Manchester University Press
9 Memory, multiculturalism and anti- racism in east London, 1990–2006
Abstract
This chapter analyses debates about racism and history in 1990s and 2000s Britain through the site of east London. The first section explores debates surrounding a text published in 1990: popular historian Gilda O’Neill’s oral history of Cockney women, Pull No More Bines. O’Neill’s work reflected a growing anti-racist sentiment within British culture, as well as this sentiment’s tendency to mischaracterise and misdiagnose racism’s historical origins. The second section shows this multiculturalism’s fragility in the early 2000s. It analyses author Michael Collins’s The Likes of Us to demonstrate that while the liberal left failed to grapple effectively with the formative place of race and empire in informing contemporary racism in London, the right celebratorily constructed a class identity in which whiteness and class were mutually constitutive. The third section focuses on Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young’s The New East End (2006), exploring a moment when left-leaning sociological opinion actively disavowed the history of empire and postimperial racism to construct an image of the state as actively welcoming an entitled and insular Bengali community. The chapter demonstrates that memory is significant to the history of multiculturalism at the turn of the twenty-first century, and that political engagement with the East End as a site of racism reveals that multiculturalism relied on a disavowal of histories of race and empire.
Abstract
This chapter analyses debates about racism and history in 1990s and 2000s Britain through the site of east London. The first section explores debates surrounding a text published in 1990: popular historian Gilda O’Neill’s oral history of Cockney women, Pull No More Bines. O’Neill’s work reflected a growing anti-racist sentiment within British culture, as well as this sentiment’s tendency to mischaracterise and misdiagnose racism’s historical origins. The second section shows this multiculturalism’s fragility in the early 2000s. It analyses author Michael Collins’s The Likes of Us to demonstrate that while the liberal left failed to grapple effectively with the formative place of race and empire in informing contemporary racism in London, the right celebratorily constructed a class identity in which whiteness and class were mutually constitutive. The third section focuses on Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young’s The New East End (2006), exploring a moment when left-leaning sociological opinion actively disavowed the history of empire and postimperial racism to construct an image of the state as actively welcoming an entitled and insular Bengali community. The chapter demonstrates that memory is significant to the history of multiculturalism at the turn of the twenty-first century, and that political engagement with the East End as a site of racism reveals that multiculturalism relied on a disavowal of histories of race and empire.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- Series editors’ foreword vii
- List of abbreviations viii
- Introduction – Anti- racism in Britain 1
- I Domestic, imperial and global anti-racist alliances and encounters 23
- 1 Countering racial discrimination in Britain, 1880s–1913 25
- 2 From racist humanitarianism to colonial human rights 44
- 3 George Orwell, pan-Africanism and reconciling antiimperialism with ‘Britishness’ 64
- 4 British anti-racism in Australia 79
- II Anti- racism and the making of post imperial Britain 101
- 5 Celebrating African culture in the north- east of England, 1930s–40s 103
- 6 British Jews and the Race Relations Acts 124
- 7 South Asian political Blackness in Britain 143
- 8 ‘Unfinished activisms’ 164
- III Anti-racism, memory and identity 185
- 9 Memory, multiculturalism and anti- racism in east London, 1990–2006 187
- 10 Tartan inclusivity or workers’ internationalism? The St Andrew’s Day Anti-Racism March and Rally in Scotland 207
- 11 ‘Martin Luther King fought for a colour-blind society’ 228
- Afterword 247
- Index 254
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- Series editors’ foreword vii
- List of abbreviations viii
- Introduction – Anti- racism in Britain 1
- I Domestic, imperial and global anti-racist alliances and encounters 23
- 1 Countering racial discrimination in Britain, 1880s–1913 25
- 2 From racist humanitarianism to colonial human rights 44
- 3 George Orwell, pan-Africanism and reconciling antiimperialism with ‘Britishness’ 64
- 4 British anti-racism in Australia 79
- II Anti- racism and the making of post imperial Britain 101
- 5 Celebrating African culture in the north- east of England, 1930s–40s 103
- 6 British Jews and the Race Relations Acts 124
- 7 South Asian political Blackness in Britain 143
- 8 ‘Unfinished activisms’ 164
- III Anti-racism, memory and identity 185
- 9 Memory, multiculturalism and anti- racism in east London, 1990–2006 187
- 10 Tartan inclusivity or workers’ internationalism? The St Andrew’s Day Anti-Racism March and Rally in Scotland 207
- 11 ‘Martin Luther King fought for a colour-blind society’ 228
- Afterword 247
- Index 254
