A Racial Archaeology of Space: A Journey through the Political Imaginings of Brixton and Brick Lane, London

Abstract

This paper conducts a form of racial archaeology in relation to the areas of Brixton and Brick Lane in London. Both inner-city areas are strongly associated with meanings related to race and difference. This paper examines some of the dominant ways though which Brixton and Brick Lane became represented in key policy texts. It investigates how these representations changed through time and identifies three different moments that have dominated the evolution of multiculturalism in local political discourse: a moment of racial pathology, where race is viewed as a problem of space or in space; a moment of reflection, where race is perceived through the lens of cultural difference; and a moment of celebration, where cultural difference is represented as an asset to be capitalised upon by acts of local regeneration.

Keywords:

• Race and Difference
• Space
• Discourse
• Multiculturalism
• Integration
• London

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Prof. Michael Keith for his comments. The comments of referees are also acknowledged.

Notes

1. From the late 1970s, Brixton became the subject of intensive, paramilitary-style policing. In 1978, Police Commander Adams of the Lambeth district ordered the deployment of the Special Patrol Group to deal with allegedly accelerating local levels of criminal activity. As a result, 120 police officers were drafted in to spend more than a month carring out ‘stop and search’ operations on the streets of Brixton. The Special Patrol Group was again deployed in Lambeth during November 1979 and July 1980, despite its discriminatory tendency to mostly ‘stop and search’ black individuals (Phillips 1976: 65). At the same time, the local police were able to implement the ‘Sus’ law, according to which the police could arrest any person suspected of loitering with the intent to commit an arrestable offence. The All-Lambeth Anti-Racist Movement openly accused the MPF of enforcing the law in a ‘blatantly’ racist fashion. It could be argued that local resentment against the police accumulated from the mid- to late-1970s onwards (Benyon and Solomos 1987). In April 1981, during a special police exercise called operation ‘Swamp 81’ , an incident between a black mini-cab driver and two police officers in Coldharbour Lane sparked local tension and developed into broad-scale disorders. As Lord Scarman acknowledged in his inquiry, these disturbances ‘were not a race-riot … the riots were essentially an outburst of anger and resentment by young people against the police’ (Scarman 1981: 45).

2. According to Barth (1969: 15), it is ‘the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses’. Ethnicity (ethnic membership) emerges when different groups of people, who maintain a minimum contact between them, create an ethnic boundary based on a perceived cultural distinctiveness (Eriksen 1993). It is not the culture of one group that defines its ethnicity, but an assumed imagined cultural juxtaposition between themselves and others.

3. I argue that this particular in-betweenness of the British multicultural discourse of the era is diametrically opposed to Bhabha's (1994: 212) synergetic notion of being ‘in-between’ cultures. In short, the first position advocates separation and division, while the second is about synergy and interconnection.

4. I argue that, in many racist discursive constructions of the 1980s, British society is presented as sharing one culture. In this sense, a British way of life can be clearly juxtaposed to other alien ways of being.

5. For a critique of the ways in which multicultural policies reinvent the nation ‘over the bodies of strangers’ see Ahmed (2000: 95–101).

6. According to Sandercock (1998), Banglatown was the result of a long struggle by specific elements of the local Bengali community to cleverly mobilise ‘notions of history and culture to achieve a redevelopment plan, to work for its own interests’ (Sandercock 1998: 173).