Ethnic and Racial Studies Special Issue:
New racisms, new racial subjects?: The neoliberal moment and the racial landscape
of contemporary Britain
Guest Editor – Malcom James
What inspired you to put the special issue together?
Well there are a few things really, I think first of all we were all working in close proximity with each other there had been a number of workshops, we’d come through the PHD programme together so there was a process that we were involved with, a series of discussions and now those discussions arose as working papers and then that fed into the special issue, so it was part of a process. But aside from that we were also interested in, we were all conducting empirical research at the time, mainly apart from one theoretical piece and we were all addressing I guess a kind of set of social circumstances, which hadn’t been addressed in the literature that we were inspired by and that we were using. The idea based around the idea of new forms of racisms and new racial subjects was to try and put together a special issue that brought together our research in a useful way for other readers but also to capture this, what we ended up referring to as a neoliberal moment and what that means for new forms of racism and new forms of racial subjectivity
What are the main themes immerging from the special issue?
In terms of subcategories there’s work on areas of policy, there’s work on issues around space, issues around I guess kind of variations of subculture formations. Ideas of memory, ideas of schooling education, but again I think all these fit together underneath new ways that racism’s are forming so if we’re looking at policy we’re looking at discourses around the war on terror and the relationship of that to Muslim women. So looking at how the war on terror is impacting in these spaces, that kind of flows into the work, that was Nasir Rashid’s work that follows into the work of Ajmal Hussain who’s looking at some of these issues around Asian masculinities but within a community arts project and really looking at how these discourses on Asian masculinity and the context of the war on terror have been broken down in these kind of spaces the way they’re contested. That kind of sedge-ways into the work of Helen Kim who’s looking again at kind of spatial sites around the Asian dance clubs, music clubs and again she’s looking at ways that identities are, she’s looking at taking this spatial thing that again Ajmal’s working on and she’s looking at the way that identities are performed in that space, again in relationship to dominant discourse and identity. So I guess what I’m trying to say is there’s a series of themes that follow each other through the articles that are quite well laid out in the introduction, my article which is on memory is quite closely related to Carolina Ramirez’s article which is also kind of on memory but also the sense of making home among the Chilean diaspora in London. Mine is challenged mist of whiteness mist of rightness related to East London and how we need to understand the processes and the dialogic processes of constructing whiteness in outer East London in a super diverse place. I think the other ones to mention, Hannah Jones is also looking at policy and contesting policy in space, Christie Colts’ work takes really exemplifies the tensions between neoliberal and policy discourse and racial subjectivity and that she takes the case of this school, that has this very strong near liberal ethos which erases the notion of race, so they kind of argue that race isn’t an issue, this is in a deprived multi-ethnic borough and they kind of promote this idea of meritocratic achievement. And obviously because this kind of has lots of racisms wound within it and bound within it and this means that the students within the school need to perform race in certain kinds of ways to be successful, and what is seen to be successful is being white and middle class and so this creates a series of kind of performances, people identifying in particular ways that relate to the policy discourse. At the end of the issue is Josh Paul’s piece and Josh Paul’s really trying to ask wider questions about this moment, this moment in which we say that racism’s doesn’t exist anymore, that we’re post race people don’t need to worry about racism, it’s all about getting on and achieving and aspiring. He’s really trying to look at how this undersells the idea of post race and how we can perhaps we engage on post racial or anti racist practices in order to build and really eliminate race and looking at what that means. I guess there is a broad range of issues and as I say they’re all really tied together with understanding how racism’s work at different sites, both in space and across time but particularly in this neoliberal moment and looking how racial subjectivities, how people perform race in those situations. And all of that set up to kind of say, well if everybody’s saying that racism no longer exists, that we’re post race, how can that possibly be true when racism has taken so many various and pervasive formations. How it adopts so many various and pervasive formations and how it continues to orient social life in this way so that’s really what we’re trying to look at
How could research pick up on or develop the ideas and themes covered in this special issue?
I think in many different ways really, there is the different substantive interests of the different kind of pieces and difficult, different topical or thematic or conceptual focuses. But I think the real issue is that the areas of race ethnicity and post colonial studies are suffering from the same neoliberal moment that we’re analysing in the pieces in that they’re underfunded areas, they’re areas that are being pushed out of the academy, they’re areas that are critical and that can test the dominant narrative of impact or market ability and all these kind of things. So the real challenge is actually first of all just doing this work, doing work that’s critical, that’s empirically engaged but is also theoretically driven, that kind of offer some kind of anti racist critique of what’s going on at the moment, and actually funnily enough that’s not very easy to do. So I think any work in this area that takes this kind of approach is beautiful and that’s what I would want to see more of really. Part of the issue is that we rely in sociology on a kind of heyday on academic research in this area that extended probably from I guess the 1980’s through to the early 2000’s, and since then there’s been a relative dearth in these kind of studies because the changing focuses on academia, because of the impulse to push out critical thinking and I guess the impulse to narrow sociology, to narrow academia into something that it never was and this means pushing out the engagements with literary studies, with humanities, with post colonialism that gave rise to these anti racist critiques and methodologies in forms of writing. So really the challenge is to keep doing this work both empirically and theoretically and to understand what’s happening now, both in order to challenge the forms of racism that exist in society and actually, to challenge the forms of racism that exists in academia as well