Automatic transmission: ethnicity, racialization and the car

ABSTRACT

This article is based on ethnographic research carried out in Bradford, an ethnically diverse city situated in the north of England. The sample of over 60 participants mostly comprises males of British Pakistani Muslim heritage but varies in terms other markers of identity such as social class, profession and residential/working locale. The article analyses the cultural value and meaning of cars within a multicultural context and how a consumer object can feed into the processes which refine and embed racialized identities. Small case studies reveal the concrete and discursive ways through which ideas around identity and ethnicity are transmitted and how, in particular, racialization continues to feature as a live, active and recognizable process in everyday experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Automobility
• cars
• ethnicity
• Muslim
• Pakistani
• racialization

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their very helpful suggestions to earlier drafts of this paper. Similarly, I would also like to thank Nasar Meer and Ian Burkitt for their notes, comments and support. I remain indebted to Charlie Husband for his commitment and enthusiasm for this topic, which usually outweighs my own; I am especially appreciative of all the research participants for their willingness to tolerate my curiosity. The responsibility for this paper, however, remains my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The researcher/author is a Bradford-born male of Pakistani, Muslim heritage who has a shared cultural repertoire with many of the participants. This emic status has been previously employed in a range of projects exploring young, Muslim male identity. See, for example Alam (2011, 2006).

2. Pronounced ‘tee-pee’, this term has been a long established, informal usage shorthand, principally used by British-born Pakistanis as a derogatory term against non-British-born Pakistanis but it has various applications which connect with signifiers of non-British Pakistani taste including dress/fashion, and, in this context, cars.