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.
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