisteddfodau, the use of highly stylized facial animation, which has become an important aspect of ‘Welsh subject-hood’, that of ‘emotionalism’ (Davies 1998: 149). Such emotional style is standardized in the festival and rigorously demarcates ways of acting emotionally. Children who learn the conventions of the festival become socialized at a young age into performing a speciic Welsh identity. The use of humour, as well as the encouragement of people to perform a key stereotype of the Irish – drunken stupidity – provides a darker, more malignant shadow on the presence of ethnicity at the London St Patrick’s Day parade. If, however, the feeling from many participants was that anti-Irish sentiment was something of the past, the point of St Patrick’s Day parade for many LondonIrish symbolized the oficial recognition of the Irish community as an integral and welcome constituent of London life. The parade had taken place through ‘the very heart of London’ (O’Neill 2002), as a London-Irish writer noted. That the parade had ended and the concert had taken place in Trafalgar Square seemed ever more poignant, seeing that until the mid-1990s Irish-related gatherings, parades and protests had been proscribed from taking pace in the square. Until now, Irish parades in London were irmly associated with supporting Irish nationalism. That the St Patrick’s Day parade was sponsored by the GLA, with the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, providing a personal endorsement by leading the parade, provided a striking visual and aural impression. Indeed, judging by the decibels of the parade and the concert, the Irish were enmeshed into the fabric of London’s mainstream. The routing of the parade through central London provided a grid to allow a number of diverse, often unrelated Irish groups and associations to articulate their political agendas, or participate in increasing their public proile. Irish agencies dependent on government funding gained from a considerable Irish presence, with mass media representation of the celebrations making more credible their claims for increased funding. These organizations, struggling to make an impact in a ‘multicultural’ milieu’ beneited from the increased media proile the parade received in the national television news and newspapers. For the Irish nationalist Wolfe Tone Society the parade provided a chance to strike at the core of the metropolitan, colonial centre. Singing Irish republican songs as they passed Downing Street furnished the perfect opportunity for the Wolfe Tone Society to make a political point, however unsubtle. Their presence on the parade made sure that Irish nationalism as a distinct ibre of Irish identity was not missing. The Royal Irish Guards and the police, once seen by many (and still seen by some, like the Wolfe Tone Society) as bastions of British oppression against Irish people in Ireland and Britain, were included to demonstrate that the London-Irish held no grudges, and all shades of identity could be contained by a pluralist ethos.

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The power invested by staging the parade through the centre of London was not only conined to signifying the legitimisation of Irish inclusion in British cultural life; it also provided a neutral space where seemingly anyone, irrespective of identity, could participate. The presence of South Asian bhangra drummers and Chinese dragons at the parade gave added emphasis to the disseminated idea the parade was truly ‘multicultural’. This stood in juxtaposition with St Patrick’s Day parades in previous years, which had taken place in areas that have historically hosted considerable Irish populations, like Willesden in north London, a part of Brent council which contains Britain’s largest resident Irish population. The parade journeyed from Willesden Green tube station up to its inish at Willesden Green, passing on its way a crowd of 5,000 or so. Rarely more than the local Irish would attend, their presence unreported in the national media. The 2002 parade in central London, however, reiterated the cry: ‘On St. Patrick’s Day everybody is Irish’. For the Irish agencies that organized the London parade, the declaration offered a chance to offer out the hand of friendship, a rapprochement with the host nation. For others, such as Guinness, disseminating the notion everybody could be Irish was a highly proitable discourse. Leading up to St Patrick’s Day, Guinness unleashed adverts asking: ‘St Who’s Day?’ Included in the advert was a Swede, a Jewish folk singer, and a Chinese Elvis singing interpretations of the Irish ballad ‘Danny Boy’ – before again inviting us to ‘give praise’ on 17 March (see O’Neill 2002). As the company claimed, drinking Guinness, the unoficial drink of the Irish, automatically bestows Irishness upon those who imbibe it – in other words, anybody can be Irish. For the London-Irish the route through central London thus attained what Shields would call a ‘social centrality’ (Shields, 1991: 103). That is, particular sites take on a symbolic signiicance around which identities are constituted and performed (Nagle 2008b, 2009a, 2009b). Central London signiied a ‘social centrality’ for the London-Irish because it represents the heart of the oficial a centre of Britain, and a site from which the marginalized Irish had previously been proscribed. In this regard, Henri Lefebvre noted that every society creates sites of social centrality in which authority is inscribed: ‘the consolidation needs centres; it needs to ix them, to monumentalize them (socially) and specialize them (mentally)’ (1976: 86). Processes of centralization aspired to be total under contemporary capitalism, argued Lefebvre (1991: 332), and in so doing attempt to expel ‘all peripheral elements with a violence that is inherent in space itself’. Lefebvre argued that cities increasingly possess centres of power and peripheries of exclusion. This binary of centres and banlieues, argued Lefebvre, was largely part of the progressive extension of the capitalist and statist production of space to concentrate the decision-making centre while creating dependent colonies on the margins: ‘around the centres there are nothing but subjugated, exploited and dependent spaces: new colonial space’ (Lefebvre 1978: 85). In Lefebvre’s synopsis, however, space is never completely imposed by the state. ‘The rationality of state’, writes Lefebvre (1991: 23), ‘its techniques, plans and programmes provoke opposition’. These seething forces of opposition ‘are still

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capable of rattling the lid of the cauldron of the state and its space, for differences can never be totally quieted’. For Lefebvre (1996) it was important that groups demand their ‘right to the city’. Lefebvre’s proclamation for the ‘right to the city’ was deeply radical, involving the formation of a participatory urban democracy and the overcoming of social divisions. He called this process the oeuvre – a work in which all citizens participate; a collective, not a singular project emerges, and new modes of living and inhabiting are invented. Lefebvre also argued for groups to constitute ‘counter spaces’, a ight against ‘specialized space and a narrow localization of function’ (1991: 382–3). The initiation of an Irish presence in the city centre could not be classiied as the ‘revolutionary initiative’ demanded by Lefebvre to ‘realize to fruition solutions to urban problems’ (Lefebvre 1996: 154). It is not only that the St Patrick’s Day parade can be accused of representing the particularistic interests of the irish and as such underplaying the universalistic politics of class solidarity; Lefebvre admitted that forms of class struggle ‘are now far more varied than formerly. Naturally, they include the political action of minorities’ (Lefebvre 1991: 55). The issue is not so much whether minority groups are able to obtain space, but more crucially what they are able to do within the space. Focusing on St Patrick’s Day parades, a major part of the problem is with the nature of the celebration itself and how for many it seems to portray stereotypical representations of Irishness. An Irish publisher working in London noted of St Patrick’s Day celebrations in the capital: I really don’t like the way the stereotypes come out. I ind myself deliberately avoiding pubs and parades that day. Possibly for that reason I don’t think London’s a nice place to celebrate it [St Patrick’s Day] … I don’t really identify with the celebrations in London … I received various ‘sure and begorrah’ emails from non-Irish friends and colleagues presumed to be hungover/dying for a pint/ going for a massive session several times by the same people. I walked three miles through London passed various scruffy pubs all advertising Guinness, St Patrick’s Day specials and wacky revellers with krazy Guinness furry hats (Nagle 2005b).

A second-generation Irish woman in London mused: I looked in one shop for St Pat’s cards but every one of them had a pint of Guinness on them. This reinforces the notion of the drunken Irish. It would be nice to see ‘tasteful’ cards instead of Guinness and leprechauns (Nagle 2005b).

Carnival Contested As we can see, there is some level of disjuncture between how St Patrick’s Day is promoted by the London-Irish organizers as a vehicle to promote a positive

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identity and how some of my informants are anxious regarding the retrogressive commercial appropriation of the celebrations. It is worth exploring how public spectacles provide a matrix for discrepancies of meaning between various groups and individuals; how they can luctuate between a radical critique of society and a co-opted conformation of conservativism; and how they can oscillate between engendering an inclusive community and facilitating discord and acrimony. Illuminating the complexity and multidimensionality of public spectacle affords a clearer understanding of its role in ‘staging’ multiculturalism. To begin with, looking at the carnival form speciically, theorists have often viewed it in Manichean terms. For some, the carnival represents a radical cultural politics of social transformation, allowing actors to engage in status reversals, of constituting and understanding the position of the ‘other’, as well as transgressive practices that ‘embod[y] symbolic forms of resistance to the instrumental rationality of modern life’ (Hetherington, 1998). For others, the carnival represents a conservative, co-opted spectacle allowing ‘the masses’ to blow off steam by providing a temporary licence to express powerful impulses normally kept in check by a repressive moral code, or a rite that provides the pleasures of unconstrained, ‘impulse buying’ consumerism (Shields, 1991). The complexity of carnival derives partly from both its pre-Christian roots in the Roman festival of Saturnalia and then its co-option as a Christian celebration – the ‘feast of fools’. As a pre-Lenten feast day, the carnival provides a momentary break from fasting as one is allowed to indulge in the forbidden. The carnival is attractive to people ‘because it occasions release from the constraints and pressures of the social order, generates relationships of amity even among strangers and allows forbidden excesses … individuals can recreate their self-identity’ (Cohen 1994: 3). The carnival has often been portrayed as synonymous with social transgression because it can represent what Bakhtin (1998) called ‘monde l’enver’ (‘a world turned upside down’) in which social norms are turned on their head. The transgressive nature of the carnival derives from how groups seek to symbolically invert the meanings associated with the established binary codes that make up society (Hetherington 1998: 147). In the carnival the grotesque supplants the classical, the disorderly overturns the orderly and those with a low a status become promoted to a high rank. In the carnival, the boundaries of the normative social order can be challenged ‘through acts of transgressive wastefulness, eroticism, drug-induced states, foul language, and the rejection of taboos’ (1998: 147). For Bakhtin (1981) – for whom the carnivalesque was a site of disorder and transgression – the performance of monstrous and grotesque identities, especially forms humour which mocked authority, challenged the conventions of social order. The mixing and blurring of genres further add to the subversive visage of carnival. However, while carnival can imagine the moment when the world is turned upside down, it could be argued that this juxtaposition of the familiar with the strange acts to conirm hierarchy. This point was very much central to the ideas of Victor Turner (1967, 1969), an anthropologist who researched the social and

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political power of ritual. Although Turner was particularly interested in the rites of passage ritual rather than carnival per se, his ideas have a strong resonance for analyzing carnival. Adapting the ideas of an earlier anthropologist, Van Gennep (1960), Turner outlined the rites of passage as containing three stages: ‘separation’, ‘liminal’ and ‘reintegration’. In particular, the middle ‘liminal’ stage of the ritual represents the transition in a status sequence between two positions, normally between an unachieved social status and that which has been achieved. The liminal was particularly interesting because it was here that the position of individuals and society were most ambiguous: they are ‘neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony’ (Turner 1969: 95). Importantly, in the liminal stage, normative social convention, rank and statuses were dissolved. This dissolution of order gave scope, Turner noted, for the temporary abandonment of social cleavages and hierarchies which divided individuals. This moment of anti-structure could engender a ‘relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders’ (1969: 96). Despite liminal rituals including an element where everything momentarily becomes its opposite, for Turner this was not to say that it always signiied a process leading to the transgression of social order. Indeed, the very opposite could be said. According to Turner, these rituals in which statuses were inverted were the means through which social order could be reintegrated and afirmed: Cognitively, nothing underlines regularity so well as absurdity or paradox. Emotionally, nothing satisies as much as extravagant or temporarily permitted illicit behaviour. Rituals of status reversal accommodate both aspects. By making the low high and high low, they reafirm the hierarchical principle (1969: 176)

In other words, the temporary abandonment of social licence was permitted to provide a social drama which conirmed the immorality of a world turned upside down. As Cohen (1985: 59) agrees: ‘ritual occupies a prominent place in the repertoire of symbolic devices through which boundaries are afirmed and reinforced’. If Turner’s analysis of ritual was mostly limited to small scale societies, where ritual delineated speciic social functions and roles, in so-called ‘complex’ and highly differentiated societies the carnival does not have such an instrumental capacity. Nevertheless, this does not mean that carnival in modern urban settings possesses a stronger capacity for fomenting radicalism. Indeed, many urban scholars fret about the contemporary proliferation of festivals, parades and carnival. These anxieties are varied and multiple. A major form of anxiety concerns how public spectacles are essentially coopted by the state and its private partners as instruments of hegemonic power or public relations ventures that shift local attention away from everyday social problems in the city (Gotham 2005). In this scenario, the mass production of

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festivals and celebrations are little more than a ‘carnival mask’ that covers continuing disinvestment and increasing social inequality (Harvey 1989: 168 ). Such spectacles are also often used as a means for generating proit and supporting inward investment. Carnivals and public events can certainly be used as part of ongoing ‘cultural strategies’ of economic redevelopment, including ‘adaptive reuse, designating areas of the city as artistic quarters, and historical preservation, among others, are becoming common features of cities in which consumption and leisure become “experiences” to be consumed, collected and displayed’ (Gotham 2005: 227). As such they are also often a constituent part of tourist-led efforts to brand the city as ‘vibrant, dynamic, afluent, healthy, tolerant, cosmopolitan and sexy’ (Waitt 2008). The document London Cultural Capital: Realising the Potential of a World Class City (GLA, 2004) places a strong emphasis on cultural activity in the city to provide, predictably, a means to ‘brand London’, to raise revenue by promoting itself as a world cultural city and tourist destination. The document continues: ‘London is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world. The capital’s reputation as a multicultural city has been in the making for centuries. The vibrant mixture of diverse cultures is a major factor in the success of London’s creative proile’ (2004: 15). ‘Visit London’, the oficial tourist website for London, further markets ‘multicultural London’. On the website the prospective tourist can ind proiles of a number of diasporic groups available to be consumed by the cosmopolitan traveller. Its guide to the London-Irish informs the tourist that the ‘Irish are one of the oldest and largest communities in London, and as such, have had an enormous impact on the city. Look around, and you’ll see plenty of evidence of Irish culture and heritage everywhere you go’. The website promotes the London St Patrick’s Day festival as a day to ‘experience all things’ and the Irish Cultural Centre as a place to hear the ‘many different voices of Irish culture, both old and new’. The website inally encourages the tourist to experience a ‘day in the life of Irish London’, predictably concluding the evening with a visit to an ‘authentic’ Irish bar to indulge in some ‘late night shenanigans’ and a pint of Guinness (see: ). Henri Lefebvre (1958) pointed out how consumer society frames leisure practices as offering liberation from worry and necessity (Gotham 2005). In a related way, carnival, as a form of leisure and entertainment, can sell ethnicity and alterity in the same way as tourism manufactures the need for vacations based on the consumption of indigenes. For those seeking respite from modern life, these leisure pursuits are aimed at those westerners who are longing for the authenticity that is perceived to be inherent in the cultures and lifestyles of others. Manning (1983: 26), for example, noted the mass presence of North American white tourists at the Rio Carnival, many of whom were seeking ‘to encounter a pristine and genuine spirit of festivity that they believe has been “lost” in their own society’. St Patrick’s Day is clearly a public spectacle which appears to be increasingly dominated by the forces of commercialism. Its appeal can be judged by how major public celebrations are no longer conined to Ireland and major centres of the

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Irish diaspora; in recent years diverse locations, like EuroDisney Paris, Gabon in africa, Omote–Sando Avenue in Tokyo and Moscow’s central thoroughfare of Novy Arbat, which hosted Europe’s biggest celebration in 2006, have hosted parades. There has also been a recent instigation of a parade in Singapore in 2006, replete with the local police band, Malay cultural dancers and ‘drag queens’ bedecked in Irish emerald green. In Gabon, Africa, Guinness took the occasion of St Patrick’s Day to launch new products with a state-sponsored celebration in 1998 (Adair and Cronin 2002: 241). This popularity is in large part to the efforts of Guinness and other sponsors seeking to extend their markets. For 2006, it was estimated that in Britain St Patrick’s Day added £40 million of revenue, most of which were refreshments, souvenirs, entrance to events and greeting cards. Mobile phone network operators estimated that over 100 million St Patrick’s Day text greetings were sent in Britain on the day – the third highest total after New Year and St Valentine’s Day (Irish Post 2006a). Little wonder that the GLA’s Deputy Mayor, Nicky Gavron, said of the London-Irish during the unveiling of plans for St Patrick’s Day: ‘their vibrancy and talent is a boost to London life not to mention London’s economy’ (Irish Post 2004a). The argument that public spectacles are largely co-opted tends to characterize them as rituals based upon the irm ixing of identities, typically wrought through rigorous stage management, regulation, exclusion and incorporation (Edensor 2002). The organizers of public spectacles also limit the role of people to spectators; ‘indeed they are alienated from them. People watch them because they are alluring, but the spectacles are put on for them; people are not an integral part of them’ (Ritzer 2005: 95) [emphasis original]. The depiction of St Patrick’s Day as a wholly appropriated ritual, however, appears out of kilter with more recent descriptions of public festivals as ‘more protean, adaptable and contested, [which] can be the site of divergent performances and change from year to year’ (Edensor 2002: 82). They can be ‘both subversive and co-optable … potentially disruptive, they become contested ground, with different sides seeking to control and impose meaning on events’ (Gerstin 2000: 312). Ritual is thus a form of political contestation, involving a battle over narrative power, the ight over who gets to retell the story, and from which position. rather than stereotyping public spectacles as either progressive or oppressive, Gotham (2005: 226) argues the task is to focus attention on ‘aspects that reinforce relations of domination while illuminating the diverse forms of resistance that people engage in to challenge inequalities and promote social justice’. The multidimensional aspect of public spectacles means that while they can pacify people, ferment political indifference and stimulate consumption, they can also ‘sow the seeds of immanent critique that provide the breeding grounds for relexive action and opposition’ (Gotham 2005: 240). Similarly, as other theorists note (Kertzer 1988, Bryan 2000), while ritual enables domination this has limits; ‘ritual provides a space for resistance and negotiation’ (Bryan 2000: 176). Importantly, ‘the interests that groups and signiicant individuals have in utilizing

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public spectacle change depending upon the particular political situation at the time’ (2000: 176) London’s St Patrick’s Day illuminates some of this ambivalence and complexity. Like many other forms of carnival, St Patrick’s Day is a feast day, a break from Lent in which adherents are allowed to temporarily abandon rigorous fasting by indulging in the forbidden. Since alcohol is often proscribed during Lent the copious consumption of alcohol is seen as an integral part of St Patrick’s Day. While ritualized alcohol consumption practices can act as a social lubricant, helping to dissolve barriers between people, they can also have dire consequences in terms of the destructive capacity of alcohol addiction and its role in perpetuating negative stereotypes of Irishness. Often perceived as merely an excuse to throw a party, st Patrick’s Day enshrines the representation of the Irish as essentially playful, avatars of good times. Drink is seen as an intrinsic contributor to merriment on the day; breweries like Guinness and distillers such as Jameson’s happily encourage through advertisement, the alcoholic beverage as an essential part of the celebrations. Drunkenness has provided one of the core stereotypes of Irishness; its addiction being linked to the supposed frail control which Irish people have over their bodies (Hickman 1998). St Patrick’s Day is also framed as an extremely inclusive celebration. This inclusivity is summed up in the epithet often used by organizers of parades: ‘On St Patrick’s Day everyone is Irish’. The beginning of the chapter noted how the organizers of the London St Patrick’s Day purposely promote the idea that the celebration is open to all individuals and it is an opportunity for non-irish to learn about the positive contribution of the London-Irish. Inclusivity has often been identiied as a constituent element of ritual and carnival. The engendering of ‘status reversals’, for instance, allows participants to experience identities they are ordinarily distanced from. In this sense, the carnival, in particular, seems particularly apposite to multiculturalism and the need to spread cross-community dialogue and intercultural exchange. The liminal aspect of carnival, furthermore, embodies inclusivity by ensuring, as Turner argued, that, human beings are stripped of anything that might differentiate them from their fellow human beings. For Turner (1969) this means of binding diversity together and overcoming cleavages represented the goal of ‘communitas’, a transient experience of equal togetherness. As Cohen (1985: 50) states: ‘ritual conirms and strengthens social identity and people’s sense of social location: it is an important means through which people experience community’. This analysis of ritual, as St John (2001) argues, characterizes it as a sphere wherein homogeneity and unity prevail over the disunity of diverse ethnicities, cultures and classes. Ritual is seen endowing an identiication among members which is so absolute as to be tantamount to the stripping away of all the social impedimenta which would otherwise divide and distinguish them (Cohen 1985: 55). Many anthropologists have challenged this conception of ritual and proffered an alternative vision of it as eminently contested. Ritual is an arena for competing discourses, for conlict between groups, ‘for drives towards consensus

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and communitas, and for counter-movements towards separateness and division’ (Eade and Sallnow (1991: 2–3). In more recent times, St Patrick’s Day celebrations have typically become wrought by ‘proprietary struggles’ (Harrison 2002): a competition between groups regarding who ‘rightfully’ owns and trademarks the ritual. Certainly, St Patrick’s Day celebrations are often seen as spaces which destabilize Irish communities. Contemporary imaginings of ethnic and national identities in the context of St Patrick’s Day parades are seen as highly contested: ‘boundaries are constructed along any number of axes internally’ (Marston 2002: 373). Even in spaces like the New York City St Patrick’s Day parade, in which a putative monolithic Irish community is compressed into the epithet, ‘everybody is Irish’, ‘different narrations of the Irish community came together … to fragment identities and construct boundaries between people supposed to share a common cultural history’ (2002: 374). A particularly virulent dispute surrounding the right to represent an ‘authentic’ Irishness erupted when the nationalist and conservative Ancient Order of Hibernians successfully excluded the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) from the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York City (Marston 2002). In the socially divided context of Northern Ireland, St Patrick’s Day celebrations have also provided a matrix for contention. The perceived appropriation of the festival as a symbol of Irish nationalism and Catholicism ensured that many British, Protestant unionists refuse to be associated with the celebration (Nagle 2006). Furthermore, commercial and statist attempts to make celebrations ‘ethnically’ inclusive have been accused by some Irish as threatening the integrity of the day as a celebration of Irish identity. An Irish-American stated of the day in the US: For me, it is a reminder of my roots, my culture, and my family. I take great pride in being Irish. I’m fascinated by those who pretend to be or wish they were Irish since I have never wished to be anything other than who I am. For those around me, it is a chance to paint your hair green, wear a green shirt and pretend you are something that you are not for a day. It is also an excuse to drink to excess on a work day … I would say that approximately one-third of the 3,600 students at my college were wearing green today. The ethnicities of these students run the gamut, but that idea of wearing green seems to have permeated American culture. I ind it interesting that people do not make the same effort on other ethnic holidays here. You don’t see people dressing a certain way on Chinese New Year or Mexican Independence Day, for example (Nagle 2005b).

The Rites of Passage As we can see, ritual and public spectacle are rarely if ever ‘symbolic performances which unite the members of a category of people in a shared pursuit that speaks of, and to, their basic values or that creates or conirms a world of meanings shared by all of them alike’ (Baumann 1992: 98). While it’s true to say that ritual

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exposes the fractured relationships between and within groups, it is still used by groups in an effort to mask these divisions in the name of a cohesive and inclusive community. Thinking about the London’s St Patrick’s Day celebration, is it possible to understand part of the celebration as a status achieving ritual, a rite that signiies the oficial recognition and rank of citizenship to the London-Irish? If the LondonIrish once felt tacitly barred from the status of citizens by being rendered invisible or even excluded from symbolic public spaces, then the irst performance of the 2002 parade represented their inclusion as citizens. As noted earlier, the rites de passage is a ritual which marks a change in a person or group’s social status. The transition from immanent membership to actual membership involves ritualized initiation and it seems as if humans experience life as a series of transitions from one identity to another and that these transitions are ritualized (Jenkins 2004: 150). The rites of passage, noted earlier, has a sequential tripartite form: separation (involving the removal of the group or individual from the society as well as the weakening of their existing identity), the liminal (a state of betwixt and between), and aggregation (the insertion of the excluded group or individual into their new identity and society). The 2002 St Patrick’s Day provides a form of the rites of passage. The irst stage of separation is represented in how the London-Irish historically believe that they have been separated from the ‘host community’ and often had to limit their identities to the private sphere; the second stage, which sees the parade routed through central London, represents the middle liminal stage, a carnivalesque celebration in which new inclusive identities and relationships are forged; the third and inal state of aggregation corresponds to how the LondonIrish are awarded the status of worthy citizens. The presence of the London Mayor at the parade and at the end to give a speech welcoming the positive contribution of the London-Irish to the city’s multicultural proile acts to grant the status of citizenship on the London-Irish: As a world city London’s dynamism stems from the many communities that have made their home here. London’s Irish community has contributed to the social, cultural and economic life of London over many, many generations and is the largest single minority group in London. I want this historic role to be recognised (GLA 2001).

The access to the city centre for marginalized groups like the London-Irish is to gain recognition as ‘citadins’ (‘urban inhabitants’) rather than ‘citoyens’ (‘citizens’), meaning that those who inhabit the city have a right to the city, regardless of their legal or national status as citizens (Lefebvre 1996). Such afirmation of the status of the London-Irish also has another important function in regard to the relationship between multiculturalism and citizenship. On one level, as the UK government becomes more assertive about promoting British identity for new migrants, a citizenship test has been inaugurated. On another level, as the state

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tries to promote a ‘vision of living together’, it has been suggested that the task to forge ‘common belonging to a citizenship that can embrace diversity but still engender solidarity is crucial to twenty-irst century Britain’. The aim is to foster ‘civic engagement and a richer notion of what it means to be a British citizen’ (Johnson 2007: 3–4). This emphasis on what McGhee (2005: 163) has called a ‘differentiated universalism’ has become the deining policy of the UK state in terms of multiculturalism. A ‘differentiated universalism’ depends on ‘boundaries remaining present, but requires that they must be lexible, and, importantly, open to change’. In other words, while ‘ethnic’ diversity is tolerated, groups should be forced to engage in intercultural contact and cross-community dialogue in order to disseminate core British vales and the virtues of community cohesion. Public spectacles, like St Patrick’s Day and other multicultural pageants, can therefore be viewed as a crucial part of this process of ‘encouraging lexible or complex meta-loyalties above and beyond competing micro-loyalties’ (McGhee 2008: 84). The inclusive range of groups and ‘communities’ in the St Patrick’s Day parade thus simultaneously allows pluralism and diversity within the framework of a seemingly uniied pageant. The relationship between multiculturalism and public spectacle appears inextricably linked. For minority groups, gaining entrance to symbolically important spaces they were hitherto excluded from is seen as an important rite to make their identity more visible in public life. It is thus a platform to challenge and correct misleading representations of the minority group. Public spectacle is also important because it affords an occasion for individuals and groups ordinarily distanced in everyday life to become momentarily connected as barriers are breached. For similar reasons, state agencies are also often keen sponsors of multicultural spectacles. One recent UK government sponsored report suggested that ‘staged spaces’ designed to foster participative interaction can contribute to ‘building positive relationships and bridges between different social and economic groups’ (Beunderman and Lownsbrough 2007: 28). They also sponsor public spectacles because they provide a means to generate private inward investment as well as tourism. Yet the very multidimensional and contested form of public spectacles means that they are extremely polymorphic. Different groups may try to control the enactment and meaning of the spectacle; but these efforts are rarely successful and often instead expose the cleavages which exist within and between groups. I would contend that the St Patrick’s Day parade and festival in 2002 was neither a site where the potential visibility of Irishness is enclosed and fetishized nor representative of a harmonious model of community and multiculturalism. Nor did the parade seem particularly contentious. There were different narrations of the Irish community present, but there was no attempt by the organizers to exclude any identity. In fact, many of the agencies and commercial organizations present positively encouraged the idea that all and sundry were Irish. The St Patrick’s Day parade and festival did not holistically inculcate a monolithic meaning on to its audience: ‘the audience is part of the spectacle, is itself spectacle, and its ways of

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participating … may reconstruct the nature and meaning of the spectacle itself’ (Davies 1998: 142). That I could, as a member of the audience not associated to any organization, march with the parade further blurred binary categories of audience and performers, adding to the self-relexive pluralism demanded by the organizers and sponsors.

Conclusion: St Paddy’s in the ‘Drunk Tank’ ‘The visibility of culture in politics’, as John Hutnyk notes, ‘has become a crucial site for theory’ (2000: 1). The politics of visibility for ‘ethnic minorities’ have been judged as something of a success. This success is often based on the arbitrary criteria, for instance, of how many pop stars from the ‘margins of society’ have stormed the charts with their exotic sounds, how many black faces can be seen reading the news on television, and whether their ‘oriental’ cuisine is providing a new lavour for the nation’s palate. I could go on. Such visibility has been vicariously celebrated as bearing testimony to the sight of the walls of hegemonic fortress Europe being torn asunder, allowing scope to redeine the very idea of ‘national culture’. Any prospective redeinition of national culture would surely require the creation of further room to allow ‘ethnic minorities’ to ind legitimate positions to live and speak within. Such a way of thinking would have us readily believe that visibility in itself provides cultural room for ‘minorities’ to assert their own negotiations of Britishness against the backdrop of stereotyping and social exclusivity. Here we rejoice in the apotheosis of ‘multiculturalism’, allowing its contours of cultural difference to permeate into the belief that the centre graciously enables ‘minorities’ the right to live their own way without recourse to its notions of equality in housing, education and employment. Maybe we should at least be content to watch the pounds lood in to the national economy, as ‘ethnic minority’ stars are imported for the purposes of global consumption. In this equation, we congratulate the few who have ‘made it’, whilst conveniently forgetting those who have not: the victims of racist attacks, discrimination and the homeless. Before I had arrived for the London St Patrick’s Day parade, at the invitation of one of the tutors from the Irish centre where I conducted ieldwork, I visited Conway House, a hostel. Providing beds for 100 homeless men, the hostel was located in Camden in North London, an area that has been at the epicentre of Irish settlement for over 100 years. Many of the residents were Irish, middle-aged and elderly men who had mostly come to London in the 1950s and 1960s to ill the manual jobs Britain required to rebuild the state after the war. Isolated from their family networks back in rural Ireland, where most Irish migrants had come from,

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the men became detached from society, many suffering the high levels of mental illness which so badly aflict the Irish in Britain.8 Downstairs in the hostel was a large communal area which was unambiguously bestowed with the epithet: the ‘drunk tank’. It was called the ‘drunk tank’ simply because this was the place where alcoholics could seek refuge from alcohol whilst recovering from the ill-effects of its degenerative toxins. In this setting, a concert of traditional music and songs was to be performed by one of the tutors from the Irish centre. The tutor had told me a few weeks before that the hostel’s ‘drunk tank’ was ‘where you go when you have nothing at all. Nothing; when your life is ruined’. At 11am the residents of the hostel congregated in the ‘drunk tank’, where for an hour the band played. The residents listened silently and appreciatively, then whooped and clapped in appreciation at the end of each tune. In between songs, when the band was taking a quick breather and sipping mineral water, a resident clothed in a long, weather-beaten, blue Dexter raincoat, approached the singer, and took out from his inside pocket a half-empty bottle of whiskey and offered a drink. ‘It’s great you’ve remembered us here. People forget we’re Irish,’ said the resident. The singer smiled, took a swig and reciprocated by performing the next song in ‘honour of his new friend’. After the concert had ended and the residents had dispersed, I enquired of the singer why he had taken drink when the rules of the hostel expressly prohibited alcohol on its premises. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘alcoholics never share drink. It’s the one possession they have and they are addicted to it. For that man to offer me drink is an incredible gesture.’

8 A bulletin from the Federation of Irish Societies in 1996 highlighted that statistical evidence shows that the health of the Irish in Britain is ‘poor in comparison with the indigenous population. It is also consistently worse than the Irish in Ireland. Irish people living in Britain have signiicantly higher mortality rates for a range of illnesses across all diagnostic categories’. A report compiled by the British charity for homeless people, Shelter (2000), stated that the Irish in Britain are more likely to encounter housing and accommodation problems because of a failure to monitor them as a separate ethnic group. Shelter’s report reveals that nearly 25 per cent of those who use homeless day centres in London are Irish and single.

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Chapter 5

be Counted: Multicultural Census Campaigns

Introduction: ‘Be Irish, Be Counted’ ‘Be Irish. Be Counted’, stated a lealet pleading for people to tick the ‘ethnic’ Irish category in the upcoming ‘Census 2001’ for England and Wales. At the same time, an equally nebulously titled lyer proclaimed: ‘Feel Irish? Be Irish! Census 2001’. ‘Tick the Box’, the Irish Embassy in London demanded of Irish people in England. An article in the Irish Post (3 April 2001) stated: ‘Irish passport not needed for Census’. The BBC (2001) blandly summed up that ‘those who consider themselves British, but have Irish roots, can still tick the Irish box’. The London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, reiterated that he hoped ‘everyone with an Irish heritage [will] tick the appropriate box’ (Irish Post, 3 April 2001). The circumstance which promulgated this advertising drive was the campaign to mobilize people in Britain to categorize their identity as ethnically ‘Irish’ in the upcoming Census 2001. An ‘Ethnic Group Question’ was included for the irst time in the 1991 Census; however, the Irish were omitted as ‘ethnicity’ was divided along the black/white binary.1 In response, a number of Irish groups in Britain, spearheaded by FIS, successfully lobbied a number of relevant organizations and important public igures for the inclusion of an Irish category in the Ethnic Group Question for the next Census, due in 2001. In the 1991 Census, the Irish population was identiied from a combination of country of birth data and those instances where people had taken the initiative to write in their Irish identity in an optional box.2 The campaign inally bore fruit in 1999 when it was agreed that, along with other already speciied groups, in 2001 an Irish category3 would be added to the Ethnic Group Question of the Census. The inclusion of the Irish as an ‘ethnic’ category for 2001 meant that you no longer had to be born in Ireland or possess Irish citizenship status to ‘tick the Irish box’; as the lealet and media campaign incessantly reiterated, it was now suficient if you merely ‘feel Irish’. For campaigners the importance of the inclusion of the ‘ethnic’ Irish category in Census 2001 was summed up by FIS: ‘the basic reasons why the Irish 1 The 1991 Census was basically divided between one monolithic white category, which included the Irish, and a number of distinct categories for the non-white population. 2 An additional estimated 20,000 Irish people in Greater London did resort to such multi-ticking in the 1991 Census (Aspinall 1997). 3 Census 2001 also introduced new ‘religious’ and ‘mixed’ categories.

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communities need data from the Census and other sources relates to the formation of policy and the promotion of equal opportunities in such key areas as health, education, housing and employment’ (Hutton 2005: 2). The information collated from the Census provides ‘valuable baseline data to highlight Irish inequalities and to advocate Irish needs both at a national and local level’ (Hutton 2005: 2). Indeed, as the FIS stated: ‘the data produced from the Census inluences … how public resources, including money raised from taxes we pay, are allocated’ (Irish Post, 14 April 2001). Gearoid O Meachair, chairman of the Cara Irish Housing Association, said: ‘put simply if the Irish aren’t included on the Census then no analysis of that community can be done properly and therefore no resources can be allocated to help them’ (Lee 1999). The Guardian (Lee 1999) went as far to state that ‘the irst-ever head count of Irish people living in England could provide an end to centuries of inequality’. Micro-decisions regarding the delivery of public services are often made at the local government level. This means that agents with local responsibility under the Race Relations Acts require ‘the best possible local data on all signiicant communities (including minority ethnic communities) at their disposal, and must use it in an inclusive way to inform their policies’ (Tilki 2007: 2). The information from the Census is used to help distribute resources to the ‘user community’ – local authorities and health authorities. If a particular district has a high proportion of people with particular needs – such as homeless people, young children, or ethnic minority groups – this can all affect what additional funding the user community receives. Census information is further used to plan housing, training and investment for employment, transport and health. The ONS,4 charged with designing and implementing the Census, recognize that the information collected from the censuses on ethnic minority groups helps local authorities identify any patterns of disadvantage and the effects of equal opportunities policies. Minorities, too, also require Census data; as the UK’s National Statistician, Len Cook (2003: 4), noted regarding the information collected from Census 2001: ‘Ethnic communities plan, inluence and need culturally relevant services and activities at various levels, and use oficial data as one source of knowledge about themselves. Their wish to distinguish themselves provides a strong basis for establishing classiications like this’. Conirming the importance of the Census to the Irish apropos multicultural provision, Ken livingstone said that the scale of need revealed in the irish community was ‘a scar on this city’. He added: ‘We are using the Census results to drive through change in the areas we control. To deliver and shape services, we need the input of the wider Irish community’ (Irish Post 2004b).

4 The ONS is the executive ofice of the UK Statistics Authority, a non-ministerial department which reports directly to the UK Parliament. It is charged with the collection and publication of statistics related to the economy, population and society of the UK at national and local levels.

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Census: The Multicultural Numbers Game Censuses are key battlegrounds of state-sponsored multiculturalism. They are presented as meaningful forms of social reality as ethnic groups are rendered as identiiable entities that can be statistically quantiied. These ‘statistical representations of ethnic pluralism constitute the informational foundations upon which the state’s multicultural policies are based’ (Howard 2006: 105). In the most literal sense, censuses provide a matrix upon which the ‘multicultural numbers game’ is played out. The more people that categorize themselves as belonging to a particular ‘ethnic’ group – and just as crucially – the greater the evidence elicited from the Census that the collectivity suffers from social disadvantage, the more this enables groups operating within the multicultural paradigm to demand their relative share of public resources. As such, censuses involve methods of ‘ethnic recruitment’: ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ actively seek to enlist people who may not be aware of their ‘ethnic identity’ as part of a strategic manoeuvre to enlarge their constituency. ‘Remember your heritage’, stated the Irish Post (2006c) already mobilizing in preparation for Census 2011, in an obvious attempt to recruit people who weren’t born in Ireland but derived some form of Irish ancestry. This chapter accordingly explores the process of how groups mobilize for inclusion as ethnic minorities in the Census, as well as the forms of ethnic recruitment utilized by groups seeking to maximize their constituency. In turn, it illuminates how censuses are ‘sites of contest in contemporary identity politics’ (Howard 2006: 104) as groups and various parties ight over what the statistics represent for respective groupings. Rather than purely providing representations of sociological ‘facts’ regarding the proile of ethnic groups, censuses can instead be made pliable through interpretative action. They also reveal the paradoxical presence of primordial and instrumental discourses which simultaneously envelope visions of ethnicity in state-sponsored multiculturalism.

Ethnic Recruitment: Feel Irish? Be Irish The ethnographic canon in anthropology is replete with examples of individuals or even practically whole groups moving to another ethnic group (see Jenkins 2004). Such processes of movement are often recorded in so-called ‘divided societies’, places wrought by ethnonational cleavages involving two or more antagonistic groups struggling for control of the polity. Certainly, a cursory reading of the history of Northern Ireland demonstrates that there have been numerous examples of individuals born and raised as either Catholics or Protestants who have changed their ethnonational identity to join the ‘other’ group (McGarry and O’Leary 1996). Individuals can be recruited to ethnic groups, and in ‘divided societies’ where the numeric advantage of one group over another can be slim, competition to conscript people is often intense. This dynamic was present in the former Yugoslavia before the beginning of the conlict in the early 1990s. When Serbs still hoped

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to keep Bosnia in Yugoslavia, the media frequently highlighted similarities with the Muslims, while Croats often stressed that Bosnia had been part of historical Croatia and that most Bosnian Muslims were originally of Croatian descent (Nederveen Pieterse 2007: 49). The changing process through which groups identify themselves and are identiied by others is also an indispensable part of state-sponsored multiculturalism. For instance, early British ‘race relations’ reports used the term ‘Negroes’ or ‘coloured migrants’ for persons of West Indian descent (Bulmer 1986) or even ‘dark strangers’ (Patterson 1963), as one document put it. The irst national study of racial discrimination, published in 1968, referred to the ‘Commonwealth coloured immigrant population’ (Daniel 1968). Groups that were hitherto unrecognized as an ethnic group, or even thought not to exist, can also suddenly emerge almost from nowhere. The introduction of the ‘mixed’ category – individuals of a ‘mixed’ heritage – in Census 2001 endowed a form of recognition upon a group previously ignored and to a large extent stigmatized. Up to the mid-1980s, various ield trials had shown that people of mixed descent often preferred not to be distinguished as a separate group (Sillitoe 1987); instead they usually identiied with the ethnic group of one of their parents – typically their father. Subsequent ieldwork trials designed to determine a revised Ethnic Group Question for Census 2001 demonstrated that a ‘mixed’ category would be acceptable, provided that an opportunity were given to record the relevant details as a written description. The oficial recognition of ‘mixed’ identities has accrued as the result of a long process of struggle by groups. In the US during the 1990s, for example, a number of successful ‘mixed race’ social movements – such as the Association of Multi-Ethnic Americans (AMEA) and Project RACE (Reclassify all Children Equally) – sought to change governmental and school forms to include a multiracial category, since they viewed current classiicatory schemas as violating the rights of mixed-race people (Tessman 1999: 276). Perhaps, however, the most obvious example of new forms of recognition for ethnicity has come with the increasing academic acceptance of the plurality of identities within whiteness. While the 1991 UK Census categories displayed ‘no perceived interest in knowing the ethnicity of “white” minorities’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Aspinall 1998), there is now more attention to how ‘whiteness emerges as a process, not a thing, plural rather than singular in nature’ (Frankenberg 1997: 1). Such a perspective thus ‘rejects the implicit assumption that whiteness is only an unconditional, universal and equally experienced location of privilege and power’ (Twine and Gallagher 2008: 7). Scholars, in particular, have sought to highlight ‘the situational, relational and historic contingencies that are reshaping and repositioning white identities within the context of shifting racial boundaries’ (Twine and Gallagher 2008: 7). The developing debate regarding the heterogeneity of whiteness, in particular, provided an opportunity for the Irish in England. Their attempt to break down the ‘white’ category in the Census to allow a separate Irish ‘ethnic’ option was augmented by academic research on the plural construct of ‘whiteness’.

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There is some basis for this shifting logic of ethnicity and how it is classiied. Frederik Barth’s (1969) seminal work on ethnicity showed that ethnic identity was inherently malleable, situational and transactional. Barth was interested in how members of one ethnic group, or even practically a whole ethnic group, could be persuaded in certain circumstances to join another group for practical and instrumental reasons. Paradoxically, however, the movement of individuals between groups does not necessarily point to the erosion of the idea that ‘ethnic groups’ exist or that there are salient and categorical differences between groups. Barth reasoned that ‘ethnic groups’ could maintain their sense of identity and awareness of differences from other groups, ‘despite a low of personnel across them’ because ‘ethnic collectivities are independent of the individuals whose membership constitutes them’ (see Jenkins 2004: 96). An ethnic group, Jenkins (2004) elaborates, can ‘survive the fact that individuals in the course of their lives may change their ethnic identities’. Indeed, Barth declared his interest in ‘social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete social categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories’. Neither is it of the utmost importance, Barth argued, to determine ethnic groups by looking at their ‘objective’ categorical content (i.e., history and cultural characteristics); a more fruitful approach would be to examine the strategies of ethnic maintenance and ethnic recruitment (see also Jenkins 2004: 97). The boundary, which delineates a sense of group identity, is maintained and even breached by the forms of interaction and relations that are engendered between groups. In this way, the palpable sense of what it means to be part of a group can change over time; yet, the ‘common sense’ belief that the collectivity clearly remains an ethnic group differentiated from others continues to be salient. The lip side to the idea that ethnicity is instrumental, prone to transmutation and malleability, has complex and profoundly paradoxical implications for multiculturalism and how groups ethnically deine themselves. On the one hand, the pliable and transactional character of ethnicity, and the fact that ethnic membership is not simply a matter of birth to death cycles, means it is possible for ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ to try and recruit ‘fresh’ individuals. On the other hand, the shifting and somewhat elastic nature of ethnicity throws up the imponderable problem of deining what exactly constitutes the ‘ethnic’ qualities of the collectivity. Statist deinitions of multiculturalism, for the purpose of public service delivery, are dependent upon the recognition of an ethnic minority grouping replete with a distinct and identiiable ‘culture’. Does this, as numerous critics opine, reify and render conservative a formation which is naturally luid, prone to contradictory and ambiguous tendencies? Pertinently, the paradoxical ambiguous character of ethnicity – its ‘Janus face’ articulated in both instrumental and primordial terms – is revealed in some of the discourses of those who tried to recruit people to designate themselves as Irish for Census 2001. For example, the editorial of the Irish Post prior to Census 2001, as Howard (2006: 118) notes, was ‘couched in a curious idiom that mixed post-

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modernist notions of the luidity and ultimately self-deining character of ethnic identity with primordialist notions of ethnicity passed down through the blood’: No one has the right to set a boundary to the march of a nation … On the eve of Census Day 2001, we can for the irst time say that the Irish in Britain have the opportunity to establish the true dimensions of our community through an act of self-determination ... The intention ... is not to seek out an ethnic ghetto and cut us off from the mainstream of British society, of which we are very much a part. It is rather an assertion of our distinctiveness ... disadvantage does not die out with the Irish-born but is somehow passed on to their children and even grand-children, the second and third generation Irish ... The Census question is not perfect and will lead to undercounting ... But there is a much more positive reason to welcome the inclusion of an Irish category in the Census, which looks beyond birthplace to cultural background and allows people to choose what to call themselves (Irish Post, 28 April 2001).

The awareness that ethnicity is subjective, and subject to multiple interpretations when it comes to how people categorize their identity, is well observed by those who spearheaded the campaign for Irish inclusion as an ethnic minority category. When I spoke to Seán Hutton, who led the FIS’s lobbying effort, he told me that: There is a lot of misunderstanding of what ethnicity is in the Irish community. In that sense ethnicity is a tremendously porous concept for a starter, and there is no attempt to clarify it whatsoever in the Census itself. A lot of people just don’t know what ethnicity clearly means and whether they are an ethnic minority (Interview with Seán Hutton, 13 November 2008).

the idea that ethnicity can appear both rooted in cultural features and unfettered from any social determinant beyond personal choice is something that Census formulators are also aware of and try to somehow reconcile. It is interesting to read the Guide for the Collection and Classiication of Ethnicity Data provided by the ONS (2003). In this document it is noticeable how the ONS struggle to adequately deine what exactly constitutes ethnicity. To help them with this task they utilize academic deinitions, like this: An ethnic group is a collectivity within a larger population having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared past, and a cultural focus upon one or more symbolic elements which deine the group’s identity, such as kinship, religion, language, shared territory, nationality or physical appearance. Members of an ethnic group are conscious of belonging to an ethnic group (Bulmer 1996).

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Yet at the very same time as they base their deinition of ethnicity upon a largely ‘culturalist’ deinition, the ONS place the concept ‘under erasure’ by noting its instrumental and changing nature. The guide stresses that: Ethnic identiication is a subjective and multidimensional phenomenon … Collecting data on ethnicity is dificult because of the subjective, multi-faceted and changing nature of ethnic identiication and there is no consensus on what constitutes an ‘ethnic group’. Membership of any ethnic group is something that is subjectively meaningful to the person concerned and the terminology used to describe ethnic groups has changed markedly over time. As a result, ethnic groups, however deined or measured, will tend to evolve depending upon social and political attitudes or developments. Therefore, we do not believe that basing ethnic identiication upon an objective and rigid classiication of ethnic groups is practicable (ONS 2003: 7)

Embedding Ethnicity in the Census In order to further explore the tricky deinitions of ethnicity inherent to modern censuses, and how they relate to multicultural provision, it is worthwhile illuminating the history of the campaign for the Ethnic Group Question in the UK Census. From here, the chapter moves on to considering the Irish campaign for inclusion. Inserting Ethnicity into the Census Although an ethnic minority category was introduced to the 1991 UK Census it was limited to non-white groups thereby excluding the ‘white’ Irish. The story behind how an ‘ethnic question’ became included in the Census is fraught and contested. To begin with, there had been attempts in previous censuses to determine the nonwhite population of the UK. The 1971 Census, for example, featured a question on parents’ place of birth. This was problematic, however, seeing that many whites had parents born abroad, especially those who had served in British colonies.5 During the 1970s the inclusion of an ethnic minority category in the Census was mooted. There was little widespread support for its introduction, as many representative ethnic minority groups saw such processes of monitoring as de facto forms of regulation which could be used against them. Some far-right groups, for example, had actually campaigned for the insertion of an ethnic minority category in order to justify their racist policies of forced repatriation for migrants and their 5 Apart from this attempt, the ONS (2003: 12) notes that various possible ways of measuring ethnic groups are available and have been used. These include: country of birth, nationality, language spoken at home, parents’ country of birth in conjunction with country of birth, skin colour, national/geographical origin, racial group and religion.

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children (see Howard 2006). In 1979 there was even a local experiment regarding an ethnic minority category in a test Census for the north London administrative council of Haringey. The experiment was subsequently called a ‘iasco’ as antiracist campaigners protested; many protestors held placards with the slogan ‘Say No to Racist Census’. The campaign for an ethnic minority category was bolstered by the institutional support of the CRE. Their backing was of crucial importance because they were ‘the statutory body established as a consequence of the 1976 Race Relations Act and charged with overseeing the implementation of the Act’ (Howard 2006: 107). In this respect the CRE was viewed as a spearhead organization committed to redressing racial and ethnic inequalities in Britain. The introduction of Section 71 of the race relations act 1976, in particular, provided enough interpretative scope for left-wing authorities to implement ‘positive action’ and ‘equal opportunities’ policies for their ethnic minority constituents (Solomos 2003). To implement multicultural polices, these authorities needed more precise information on their constituents. However, despite the CRE calling for an ethnic minority category in the 1981 Census, the incumbent UK government (The Conservative Party) vetoed its inclusion on the basis of its impracticality. Circumstances were to change from the early 1980s onwards as the acceptance of an ethnicity question on the Census grew, and inally in 1989 the format for the Census was completed replete with ethnic options (Howard 2006).6

The Irish Census Campaign: ‘Giving the Irish a Bad Name’ As already noted, the Irish were excluded from the ethnic minority category for the 1991 Census. As such, the Census reinforced the supposition that ethnic minority status was circumscribed by the non-white population. The mobilization of the Irish for inclusion as an ethnic minority, as explored in Chapter 2, began in the early 1980s. In January 1983, a London-Irish conference featuring representation from over 400 Irish groups formed common cause as achieving formal recognition of the Irish in Britain as an ethnic minority (McConville 1982). Attaining ethnic 6 It is also worth noting that prior to 2001 there had been some other attempts to quantify ethnic minorities in Britain. The most conspicuous of these efforts were the four surveys of ethnic minorities undertaken by the Research Policies Institute (1966, 1974, 1982, 1994) (see Berthoud et al. 1997). These research surveys charted the experiences of ethnic minorities by assessing changes in family and household structures, education, qualiications and language, employment patterns, income and standard of living. The 1994 survey also included information on health and health services, racial harassment and cultural identity. From the results of these surveys, the researchers have strived to illuminate not only the socioeconomic disparities between non-white groups and the rest of the population but that, according to them, ‘equality’ should not be confused with ‘uniformity’ (Berthoud et al. 1997: 10).

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minority status, the delegates formulated, would make the Irish conspicuous within the debates on racism and discrimination thus creating space for redress in terms of government resources to deal with the speciic problems faced by what they believed to be an ‘abused and oppressed’ (Lloyd 1995) Irish community. Under the auspices of the Ken Livingstone-led GLC the Irish were categorized as an ethnic minority in a number of London councils and thereby included in their ethnic monitoring programmes. A policy report on the ‘Irish Community’ submitted to the GLC’s Ethnic Minority Committee in 1984, demanded ‘[t]hat the Committee recognise the Irish as an Ethnic Minority Group and to adopt the deinition of Irish for such purposes: persons who come from, or whose forebears originate in, Ireland and who consider themselves Irish’ (GLC 1984a: 1). The report concluded by reiterating the call that ‘the Irish should be recognised unequivocally as an ethnic minority with a unique and identiiable cultural heritage and should be included in all initiatives to improve the quality of life of London’s ethnic minorities’ (GLC 1984a: 11). While such campaigns were focused on the local council or citywide government, Irish groups in Britain also began to seek inclusion as an ethnic minority at the national level. This was certainly the case for the London-Irish, as the abolition of the GLC in 1986 removed a vital lever of political support. The Irish, accordingly, needed to forge a broader base of support for their campaign with inluential organizations at national level as well as at the scale of the local. There were a number of distinct problems and conlicts which hindered the Irish campaign, however. To begin with, despite a vociferous mobilization by numerous Irish organizations for Irish inclusion in the early 1980s, this momentarily obscured a high level of dissension amongst the Irish population for the proposal. The Irish were divided amongst themselves as to whether they should be deined as an ethnic minority. Seán Hutton, who led FIS’s campaign during the 1990s, told me that some of the London-Irish he spoke to were actively hostile to the idea that the Irish were going to be included in the ethnic minority category of the Census. The reasons for these objections varied from disbelief that the Irish, as a predominantly white group, were an ethnic minority grouping; for some others the label was seen as belonging to lazy people who lived off state handouts; or that proclaiming ethnic minority status would suddenly mark out the Irish as ‘visible’ and thus potentially the focus of an even stronger backlash from the host population. Hutton recalled that at that time: I had Irish business men ring me up here and say: ‘you know you people [the FIS] are giving the Irish a bad name. My son received a good education and he’s successful’. Or you know, ‘we’re ordinary people’. In other words, they were saying they weren’t an ethnic minority as Irish people. There’re misunderstandings and there’s a lack of clarity about what ethnicity is (Interview with Seán Hutton, 13 November 2008).

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Another problem for the campaign was the contextual way in which people often deine their ethnicity and identity. Throughout the campaign Hutton noticed that: there are very large numbers of people who if they are in a particular context, like they meet somebody like me who has an Irish accent, will say, ‘I’m Irish’ or ‘my mum was Irish’ and they had holidays in Ireland, so they were identifying themselves as Irish here. But most of the time in other contexts the problem was that they wouldn’t think of themselves as Irish (Interview with Seán Hutton, 13 November 2008).

One of the main contexts which dissuaded some Irish from embracing the ethnic minority status during the 1980s concerned the main Irish organization leading the campaign, the IBRG. Formed in 1981, the IBRG was expressly Irish nationalist in terms of its politics. On one level, the IBRG mobilized ‘to foster a positive identity for the Irish in Britain and to give effective representation to our community at a national and local level’ (see:). The IBRG’s main sphere of interest, however, was in ‘Irish unity and self-determination for the Irish people’. Due to the negative representation of Irish nationalism during the 1980s, exacerbated by the IRA’s bombing campaign in London, many Irish feared that espousing any form of nationalist allegiance could potentially mark them out to the authorities responsible for the PTA. To demonstrate further the extent of disunion surrounding the campaign, some Irish nationalists in England also opposed the bid for ethnic minority status. These people believed that the Irish should be independent from assistance from the British state who would seek to co-opt the groups they funded. John Fitzpatrick (1989), a high-proile trade union leader in west London, wrote in the Irish Post: ‘The campaign for ethnic minority status … rests on an illusion … that the British state … can help to improve the position of the Irish people in Britain’. largely because of the level of discord and uncertainty surrounding the Irish campaign for inclusion, a broad alliance required to engender a successful campaign was distinctly lacking. This fractured picture of the Irish meant that it was not until the late 1980s that a sustained and concerted campaign was initiated. The net result of the slow pace of the mobilization was that the Irish bid was too late to be seriously reviewed by the relevant institutions responsible for the direction of the 1991 Census. Hutton of the FIS recalls that: The Irish campaign began relatively late in the day chronologically as it were, because the preparation for the Census begins fairly shortly after the one before and that’s when they ask for the data inputs from various groups. So those there from the beginning can obviously make the most impact. If you are in at the beginning of the whole process you have several chances to submit your views and to submit your critiques to the Census ofice; that’s the way the ONS likes to do things (Interview with Seán Hutton, 13 November 2008).

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Too late and divided for the 1991 Census, the campaign for Census 2001 gained momentum when it was headed by the FIS. The FIS started to lead the campaign in 1993. Notably, the FIS were purposely a politically ‘middle-of-theroad’ organization who stayed as clear as they could from the politics of Irish nationalism. When the FIS began to lead the campaign in the 1990s they reframed the issue within an identiiable multicultural context. Hutton elaborates: What we did when we began to campaign for inclusion was put the argument in a slightly different way from the IBRG. We argued that we needed the data to form our polices, to identify Irish needs and to get proper treatment for the Irish people in this country because of the poor statistical health proile of the Irish, and things like that. So we didn’t argue on Irish nationalist terms but on the terms that ethnicity was one of the very important ways in which resources were allocated in this country, and for those practical reasons we needed that information and only the Census could do that (Interview with Seán Hutton, 13 November 2008).

As such, the FIS, as an umbrella organization representing over 100 afiliate groups, was able to build up a much broader alliance than the narrow nationalist remit of the IBRG. As part of the mobilization, the FIS began to lobby a number of relevant organizations who they identiied as key decision-makers or organizations who could inluence the decision-makers. Towards this, the FIS disseminated a research document to all interested parties which set out research on the need for Irish inclusion in the Census. The FIS encouraged representations of the need for an Irish category by experts in the ield, including market researchers, academics and those within local government. They also lobbied UK government departments. Howard (2006) argues that the main focus for Irish groups lobbying for inclusion in the Census was to gain the support of the CRE. As already noted, the CRE was the statutory body that oversaw many of the dispensations of the 1976 Race Relations Act. The CRE’s use of classiications regarding which groups belonged to the ethnic minority category could be vital, since this information would be adopted both by local authorities for multicultural provision as well as the ONS for the Census. Indeed, since the CRE was committed to the inclusion of the ethnic minority category in the national Census to help specify the requirements of disadvantaged minority groups, it would be ‘statutorily obliged to include an Irish dimension in all its work if it could be shown that Irish people were systematically subjected to racial discrimination in a similar way to non-whites’ (Howard 2006: 112). The CRE was ambivalent regarding Irish inclusion as an ethnic minority in the Census. Although they remained uncommitted to the proposal, in March 1991 the CRE agreed to the establishment of an Irish Research Advisory Group [IRAG] to develop a research agenda on the proile of the Irish in Britain (Howard 2006). The aegis of the IRAG included both welfare activists and academics, such as Robert Miles, a leading theorist of racism. The result of this research was the report entitled The Irish Community: Discrimination and Disadvantage (Hickman

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and Walter 1997). Initially the report was rejected by the CRE, who stated that ‘the paucity of evidence on discrimination against the Irish was still a bar to accepting’ the proposal to include an ethnic Irish dimension to the Census (see Howard 2006: 113). Howard (2006) argues that the main area of objection articulated by the CRE to Irish inclusion was the methodology of the research. The CRE insisted that the research required a discrimination testing element. The CRE based its ethnic monitoring system on the number of people applying to the CRE to pursue a case of racial discrimination. In 1990, of 1,655 pursuing cases of racial discrimination only 20 came from Irish applicants. The Irish, alternatively, based their campaign largely on the poorer health proile of the Irish relative to other groups and forms of disadvantage and anti-Irish prejudice. In seeking to explain why the CRE eventually supported the Irish campaign for inclusion as an ethnic minority, Howard (2006) claims that there was a radical restructuring of the CRE in late 1993 which allowed an opportunity for the commission’s hierarchy to integrate an Irish dimension into the CRE’s analysis. In particular, the FIS managed to recruit the support of Sir Herman Ousley, the then Chair of the CRE, who as Hutton remembers, ‘said quite irmly that the Irish were an ethnic minority’. However, Ousley, Hutton continues, was unable to set the policy that the Irish should be recognized as a minority in the culture of the CRE … if somebody from outside rang up the CRE and asked ‘are the Irish an ethnic minority?’ it depended on who you got at the other end of the phone, because I would say that the majority of people in the CRE believed in the black/white binary (Interview with Seán Hutton, 13 November 2008).

Despite lack of clarity within the ‘culture’ of the CRE vis-à-vis an ethnic minority Irish category, when the CRE published its new system of ethnic monitoring – recommended for use by national Census administrators in 1995 – the categories used were: ‘White, Indian, Irish, Pakistani, Black-African, Bangladeshi, BlackCaribbean, Chinese, Black-Other (please specify), Other’ (CRE 1995). The Irish thus eventually managed to convince the CRE to back the Irish campaign. The real struggle of the Irish, however, was persuading the ONS – the organization responsible for all aspects of the Census – to accept the idea that the Irish merited inclusion in the Ethnic Question Category. Recognizing the importance of gaining the ONS’s support, the FIS began to attend ONS consultation meetings on the form of Census 2001 to put the case for an Irish category. Problematically, for the FIS, many of the statisticians of the ONS were downright hostile to the idea of Irish inclusion. When the FIS irst started raising issues with the ONS in the early 1990s in preparation for Census 2001, few people within the ONS were willing to listen. Hutton recounted to me how the ONS dismissed the FIS’s arguments: When we started raising issues with the ONS in the early 1990s in preparation for Census 2001 we got responses at the level there that somebody Irish lives

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in their street and they don’t want an Irish category. You know, their response was anecdotal stuff. They were basically saying that because some Irish person lives down the street from them didn’t want to be seen as an ethnic minority the Irish shouldn’t be included in the Ethnic Question of the Census. They weren’t debating with us on any intellectual level at all (Interview with Seán Hutton, 13 November 2008).

In an effort to overcome the ONS’s objections the FIS sought to enlist key personnel within the organization. In particular, they found a responsive igure in Peter Aspinall, an academic who had also worked as a researcher in the health service. Importantly, during the early 1990s, in preparation for Census 2001, the ONS had set up an overarching working group, called the ‘ONS 2001 Development Programme Working Group on Content, Classiications and Question Testing’. Within that structure, for several of the key questions that were included in the Census, the ONS set up working sub-groups. This meant, for example, that there were working sub-groups to examine questions on ‘ethnicity’, ‘health’, ‘language’ and ‘religion’. Aspinall was invited by the ONS to be the national convener for the working sub-group on ethnicity. This sub-group was given the title ‘Working Subgroup on the 2001 Ethnic Group Question’. The sub-group was set up in 1994 and ran until 1999 when the inal Census questions set was approved by government and by Parliament. If community groups and the ‘user community’ believed that aspects of the ethnic question required alterations, or if groups demanded inclusion as ethnic minorities, it was Aspinall’s job to consult with both users of the Census data and the groups mobilizing for inclusion, and then to feed back that information to the ONS’s the overarching group. It was here that Aspinall was contacted by FIS as part of their lobbying effort for inclusion in the ethnic question category for Census 2001. Aspinall informed me that he had no hesitation in accepting the case presented by FIS: When I was involved in the ONS convenorship role I knew of the FIS and my own personal view, even before I undertook the user consultations, was that it was quite a startling omission not to have the Irish in the 1991 Census and it really did need to be in the Census 2001. So from that point of view I did not need persuading … It was one of the things that I felt should be in Census 2001 and I think most people in the ‘user community’, or certainly at least a signiicant proportion of people I consulted with felt the Irish should be in there. It wasn’t by any means an unequivocal position, some people didn’t want it, and they didn’t think it was necessary. ONS were very uncertain and argued against it initially. That was the kind of environment I was working in to try and get this change made (Interview with Peter Aspinall, 26 November 2008).

Despite the unequivocal support of Aspinall and his working sub-group for the claims of the Irish, the overarching working group within the ONS were still

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unconvinced. As late as 1996, the ONS were still arguing against Irish inclusion. One ONS report of that time outlined its reasons for rejecting the Irish case: Having Irish as the only white category could cause suspicion and feelings of exclusion within the Irish community in Britain. They would feel they were being singled out and believe that the information could be used against them … Recommendation: an irish category should not be included in the Census Ethnic Group Question (Mortimer and White 1996: 1) [emphasis original].

Interestingly, the logic underlying the ONS’s rebuff of the Irish case was not so much that the Irish were not a group subjected to forms of prejudice; in fact, guided by the awareness that there had been a level of division and suspicion amongst the Irish regarding their ethnic minority status, the ONS sided with the arguments of the opponents. This brings us to why the ONS crucially shifted to support the case of the Irish leading to their inclusion in the Ethnic Question Category for Census 2001.7 Addressing this issue, Kevin Howard (2006: 106) argues that ‘changes to the ethnic designations used on the Census can relect the outcome of politically motivated compromises rather than considered evaluation as to which ethnic designations are sociologically meaningful’. As such, he (2006) claims that ‘systems of ethnic classiication … are subject to political control and hence open to politically expedient reconiguring’. To illuminate this, he provides the case of the Irish inclusion in the Ethnic Question Category for Census 2001. Despite an inability to provide any concrete evidence to support his thesis, Howard (2006: 114–15) claims that the change of UK government in 1997, from Conservative to New Labour, was instrumental. He argues that the new UK Home Secretary looked favourably on the case made by the Irish and the CRE. The reason for this support was supposedly because of New Labour’s commitment to the ‘re-packaging of “Britishness” that involved reaching out to minority groups formed through immigration and to a radical constitutional restructuring aimed at accommodating rather than ignoring nationalist aspirations … Part of this project involved … the stalled Northern Ireland peace process’ (2006: 114). In other words, the inclusion of the Irish in the ethnic question of Census 2001 was expedited by political pressure rather than any concrete empirical data on the disadvantaged position of the Irish in Britain. I asked Peter Aspinall if political departments or prominent politicians had pressured his sub-group on ethnicity within the ONS to include the Irish in the ethnic question category. Aspinall answered: I don’t think the change in government had any effect at all. I think that by the time New Labour came in the arguments had essentially been established. 7 The New Labour government’s White Paper on the 2001 Census of population (UK Parliament 1999), published in March 1999, conirmed that an Irish ethnic option was to be included for the 2001 Census.

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I think the ‘user community’ recognized that even without any question in the ethnic group category of the Census, the Irish are one of the most disadvantaged groups; it’s also one of the largest groups and the proile of health disadvantage was unequivocal. A lot of studies have been done on morbidity and mortality rates for the Irish in Britain. People of the sub-group and the main working group were just persuaded that all the reasons were there for Irish inclusion and there were no reasons for exclusion. I can’t recall any shift in viewpoint at the ONS related to the change in government … It was incredibly evidencebased at the ONS. People took note of on what was coming out of focus groups, out of cognitive research; work was done for the Irish community in focus groups. There were lots of issues around how to capture the Irish and other groups, how to categorize them and lots of questions around how to structure the questionnaire question. For example, the different question formats explored included two-tier or hierarchical structures as well as conventional question formats. We looked at two-tier structures and all sorts of different combinations, permutations, classiications in trying to get the best capture (Interview with Peter Aspinall, 26 November 2008).

The Census Results On 2 April 1998 the FIS attended the inal meeting of the Working Sub-Group on the 2001 Ethnic Group Question, which recommended to the ONS the inclusion of an Irish category in the Census 2001. Now that we have considered the complexities of the campaign for Irish inclusion, it is worth briely examining the results of Census 2001. At its bare bones, the results show that while just over 750,000 people in Great Britain were born on the island of Ireland, crucially only 690,000 categorized their identity as ethnically Irish. In England the ‘white Irish’ population was recorded as 624,115 – 1.3 per cent of the overall population – which made the white Irish population the fourth largest of the minority ethnic populations listed. Of those who ticked the ‘Irish box’ as ethnically Irish, 75 per cent were born on the island of Ireland. This meant that 467,106 people resident in England were born on the island of Ireland, leaving 157,009 (25.2 per cent) second and subsequent generations of Irish.8 Notably, the number of Irish-born people in England recorded in Census 2001 had dropped by 92,653, a fall of 12.1 per cent compared to the igures for the 1991 Census. Less than 1 per cent of people born in the Republic of Ireland and 1.06 per cent of those born in Northern Ireland, deined themselves as either ‘white other’; ‘mixed white’ and ‘Black’ or ‘Asian’; or ‘Asian’, ‘Black’ or ‘Chinese’. In terms of 8 Also of interest is that 9.6 per cent (43,846) of those people resident in England who were born in the Republic of Ireland recorded themselves as being British. Of those people born in Northern Ireland, 26.1 per cent deined themselves as white Irish and 71.8 per cent deined as white British.

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gender, 52.9 per cent of the white Irish population of England are female, a igure that is higher than the percentage in the population of England as a whole. The Census does not only collate information on the population numbers of each group; importantly, it also provides a statistical proile of groups from which decisions regarding the provision and allocation of public services are made. As such, it allows government agencies to view groups comparatively, so that they can theoretically identify and address particularistic needs. The Census, thus, also provides statistics regarding the socioeconomic proile of each group: ‘age’, ‘education and qualiications’, ‘work’, ‘health’, and ‘housing and amenities’. It is worth providing some brief information of this data on the Irish. The Age Proile of the White Irish Population Census 2001 pointed to an ageing Irish population in England. A igure of 24.9 per cent of white Irish people are aged over 64. Just 5.9 per cent of the Irish are under the age of 16. The Educational Proile of the White Irish Population Census 2001 revealed that among the white Irish aged 25 to 34 the proportion which attained the highest qualiications (degrees, Ph.D.s and professional qualiications) reached 46 per cent. It was recorded that 12 per cent of white Irish 16 to 24 year olds have no qualiications, while 22 per cent of white Irish 16 to 24 year olds have qualiications at the highest levels. It was recorded that 46 per cent of white Irish 16 to 24 year olds are in full-time education. This information points to a generally highly qualiied Irish population relative to other groups identiied in the Census. The Employment Proile of the White Irish Population Census 2001 showed that 66 per cent of white Irish men aged 25 to 74 are economically active, while 54 per cent of white Irish women in the same age category are economically active. A igure of 20 per cent of Irish men are to be found working in construction, while 27 per cent of white Irish women are working in health and social work. The Census recorded that 15 per cent of white Irish men in England are in professional occupations compared to 13 per cent of white Irish women. The Health Proile of the White Irish Population Respondents were asked, in the Census form, whether they had ‘any long-term illness, health problem or disability which limits your daily activities or the work you can do?’ The Census showed that 11 per cent of white Irish men are not working because of permanent sickness or disability. In the Census, 29 per cent of white Irish men aged 16 to 64 stated that their health is not good; 25 per cent of white Irish women aged 16 to 64 are not in good health. A igure of 9.6 per cent of men have long term illnesses. For the group aged 50 to 64, 25.8 per cent of women and 26.3 per cent of men suffer long-term illness. The Housing and Amenity Proile of the White Irish Population the 2001 Census showed that 26 per cent of the Irish population owned their home outright, 63

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per cent of Irish people own their own home with the aid of a mortgage or loan, and 21 per cent live in social housing. It also showed that 1.2 per cent of the Irish population live in medical and care communal establishments (including psychiatric units, prison, and those we might associate with an older population, residential and nursing homes). A igure of 40 per cent of white Irish people do not own a car, while 8 per cent of the white Irish population does not have central heating.

Making Sense of the Census The Census thus provides us with a range of statistics in a number of categories to build up a proile of a number of speciied groups. The story, of course, does not end there. Census results by themselves mean relatively little; like all statistics they require construal efforts to make them ‘speak’ for broader social processes. Since Census results are important for providing public agencies information vis-à-vis the speciic needs of groups, the interpretation of Census data is highly contested. For the vast majority of the population in England and Wales the Census means little more than information on the size of the population. For the leaders of ethnic minority welfare and social groups, alternatively, Census data is eagerly anticipated and often the focus for numerous projections regarding its meaning. It is important to note here that the process of categorization enacted by instruments of government, such as the Census, is rarely if ever disinterested. Categorization has a fundamental role in disciplinary power – the forms of surveillance through which people self-regulate behaviour and identities. Just as the state and ‘modern organizations produce engine parts, meals, telecommunication services, government information … they also contribute to the production of people, identiied in a particular way’ (Jenkins 2004: 161). Statistics about people are utilized to transform ‘the imprecise everyday probability of chance and experience into a hard image of predictability, legitimated by science and suited to the needs of bureaucracy’ (Jenkins 2004: 171). This ‘people processing’ – the gathering of objective knowledge about the human world – ‘is always potentially an intervention in their lives’ (2004: 84), regardless of whether they are aware of how they are being classiied. To elaborate precisely this point, Jenkins (2004: 83–4) provides the example of the Nilotic peoples of southern Sudan. He notes that anthropological debates about whether the Neur people are a deinite collectivity in their own right, or whether the Neur and the Dinka are in fact the same group, probably had little impact on the lives of these people. The way in which these groups are classiied and categorized by anthropologists, however, can have real consequences for the Nilotic peoples if the government decided to utilize some of these classiications for regulatory purposes. Since processes of categorization are often profoundly signiicant in the constitution of humans as subjects and as groups, as well as for determining what resources are provided for them, bureaucratic mechanisms aimed at producing

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‘objective’ inventories are almost always contested. Examining the case of the Irish in England as a microcosm for the interpretive and contested character of not only censuses but of multiculturalism, it is important to note how the debates begin before Census Day itself. Prior to the Census, the speculation and various projections of Irish welfare groups and the media ranged from audible optimism to muted pessimism. Interpretation Prior to Census 2001 Conidence was buoyed amongst Irish welfare groups in 1999 when the ofice of the Mayor of London (the GLA) commissioned a report to ask people in London whether their parents or grandparents were Irish. The results showed that 11 per cent said one of their parents was Irish while 19 per cent said that one or more of their grandparents were Irish (Irish Post, 27 September 2006). Another survey released in March 2001 – conveniently just prior to both Census Day and St Patrick’s Day – claimed that there were up to 14 million Irish descendants in the UK, 22 per cent of the population. The survey found that out of 1,000 people questioned throughout Britain, 216 (22 per cent) claimed to be ‘in some way’ Irish. Staggeringly, given that the Irish population in Britain derives an older proile, 42 per cent of those in the 18–34 category claimed to have Irish ancestry. The highest concentration was found in London where more than three quarters (77 per cent) claimed Irish roots. Reporting on the indings, the BBC (2001) stated: ‘The survey is a major illip for the “Be Irish, Be Counted” campaign for this year’s Census, which will have an Irish tick box for the irst time’. Commenting on the results of the survey, a spokesperson for the FIS stated: What is important, from the point of view of the Census, is whether people regard themselves as of Irish ‘cultural background’ (the actual terminology of the Ethnic Group Question) or not … Census data plays an important role in policy formation, so we need to secure good data to raise the particular proile of Irish performance and need in Britain (BBC 2001).

Conspicuously, however, the survey was sponsored by Guinness, the Irish brewery. The release of the survey’s indings, just a few days before St Patrick’s Day, was a cynical marketing ploy. Quite simply, since St Patrick’s Day is the Irish national Saint’s Day, in which Guinness is traditionally used to ‘wet’ the saint’s head, the more people who are made to feel Irish and to participate in celebrations, the more Guinness can increase proits. Equally problematic about the survey, particularly as an indicator of the then upcoming Census, was the breakdown of the question asked by the pollsters. The question asked to the 1,000 people surveyed was: ‘Do you regard yourself as having any Irish ancestry, or do you think of yourself as Irish?’ Only 3 per cent answered that they identiied themselves as ‘being Irish’; the remaining 19 per cent stated they ‘believed they are in some part Irish’.

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Despite some optimism engendered by these polls – especially that they could stimulate those with an Irish heritage to identify themselves as Irish in Census 2001 – many Irish groups feared that the inal numbers would be undercut. To try and minimize a likely undercount, prior to Census 2001 the FIS and other Irish welfare organizations instigated an awareness campaign through the Irish media in England. To begin with, from August 2000 a sub-group was set up to evolve Census awareness and to build a series of partnerships with the ONS, the Irish embassy, the media, the all-party Irish in Parliament Group and the race equality councils. The FIS sub-group produced over a million Census awareness cards which were distributed with the assistance of Irish groups throughout Britain. Posters, banners and T-shirts were handed out at St Patrick’s Day events and other Irish festivals. A media campaign was coordinated with the British-based Irish media to peak in the three weeks before the Census and articles and information were placed in the British media. In the weeks before the Census 400 information packs were distributed to Irish organisations, race equalities councils and Roman Catholic diocesan information ofices. MPs in constituencies with large Irish populations were also targeted with information. One lealet designed by FIS asked people, ‘Do you identify as Irish?’ The lealet went on to state: ‘The Census ethnic group question is not about nationality. It asks you to state your cultural background’. In a more detailed media campaign in a newspaper, the FIS targeted three broad categories of people they wanted to tick the Irish box. The irst category targeted were those born in Ireland but settled in England for a sustained period. Irish organizations feared that a substantial number of this group preferred to remain invisible because of their experience of anti-Irish prejudice. One newspaper article stated: For those born in Ireland: If you have lived in Britain for some time, you will remember times when it was not easy to stand up and be counted … For a long time, identifying yourself as Irish, when dealing with oficialdom, was seen as the act of a brave person or a fool. Keep your head down – that was the cautious, sensible option. And old habits die hard (Irish Emerald, 3 March 2001) [emphasis original].

The second category of people targeted were the second and third generation who had been born and brought up in England. Directly addressing these people, the same newspaper article stated: If you were born in Britain, you will be used to all sorts of people telling you you can’t be Irish. The British state tends to see all white people as Englandersin-the-making, and when you were in school no doubt you faced questions from other kids about your loyalty. You’ve even got it in the neck from irst-generation Irish, who casually dismiss you as a Plastic Paddy. Well, April 29th [Census Day

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2001] is Meltdown Day for the myth of Plastic Paddy (Irish Emerald, 10 March 2001) [emphasis original].9

The third category of people targeted were those of a ‘mixed’ background with ‘ethnic’ origins that weren’t purely Irish. This group were instructed to look for the ‘mixed’ category in the Census which allowed individuals to write in their cultural identity. ‘Remember to be speciic’, stated the newspaper, ‘if you have an Irish and a Black Caribbean parent, do not tick the White and Black Caribbean box – write in Black Caribbean and Irish in the space provided’ (Irish Emerald, 17 March 2001) [emphasis original]. This campaign to recruit as many people as possible with some form of Irish heritage drew displeasure from some interested commentators. Brendan O’Neill (2001), a second-generation London-Irishman, wrote an article to deplore the idea (which he viewed as being promoted by the FIS’s campaign) that ‘Irishness seems to include ifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, nth generations of so-called “Irish people” – and it is these “lost Irish” who are being targeted to tick the box in the Census’. The article proceeded to attack the Irish campaign for pandering to ‘wannabe Irish’ – ‘young Brits who think Irishness is the new black, and they want to wear it’. ‘As far as the Census campaigners are concerned’, continued O’Neill, ‘Irishness is something you feel – a feeling you can have even if you are in fact British. This is Irishness as trendy badge, rather than Irishness as nationality’. According to O’Neill, these ‘wannabes’ just want to be different, to proclaim an ethnic identity ‘like those dumb middle-class white kids in the USA who claim to be one-sixteenth Native American’. Rather than deining Irishness through what he viewed as the more authentic remit of ‘nationality’, O’Neill raged against the Census 2001 campaign for ‘lagging up spurious ethnic and cultural differences’. Post Facto Interpretation As we have already seen, Census 2001 revealed that 750,000 people in Great Britain were born on the island of Ireland but only 690,000 categorized themselves as ethnically Irish. This inal igure was substantially lower than the polls might have suggested and what Irish welfare groups hoped for prior to Census 2001. The question is why were there fewer people who chose the ‘ethnic’ Irish encapsulation than those born in Ireland? The varied answers to this precise question reveal the acrimonious debates surrounding the Census. Analyzing the data from Census 2001, a report by the FIS (2007b) proffered a number of reasons for the ‘under representation of the actual Irish community in England’. 1. Second or third generation Irish people may not classify themselves as 9 Plastic Paddy is a pejorative term used against those who weren’t born in Ireland but identify themselves as Irish. For a more detailed deinition and analysis, see Chapter 6.

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Irish as they were confused about the question. The wording of the Census question on ethnicity, it is claimed, ‘forced individuals to make an unrealistic choice between being Irish and being British’ (2007b: 10). This is the case when individuals have one parent who is Irish and another who is British, or have two Irish-born parents but are themselves born and brought up in Britain. ‘Choosing between the two ethnic groups is not always a clear-cut decision’, state the FIS (2007b: 10). Walter (2008: 180) further argues that many second-generation ‘felt that they were being forced into accepting english identities by the dual pressures of denial of their difference by English people and a refusal to accept their sameness by the Irish-born’. 2. Irish people who are also black or South Asian are likely to be recorded in one of the ‘other’ categories. These people chose to identify with their black or South Asian heritage or they chose the ‘other’ option, ‘in which an array of ethnic origins and mixed ethnic origins could be assumed’. A igure of 2.7 per cent was recorded as ‘white other’ in Census 2001. 3. There was an under-enumeration of Irish because signiicant numbers, especially white Irish males, for some reason failed to complete the Census. Due to the perceived undercounting of the Irish, there have been attempts to assess the ‘real’ number of Irish in Britain. Prior to Census 2001, Hickman and Walter (1997: 10) argued that a correctional factor of 2.5 to 3 needed to be utilized to calculate the size of the second-generation from the igures known of the Irishborn population. Using the correctional factor, Hickman and Walter (1997) argue the true size of the Irish population ranges between 1,149,000 and 1,379,000, between 2.3 per cent and 2.8 per cent of the population of England. Not content with this, Hickman and Walter (1997) argue that the igure is yet probably still an underestimation of the ‘true’ size. They stress that there are further as yet unidentiied groups out there who could potentially be included in the total number of Irish. These hidden categories include, for instance, people who have an Irish grandparent, those with an Irish partner and Irish people with British partners who identiied themselves as British in the Census. If we add in these groups the total population could be between 1,687,000 and 2,024,000 people, 3.4 per cent to 4.1 per cent of the population of England. Crucially, the reason why people with an Irish grandparent or an Irish parent are included in statistical projections is because, as the FIS (2007a: 11) note, ‘ethnicity in the Census is about self-declaration’. In essence, due to the ascriptive nature of the Census, irish agencies are trying to recruit people with a distant Irish heritage or those who merely ‘felt’ Irish. The discourse surrounding the almost elastic range of groups and individuals able to rightfully proclaim Irish identity lets slip the paradoxical presence of instrumental and primordial deinitions of ethnicity. Although the FIS, for example, note that the ethnic category in the Census allows encapsulation to be a matter of subjective choice, their task is to awaken the ‘true’ Irish identity of those people who may be unaware of their heritage.

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the other broad area of contestation regarding the results of Census 2001 relates to which areas and to what extent the Irish can qualify as a disadvantaged group. To ensure that precious multicultural public resources and services are targeted at a particular minority group, it is important to demonstrate not only their numerical size, but to illuminate their inequalities relative to other groups. As already noted Census 2001 provides a socioeconomic proile of each group by collating information in a number of designated areas: age, education, employment, health, housing and amenities. Through the analysis of these particular areas, the relevant public agencies are able to formulate policies as well as specify to whom they ought to be delivered. In their interpretation of Census 2001, the FIS (2007b: 2) point out that ‘the statistical proile of the identiied white Irish places them closer to white British and Indian in many respects than, for example, more radically marginalized groups like Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, refugees and asylum seekers’. For instance, the high igure of Irish with qualiications at the ‘highest levels’ shows a well educated population. Despite this, the FIS argue that: Irish deicits exist, most visibly in the area of health. They extend to related areas like levels of economic activity, where limiting long-term injury and disability contribute. The speciic age proile of the white Irish population, with its bias towards older people, has implications in terms of care needs, as have the high proportions of white Irish single- and two-pensioner households … It is important that the duality of the performance of the Irish in Britain – that combination of high achievement and disadvantage/social exclusion, which is by no means unique to the Irish community among British ethnic minority communities – should not distract attention from issues that need to be addressed (Tilki 2007:2).

There have been different interpretations of the statistics and data from Census 2001. The academic Kevin Howard (2006), in particular, has come up with a distinctly conlicting analysis of Census 2001 compared with the FIS (2007b). Examining the results of the Census – especially the revelation that the total number of people who designated themselves as ethnically Irish was lower than the igure of those born in Ireland – Howard (2006: 118) asks: ‘what are we to make of these results?’ He (2006: 111) concludes: ‘there appears to be relatively little evidence of an Irish ethnic community persisting over time in Great Britain’; instead, ‘the Irish experience in Great Britain is characterized by rapid assimilation’. Academic debates can, in some circumstances, determine how groups are classiied for the purpose of multicultural service provision. More worryingly for Irish welfare groups, however, is that the results of Census 2001 have promulgated a consultation process within the ONS on whether the next national Census should contain an ethnic Irish question. On this, a spokesperson for the Action Group Irish Youth stated: ‘[a]n assumption can be made that the ONS feels the Irish have assimilated into British society and are no longer socially, economically or

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culturally different to the white British’. The Action Group Irish Youth now fret that there is a possibility that the Irish question could be taken out of the next Census, something which they see as disastrous for the Irish in Britain (Irish Post, 6 July 2005). The FIS, however, maintain that their relationship with the ONS remains strong, and Census 2011 will again include an ethnic Irish category. Seán Hutton of the FIS explained to me that the ONS are not speciically concerned with the undercutting of Irish numbers, but an undercutting of numbers across a wide range of groups: When you attend ONS meetings, where they table papers about Census 2001, it is very clear that it just isn’t the undercutting of the Irish numbers: it’s the undercutting of the numbers generally. A huge range of people weren’t accounted for, and crucially the local authorities lost out on the grant distribution. The ONS admitted that it was a very serious thing. The other thing is the debate that the Census costs a lot, and people ask whether there are other ways now with the electronic age that we could collect this data – good and comprehensive data – more frequently so we don’t have to wait so long. In the 10 years between censuses the formula for distribution is based on the Census and in year nine it is still based on the Census, even though circumstances for groups may have changed radically. There is a lot of criticism of the concept of a decennial Census and people ask if it can be replaced in any way. The ONS feel under pressure (Interview with Seán Hutton, 13 November 2008).

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Chapter 6

Multiculturalism’s ‘Indian Summer’ and the second-Generation

Multiculturalism’s ‘Indian Summer’ A warm Sunday afternoon in early August 2000 provided the setting to ‘Indian Summer’: ‘a free celebration of the best in traditional and contemporary South Asian culture’, stated the festival programme. Under the aegis of the ‘Coin Street Festival’ in central London, Oxo Tower Wharf and Bernie Spain Gardens shuddered to ‘the wild percussion sounds’ that the festival programme promised would be the sonic constituent of the bhangra drummers from the Dhol Foundation, a group of ‘second-generation’ South Asian musicians. Small children stood at the back of the wharf, only the Thames River behind them, with hands clasped tight to their ears in protective posture. Beginning in 1990, the Coin Street Festival – in a small park nestled in between some of London’s prime real estate on the South Bank development – is sponsored by the local government as an annual celebration where ‘visitors can celebrate London’s diversity and cultural contributions from around the world’ (see: ). The Dhol Foundation’s presence complimented the multicultural remit of the Coin Street Festival. The Dhol Foundation have performed at some of the biggest multicultural festivals in the world, including the World of Music and Dance (WOMAD), and they are often seen and heard at events like the London Lord Mayor’s Show. Their music has also been featured in Hollywood movies, like Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. They are also renowned for engaging in cross-cultural fusions with international bands, such as U2 and the Afro Celt Sound System, a group of mainly secondgeneration Irish Londoners and other like-minded ‘world music’ specialists who fuse together Irish traditional music and African music with contemporary dance and hip-hop. Notably, Johnny Kalsi, the leader of the Dhol Foundation is also an occasional member of the Afro Celt Sound System. As much as anyone can be certain, bhangra – the music which provides the basis of the Dhol Foundation – derives its roots from the Panjab in northern India. For just over 200 years bhangra’s function was to provide the musical backdrop to the Panjabi harvest celebration bhasaki. During the late 1970s and early 1980s bhangra seemed to reappear in the predominantly Panjabi diaspora of Southall, west London. In Southall bhangra quickly emerged as a robust cultural form for young South Asians. It was in this location that bhangra provided the set dance for weddings, club nights for ecstatic, adoring teenage fans, and almost anything

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else young second-generation Panjabis and other South Asians deemed worthy of a good time. Equally striking was the rapid development of bhangra as a highly sophisticated, professional and proitable clique of pop music. The sudden emergence of bhangra music in the UK during the 1980s quickly caught the gaze of ethnographers fascinated with what they viewed as an instance of cultural syncretism – what Baumann (1990) called ‘aesthetic shifts’ within the British South Asian diaspora. Previously, more redundant theoretical models had sought to explain bhangra’s development as the result of ‘cultural conlict’ which drove an ideological wedge between the new ‘pop’ values of South Asian youth and the older paradigms of caste, village, tradition and izzat supposedly cherished by their parents. To replace this model, bhangra has been subject to increasingly complex analyses regarding how it mediates, negotiates or transcends the putative dichotomy supposedly derives from two mutually opposed cultural traditions: British and South Asian, or even more anachronistically: the ‘modern’ west and the ‘backward’ east. Such blurring of the binary categories of ‘us/other’ – the sheer array of ‘subject positions’ performed by the ‘second-generation’ bhangra performer – have therefore come to be seen as powerful tropes which consciously challenge the ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu 1977) of racist, stereotypical images of South Asians projected by the mainstream British media. Inherent in this position, it is argued by some (Hebdige 1996, Taylor 1997, Lipsitz 1994), is that the play of identities threaten an exclusively deined hegemonic Britishness. For Taylor (1997: 155), ‘Apache Indian’ – an English-born performer whose music mixes bhangra with Jamaican dancehall reggae – ‘exploits … free-loating signiiers’. ‘The popularity of bhangra’, argues Taylor, ‘has helped young AngloAsians … break up an imaginary Britishness, that is, bhangra makes available new identities, even new kinds of identities, post-colonial and transnational’ (1997: 156). Similarly, Lipsitz (1994: 94) states that Apache Indian ‘creates problems for nation-states with their narratives of discrete, homogeneous, and autonomous culture, but he solves problems for people who want cultural expressions as complex as the lives they live every day’. Some bhangra performers have occasionally tried to market their music as an almost political project which fuses together new multicultural identities. The celebrated Pakistani qawwali singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan once stated that ‘bhangra is a combination of East and West and I like it. We get loads of youngsters coming to our concerts and they dance to bhangra music’ (Sultan, September/October 1989: 2). CDs entitled ‘East West collision’; ‘Culture clash: the sound of two continents colliding’; ‘East to West: bhangra for the masses’ make it seem as if the music has the capacity to fashion together two cultures viewed by some as oppositional. This music reconigures Huntington’s (1996) classic ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis by making the ‘clash’ a sonic reconciliation. A few journalists have joined in with the celebratory analyses. According to Nigel Williamson (2000: 26), the music of Joi, a British South Asian, with his ‘musical vision [where] East and West fused effortlessly’, is ‘in the vanguard of the sound that [is] coming to deine the new pluralism of an increasingly multi-cultural Britain’.

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Chicken Tikka Masala Multiculturalism Returning to ‘Indian Summer’ in central London. A hundred metres to the west from the festival stage, along the Thames River, the sound of the drummers could only be vaguely heard. From outside the Royal National Theatre, the hollow rhythm of the thundering dhol and dholak drums sounded like the noise of a steam train, somewhat similar to those which once left nearby Waterloo station. This is the point where London’s South Bank begins or ends depending on your point of view. The South Bank, a concrete ediice that purports to stand as the home and post-war monument to Britain’s arts heritage (the Hayward Gallery, the National Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall), winds its way down towards Waterloo. Almost opposite, across on the other side of the Thames, stands Big Ben looking over the very bastion of British democracy, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster. By journeying eastwards, past ‘Indian Summer’, by following the footpath which traces the Thames, the traveller soon passes the newly-built Tate Modern, Britain’s oficial museum of international art, housed in a former power station. Standing roughly adjacent to the Tate is the reconstructed Globe Theatre, which is located on the precise site of Shakespeare’s sixteenth century original theatre. Othello is playing. Such is the thud of the Dhol Foundation it seems safe to assume that during the play’s more quiet passages ‘Indian Summer’ could be dimly heard. Another 10 minutes walk past the Globe takes us into Greenwich Park, where located at its epicentre is the Old Royal Observatory. Within the Old Royal Observatory resides a brass strip which marks the Prime Meridian. ‘Stand to the left hand side of the brass strip’, notes Young (1995: 1), ‘and you are in the western hemisphere. But move a yard to your right, and you enter the East: whoever you are, you have been translated from a European into an Oriental. Put one foot back to the left of the brass strip and you become mixed with otherness: an Occidental and an Oriental at once’. Back at ‘Indian Summer’. Looking on and listening, it would seem almost too trite to conclude that similar to standing astride the Prime Meridian, the music of the ‘Dhol Foundation’ is sutured by the east and west. It is, nevertheless, too hard an impulse to momentarily discount the almost bewildering number of ‘identities’ on stage as not signiicant of an underlying cultural translation. On stage, the ‘Dhol Foundation’ are comprised of the ‘traditional’ Panjabi percussive retinue of the dhol and dholak, the drums which are often called by fans and commentators alike as the ‘heartbeat’ of bhangra music. Dressed in turbans and wearing beards, the dhol and dholak players appeared to be khalsa Sikhs.1 Augmenting the drummers was DJ Ritu, who spent practically the whole concert crouching awkwardly over her mixing decks. Her performance consisted of juxtaposing composed and extemporaneous dance remixes and dub beats with the grooves of the bhangra drums. The lead vocalist of the Dhol Foundation, Dips Soor, blended in cut-andmix fashion Panjabi-worded bhangra songs with ‘beat-box’ vocalisations; these 1

Khalsa refers to ‘pure’ or ‘baptized’ Sikhs.

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modes of toasting and improvised rapping styles are typically generically traced as deriving from African-American hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall. Some audience members sniggered at Dip Soor’s performance; apparently the joke was based on the seeming incongruity of a South Asian person trying to ‘mimic’ stylisations which are putatively the ethnic preserve of black people. The biggest guffaws, however, were reserved for Garam Masala, the Dhol Foundation’s guitarist, who played ear-piercing heavy metal guitar riffs and solos. Who had ever heard or seen a South Asian rock guitarist, never mind a virtuoso player whose display of showmanship seems to encompass the lineage of many of Britain’s great white guitarists: Eric Clapton. Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck et al.? Overall, however, it is the sense of ‘in-betweeness’ which was celebrated in the performances during the ‘Indian Summer’ event. This ‘hybridity’ is tacitly promoted by the sponsors of ‘Indian Summer’ – Sharwoods, a British-based Indian spice manufacturer. Their stalls at the festival allow festive goers to avail themselves of curry, samosas, and other Indian foods. The curry, particularly the chicken tikka masala, has infamously become for some British politicians a celebratory signiier of a hybrid British multiculturalism. In a speech in 2001, just a few months prior to 9/11, Robin Cook, the then UK Home Secretary, stated: It isn’t just our economy that has been enriched by the arrival of new communities. Our lifestyles and cultural horizons have also been broadened in the process. This point is perhaps more readily understood by young Britons, who are more open to new inluences and more likely to have been educated in a multi-ethnic environment. But it reaches into every aspect of our national life. Chicken Tikka Massala [sic] is now a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external inluences. Chicken Tikka is an Indian dish. The Massala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy. Coming to terms with multiculturalism as a positive force for our economy and society will have signiicant implications for our understanding of Britishness (Cook 2001).

It seems strange that ‘chicken tikka masala’ should be marked as a successful form of multiculturalism. Responding to Cook’s speech, Iqbal Wahhab (2001), a restaurateur, asked: Should we be proud, or should we be appalled, that the chicken tikka masala has become the cultural symbol of our times? A bit of both, I suspect. But either way, the question arises of why exactly Foreign Secretary Robin Cook settled on this particular made-up dish, concocted to soothe the sensitive British palate, when he was searching for the perfect metaphor to show how successful that other concoction, multiculturalism, had become? … [It] makes it particularly fascinating that the chicken tikka masala, and by extension the Indian restaurant in general, should be selected to provide a cultural capsule of Britain today.

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After all, the great British curry house is still modelled on a design that owners a couple of decades ago thought relected what the British thought of India. Minarets for the exotic touch, pub-style velour seats for recognisable comfort… Who are we kidding? Genuine multiculturalism this isn’t.2

To the ears of the ethnographer (the author), at that time (2000) the music of ‘Indian Summer’ also appeared to be the soundtrack of the new multicultural Britain. During the festival I recorded how the sound of the music, like the young South Asian performers on stage and in the audience, embodied the sight and sounds of cultural luidity which challenged essentialist categories delineating racial and cultural ixity. The music of the Dhol Foundation, performed by Londoners proclaiming a proud South Asian heritage, did not seem to conform to any of the discourses delineating what is ‘authentic’ South Asian music or what music should be the ‘natural’ preserve for South Asians to perform. Certainly, the Dhol Foundation refused to be saddled by exclusive remits, which would categorize them as wholly eastern, occidental or even British. At Coin Street, which is innocuously located in between the vestiges of the British cultural and political establishment in the form of the South Bank and Westminster, the Dhol Foundation seem to make a sonic impression in this milieu thereby signifying the very ambivalence and inside/outside dialogical relationship with the mainstream that seemingly characterizes the status of the second-generation in Britain. Though neither has the mainstream of society totally opened up to allow groups like the Dhol Foundation to enter, nor or have they been cast into the margins, sites have begun to emerge where overlap occurs to varying degrees. Writing in the mid1990s, Young (1995: 4) argued that ‘[t]oday’s self-proclaimed mobile and multiple identities may be a marker not of contemporary social luidity and dispossession but of a new stability , self-assurance and quietism’.

The Backlash Against Multiculturalism Looking back to 2000, especially pre ‘9/11’ and ‘7/7’, and in the wake of the authoritarian government and media backlash against diversity and ‘multiculturalism’ (McGhee 2008), the epithet of ‘Indian Summer’ for the Coin Street Festival seems to sum up the last lourish of state-sponsored multiculturalism

2 It is not only curry that is made to stand for how migrants have literally added some ‘spice’ to British life. Parker’s (2000: 73–4) research illuminates that while ‘Chinese’ food and the Chinese takeaway are made to exemplify ‘peaceful multicultural existence’, they instead embody ‘deep structures of racialized domination’. He continues: ‘the Chinese presence in Britain is recurrently reduced to the willing provision of everyday staples, and thus celebrated with orientalist condescension as an example of a dormant and paciied contribution to a successful multicultural society’ (2000: 74).

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as a model to accommodate ethnic diversity and encourage social equality and harmonious forms of cross-cultural dialogue. As mentioned in the introduction, the 1990s, in particular, represented the apex of support for state-sponsored multiculturalism. Governments and international organizations appeared accommodating to the principle of minority group rights. For instance, the European Union’s (EU) Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities (Council of Europe 1995) made provisions so that a ‘pluralist and genuinely democratic society should not only respect the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity of each person belonging to a national minority, but also create appropriate conditions enabling them to express, preserve and develop this identity’. Unwavering critics of multiculturalism were resigned to the hegemonic dominance of multiculturalism. Malik (2002) complained that the ‘belief in pluralism and the multicultural society is so much woven into the fabric of our lives that we rarely stand back to question some of its assumptions’. Nowadays, a successful backlash has been instigated against multiculturalism. Once-avowed fans of multiculturalism now line up to condemn what they identify as the ill-effects of state-sponsored multiculturalism. Trevor Phillips, former Chair of the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), now agrees that multiculturalism should be ‘killed off’ and that Britain is ‘sleepwalking towards segregation’ (Casciani 2005). In the self-consciously liberal state of Holland, where multiculturalism is enshrined in formal state policy (Minderhedennota), there is a call to force Muslims to prove that they are Dutch irst and that their Muslim identity is secondary (Rai 2006: 159). At the level of national debate, multiculturalism in the UK has been ‘driven underground’ (McGhee 2008: 145). ‘Britain has entered an authoritarian “anti-multiculturalism” period in which multiple identities, loyalties and allegiances are both being problematized and deployed in order to facilitate “our” primary identiication as British citizens who must accept British values above all else’ (2008: 145). Multiculturalism is being replaced by intolerance as ‘hatred embodies a set of fears about difference’ (McGhee 2005: 1). Much of the consensus against British multiculturalism gained momentum in the aftermath of so-called ‘race riots’ in some northern English towns and cities during 2001, which involved second-generation Pakistani-Muslim male youths, neighbouring white communities, members of far-right organizations and the police (McGhee 2008: 83). ‘The Cantle Report’, commissioned by the British government to investigate the disturbances, claimed to have uncovered a picture of deep division, noting that ‘many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives. These lives often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone promote any meaningful interchanges’ (Home Ofice 2001: 9). It seems ironic that multiculturalism was to blame for the disturbances. A generation before, a lack of multiculturalism was identiied for causing the chronic urban riots of the early

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1980s, which in this instance involved Afro-Caribbean males, neo-Nazis and the police (Kundnani 2002).3 Then, worst of all for the healthy prospects of multiculturalism, on 7 July 2005 al-Qaeda-inspired suicide bombings in London killed 52 and injured 700. The bombers were all born or largely raised in Britain. Many observers were quick to blame multiculturalism for nurturing the murderous instincts of the bombers. The then Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, MP for the Conservative Party, was among those quick to scapegoat multiculturalism. By allowing people of different cultures to settle without integrating we let the ‘perverted values of suicide bombers’ take root, he told the Daily Telegraph (3 August 2005). He continued: Britain has pursued a policy of multiculturalism – allowing people of different cultures to settle without expecting them to integrate into society. Often the authorities have seemed more concerned with encouraging distinctive identities than with promoting common cultural values of nationhood.

What seems to have been conspicuously absent in Davis’s analysis was that most of the suicide bombers did not reside in hermetically sealed ‘ethnic ghettoes’ living parallel lives and cultures from their ‘white’ neighbours. Many friends and family of the bombers were quick to state that these men had been, at least by Davis’s standards, integrated. One of the bombers, Shehzad Tanweer, was recorded as someone who ‘appeared to be the epitome of assimilation into British society’; friends and family noted that ‘he seemed to enjoy everything British’, and was indeed ‘proud to be British’ (see Rai 2006: 32).4 If anything can be extracted and congealed from current media accusations it is that the malfunction of multiculturalism appears inextricably related to the putative failure of Muslims to integrate and cherish British values. If multiculturalism was once seen as a ‘loating signiier’ (Bhabha 1998) containing a multitude of philosophical ideas and legislative policies, it is now condensed to a motif concerning the collision between the supposed incompatible values of Islam with western liberal values. Although the notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’ has been most crudely posited by conservatives like Samuel Huntington (1996), liberal commentators too have made binary contrasts between Islam and the liberal western 3 Signiicantly, after the ‘Brixton Riots’ in London during 1981, the right-wing Conservative Party had ‘prescribed more “positive action” and multiculturalism as a way out of failing minority integration’ (Joppke 2004: 251). 4 It is estimated that only one in ten Islamic militants in the UK have attended ‘separate’ Islamic schools (Malik 2005). Neither does it appear that so-called ‘home grown’ terrorist cells are particularly endemic to western nation states with strong multicultural polices. Indeed, seeing that ‘home grown’ terrorist cells exist in a wide range of western countries, some with strong multiculturalism policies (Canada) and some ideologically opposed to multicultural policies (France), there is no evidence that multicultural policies either encourage or obstruct the development of ‘terrorist cells’ (Kymlicka 2007: 165).

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state (e.g., Sartori 2000). In a somewhat circuitous argument, multiculturalism is ingered ‘for perverting young Muslims’ (Nazir-Ali 2006).

Multiculturalism, Hybridity and the Second-Generation The ethnographic introduction to this chapter also returns us to two themes mentioned in Chapter 3: hybridity and the second-generation. The idea that the second-generation and their cultural forms are ‘hybrid’ is a discourse often elaborated by theorists. Theorists have been keen to show how this group are ‘skilled cultural navigators, with a sophisticated capacity to manoeuvre their way to their own advantage … It is apparent that members of the rising generation are best understood as extremely mobile in linguistic, religious and cultural terms, and often taking delight in drawing eclectically on every tradition available’ (Ballard 1994: 31–4). Such hybridity, at its most utopian level of analysis, serves as a promissory note of a decentralized culture and multiple afiliations, a means of recasting contemporary British identity and undermining British national and racial exclusivity. This analysis, which had its heyday in the 1990s, currently has much less appeal. It is not only that ‘hybridity talk’ represents the vacuous anti-humanism of ‘identity politics’ in exchange for the more substantial politics of economic redistribution (Gilroy 2004). Nor is it only that hybridity fails as a truly radical form as ‘hybridity sells difference as the logic of multiplicity’ (Hutnyk 2000: 4). Perhaps the ultimate failure of the ‘hybrid’ discourse has come from those who claim that multiculturalism, rather than contributing to a nascent transnational and hybrid second-generation culture, has in fact led to extremism and fundamentalism, engendering essentialist and separatist conceptions of identity. The most visible example of the second-generation’s perceived lack of hybridity has been the media’s fascination with ‘home grown’ Jihadist ‘suicide bombers’. As noted, the bombers behind the 7 July 2005 London transport bombs were all either born or brought up in Britain – members of the second-generation whose parents had migrated to the UK. In the aftermath of the bombings, Kepel (2005) wrote in the ‘liberal-minded’ ‘OpenDemocracy’ forum that the bombers ‘were the children of Britain’s own multicultural society’ and that the bombings ‘smashed’ the ideological consensus that produced multiculturalism ‘to smithereens’. Multiculturalism, in this conspectus, is an almost evil magic incantation, a spell which corrupts Britain’s youth. This current perspective regarding the relationship between multiculturalism and the second-generation stands in antithesis to how multiculturalism was once framed as being of positive beneit to them. After the so-called race riots of the early 1980s, involving british afro-Caribbean and south asian youth confronting the police and neo-Nazi groups, it was suggested that these youths suffered pathologies because of their liminal status; they were supposedly caught between two cultures: ‘here’ and ‘back home’. The solution to this quandary was ‘culture’;

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if only these youths could gain greater awareness of their ‘ethnic heritage’, as well as the cultures of other groups, then these youths would gain greater conidence in their identity thereby negating the propensity of ethnic minority youths to ‘explode’ in a frenzy of violence. This positive view of multiculturalism was also once applied to secondgeneration Irish youths in England. A report on the London-Irish in 1984 stated: ‘when we look at the many reports commissioned before and after recent social upheavals, such as was experienced in Brixton, Toxteth … we are looking at a society that is awakening to the reality and problems caused by racism’. Looking at the schooling of second-generation youth, the report continued by arguing that it was: [t]he refusal to recognise and respect cultural identity and language in our multiracial society coupled with the presentation of an ethno-centric culture medium with which minorities cannot identify that causes a rejection of the teacher and the school and locates psychological anxieties that sooner or later will burst into some form of violence because it creates crises of identity for minority groups (GLC 1984b: 11).

Fast forward to 2002, in the aftermath of riots between British South Asian youth, the police, white youths and neo-Nazis in some northern English towns in the summer of 2001, and the blame for this is squarely placed on the shoulders of multiculturalism. The Cantle Report, sponsored by the UK Home Ofice (2001) to investigate the riots, concluded that the policy approaches of the past 20 years had encouraged and privileged separate ‘ethnic’ identities by concentrating on notions of ‘equality’ for different ethnic/religious groups whilst profoundly neglecting the need to promote respect and ‘good relations’ between those different groups. Rather than the riots being triggered by speciic events, the Cantle Report viewed the violence, in effect, as an accident waiting to happen. This failure, the report continued, had left second-generation youths marginalized in society and lacking the self-esteem required to build bridges with other groups. Multicultural forms of education, the report noted, were failing youths, because ‘the attempts made to teach children about each other’s culture does not seem to have assisted in reducing the distrust and lack of understanding among the communities’ (2001: 71). The answer to this problem, the report stated, was greater ‘community cohesion’: We believe that there is an urgent need to promote community cohesion, based upon a greater knowledge of, contact between, and respect for, the various cultures that now make Great Britain such a rich and diverse nation. It is also essential to establish a greater sense of citizenship, based on (a few) common principles which are shared and observed by all sections of the community (Home Ofice 2001: 10).

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For some, the Cantle Report represents the ‘death of multiculturalism’ (Kundnani 2002). Others (Back et al. 2002) have read into the same report a palpable refusal on the side of the UK government to accept cultural pluralism and instead a willingness to return to the policies of assimilation of the early 1960s, which assumed that immigrants must abandon their distinctive ethnic cultures to become ‘British’. ‘Celebrating difference’ has now been replaced with strategies for ‘managing diversity’, with all the legislative control that this implies. Alexander (2004) further points to how the Cantle Report creates a ‘culturalist pathologization’ of South Asian young men. Multiculturalism, as depicted in the Cantle Report and in the media furore which surrounded the riots, is accused of contributing to the second-generation’s problems with cultural dysfunction, alienation, generational conlict, crime and law and order. The Cantle Report’s emphasis on ‘culture’, and particularly cultural difference as the underlying source of conlict between groups, ‘illustrates the shift from a dualistic racist/anti-racist discourse towards a more nuanced “new racist” discussion of nation and belonging … Multiculturalism is thus placed as part of the problem rather than, as in the 1980s, its proposed solution’ (Alexander 2004: 549). In a more positive analysis, Thomas (2007: 441) believes that the Cantle Report opens up the right path towards the formation of ‘robust inter-ethnic dialogue needed for the operation of a genuinely multi-cultural society’. That the report, according to Thomas, refuses to accept any absolute ethnic boundaries at face value could be seen as a form of ‘critical multiculturalism’. This ‘critical multiculturalism’, continues Thomas (2007: 441), is relective of: Britain’s remorseless move towards greater ‘hybridity’ and cosmopolitanism, and suggests that negotiation or ‘translation’ around an individual’s experiences of this is becoming a necessary part of life in modern Britain … hybridity can be seen as the positive experiencing and adoption of differing cultures, beliefs and lifestyles arising from the operation of a genuinely multi-cultural society.

Trapped Between Two Cultures? The relationship between state-sponsored multiculturalism and the secondgeneration is both profoundly important and complex. One recurrent theme concerns how the second-generation is supposedly ‘trapped between two cultures’, which frames young people, especially youths, as caught between two monolithic and oppositional cultural formations. This pathological status in turn creates psychological problems for second-generation youth which forces them into a misguided search for roots and authenticity. As a byproduct, such ‘identity conlict’ leads to anger, dysfunction and violence, which ind their expression in riots or even militancy, like Islamic Jihadists. Figured through images of the ghetto, of rage, of nihilism and violence (Alexander 2004), the second-generation represent an accident waiting to happen, and not just in English cities, but also in

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the Parisian banlieues, like Clichy-sous-Bois in October and November 2005.5 Multiculturalism has variously been seen as a panacea for such crises or the malignant cause of the disease. Hybridity is also either the process through which the second-generation creatively mediate and reconcile oppositional identities – and through doing so contribute towards a new multicultural Britain of dialogue and exchange. Or multiculturalism, alternatively, heralds the negation of a truly transformative class politics (Hutnyk 2000; Kundnani 2002). In order to explore further these conlicting discourses, the rest of this chapter examines the relationship between the second-generation and multiculturalism. Looking at the Irish second-generation, especially in England, provides a different focus from the more visible recent studies of mainly Muslim South Asian youth. While the Muslim second-generation youth are often portrayed in terms of their position within the matrix of Islamaphobia and the conines of the ‘cultural clash’ model, the Irish second-generation are framed in different terms. The fact that they are largely white, they speak with English accents and they were born in England means they are an even more ‘invisible’ group than the Irish irstgeneration. The struggle for some of this group, as we will see, is to be accepted as Irish or as part Irish. This struggle is two-fold: it is against wider society, very generally speaking, which does not ‘recognize’ their ‘hybrid’ identity; it is also against the Irish-born, who also refuse to accept this group as ‘authentically’ Irish in any sense. For Arrowsmith (2000: 35), the second-generation Irish in Britain are often saddled by the remit of ‘exclusive nationalisms’, which frame this group as ‘double inauthentic: not quite English, neither are they “truly” Irish’. Adding to this perspective, a report published by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and compiled by the ‘Irish 2 Project’ (Hickman et al. 2002), concluded that ‘second-generation identities lie at the intersection of two hegemonic domains, each of which represents their Irish identiications as inauthentic’. These putative ‘two hegemonic domains’ broadly refer to, on the one hand, the land of the second-generation’s birth and rearing, Britain, which through oficial legislation refuses to recognize the second-generations’ attachment to Irishness, viewing their ‘whiteness’ and British accents as markers of Britishness. On the other hand, the Irish-born often eschew any claims the second-generation may have to Irishness. ‘One of our main indings’, the report concluded, ‘is that the children of Irish migrants ind it dificult to claim an Irish identity, even when they feel strongly Irish – their Irishness is denied by Irish and British people alike’. What an examination of the Irish second-generation provides is the multilayered generational experiences of different groups.

5 October and November 2005 witnessed a period of civil unrest, including riots, in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. The riots were reported to have been triggered by the deaths of two teenagers who had been chased by the police. They were also reported to have involved a large contingent of youths with a ‘north African’ background.

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Second-Generation and Multiculturalism It is worth noting that when groups engage in claim-making exercises for public multicultural resources, the second-generation are often an indispensable part of the application. The applicants often make emotional appeals to the sponsors by invoking the future of their children. Activists use the emotional vocabulary of propriety or duty to provide compelling accounts of why their constituency should be funded, and the image of children places a huge moral value on multiculturalism for providing stability for the child. The aim of cultural preservation is that it can be transmitted to the children so that they can learn about and enjoy their heritage. For instance, the mission statement of the Irish Cultural Centre, speaks of the importance of its ‘education programme’: ‘Irish traditional culture (traditional Irish music, dance, storytelling, language, theatre) is kept alive and is available to be passed onto our future generations’ (see: ). Phillip Ullah’s (1985) research on the second-generation in London during the early 1980s noted how the vast networks of Irish community centres, social and sports clubs and pubs provided a matrix for inculcating Irish youth with a proud sense of their Irish roots. He wrote: ‘The activities they offer are speciically organized by the Irish as a means of introducing their children to the Gaelic culture and encouraging a positive sense of Irish identity’ (Ullah 1985: 168). For LondonIrish groups, the procurement of multicultural resources for the second-generation could have a speciic function. A report in 1984 on the London-Irish noted that: Of the Irish-born members of the Irish community over 50 per cent are over the age of forty ive. It is unlikely that further large scale migrations of Irish people will take place and therefore the onus for the survival of the Irish falls heavily upon second and third generation Irish (GLC 1984a: 3).

Certainly, much of the London-Irish multicultural initiatives I encountered during my research included a strong emphasis on the second-generation. The Irish Cultural Centre, as elaborated in Chapter 3, contained speciic educational and cultural classes for children, such as traditional step-dance classes which prepare the children for ‘festival’ competitions and public performances. There was also a two-week summer school for children, which instructed them on Irish traditional culture and throughout the year Tír na nÓg (‘the land of ever young’), an ‘Irish language and culture club’. Many adult members of the second-generation also attended the Centre; some of these people were even middle-aged. During my research at the centre I noted a different proile between second-generation adults and those born in Ireland. I recorded that the second-generation were likely to participate in educational classes that entailed a strong performative aspect, especially music and dance. The Irish-born group preferred history and literature classes, which have less of a basis in performance. The reason for this, I surmised, was that learning traditional Irish

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music and dance for the second-generation provided scope for them to legitimize and authenticate their Irish identities when they feel this identity has often been disavowed by others. This also points to how Irishness has largely become a corporeal and embodied identity enacted through cultural performance (see Wulff 2007). Interestingly, this can also be indicative of a more profound cultural change concerning the relationship of Irishness to the body as well as of broader societal changes from an industrial to a consumer society. As Mac an Ghaill and Haywood (2003: 388) argue, speciically in terms of Irish masculinity, there has been a ‘cultural shift’ from a: racialized masculinity, with a focus on working with the body (for example, the navvy), to an ethnicized masculinity of working on the body … This cultural shift can be read as an effect of a broader movement from production to consumption as a key dynamic of contemporary social conditions and how we live our lives [emphasis original].

The Plastic Paddy after a Wednesday evening screening in the irish Cultural Centre’s concert auditorium of a rather poor ilm about love across the sectarian divide and mambo dancing in Belfast, the London-Irish producer of the ilm answered questions from an open audience. The audience mostly asked questions about how the producer had successfully gained funding from a major Hollywood studio – a rare triumph for a Northern Irish movie. After answering these rather perfunctory questions, the producer then disclosed that he was currently trying to gain funding for a television drama about a ictitious contemporary London-Irish family. The point of the drama, he continued, was to illuminate the multi-generational experience of the Irish in the capital. The production, stated the producer, would help the audience comprehend the differences between the older generation who came as poor economic migrants in the 1950s and 1960s from Ireland and their upwardly mobile children, who were professional, highly skilled members of the global economy yet equally adept in the old world and traditional culture of their parents and the putative new world of the global multicultural city. An Irish poet who once lived in Los Angeles as a script writer declared from the seated audience that the project would be a great way to preserve the stories and focus on the relevant issues of the Irish in London, because if you ‘leave culture to the politicians, culture will die. All politicians kill culture’. Ros, the centre’s manager, and a second-generation Irish woman, excitedly grabbed the microphone to loudly proclaim that the Irish in London ‘should start a call to the Irish community; we need to start documenting and celebrating the stories and culture of how we came here to London, who we are, where we should be going …’ At that precise moment, an elderly Irish gentleman standing up at the bar interrupted by barking out: ‘Culture? What do you lot know about culture? When

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I came to London during the war and worked at the rubber factory in Southall,6 i had to share my bed with three other workers on different shifts. As soon as I got out of bed to go to work, another one inished his shift to take my place in the bed. I don’t see anyone coming round to me to talk about culture. The only culture you lot know is a “plastic Paddy” one …’ At this, the poet angrily retorted, ‘I don’t recognize or like that term – “plastic Paddy”’. Ros pitched in and asked: ‘Why can’t we, the second-generation, be listened to and included as well as part of the Irish community?’ Instantaneously, the old man shouted back: ‘We never hear the end of you plastics.’ If, momentarily, there was tension in the auditorium, it was quickly dispersed as people began to swap winks, grins or they rolled their eyes, suggesting the elderly gentleman’s views were tolerated as something eccentric and were to be treated with little more than quiescent derision. The second-generation, as we have seen, represents an integral part of statesponsored multicultural projects. While for various reasons the second-generation are called upon to maintain the ‘culture’ and the ‘community’, to identify themselves as Irish, there is also a counter-current which seeks to de-authenticate this group. The most obvious attempt to absolve the second-generation from their ‘Irishness’ is by endowing them with the epithet ‘Plastic Paddy’. Typically, a ‘Plastic Paddy’ refers to someone who wasn’t born in Ireland and is therefore not ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ Irish, though they may appear to be trying to be ‘more Irish than the Irish’ by demonstrating an over-zealous allegiance to Ireland or through participation in Irish cultural forms. The term ‘Plastic Paddy’ is normally used in a pejorative way: it makes the second-generation ‘implicitly seen to be unit to belong within this “we Irish”: unit to claim the conveniently undeined “authentic Irishness” upon which such arguments unwittingly rest’ (Arrowsmith 2000: 36). The origins of the term ‘Plastic Paddy’ are disputed. Some research studies have traced the origins of the term back to the 1980s and the matrix of Irish emigration to London. In 1989, 46,000 people migrated from the Irish Republic with as many as 2,000 a month pouring into London. Alongside the traditional ‘working class’ Irish migrant, was a new group. These people were largely professional, highly-skilled, university graduates, and they were even given their own distinctive typologies to differentiate them from the traditional Irish migrant type: ‘emigrant aristocracy’ and the ‘Ryan Air generation’ (Gray 2000). Their pattern of migration was typically short term compared to the embedded and permanent form of previous generations of Irish migration. Seeking to further distinguish themselves from both the older working class migrants and especially their children, the middle-class migrants developed the ‘Plastic Paddy’ soubriquet as part of an ‘active disidentiication with the second-generation, which it positions as culturally recidivist’ (Mac an Ghaill and Haywood 2003: 391). In this synopsis, the ‘new’ upwardly mobile migrants fashioned a narrative in which they represented the ‘national community that is authorized as the most authentic form of collectivity’ (Mac an Ghaill and Haywood 2003: 391). This 6

Southall is a district in west London.

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group represents itself ‘self-relexively as the transnational generation, inhabiting a temporary bodily relocation outside of Ireland, while making frequent return visits home’ (Mac an Ghaill and Haywood 2003: 391). The new migrants unfavourably compare their ‘geographies of movement and mobility of the present’ with the second-generation’s ‘ascribed histories of the past’ (Mac an Ghaill and Haywood 2003: 391) [emphasis original]. The second-generation’s perceived wish to mark out their identity as irish is thus portrayed as rooted in an archaic irish nationalist encapsulation while simultaneously and paradoxically ixed to the geographic coordinates of England, a place which has often been portrayed as the binary opposite of Ireland. Indeed, it is also important to see the ‘Plastic Paddy’ term of abuse as a product of the ‘troubled’ relations between Britain and Ireland. Since Britain has traditionally been presented as the colonizers of Ireland, the fact that the second-generation are not just born in England but speak with English accents potentially marks them out as part of the enemy. There are also racial overtones to the ‘Plastic Paddy’ phrase; it is not only that the second-generation are not authentically ‘ethnic’ Irish, but the fact that they are deined as English generates age-old stereotypes concerning the supposed immutable differences between the Irish Celt and the English Anglo-Saxon. Another reason which explains this binary division between the ‘real’ Irish and the ‘plastic’ second-generation is that Ireland has traditionally felt collective shame about the presence of a huge Irish diaspora outside of its shores. The shame emerges from an unspoken sense that Ireland was unable to provide for its own – those who were forced to leave and search out a new life abroad. This ‘denial of the diaspora’ (Hickman 2002) becomes manifest in an almost psychological condition where the ‘true’ Irish ‘project’ on to the ‘fake’ second-generation their own shame. While there may be some truth to this, within Ireland there is nowadays much recognition given to the fact that there exists a substantial diaspora outside of Ireland. Indeed, as described in Chapter 2, the Irish government now provide generous funds to Irish groups in Britain.

The Hybrid Generation? Due to this perceived confusion as to whether the second-generation are the true inheritors of an Irish heritage or ‘Plastic Paddies’, similar to those discourses which have enveloped other second-generation groups, the second-generation irish have occasionally been framed within the ‘trapped between two cultures’ paradigm. Greenslade, in his work analyzing the high incidence of mental illness suffered by the irish second-generation, argues: Isolation in the sense of a deeply felt or experienced, classical alienation is … characteristic of these people. They belong completely to neither one culture nor the other and are caught between their parents’ heritage and their present

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This view of the second-generation as interminably recidivist, unable to adequately come to terms with their position in the interstices between two mutually exclusive ‘cultures’, means that in archetypal ‘marginal man’ theory they are drawn to extremes. For Greenslade (1991), the alienation of the Irish second-generation leads to one type of extreme: mental illness, particularly schizophrenia. For others, they fret that the second-generation will seek out the extremism of one part of their particular identity: militant nationalist politics and religious fundamentalism. this particular suspicion has especially been applied to young second-generation British Muslims. For instance, when it was revealed in May 2003 that Omar Khan Sharif, a 27-year-old man, who was born and brought up in the east Midlands of England, walked into a Tel Aviv bar and blew himself up, a British newspaper asked: ‘How could a second-generation immigrant, a British citizen born and brought up [in Derby], turn his back on his cultural and religious roots and ind in them a cause for which to both kill and to die’? (O’Hagan 2003). Similarly, the death in 1996 of an IRA man, born and brought up in London, who was accused of plotting to detonate bombs in London, was met with some puzzlement by media igures (Harnden 1996). Perhaps unsurprisingly, processes of hybridity, the melding together of disparate cultural traditions to forge new identities, have become seen as a progressive way in which the second-generation can provide solutions to their ‘marginal’ status. Even in the early 1980s one writer, Jim McGrath, envisaged a hybrid, hyphenated ‘Anglo-Irish culture’ for the second-generation Irish, which would maintain an Irish identity for these people whilst simultaneously allowing ‘integration’ into British life. Calling for a ‘youth movement’, McGrath stated the second-generation should be given the chance to learn about Irish history, not to ‘reinforce prejudices or cultural paranoia, but to put the balance right and to better understand their entitlement to an Irish heritage’ (1982: 10). More recent academic analysis of the Irish second-generation has certainly been concerned with their agency and not ‘just as the recipients of structural processes’ (Mac an Ghaill and Haywood 2003: 389). These texts illuminate a group who are seen to utilize both multiple and syncretic identities to negotiate their lives. Analyzing the autobiographical writings of second-generation Irish in England, Liam Harte (2003: 301) argues that ‘the desire for authentication is that which the second-generation imagination cannot not want’. Their quest for legitimacy is a search for an authentically hybrid identity, in which the coordinates of ‘here’ and ‘there’ might be creatively ‘pestled together’. The project, The Second-Generation Irish: A Hidden Population in Multiethnic Britain (Hickman et al. 2002), stated that the second-generation, rather than desiring to be either/or Irish/English, were more: Concerned with expressing and gaining recognition for the complexity of the identiications and positionings of the second-generation. The desire of

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the majority was for recognition of this hybridity rather than for the key to a successful trajectory … Many participants expressed or wished there was a way of articulating allegiances to more than one domain, conjoined as their ‘secondgenerationness’ and contingent upon their locational speciicity.

The Pogues and the Afro Celt Sound System A particularly visible and marketable way in which the second-generation Irish in England have announced their hybrid and multiple identities is through popular music. Some commercially successful and internationally renowned London-Irish groups emerged from the 1980s onwards with new musical forms which mixed Irish traditional forms with other contemporary forms from across the globe. The development of these new ‘hybrid’ forms, however, has revealed a complex and ambivalent picture, with some representations hard to categorize as to whether they conirm or challenge negative stereotypes. Importantly, these forms have also fed into the way that state-sponsored multiculturalism is produced. The Pogues The music and image of the London-Irish band, The Pogues, provides an interesting insight into the multifaceted and even contradictory fashion that some of the second-generation have developed new encapsulations for their speciic experience. The Pogues were formed in north London in 1983 and they originally played Irish traditional music in the bars of Kilburn. Even though the members had learnt traditional music in London, where they were raised, it was not surprising that they were extremely proicient exponents of the form. As explained in Chapter 2, traditional Irish culture became an important mechanism through which some London-Irish groups promoted a positive Irish identity, to mark themselves out as an ethnic minority, and as a means to gain multicultural funding. On top of this, there had been a strong traditional music scene in London since the 1950s. a branch of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (Music Association of Ireland) was established irst in 1957 and a vibrant ‘session’ scene emerged in the Irish bars of London at the same time. Some of the best Irish traditional musicians, like Jimmy Power, Bobby Casey and Brendan Mulkere, had settled in London where they continued to perform. At the heart of the scene was undoubtedly ‘The Favourite’ pub in north London. As a lasting testament to the outstanding creativity fomented in ‘The Favourite’, the seminal Paddy in the Smoke live album was recorded. In this way, the London-Irish began to view themselves as almost the very heart of Irish traditional culture. An article in the Irish Post in 2002 by John Moloney, a second-generation London-Irishman and popular comedian, demonstrated that in some circumstances the Irish in England continued to represent a pure version of the national culture compared to those in Ireland:

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While the Irish in Ireland kept their heads down, the Irish in England grabbed whatever culture they could, and ran with the ball. Music, dancing and language classes sprang from nowhere and thanks to the likes of Brendan Mulkere7 – a ine teacher, brilliant musician and linguist – the London-Irish were given the opportunity to carry the torch while, seemingly, the rest of Ireland itself was listening to Country and Western (Moloney 2002: 45).

The Pogues, however, began to move away from the conines of a ‘pure’ Irish traditional sound by blending the form with new inluences, particularly punk music. Before joining the Pogues, the lead singer, Shane MacGowan, had at one point been a punk and was even once ilmed in a Union Jack T-shirt. Responsible for writing most of the band’s songs, MacGowan created a veritable canon of modern classics, such as ‘Fairytale of New York’ and ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’, which quickly became established as part of the ever-adapting Irish music scene in London and across the globe. Revealingly, much of MacGowan’s thematic inspiration for the geographic location for his songs is london, thus integrating the Irish diaspora into an integral site for Irishness. The propensity of The Pogues to mix and juxtapose punk and Irish traditional music elements has led to them being described as ‘Irish music viewed through the prism of a north London sensibility’ (O’Connor 1991: 159). O’Connor takes this concept further to explore how The Pogues, in their synopsis, are representative of a new diasporic Irish identity in England. The Pogues: were assimilated to the extent that they were reared, educated and socialized in Britain. They rejected the anodyne ballad culture of the Irish communities their parents identiied with. The Pogues showed a way in which they could be Irish in Britain. The music was exciting and contemporary in form and content, yet it was culturally familiar also (O’Connor 1991: 158–9).

Here, the author is positing a narrative in which The Pogues, through the usage of cultural hybridity, are dialectically resolving the contradictions of the secondgeneration experience which was hitherto ‘trapped’ somewhere between Irishness and Englishness. There is a further layer of complexity regarding how The Pogues represent and even play with identities. Their music often dealt with extreme alcohol consumption and Shane MacGowan is infamous for his drunken on and off-stage performances and lifestyle. As O’Connor (1991: 158–9) notes: ‘The Pogues disported themselves like archetypal Paddies, with a reputation for hard drinking, bad manners, and disdain for personal appearance’. Shane MacGowan’s behaviour has witnessed the singer being subject to viliication in some quarters for his public, drunken behaviour and celebration of alcoholism. MacGowan, therefore, has been identiied as glorying in a core prejudicial stereotype of Irishness – the ‘Irish drunk’ and the 7

Brendan Mulkere also teaches traditional music at the Irish Cultural Centre.

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lack of control the Irish have over their bodies (Hickman 1998). Yet, at the same time, there is an extreme ambivalence at the core of The Pogues. The Pogues, as Keohane (1997) elaborates, have helped deine the current ‘bewildering’ experience of immigration in the Irish diaspora by providing a critique of a reiied Irishness proposed by ‘quasi-fascist national’ organizations, like those who claim the right to demarcate what is authentic Irish culture. This critique has taken the form of eschewing the stereotypes presented in traditional song which idealize a ‘mythical’ Irish past. The Pogues, instead, deal with ‘Irishness, warts and all’ (Keohane 1997: 299). As part of this self-effacing tendency, Keohane notes how The Pogues deal with the ‘good and the bad’ of alcohol consumption, afirming: its use as a social lubricant … and the role its ritualized consumption practices play in cultural production. Equally, they employ images of the horrors of alcohol abuse: social and self-destructiveness, the sordidness and social impotence associated with alcohol dependency, and the political and creative ineptitude which results from numbed minds and dulled senses (Keohane 1997: 299).

McLaughlin and Mcloone (2000: 191) also argue that ‘The Pogues parody and interrogate aspects of Irishness in complex and confusing ways, and to see in them only a lack of positive stereotyping is to miss the point’. In particular, the authors are interested in how The Pogues address the ambivalent experience of the second-generation, especially ‘through song narratives that offer an ‘in-betweenness’. Within this there is a critique, through parody, of national stereotypes: ‘They rant about the absurdity of nostalgia for Ireland and twist and bend sentimental ballads to rearticulate feelings of alienation in London’ (McLaughlin and McLoone 2000: 191). The Afro Celt Sound System another globally successful london-irish band of recent years has been afro Celt Sound system. Afro Celt Sound System, in particular, have coalesced together traditional music variously with ‘Dub Reggae’, Punk rock and other forms in multiple hybrid combinations which have afforded the music a global audience as well as critical accolades. Typically portrayed in the media as an ‘eclectic world music mix of African rhythms, dub reggae and traditional Irish music’ (Irish Times January 1997), the band are based in London and led by second-generation Irish musician James McNally. The underlying reason why McNally – an all-Ireland champion on the accordion, piano and bodhrán drum by the age of sixteen – was willing to create new forms of musical dialogue derived from a sense of rejection he experienced from the Irish-born concerning his right to claim to an Irish heritage: I’d spent my life struggling to get the Irish community to accept me, whereas playing Celtic music with African musicians made me see the whole question is bigger than whether or not, being born in England, to Irish parents, gave me the

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By becoming a highly successful part of the ‘world music’ scene, the Afro Celt Sound System has set the ‘tone’ for forms of cross-cultural dialogue. Through engaging in musical fusions with bands like the Dhol Foundation described at the beginning of the chapter, the ‘Afro Celt collaborative philosophy’, writes James McNally, is ‘crossing cultural boundaries with such a passionate desire to embrace a future without losing sight of the past’ (see: ). Such forms of mixing and ‘dialogue’ have also become a central component of state-sponsored multicultural initiatives. As described in Chapter 3, the irish Cultural Centre, in particular, has actively encouraged musical and cultural ‘fusions’ as a means to engender alliances between groups and intercultural alliances.

Conclusion: The Death of Multiculturalism: Redux

Multiculturalism: ‘Apartheid Multiplied’? This book has considered a number of issues: What does it mean when an initiative that is funded by a state agency is designed to promote interculturalism and cross-cultural dialogue? Do such initiatives help break down modes of negative stereotyping and a history of pervasive mistrust which has hitherto existed between groups, allowing in the process a new sense of mutual respect and appreciation to lourish? Or, as critics would opine, does the process represent little more than a conirmation of the differences and indeed the inequalities which exist between groups? Rather than an intimately benign operation in which groups civilize each other by learning of the richness of each other’s cultural identities, multiculturalism represents for some ‘an archipelago of separate communities, a mosaic of ixed pieces, like a series of ghettos, or apartheid multiplied’ (Nederveen Pieterse 2004: 36). Indeed, does multiculturalism merely allow prospective groups to ‘retreat into ghettoes and accentuate their speciicity without contributing anything more meaningful than curries and carnivals to our national culture’? (Bodi 2006)? This book has closely considered and addressed these questions. In doing so, the book has sought to go beyond the rather stale debates that currently divide many political theorists, mainly within left-liberalism. These theorists have generally addressed the issue of multiculturalism in terms of whether it promotes social equality through the proliferation of group differentiated rights. When they have addressed the issue of interculturalism and other forms of cross-cultural dialogue they have been equally divided. And so the debate rages. As we have seen, the debate on multiculturalism is polarized between the two camps, pro and against, and has in the process fostered acrimony and rancour. ‘Like all family quarrels’, Parekh (2006: 346) notes, the tone of some interested commentators ‘is predictably angry and self-righteous’. Although this book has taken cognizance of the dispute by outlining many of the crucial arguments purveyed by the interested factions, it has also argued for a more grounded, ethnographic approach to the study of state-sponsored multiculturalism. This has allowed scope to view the almost routine, even banal, mundane and ritualistic ways that multiculturalism is produced by groups and experienced by individuals, as well as an insight into the speciic spaces where state-sponsored multiculturalism takes place. Above all, the ethnographic approach engenders an analysis of the complex, contradictory and paradoxical

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ways that multiculturalism is practised and received. These complex worlds and processes stimulated by forms of cross-cultural dialogue range from the simple act of learning about the history and cultural identities of a minority group, to a more involved carnivalesque act of ‘status reversal’ and alterity, in which an actor seeks to embrace and even become part of identities they do not ordinarily belong to. Beyond this, as we have seen during the book, there are more banal, unrelexive and quotidian modes of multiculturalism, such as actors enjoying a few pints of Guinness on St Patrick’s Day, or visiting a multicultural arts and ‘community’ centre as part of simple socializing activities and even itness training. Notably, such mundane modes of multicultural participation and performance can provide a determinative inluence on the way in which ethnic and racial identities are practised and understood. An actor identifying with a particular ethnicity can, therefore, be also quite contextual and shifting in how they view this encapsulation. I have noted how people, to some extent, can move in and out of ethnic encapsulations and this can be exploited by so-called ethnic entrepreneurs: people who have a vested interested in awakening the ethnic identities of others. The task of the ethnic entrepreneur is to make non-members of the group feel as if they belong to the collectivity, even if it is for a short while. An example of this was the Census 2001 campaign ran by a number of Irish welfare organizations. Since the allocation of public multicultural funds is contingent on information gathered from the Census, the Irish welfare groups instigated a campaign to ‘recruit’ people who were not born in Ireland but could be made to feel that their ethnicity is Irish. However, while this may point to the instrumental and luid nature of ethnic identiication, for the prospective ‘migrant of identity’ it still remains a dificult and tricky task to convince others of your new ethnicity. The boundary delineating ethnic identities is often iercely patrolled. Some members of the group may ensure that crossing the ‘border’ is made verboten through discourses of pollution and danger. For instance, the term ‘plastic’ to describe second-generation Irish in England or practically anyone else not born in Ireland but who expresses an Irish identity acts to circumscribe an authentic Irish ethnicity to an exalted few.

The Global City and Cosmopolitanism The ethnographic backdrop of the book – mainly London – has provided a speciic context to illuminate multiculturalism in the ‘global city’. The ‘global city’ is not only an important hub in the global economy; it is also characterized by the presence of actors who are committed to a cosmopolitan culture shaped by the large number of groups living in the city. Rather than the embodiment of the national culture, ‘global cities’ can appear an immense repository of cosmopolitanism; they are places in which the economy and even, according to some (e.g., Purcell 2003), citizenship is being rescaled thereby providing the potential to furnish new conceptions of identity unfettered by its subordination to the nation-state (Purcell

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2003). Indeed, while the ‘global city’ attracts migrants who were originally pushed by the factors of poverty, conlict and disaster, it also pulls in those actors who are excited and interested in experiencing the vast array of international cultures and identities on offer. Hence, the ‘global city’, engenders a matrix for actors to explore commonalities and differences, which can possibly provide an initial point for the important task of building a broad based social movement dedicated to anti-racism. This is not to say that other cities which are not endowed with the epithet of ‘global’ cannot promote a cosmopolitan identity; ‘global cities’, in short, are perhaps just better at marketing and promoting this particular self-identity. Moreover, global cities are also sites of profoundly embedded socioeconomic inequalities between groups, as well as conlict between groups over resources and the esteem to which group identities are held. Furthermore, the forms of contemporary urban regeneration that occur in the global city are often based on creating the aura of both excitement and the security of that communal afiliation. In this way, many of the areas traditionally host to migrant settlement in the global city are now the focus for new forms of creative industry. Conlict Versus Inclusivity Much of the critical writing on multiculturalism argues that the recognition of group- based ethnic differences axiomatically ignites conlict over resources and incompatible visions of organizing the polity. In the ‘global city’, alternatively, the mobilization for multiculturalism can provide a matrix for inclusivity and the building of bridges between groups. This inclusivity is problematic. Ethnic minority groupings, in particular, often make their identities appear exotic – the reverse side of modern day life typiied by anomie, social disconnection and even repression – in order to make them interesting to others. They can also cultivate the idea that they are holders of ‘real communities’ and ‘authentic traditional cultures’ which represent feelings of connectivity, security and solidarity that are often perceived to be missing from modern urban living. These images and emotions conjured up by ethnic minority groupings afford an opportunity to recruit non-members to engage with their cultural identities. This projection of ‘exotica’ can, in some circumstances, represent a strategic and instrumental tactic of the group or by certain key individuals within the group. Promoting the group as exciting, vibrant and creative – even the bearers of forms of totemic spirituality and a ‘rejected knowledge’ – can help a group carve out a niche in the multicultural paradigm. As such, this can assist with the project of gaining valuable resources from state agencies. This is the ‘multicultural numbers game’: the more people that are seen to belong to the group, even tenuously, can legitimate the group’s claim to funds. The Dark Side of Multiculturalism: ‘Pieces of a Mosaic’ While such a project may appear particularly appealing to a group, it can also have a dark side. The representation of the group as marginal and different can

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act to imprison them as eternally bound by custom and culture (see Malik 1996, Bauman 2001). The recognition of difference can even represent the legitimization of pervasive structural social inequalities. It is rejected that groups can be deined as embodying a culture which approximates to ‘clearly delineated and identiiable entities that coexist, whilst maintaining irm boundaries, as would pieces of a mosaic’ (Benhabib 2002: 8). Critics instead elaborate an alternative view of culture, which consists of ‘intercultural interplay and mingling, a terrain of crisscrossing lows, in the process generating new combinations and options … in relation to political interests, lifestyle choices, and economic opportunities’ (Nederveen Pieterse 2004: 36). In this conspectus, culture and ethnicity are not ‘ixed and unchanging entities in the moral universe. Groups are constantly forming and dissolving in response to political and institutional circumstances’ (Kukathas 1995: 232). Multiculturalism, however, should not be framed as a mode of social organization which inherently acts as an apologia for groups to act as autonomous islands of tyranny, in which ill-treatment is perpetuated against group members in the name of culture and tradition. While opponents of multiculturalism are willing to press into service various scenarios in which multiculturalism perpetuates illiberal and barbaric practices (e.g., Barry 2001), multiculturalism can also be consonant with democratic, peaceful and liberal forms of ethnic mobilization. As Kymlicka (2007) convincingly argues, minority groups mobilizing within the multicultural paradigm are equally, if not more prone to the ideals of liberalism: respect for equality, gay and women’s rights, and religious tolerance. What is more, multiculturalism can provide a medium through which ethnic politics is peacefully sublimated into democratic means. In fact, the inability of a state to recognize and deal with ethnocultural diversity and minority rights in a satisfactory fashion is a strong indication that a nation is unit to be a member in good standing of the club of liberal democracies (Kymlicka 2007). Moreover, different groups make different demands and pressures upon the liberal state. The demand of some religious and fundamentalist groups for group differentiated rights can clash or appear incompatible with the secular values of the liberal state. The demands of some other groups appear less unaccommodating. They may request some form of recognition for their identities – which have been subject to forms of negative stereotyping – by calling for funds to promote their cultural forms, asking for community centres, some schools, increased media visibility, and access to public spaces they were hitherto proscribed from. Critics of multiculturalism argue that any form of group targeted rights is inconsistent with the values of the liberal state. In democratic politics, consequently, it is important that all perspectives should be represented in the public arena, ‘but in reaching policy decisions citizens should set aside their personal commitments and afiliations and try to assess competing proposals in terms of shared justice and common interest’ (Miller 1999: 106). This is a model of civility and harmony which demands that differences are left at the door when entering the public realm. The exchange of inclusion for identity supposes that ‘civil society and more largely citizenship required its own unitary identity; you could not be different and still connected to others’ (Sennett 2005: 1).

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The Backlash Against Multiculturalism At one point – especially during the 1990s – proponents of multiculturalism were claiming that they had won the ‘culture war’ (Kymlicka 1999). They had good reason to make a proclamation of victory. A number of nation-states in the west had begun to develop de jure legislation for multiculturalism; international agencies – like the EU, UN and UNESCO – also formulated a series of packages designed to promote group rights and multiculturalism.1 the broad international coalition of support for multiculturalism in the 1990s came at a time when it was seen that the ‘recognition’ of ethnicity and identity could contribute towards the amelioration of conlict and thus be consistent with liberal democracy (May 1999, Kymlicka 2007). Multiculturalism was also seen as helping to correct pervasive and historically long-standing inequalities suffered by minorities either excluded or forcibly assimilated by the dominant group. To help minorities achieve parity with the rest of society multicultural policies were formulated. These policies ranged from language rights, positive discrimination in employment hiring, and funding measures to maintain and preserve cultural practices. Staunch opponents of multiculturalism (e.g., Malik 1996, Barry 2001) admitted there was little they could do to fundamentally challenge the prevailing consensus. Arch-nemesis of multiculturalism Brian Barry moaned: ‘I used to believe that multiculturalism was bound sooner or later to sink under the weight of its intellectual weaknesses … There is no sign of any collapse so far’ (2001: 6). The tide has now changed. The opponents of multiculturalism are in the ascendancy. There is currently a discernible backlash against multiculturalism and group rights. Many nation-states who had hitherto embraced robust multicultural politics are at present seeking to limit any commitment towards sponsoring diversity (McGhee 2005, 2008). The reasons for the contemporary predilection for eschewing multiculturalism are multiple and complex. Many have critiqued multiculturalism for fracturing or even ‘Balkanizing’ society so that the nation is made up of a multiplicity of separate groups and identities that are in competition with each other to claim public resources. There is a call in response for the state to promote a more uniied national identity in order to overcome divisions. In another critique, radicals, especially socialists, claim that, by promoting the particularistic micro-interests of each group, multiculturalism impedes the vital work of class solidarity needed to overcome inequality (see Fraser 2000). Then there are the words of censure from left-liberals, who argue that multiculturalism irreconcilably threatens the project of social equality and the primacy of the individual over communal, group afiliations. They demand that the polity is organized by the 1 Some of these policies include the UN’s 1992 ‘Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic Minorities’; the Council of Europe’s 1995 ‘Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities’; the Organization of American States’ 1997 ‘Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ (see Kymlicka 2007).

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values of a singular, equal and undifferentiated concept of citizen, the relegation of group identities to the private sphere and the autonomy of the individual from the ‘shackles’ of group based identities (Kukathas 1995, Barry 2001). Moreover, as nation-states and local government agencies increasingly advance neo-liberal policies, the decline in support for multiculturalism has provided a convenient excuse to reduce its commitment to furnishing public funds on multicultural initiatives. As highlighted in Chapter 3, in the context of the Irish Cultural Centre in London, a change in local government administration witnessed the end of the Centre receiving a substantial annual endowment. Nevertheless, as this book has shown, although the national government may be strongly resistant to fostering multiculturalism, there are multiple scales of multicultural governance, including citywide and local authorities. This means that there are often multiple and contradictory state approaches to multiculturalism. There is, consequently, no such thing, as one commentator has stated, a ‘dominant discourse’ (Baumann 1996) to multiculturalism produced in service of the ‘neocolonial’ state. Despite commentators predicting the ‘death of multiculturalism’, this book has explored many of the issues surrounding contemporary state-sponsored multiculturalism, especially the extent to which the state can engender modes of cross-cultural dialogue, and if it does, what does this mean in regard to how group-based identities are constructed, consumed and even challenged? To aid this search, the book has assessed how groups and individuals experience statesponsored multicultural initiatives. How is the notion of ‘community’ constructed and understood in order for groups to avail themselves of public resources? What happens at multicultural ‘community centres’ or multicultural ‘public spectacles’? Why are censuses such an important part of the way an ethnic minority group mobilizes and how multiculturalism is deined? What is the role of the second and other generations in multiculturalism? Who are the people that organize and participate in multicultural initiatives? Assessing these questions both theoretically and ethnographically allows for a more holistic answer.

The London-Irish Although I have explored a number of groups in this book, I have primarily looked at the case of the Irish in England and the London-Irish speciically. The utilization of this case study has demonstrated how the multicultural paradigm impacts upon a group in similar, speciic and variable ways from other groups. The Irish in London, in particular, are a long-standing group in the capital city characterized by recurrent waves of migration. They are also mainly ‘white’, largely Christian and share the same language with the host nation. In many ways and at certain historical junctures the Irish and Irish identities have been valorized in England. They have also been portrayed, for bureaucratic reasons, as being of the ‘same race’ as the English (see Hickman 1998). In one sense, then, the example of the London-Irish seems to differ from so-called NCMs who settled in post-war Britain.

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These groups are mostly non-white and contain an array of cultures and religions, which have often been framed by sections of the UK political establishment and the media as fundamentally incompatible with Britain’s self-ascribed identity (see Gilroy 2004). While there appears to be clear differences between the ‘narrative’ of the Irish and that of NCMs, there are also some startling similarities. For instance, as I have explored in Chapters 1 and 2, the Irish in England have suffered from some forms of prejudice and discrimination since the nineteenth century at least; modes of exclusion which are often assumed to have developed in order to demarcate nCMs as an alien intrusion into british life have long been used against the mainly Catholic Irish. This process of ‘othering’ the Irish, I note, has been at its most intense when Irish nationalists have mobilized for Irish independence from British rule. The instigation of civil conlict in Northern Ireland from the 1960s onwards, with Irish republican bombs planted in London and other English cities, witnessed a major backlash against the Irish in England. The Irish were subject to the PTA, which was seen by the Irish as criminalizing the whole community and many injustices were committed against the Irish. The pervasiveness of anti-Irish sentiment – often mediated through the ‘Irish joke’ – led to the Irish mobilizing for recognition within the state-sponsored multicultural paradigm as an ethnic minority. A large number of Irish organizations worked together to demand public resources so that they could promote a positive Irish identity to counter demeaning representations. The Irish campaign for inclusion within state-sponsored multiculturalism has been complex. The fact that the Irish can appear similar to the host population has meant that many Irish abjured from identifying themselves with the ethnic minority label. The Irish in England have often been at variance and conlict amongst themselves regarding how to represent the ‘community’, who the ‘community’ is, or even whether there is such a thing as an ‘Irish community’ in the irst place. Equally problematic was that although the Irish managed to secure important political representatives and agencies (especially the GLC and GLA) to support their claim-making they have often experienced strong resistance from many state agencies. They have also been confronted with some level of resistance from mainly non-white ethnic minority groupings who are sceptical that the mainly white Irish are equally discriminated against and thus deserve public resources. Mainly due to the ambivalent ‘in out’ relationship that the Irish have to the category of ethnic minority status, Irishness can appear to be a rather nebulous identity, subject to multiple and conlicting deinitions. The ‘loating signiier’ capacity of Irishness has an enhancing and constraining facet regarding how Irish groups mobilize for multicultural resources. It may have an enhancing effect because irishness can appear an attractive and inclusive identity unrestrained by territorial factors, and this can be used by groups to try and recruit new members to the collectivity. It may also be constraining because this very inclusive potential of Irishness can mean that the identity appears too luid and malleable and thus hard to deine for the purpose of multicultural recognition. It is also constraining because,

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especially in a postcolonial sense, this inclusive representation of irishness can often be based on the supposed ‘other-worldly’ identity of Celticism. The issue of inclusivity is not only framed by the matrix of the Irish in England and their struggle for public resources; Irishness, as explored in Chapter 2, has become a global identity and brand. The globalization of Irish identity, fuelled especially by the culture industries, interlinks with campaigns for multicultural recognition. Globalization can also have a paradoxical impact on how groups deine ‘community identity’. Ignatieff (1998: 58) elaborates: Globalism scours away distinctions at the surface of identities and forces us back into ever more assertive defence of inner differences – language, mentality, myth, and fantasy – that escape the surface scouring. As it brings us closer together, makes us all neighbours, destroys the old boundaries of identity marked out by the national or regional consumption styles, we react by clinging to the margins of difference that remain.

Ethnicity, community and identity are becoming increasingly salient in a globalized society. The question, therefore, is whether the polity should be organized to oficially recognize and accommodate group-based identities or whether such encapsulations should be relegated to the private sphere in order to dilute antagonistic ideas about how our society should be ordered? At present, a consensus has largely been established which favours a rejection of multiculturalism. In this book, however, I have provided a more guarded and contextually driven analysis of speciic sites and spaces in which state-sponsored multiculturalism is performed, as well as the various levels of participation of interested actors and state agencies. In doing so, the book has shown the rather ambivalent fashion in which statesponsored multiculturalism enables actors from different groups to come together and engage in dialogue about the value of their respective identities.

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Index Afro Celt Sound System 167–8 Anokha club night 36 apache indian 150 asian underground 36 assimilation of minorities 7, 12, 51–2, 158 Association of Multi-Ethnic Americans (AMEA) 128 Banerjea, Koushik 36 Barnet Multicultural Community Centre 76 Bauman, Zygmunt 7, 29–30 Baumann, Gerd 12 Belgium 26 bernie Grant arts Centre 76 bhangra 149–50 BMCC (Barnet Multicultural Community Centre) 76 brent 38 Brick Lane 34 british nationality act 1948 50, 55 Brixton riots 155 burchill, Julie 107 Cantle report 154, 157–8 carnival 114–15, 116 Celtic tiger 71–2 Celticism 69–74, 103 see also irishness censuses 2001 170 interpretation of data 141–7 results 139–41 ethnic minorities 127 ethnic questions 131–2, 136–8 ethnic recruitment 127–31 ethnicity 130–32, 134–9 interpretation of data 144–7 irish ethnicity 125–6 mixed heritage 128 multiculturalism 127 white identities 128

chicken tikka masala 152–3 Chinese takeaways 153 citizenship 9, 13, 26, 120–21, 172 clash of civilizations 150, 155 class struggle 113 Clichy-sous-bois 159 cognitive liberation 60 Coin street Festival 149 colonialism 11–12 Commission for Racial Equality 132, 135–6 Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 51 community 30–31 community centres, multicultural 75–6 cosmopolitan habitus 81–3 cosmopolitanism 27–31, 41–6, 170–72 counter spaces 113 CRE (Commission for Racial Equality) 132, 135–6 critical multiculturalism 158 cross-community dialogue 68, 121 cross-cultural dialogue 6, 8–9, 10–11, 36, 66–9 see also intercultural dialogue cultural conlict 9 cultural diversity see diversity cultural forms 8 cultural framing 60, 64 cultural pluralism 67 cultural preservation 90–93 culture(s) 6, 8, 11, 172 dancehalls 77–8 davis, david 155 de-industrialization of global cities 33–5 dhol Foundation 149, 151–3 diagnosis framing 65 differentiated universalism 121 Díon Committee 72 diversity 5, 6, 13, 14, 24, 35–6, 158 see also ethnic pluralism

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double bind of multiculturalism 5, 35–7 drunk tank 122–3 economic redistribution 10 eisteddfodau 111 emotionalism 111 empire of uniformity 7 Empire Windrush 50–51 ethnic identity 129, 170, 172 see also ethnicity ethnic minorities 6–7, 16–17, 36–7, 49 censuses 127 politics of visibility 122 prejudice against 8 quantiication 132 ethnic mobilization 15–18, 49 ethnic pluralism 5 see also diversity ethnic recruitment 17–18, 170 censuses 127–31 ethnicity 129–30 northern ireland 127 Yugoslavia 127–8 ethnic social movement 17 ethnicity censuses 130–32, 134–9 changing 172 contextual 134, 170 ethnic recruitment 129–30 group identiication 128–9 meaning of 130–31 ethnographic analysis 4 ethnography 169–70 exclusion of minorities 7 Federation of Irish Societies (FIS) 38–9, 63–4, 73, 135, 136–7 framing 64–6 France 159 GLA (Greater London Authority) 102, 104, 106 GlC see Greater london Council global cities 5, 14–15, 18–19, 23–5 cosmopolitanism 29–31, 170–72 de-industrialization 33–5 diversity 24 inclusivity 171 migrants 24

national identity 26–7 political autonomy 25–6 socioeconomic inequality 24 transnational character of 25 as urban global villages 31 globalization 176 glocalisation 26 Good Friday Agreement 71 Greater london authority 102, 104, 106 Greater london Council 60–62 group identiication 128 groupsicles of competing ethnicities 9–11 Guinness 117, 142 Hammersmith 77–8, 80–81 hattersley, roy 51 heterotopia 76, 93–6 holland 154 Hoxton 36 human rights 9 hybridity 96–9, 156–8, 163–8 IBRG (Irish in Britain Representation Group) 56, 134 immigration 50–51 Indian Summer 149, 151–3 injustice masterframe 64 inner city regeneration 33–4 institutionalist multiculturalism 3 intercultural dialogue 2, 11, 17, 68, 121 see also cross-cultural dialogue IRAG ( Irish Research Advisory Group) 135–6 ireland, republic of Celtic tiger 71–2 diaspora 163 Díon Committee 72 emigration 162 immigration 72 migrants to UK see london-irish potato famine 53 self rule 69–70 Irish Chaplaincy Scheme 54–5, 63 Irish Cultural Centre(s) 47–8, 73, 76–83 constituencies of 83–6 cultural preservation 90–93 as heterotopia 94–6 as a neutral political space 88–90

Index as a radical space 86–7 irish ethnicity 125–6 irish identity 42, 67–8, 119 see also irishness irish in britain representation Group 56, 134 irish in london and uK see london-irish Irish jokes 56, 58, 66, 110 irish research advisory Group 135–6 irish second-generation 159 irishness 28, 39–40, 42, 56–8, 63, 69–73, 103, 144, 166–7, 175–6 JCC (Jewish Community Centre) 75–6 Jenkins, Roy 52 Jewish Community Centre 75–6 Khan, nusrat Fateh ali 150 Kilburn 37, 40 Kymlicka, Will 6–8 liminal rituals 115 liminal time 104 livingstone, Ken 14, 60–62, 66, 104, 106 local government 13–14 london Barnet Multicultural Community Centre 76 bernie Grant arts Centre 76 branding of 116 brent 38 Brick Lane 34 Brixton riots 155 demographics 23 inancial markets 25 GLA (Greater London Authority) 102, 104, 106 as global city 14–15 Greater london Council 60–62 Hammersmith 77–8, 80–81 Hoxton 36 immigration 23, 31–3 Irish Cultural Centre(s) 47–8, 73, 76–96 Jewish Community Centre 75–6 Kilburn 37, 40 migrant labour 24 notting hill 33

195

notting hill Carnival 105–6 overseas visitors 24 Poles 98 political autonomy 25–6 post-industrial 33–4 racism 32 scottish traditional culture 42 southall 32 St. Patrick’s Day 2002 see St.Patrick’s day, 2002 suburbs 32 suicide bombings 155 Tower Hamlets 34 as urban village 32–4 Welsh 28 London Evening Standard 66 london-irish 16–20, 28, 37–40, 174–6 black groups 68 as citadins 120 community 72–3 cross-cultural dialogue 66–9 early settlement 53 as ethnic minority 58–9, 69, 132–4, 136, 175 Good Friday Agreement 71 health 73, 122–3, 136 homelessness 65, 122–3 marketing of 116 mental health 122–3, 163–4 migrants 24, 39, 72, 162–3 popular music 165–8 post-war migration 54–5 potato famine 53 prejudice against 54–5, 136 Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974 55 public employment 65 racism 52–8 right to the city 120 second-generation 160–68 social centrality 112 social movement 59–66 south asian groups 68 London-Irish Commission for Culture and education 67 mobilizing structures 59–60, 63–4 multicultural community centres 75–6 multiculturalism

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backlash against 153–6, 173–4 banal 170 censuses 127 chicken tikka masala 152–3 citizenship 120–21 critical 158 deinition 6 ethnicity 129 ethnography 169–70 group identiication 128 hybridity 96–9, 156–8 inclusivity 171 Jenkins formula 52 liberalism 172 marginalization 171–2 Muslim integration 155–6 public spectacles 114, 121 second-generation 160–68 state-sponsored see state-sponsored multiculturalism terrorism 155 Muslim second-generation 159, 164 nation-states 25–7 national cohesion 10 national identity 26–7 netherlands 154 neutral liberal state 7–8 New Commonwealth Migrants 50–52, 175 New York 29, 119 nilotic peoples 141 normative multiculturalism 3 Northern Ireland, ethnic recruitment 127 notting hill 33 notting hill Carnival 105–6 Ofice of National Statistics 126, 136–9 Ousley, Herman 136 Parekh, Bikhu 6 Paris 159 Plastic Paddy 144, 161–3 the Pogues 165–7 Poles 98 political opportunities 59–63 political philosophy 3–4 Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974 55, 61, 65

prognosis framing 65–6 Project RACE (Reclassify all Children Equally) 128 PTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974) 55, 61, 65 public spectacles as a carnival mask 116 co-option 117 discrepancies of meaning 114 economic redevelopment 116 hegemonic power 115–16 multiculturalism 121 multidimensional aspects 117 political contestation 117 public relations 115–16 race relations 12, 46, 51–2 race relations acts 51 race riots 154–5, 156–7 racism 10–11, 12, 32, 47–8, 52–8, 158 rescaling of nation-states 25–7 right to the city 113, 120 rites of passage 115, 119–22 riverdance 71 scottish traditional culture 42 second-generation 156–68 sense of identity 8 sense of ireland 66 Síol Phádraig 67, 68 Smurit Communications 106 social centrality 112 social equality 9 social movement theory 59–66 somatic society 44 southall 32 spaces of hate 32–3 state-sponsored multiculturalism 2–3, 4–6, 11–13, 31, 46, 48, 153–4, 158–9 St.George’s Day 106 St.Patrick’s Day 2002 101–3 aggregation 120 as carnival 120 class struggle 113 Greater london authority 106 inclusivity 105–13, 121–2 incorporation 103–4

Index liminal time 104, 120 political resistance 103 public funding 106–7 as rite of passage 120–22 separation 120 social centrality 112 stereotypes 110–11, 113 commercialism 116–17 ethnic identity 46 Guinness 117 international 71 irish identity 119 proprietary struggles 119

United Kingdom see also london black power 68 immigration 50–51 imperial racism 54 Irish community see london-irish united states 119, 128 urban anthropology 18–20 urban global villages 31–7 victimhood 42 visibility, politics of 122 voluntary communities 29–31

territoriality, politics of 32–3 terrorism 155 Tower Hamlets 34

welfare state 10 Welsh emotionalism 111 in london 28

unitary citizenship 7

Yugoslavia 127–8

197