The white middle class young people, who lived in
upmarket commuter villages, were the least localist
in orientation and had very little sense of beloningness
in relation to where they lived ... Asians were the most
localist in orientation amongst all of the young people
we spoke to. Many of the young Asian men, in particu-
lar, felt a strong sense of loyalty to [one area] based
upon a masculine-dominated street defensiveness: ‘it’s
always filled with Asians here, it’s like no one messes
around with you, we just hang around with each other’.
(1998: 692)An irony born, at least in part, of middle-class
mobility, that emerges from Watt’s summary is
that whilst racial exclusion demands a certain
level of attachment to the local amongst minority
residents of ‘white space’, many young white
residents enjoy the ‘privilege’ of being (or at
least professing themselves to be) unattached
to the places where they live. The ‘authentic
England’ may turn out to be populated by people
who, far from being ideologically attached to
local rural communities, are more akin to root-
less middle-class nomads (see Murdoch and
Marsden, 1994).NEW THEORIES OF CULTURAL
IDENTITY: BEYOND ‘RACE’As geographers have struggled to come to terms
with the discipline’s imperial legacy and to pro-
duce alternative, critical geographies of racializa-
tion, they have drawn inspiration from new
developments in the fields of cultural studies,
postcolonial literature and the broader sociology
of race and ethnic studies. Peter Jackson, whose
Maps of Meaning(1995) forms a key part of
this interdisciplinary bridge-building exercise,
declared his intention to reinvigorate the stasis of
cultural geography. This could be achieved, he
believed, by combining ‘some of the most impor-
tant ideas from cultural studies with some recent
developments in human geography, seeking
alternative approaches to the geographical study
of culture from the traditional obsession with
landscape’ (1995: 3).
To illustrate the changing politics of cultural
identity Stuart Hall, referring to Paul Gilroy’s
book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack
(1987), considered that until recently he ‘didn’t
care, whether there was any black in the Union
Jack. Now not only do we care, we must’ (1993:
258). That blackness could no longer be seen as
‘alien’, other and essentially ‘unBritish’, is
indicative of a new ‘ethnic assertiveness’ appar-
ent in recent generations of minority youth.However, by rejecting the concept of race as
anything other than a social artefact, anti-
essentialist scholars have also brought into ques-
tion the very basis of black identity. For if race is
little more than a social concept discursively
mapped upon the bodies of black people through
the process of racialization, how useful is it to
politically organize around this collective iden-
tity in the first place?
Increasingly, anti-racist writers and activists
have begun to question the value of colour-based
alliances. Strategically useful they may have
been, but the extent to which a racial dualism can
adequately articulate the historical and geograph-
ical complexity of cultural identity appears
limited. These issues point to a move away from
western binary relations of racism (which are
currently black/white, though historically have
tended to centre on a geographical axis –
east/west, orient/occident – or a religious affilia-
tion, such as Christian/Muslim, civilized/heathen).
The new politics of cultural identity now suggests
composite forms of discrimination and lends
itself to the consideration of internal gradations
within ‘blackness’ or ‘whiteness’. Hall has sug-
gested that the implosion of ‘black’ could in turn
lead to the production of ‘new ethnicities’:What is at stake here is the recognition of the extraordi-
nary diversity of subject positions, social experiences
and cultural identities which compose the category
‘black’; that is, the recognition that ‘black’ is essentially
a politically and culturally constructed category, which
cannot be grounded in a set of fixed transcultural or
transcendental racial categories and which therefore has
no guarantees in Nature. What this brings into play is
the recognition of the immense diversity of differentia-
tion of the historical and cultural experiences of black
subjects. This inevitably entails a weakening or fading
of the notion ... of ‘race’. (1993: 254)According to Hall, this new politics of difference
may lead to ‘the end of the innocent notion of the
essential black subject’ (1993: 254) and engen-
der a greater appreciation of plurality (see
Mercer, 1994).
The manner in which multiple identities are
clumsily collapsed and conflated is an issue that
has not been lost on those working in the field of
public policy. Thus Carrington et al., in their
research on the recruitment and retention of
ethnic minority new teachers in England and
Wales, found that the available ethnic categories
‘are perceived to be ambiguous, anachronistic and
discrepant with commonly held subjective defini-
tions’ (2001: 44) of interviewees. Tariq Modood
has also emphasized problems with imported
forms of ethnic classification. His critique of
black identity centres upon the manner in which306 PLACING SUBJECTIVITIES3029-ch15.qxd 03-10-02 10:54 AM Page 306