Hierarchical Assemblages of Citizenship and Belonging: The Pedestrian Speech Acts of British Gujarati Indian Walkers

Abstract

The 2018 Windrush generation controversy, made public state-induced hostilities towards African Caribbean citizens of the nation. However, this is not a new phenomenon. The state’s de-humanising treatment of racial and ethnic minority migrant settlers has a much longer history. I make visible this history by exploring the informal walking pastimes of five, married, British Gujarati Indian couples, many of whom, like other South Asian migrants, arrived in England during the 1960s and 1970s. Using the notion of pedestrian speech acts, I explore the relationship between race, urban multiculture, citizenship and belonging. The findings signal how public and state discourses are mobilised by these walkers to repeatedly invoke their citizenship, mainly by ‘Othering’ Eastern European communities, as well as in terms of what I have called hierarchical assemblages of citizenship and belonging, elucidating the dynamic complexities of racial, ethnic, religious, caste, class, gender, and generational unities and tensions.

Khat-chewing, Moral Spacing and Belonging: Sociological Insights into the Cultural Space of the mafrish in the Leisure Lives of Older and Middle-aged British-Somali Males

“…Puwar (2004) unpacks this relationship between 'race', space and separation by communicating the difficulties black bodies have occupying spaces associated with 'white' people: the presence of ethnic groups in traditionally white areas causes such bodies to be viewed as 'space invaders'. In this context, skin colour represents a distinct racialised marker, classifying which bodies are perceived as being out of place in specific cultural localities (Ratna, 2019). This perspective connects with Du Bois' (1996) concept of 'the veil', by documenting the one-dimensional manner through which black people are viewed in metropole societies, robbing such individuals of their individuality by characterising them as an object of difference.…”

Pluralising (im)mobilities: anti-Muslim acts and the epistemic politics of mobile methods

“…There is now a clear trend in qualitative methods around mobile methods, with a fast expanding literature exploring their myriad possibilities. To signpost but a few: the walking 'go along' (Kusenbach 2003;Middleton 2010;Evans and Jones 2011;Warren 2017;Ratna 2020); cycling/along (Spinney 2006(Spinney , 2011Jones 2012;Aldred and Jungnickel 2012); car ride-along (Laurier 2004;Ferguson 2010); 'wheel-along' (Parent 2016); photographic, video and virtual ethnography (Pink 2001(Pink , 2006Cook and Butz 2017), and mobile technologies, including GPS (Hein, Jones and Evans 2008;Jones 2020;Wilmott 2017). These methods have typically deployed more conventional interviews, participant observation or ethnography with technology to engage with thematic exploration of the more-than-human (humantechnology; human-animal), non-representational theory and practice; embodiment and (inter-) subjectivity; urban and rural diversity, including anti-racist, feminist, queer and disability studies; social justice; sustainability; health and well-being; globalisation; geopolitics and power; to psychogeography and participatory arts practices.…”