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In this paper, I examine the experiences of Jason and Ricardo, two men who were deported to Jamaica from the UK following criminal conviction. This ethnographic inquiry into deportation provides a rich and complex account of race-making at different scales. Theorizing the connections between racialization and illegalization offers a productive framework for the study of racism in multi-status Britain. The paper argues that the border is central to race's contemporary mobilization, not only in the lives of individuals like Jason and Ricardo but also for those interpellated as "natives". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores collective memory in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting. Newham's formation through migration – its ‘great time’ – has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people's and youth workers' memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced over, and how this tracing reveals ambivalence and porosity, at the same time as it highlights the continued allure of race. It explores how whiteness and class loss are appropriated across ethnic boundaries and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses analysis of interview transcripts and notes from participant observation to explore white reactions to the introduction of diversity management in a large public sector workplace in Glasgow. The paper analyses white talk about racial equality in a social context where the shaming, exclusion and demonization of disadvantaged groups including migrants, asylum seekers and the poor have ensured that issues of entitlement and race are highly charged. It is suggested that in such contexts diversity management is being wielded as a new kind of civility by middle-class people invested in the objectification of poor whites. This represents a form of class conflict over belonging within the body of whiteness that risks reinforcing rather than redressing racial resentments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Banton's paper provides fascinating insights into his long-running intellectual disagreements with John Rex, the other major post-war figure in the sociology of ‘race relations’. Published work and personal recollections are supplemented by a series of communications by letter to flesh out the precise nature of these debates. They reveal differing views on the ontological status of ‘race’, race relations and racism, as well as a number of criticisms of Rex's work. He argues that Rex was wrong to put so much faith in the ability of classical sociology to address these concerns, and that there was a disjuncture between theory, methods and substance in his empirical work. There is also a suggestion that Rex played down the significance of racism. The greatest difference between them, however, lay in their divergent views on the role of sociology and the sociologist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper asserts that academics, unless they work for or in malign regimes, do not make ‘mistakes’, but work within their own historical period using their knowledge of past thinking. Thus, debates on race, ethnicity, race relations and so on, and the plethora of competing definitions and approaches, take place within specific historical times. The paper notes that for John Rex, racism was always the problem, to be defined and explained. It reviews the research carried out in Handsworth, Birmingham 1974–78, Rex's use of classical social theorists, and it refutes Banton's assertion that Rex did not engage with his critics. It concludes that Rex may well have been prophet in foreseeing the permanence of issues of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, migration, integration, citizenship and a ‘war on terror’ in a global era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers how Paul Gilroy transformed hitherto dominant understandings of the relationship between race and class by developing an innovative account that foregrounded questions of racist oppression and collective resistance amid the organic crisis of British capitalism. The returns from this rethinking were profound in that he was able to make transparent both the structuring power of racism within the working class, and the necessity for autonomous black resistance. At the same time, significant lacunae in his account are identified, including the neglect of the episodic emergence of working-class anti-racism and the part played by socialists, particularly those of racialized minority descent in fashioning a major anti-racist social movement. The paper concludes with a lament for the disappearance of such work informed by a ‘Marxism without guarantees’ in the contemporary field of racism studies, and asks readers to consider the gains to be derived from such a re-engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article re-examines how willing the English and Scots are to accept or reject claims to respective national identities by people born elsewhere. A previous paper showed, counter-intuitively, that people in the two countries were similar in their willingness to accept claims to national identity. Since then, different political parties are in power in England and Scotland, with differing policies and attitudes to identity. Have the original findings changed in the context of this significant political change? We conclude that the English and Scots continue to be similar on accepting or rejecting claims. However, they have diverged with regard to claims by white people, with national identity a less important explanatory variable than education in Scotland, whereas in England it remains the determining factor. For claims by non-whites, the two societies have become more similar. Education remains in Scotland, and to a considerable extent in England, the more important explanatory variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that the intersecting sociologies of ethnicity and migration work from a series of interconnected blind spots hindering effective analysis of the current UK situation. Both operate analytically within the limitations of an 'immigrant problem' framework; are overinvested in state agendas; privilege a nation state analysis; are narrowly focused on distributions of migrant bodies, and on receiving, at the expense of sending, contexts. Exploring these limitations with data derived from a modest small-scale qualitative study of young Chinese migrants in London, I argue for a reframing along four dimensions. Firstly, in an era of elite migration, sociology could reach beyond its immigrant problem framework and open up to a broader range of UK migrant ethnicities and circumstances. Secondly, a stronger focus on cities as the scale on which lives are lived, and through which diverse streams of translocal activity are routed, would open new avenues of sociological exploration. Thirdly, including translocal activities connected with distributions of ethnic migrant bodies, such as capital transfers, would broaden its focus, taking migration and ethnicity more centrally into the analysis of globalization as one of its constituting practices. Finally, paying attention to sending, as well as arrival cities, reveals migrants' thinking and shapes the ways in which they live, as my data shows. The Chinese are both one of the UK's neglected minorities, and one of its fastest growing populations. They are a good example of new UK migrants and they bring globalization's realignment with the rising significance of China to the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the identities of Britain’s black middle-classes. Drawing upon interviews with seventy-two participants, I theorize a ‘triangle of identity’. This triangle emphasizes how black middle-class identities are constructed within the dynamics of three poles. Firstly, there is the class-minded pole whereby class comes to the fore as a conceptual scheme; secondly, there is the ethnoracial autonomous pole whereby ‘race’ is central to one’s identity and whiteness is actively resisted; and lastly there is the strategic assimilation pole, where one continually moves between classed and racialized spheres of action. This tripartite approach to identity builds upon previous research by further exploring the social, cultural and phenomenological distinctions within Britain’s black middle-classes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I investigate the resonance of the volumeThe Empire Strikes Backwithin the debates on racism in Germany since the late 1970s. I am interested in this long-term intellectual exchange in light of the current need to conceptualize racism in a European framework and thereby reflect upon the characteristics, concepts and possibilities of such a framework. I begin by situating the debate at that time within the context of the New Left. What connected both situations, in Germany and the UK, was an inscription of the then-ongoing anti-colonial and decolonial struggles of the South in the North, not least through the ‘retaliatory effect’ of migration movements and struggles of migration arriving in Europe. I argue that the understandings of racism and anti-racism are grounded in a materialist framework and that the concept of articulation helped and continues to help thinking the complexity and heterogeneity of the social. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Throughout history sports cultures and alcohol have been intimately linked. Being able to drink huge amounts of alcohol is a celebrated male athletic virtue. Ridicule and often exclusion is reserved for those who are unable to conform to this. Ritualized drinking is not, and cannot, be enjoyed by all. British Muslims (the majority of whom are of South Asian descent) for instance, are restricted from drinking alcohol due to the demands of Islam. This paper uses data collected from ethnographic research conducted with white British and British Pakistani Muslim cricketers to locate the significance of drinking alcohol in both the inclusion and exclusion of British Pakistani Muslims. We demonstrate that, in negotiating their inclusion, British Pakistani Muslims have to accommodate, negotiate and challenge various forms of inequality and discrimination in their leisure lives.We argue that consuming alcohol calls attention to the challenges of being ‘normal’ within this cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the advancement of racial neoliberalism in Britain, and notes the genealogy of the evaporation of race post-Macpherson to demonstrate that, while the terms of race are increasingly erased from public and institutional discourse, the institutionalization of racism continues unbounded, legitimated through the ‘War on Terror’. This dichotomy comes together under the ‘Prevent’ agenda which, as it maps onto ‘Community Cohesion’, has become the dominant thread of state policy on race. Thus, while any progressive measures using race for the purposes of anti-racism fade from view, they are increasingly overshadowed by a position which uses race, silently and ambiguously, through policies of policing and securitization. Consequently we move towards a place where the only mode in which race is spoken by the state is for the purposes of discipline and control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reinterprets the political and cultural underpinnings of post-slavery indentured labour migration in the British empire. Focusing on the early period of emancipation, it explains how and why indenture transformed in public debates from an unnatural scandal into a legitimate form of free labor. It argues that new modes of social-scientific analysis associated with race and liberal political economy drove this process of normalization. Connecting ideological with material change, it also argues that debate on indenture was fundamentally linked to broader unresolved questions about the meaning and purpose of emancipation. In this context, it shows that a growing consensus that emancipation had 'failed' reshaped debate on indenture even as increasing sugar production in parts of the empire bolstered support for labour migration. The article concludes by showing how supporters of indenture appropriated antislavery language to their own ends, paving the way for significant expansions of the indenture system during the early 1860s without public debate or controversy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the English language proficiency testing of immigrants in Great Britain. Topics include racial and class divisions in Great Britain, the notion of national unity in relation to the English language, and a White Paper issued by British Home Secretary David Blunkett. Disputes regarding the use of Celtic languages in Great Britain are noted.

Examines the impact of race and gender intersect on therapeutic relationships in Great Britain. Debates on race and gender in psychotherapy; Representation of women in the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic literature; Claims on cultural specificity in psychological therapies.

The Syrian refugee "crisis" has prompted contradictory responses of securitization of European borders on the one hand, and grassroots compassion on the other, that posit a universal conception of the human deserving of equal rights to safety irrespective of racial or religious difference. However, in the aftermath of the 2015 and 2016 Paris terror attacks there has been a backlash against refugees amid fears of Islamist terrorists exploiting refugee channels to enter Europe, as well as an upsurge in a populist nationalism framing Brexit and anti-Muslim hostility following recent UK terror attacks. I argue that the convergence of the "Muslim refugee" and the "terror suspect" as threatening mobilizes a racialized biopolitics present in intersecting counter-terrorism and asylum regimes that prioritise security concerns above human rights. I advance the Concentrationary Gothic as a framework for understanding continuities in logics of racial terror framing the "Muslim question" within the Syrian refugee "crisis." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the question of race has been largely underexplored in the study of postsocialist Europe, the logic of coloniality remains at the heart of Europeanness, complicating the assumption that migrants from the region only encounter racial difference once they arrive in a "multicultural" society. The article contributes to recent debates on racializing Central and East European studies as well as the literature on migrant encounters with difference by examining the articulations of "race" and coloniality among migrants from former Yugoslavia in Britain. On the one hand, interactions with fellow migrants are frequently imbued with racialized hierarchies that equate Europeanness with whiteness and modernity. On the other hand, the history of Yugoslav solidarity with decolonizing nations provides an alternative archive that refutes claims of British "openness" and recognizes unexpected forms of intimacy, highlighting a genealogy of encounter that extends the spatiotemporal scope of debates about migrants' responses to racialized difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short article comments on the Symposium inERSvol. 37/10 in which current scholars revisited the bookThe Empire Strikes Backand its legacy. The article comments on the book's assertion that a historical background is necessary to understand the absorption of migrant labour into capitalist societies, and notes the prevailing ignorance of the history of imperialism in UK schools and society. It discusses the current assumptions that if schools teach ‘fundamental British values’, racial and religious conflicts will somehow be minimized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Banton and Rex's differences in their analysis of race and ethnic relations rest not so much on the contrast between ‘prophet’ and ‘scientist’, but rather on two quite different perspectives on the nature of sociology itself. Each in their own way has much to offer the field, which explains their continuing relevance to this area of study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Empire Strikes Back made a landmark and sometimes controversial intervention in the scholarship of ethnicity and race when it was first published. This article considers both the continuities and breaks that linked and separated the volume from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies' work and tradition that preceded it. It also suggests that the balance between ethnographic engagement and critical scholarship sets up a necessarily iterative process that values both but also recognizes the differences between the two. Such iteration speaks also to the manner in which the study of contemporary migration and its consequences demands both more self-conscious links between the study of migration and the scholarship of racial formation and ethnic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to contribute to the study of migration andnation-buildinginstatelessnations. It explores the media portrayal of Italian immigration in Wales after the 1997 devolution. It assesses why Italian immigrant narratives have figured prominently in the Welsh media after devolution. It shows that, being seen as Wales's ‘model minority’, Italians have ideally served a reinforcement of the surroundinginclusiverhetoric, one that draws on an old-standing Welshtolerance-myth. Thus, this article argues that stateless nations aiming to gain increasing autonomy can use their immigration history to construct and disseminate a tolerant and inclusive national image, one that aims to foster both indigenous people and migrants' sense of national belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores relationships between Englishness and racialization in order to consider the potential for English identities that are progressive in anti-essentialist or multicultural terms. The article draws on data from interviews in which people from a South London area talk about Englishness. I will examine how English identities are understood by participants who are white and participants who are not white. While white participants experience Englishness as a taken-for-granted identity, for participants who are not white English identities are a more calculated, precarious performance. I will then examine discussions of ‘who can be English’. While most participants argue that ‘anyone can be English’ in principle, this is not necessarily the case in practice. It will be suggested that talk of Englishness is particularly constrained by relationships between Englishness, whiteness and ancestry, but that for those who experience Englishness as precarious there are signs that this is not necessarily the case. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the interface between national and local levels of UK government, narratives of place are made to fit particular tropes of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ at multiculturalism. Thinking through ‘community cohesion’ policy in England between 2001 and 2010, this article shows how (reputations of) relative success at ‘living together with difference’ become a medium through which local government practitioners negotiate the space between national and local priorities, needs and ambitions, by examining how practitioners in English local authorities negotiate narratives of ‘failed multiculturalism’ associated with the places they work and, in doing so, how they re-inscribe or subvert local reputations and their ‘elsewheres’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reviews the ways in which Britain and the USA classify and analyse the integration of immigrants and their descendants. While both societies recognize racial differences in their official statistics and in the academic analyses of change over time, the USA tends to classify immigrants and their descendants by immigrant generation much more than Britain does. The importance of the concept of generation in American immigration research is highlighted and it is suggested that studies built on the importance of generation can illuminate social processes of integration in Britain. The complexities of defining and measuring immigrant generation are reviewed, including new developments in the measurement of generation that take into account age at migration, and historical period and cohort effects. Racial and ethnic minority groups formed through immigration may have very different characteristics depending on the average distance of their members from immigration – including the possibility of ‘ethnic leakage’, as more assimilated, later-generation individuals no longer identify with the group. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues for a public sociology of ‘race’ that can respond to Weber's injunction that sociology should ‘meet the demands of the day’. While the author's version of these demands – for a society of autonomous individuals and groups, living as equals – is utopian, the main argument offered here is that a sociology of ‘race’ should be a modified version of Burawoy's ‘public sociology’. Adopting Bauman's notion of a sociology of interpreters, a further suggestion is that this type of sociology needs to be reflexive and affective. Based on an analysis of his own sociological education in the late 1960s, his participation in social and political movements in which ‘race’ was key, and with brief reference to the sociology of ‘race’, the author argues that the emotions that circulated in each arena need to be examined, acknowledged and incorporated if theoretical and practical progress is to be made. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the persistence of stereotypical representations of ‘race’ that appear in television in the West. According to a particular policy discourse, improving the on-screen representation of non-white groups is a matter of increasing the number of black and Asian folk working in the broadcasting industries – particularly at the senior management level. However, this article argues that the constant production of hegemonic images of ‘race’ cannot be tackled via recruitment measures alone. Adopting a ‘cultural industries’ approach to television production, the article uses an ethnographic study of British Asians working in the UK broadcasting industry to examine the conditions of production through which minority representations are created. By paying closer attention to the experience of cultural work, the article reveals how it is the increasingly commercialized cultures of production in television, constituted by the industry’s shift towards deregulation and neoliberal market models, that steers the work of Asian filmmakers and executives themselves into producing problematic, reductive representations of ‘race’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]