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.
This article explores suggestions made by the contemporary mainstream left in England that reinvigorated English national identities could be an important resource for constructing a progressive sense of social solidarity and community in England. Analysis of semi-structured qualitative interviews undertaken in a South London area finds that English identifiers do associate Englishness with a sense of social cooperation and community. However, for most participants, the expectations they have of Englishness are experienced as disrupted. Focusing on white participants' accounts, the article demonstrates how such disruptions are crucially related to the discourses of 'race' and class that seem to underpin English identities and thus severely if not fatally undermine the progressive potential of English nationalism.
Analysing data from qualitative interviews, this article demonstrates how white people's constructions of national identity in England destabilise but ultimately reaffirm essentialist, exclusionary boundaries. The first set of findings presented demonstrate the ways in which normalised associations between whiteness and Englishness are regularly, temporarily unsettled through empirical, experiential and ethical processes of reflection, only to be finally regulated back towards dominant, racialised understandings. The second set of findings presented demonstrate that for a minority of white participants who construct the nation in ways that more effectively challenge and destabilise racialised understandings, they nevertheless still normalise difference in relation to the nation-state boundaries of Britain. While racialised boundaries of the nation are often, to varying degrees, problematised by many white people in England, essentialist nation-state boundaries remain virtually unchallenged in discussions of national membership.
This article re-examines two key questions from the sociology of nationalism – why nationalism resonates emotionally and to what extent nations are socially salient – and the implications of these for a sense of peoplehood and collective political agency. The particular focus is on the state. Instead of conflating statehood with nationhood, or seeking to expose it as illusory, sociologists should consider how the state – imagined and experienced as a permanent, trans-historical fixture structuring public power and authority – has crucial conditioning effects on society and politics. It will be posited that statehood is a more useful concept than nationhood for explaining the resonance and salience ascribed to nationalism and nations. Whether we favour reinvigorating or abolishing nationalism, the implications of this argument are profound, with contemporary cosmopolitan sociology in particular suffering analytically and prescriptively from a failure to recognise its tacit methodological statism.
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