‘It's true, I'm English… I'm not lying’: essentialized and precarious English identities

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Englishness
• national identity
• whiteness
• race
• performativity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the ESRC for funding the research. Thanks also to my supervisors Katharine Tyler and Paul Johnson for their excellent support, to the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and challenging comments, and to Natalia Ivanovski for her advice early on.

Notes

1. Bernard Yack (1996) has persuasively critiqued the validity of the civic-ethnic distinction for evaluating the extent to which national identities are inclusive. Nevertheless, 18 Charles Leddy-Owen in the English/British case the evidence suggests that, for people who are not white, Britishness is easier to adopt (see the statistics from Condor, Gibson, and Abell (2006) referred to elsewhere in this paper). The civic-ethnic distinction is used in this paper as a reference to different sets of symbolic resources that are drawn on rather than as representative of two distinct types of nationalism.

2. While Ayan's example of ‘going to the pub’ could be seen as constructing a practising- Muslim ‘other’, she elsewhere suggests that pubs are not an essential symbolic resource (many of Ayan's family members – who she argues should be able to identify as English if they choose – are practising Muslims).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charles Leddy-Owen

CHARLES LEDDY-OWEN is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey.