The aim of this article is to examine ethnographically how ideas of descent, biology and culture mediate ideas about the inheritance of racial identities. To do this, the article draws upon interviews with the members of interracial families from Leicester, a city situated in the East Midlands region of England. The article focuses upon the genealogical narratives of the female members of interracial families who live in an ethnically diverse inner-city area of Leicester. Attention is paid to the ways in which the women mobilise and intersect ideas about kinship, ancestry, descent, belonging, place, biology and culture when they think about the inheritance of their own and/or their children's interracial identities. The article's emphasis upon the constitution of interracial identities contributes to the sociological study of race and genealogy by exploring the racialised fragmentation of ideas of inheritance and descent across racial categories and generations.
This article explores the entwining of discourses of race, class and coloniality within a specific set of racialised discourses articulated by white middle-class and middle-aged residents of a suburban English village. I draw upon Frankenberg's (1993) analysis of whiteness and the contemporary reproduction of colonial notions of cultural difference to examine whites' othering of wealthy British Asian (BrAsian) residents and the everyday construction of non-Western others. My contention is that central to the reproduction of the idea of the village as a white and English space is amnesia of the colonial past and its implications for the postcolonial present. I examine how this process of amnesia mediates an aspect of my co-conversationalists' representations of wealthy BrAsian residents as immigrants, that is, cultural others whose origins are thought to belong outside the village community, the nation and ultimately the West.
White working class people have been portrayed in the media and political discourse as unable to keep pace with the demands associated with living in multicultural Britain. In this article I shall challenge such representations of white working class people's attitudes towards racialized 'others'. To do this I explore the views of the members of a white working class family to the changing racial composition of their once ethnically homogenous council estate (municipal housing). My ethnographic attention is directed to the connections, affective ties and emotional investments that the members of this family have with the estate and its community, and the ways in which BrAsians become configured in these narratives of belonging. I will show how analytical attention to the connections and attachments that white working class people form with those they identify as ethnic and racial 'others' provides an account of white working class identities that undermines popular representations of 'them'.
The history of relations between anthropology and sociology in the UK might at best be described as 'studied indifference'. And yet, they have shared disciplinary interests in many respects, including the concepts of belonging and identity. This article resists disciplinary boundaries and 'thinks together' sociological interpretations of intersectionality and anthropological notions of intersection. We argue that whilst intersectionality offers a frame to think about the co-constitution of ethnic, racial, class, sexual and gendered identities and the production of social inequalities, anthropological approaches to intersection draw on a cultural form and social logic encountered during ethnographic fieldwork that emphasises ideas about interrelatedness, belonging, place, temporality, connection and disconnection. In juxtaposing these two approaches, we seek firmer traction to better articulate the shape and scope of the ways in which scholars in both fields might develop new ways of explaining the lives and the concerns of the people we work with.
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