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This roundtable is the first event in the TCRU@50 programme of activities celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Thomas Coram Research Unit.
Alison Koslowski
Good evening, everybody. Very warm welcome. It's lovely to see you all here today. Very excited. I'm gonna sit down. So, for I I've got the easy job. I'm just “introducing the introducing”. A very warm welcome. Today's quite special. It's our very first event in our 50th anniversary year. One of many nice events to kick off in 2023. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Alison Koslowsky. I've been at the helm of TCRU for just over a year now. And so, it's my job to say a few words about who was Thomas Coram and what we are celebrating before I hand over to Professor Mette Louise Berg who will be introducing our panel, our last year's panel and sharing today event.
So, I wanted to say just a few words about how we got from Thomas Coram in the 1700s to now, and the heritage that he's left us. For those who don't know, Thomas Coram set up the Foundling Hospital in 1739. Following time as a shipbuilder in New England, Thomas Coram came back to Old England and was in despair at the poverty, and in particularly the plight of abandoned children that he found in London. So, a philanthropic endeavour involving some names you might know, such as Handel and Hogarth, he set up England's first children's charity, which is still going strong today. The Foundling Hospital was, in effect, a permanent boarding school for children whose mothers brought them unable to provide themselves. And the hospital endured until the 1920s, at which point a child welfare centre was set up on the site and the Thomas Coram Foundation for children. So, if you want to find out more about that part of the history, do visit the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square.
Roll forward to the 1970s, and TCRU's founder Jack Tizard came into discussion with the governors of the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, known today as Coram, about the possibility of setting up a research centre to provide a home for a group of researchers working on related grants and just told me that he gave up his professorship at IoE because it wasn't seen as a good bet. And they gave it back to him. So, IoE didn't start off as being terribly supportive of TCRU. But TCRU was born in in 1973, and we will be having our main anniversary event back at Coram in Brunswick Square in November. So that's one to look forward to. So, 50 years on, unbelievably, and many changes later, I think what's remarkable is how much we still share as a unit with the core values held by Jack Tizard, and indeed by Thomas Coram. So, at TCRU, as I've come in this year, people often refer to it as a family or as a home for our research, and what we share are core values which guide our research. So, in the words of Jack Tizard nearly 50 years ago, there is still a huge need to champion the needs of the most disenfranchised and the most disadvantaged children and young people, and central to so much of our work still today is to ensure that we listen and promote the voices of children and young people.
So, we're quite a large unit these days. We've got 38 staff, 54 PhD students and 20 honorary fellows and professors emeriti. We're based at the Social Research Institute, Toby Sheldon, head of departments here today, which is a department within IoE and now, since 2015, UCL's Faculty of Education. And we're also situated still in Bloomsbury which remains as a crossroad for intellectual exchange, and I think that being in Bloomsbury is very important for our history, but also our present. So, today we very broadly cluster into three research groups. There's the focus on children and children services, the focus on diverse families, gender and work, and the focus on migration; and these research groups overlap very much. They're just a way to organise ourselves, but they have led to this round table today. So, we kick off with the migration group and our focus on racialized inequalities. And, Mette, I'm going to hand this and literally get up and give you the chair to introduce the panel. So, thank you everyone for coming and look forward to the event.
Mette Berg
Great, thank you and a very warm welcome from me as well. As Allison said, I'm Mette Berg and I'm based at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, and I'm honoured to chair the first TCRU at 50 event and delighted that we have such distinguished and wonderful colleagues and scholars here tonight. So, thank you for coming. Now migration has always been a part of TCRU's research, and it has become an increasingly important strand of our research in recent years. We are a critical mass of scholars at TCRU, including PhD students who now work on a range of migration issues from different disciplinary perspectives and methodologies.
Now, migration is never out of the headlines these days, but is so often written about in reductionist, misleading and highly emotive ways linked to questions of national identity, belonging and race. 1973, the year that TCRU was founded, has also retrospectively become known as the period just after the end of the Windrush generation and it was the year that the 1971 Immigration Act came into force following the UK's first major immigration legislation in 1968. These two acts set the scene for the hostile environment and the increasingly restrictive immigration acts that followed, culminating so far in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 as well as the Windrush scandal and Brexit. In the early 1970s, the expectation was that migrants would integrate, but processes of racialization meant that this was impossible. And indeed, as scholars of migration have shown, some of them here, race has always been central to Britain's immigration legislation, drawing lines between those who belonged and those who did not.
So, for today's round table, we have invited three eminent scholars to engage in a history of the present. That is, using history as a means of critical engagement with the present, and to reflect on race, multiculture, and conviviality at our current juncture in the shadow of the Windrush scandal, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The present moment seems especially bleak. We have a home Secretary who has spoken of her dreams of seeing people seeking asylum flown off to Rwanda. And several hundred asylum seeking children have recently gone missing from their accommodation while in the care of the Home Office. So, it seems important as well at this juncture that we remember to talk of hopes and dreams for the future, whether utopian or dystopian. And so, we've asked our roundtable participants to also talk of hope, drawing on their work and what it means for how they view the future.
So, let me just introduce the round table speakers and then we'll get going and I'll introduce you in the in the order in which you're going to speak. So first, it's my really great pleasure to introduce Professor Ann Phoenix, my colleague at the Thomas Coram Research Unit. Anne is a psychosocial scholar and former Co-director of the Thomas Coram Research Unit. Her work is centred on motherhood, social identities, young people, racialization and gender. She is the co-author of ‘Black, white or mixed race? Race and racism in the lives of young people of mixed parentage’ from 1992. And lots of other books and articles, but we thought this was one that was most pertinent for today's round table.
After Ann has spoken, Professor Les Back from Glasgow, formerly Goldsmiths. I think many of us know you from Goldsmiths. Les is a sociologist and worked with Anne at TCRU, Thomas Coram Research Unit, and it was during his time at the unit that he wrote his ground-breaking monograph ‘New ethnicities and urban culture: Social identity and racism in the lives of young people’, first published 1996.
And finally, Dr Sivamohan Valluvan, or Vallu, based at Warwick, is a sociologist and works on racism, nationalism, conviviality, multiculture and cosmopolitanism. He is the author of the ‘Clamour of nationalism. Race and nation in 21st century Britain’, published in 2019. So, welcome and thank you. And so, without further ado, I'll hand over to Ann for her presentation. Thank you.
Ann Phoenix
OK, it's a real pleasure to be here and I am particularly delighted because I started at the Thomas Coram Research Unit in 1983, which was a long time ago. It didn't take long for it to feel like it was my home, and it's always been the institution that I think of as home. My first boss was Peter Moss, sitting there next to Charlie Owen. So, I've gained an awful lot from the Thomas Coram Research Unit in one way or another.
And what I want to do today is very briefly... Well, or rather, what I plan to do is to briefly talk about 1980s Thomas Coram. Literally, say a word about it. Then I want to spend most of my time on the history of the present. The way in which racialization and migration, given that this is for that theme of Thomas Coram's research; the way in which it plays now. And I then will say just one or two words about Brexit, COVID-19 and the Windrush scandal, and another word about hopeful signs. And I've put my phone on, because I'm terribly difficult about timing. And so, it will alarm, and I'll have to stop.
OK. Because the time is short and I've prepared a great deal, I wanted to give you what my argument is. And first of all, it's partly a privilege to reflect on this time frame because it illuminates the importance of thinking about Foucauldian ideas about the history of the present and the conditions of possibility. And I would argue that the things that were happening around Thomas Coram in terms of racialization and migration at the time that it set up, and at the time certainly that I started, have been key, you can see, the ways in which their legacies are part of the current era. And in understanding the issues that we're discussing at the moment to do with racialisation, migration and so on, I think Derrida's notion of ontology is really helpful. And in recent years, I've been thinking about that more and more. And in order to think about future hopes for them to make sense, there are two things that I think that we really need to do. One is to rethink bordering, belonging, and Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities; and another is to draw on Hassan Haji's notion of co-hoping, that is hoping not at the expense of other people, hoping to enrich oneself, or whatever, but thinking with other people. So that means that one also needs to think about strategic alliances rather than essentialist categories. And really have a commitment to social justice.
So, Thomas Coram Research Unit, it became my home in my mind because it's always been concerned with policy relevant research. But it's always been concerned with it in a way that's dynamic, that really thinks about the policy landscape, but the research landscape as well, and is concerned with innovative methods. That's been one of the things that's been wonderful about it. And, overall, a commitment to social justice, I couldn't have stayed if there wasn't that commitment. Because it was also at the time that I joined it a place where you, lovely as it was, and where there's so many people who are still friends, where you sank or swam; because Basil Bernstein, who led a committee on which I was a member, thinking about research at the Institute of Education, called it a culture of impermanence. And that's what it was. So, those of us who've had long-standing relationship, that's one of the things that, luckily, I think it has changed rather than being the same, but the commitment to social justice has not, and a keen critical engagement. We discussed a great deal. We still do discuss, and we discussed. We were lucky enough to have lots of space where we could be social, and we spent a lot of time discussing and it was supportive. We got to know each other I think very nicely. And there are five of us who were at Thomas Coram in the 80s in the audience... Were you there in the 80s or 90s? OK, so five since the 90s, six since 1990s.
OK, so the history of the present. Then I better get on, and I'm just going to give some images really. So, just the year before Thomas Coram started, there was Idi Amin’s announcement that Ugandan Asians had to leave. And these were British passport holders. They were British, always had been. But the thing I wanted to show you is this advert that Leicester City Council, which celebrated and put up a monument to Ugandan Asians for enriching Leicester only last year. But this was what they did. They sent an advert to Ugandan Asian to say: ‘In your own interests and those of your family, you should accept the advice of the Uganda Resettlement Board and not come to Leicester’. OK, so you know, that's just very quickly. I think you know what that means.
And then, at the time also that I joined the unit, there was a great deal of concern about West Indian children's and indeed their families' deficiencies and particularly with the fact that West Indian children, all of whom of course are British, coming to Britain, were not doing well at school. The year... Two years before Thomas Coram started, Bernard Court had produced this wonderful pamphlet, but which has been reproduced just recently in 2001, 15 years on, about how the West Indian child is made educationally subnormal in the British school system. And that and lots of campaigning by black parents, by lots of other people as well, led the government to have an inquiry which started off as a Rampton report, they sacked Rampton part of the way through, and then it became ‘Education for all’. I can't say anything more about that.
Another thing that was absolutely key is Margaret Thatcher. Before she came to power, in 1978, in an interview, she made some comments that have been so much analysed and basically come to be called the ‘Swamp speech’. So, because what she said was that she was really rather afraid that this country might be rather ‘swamped’ by people with a different culture, and she's talking about people from the new Commonwealth and Pakistan in particular. And if you want good race relations, you've got to allay people's fears on numbers. So, the idea was, how do we stop immigration? OK. That was 1978, before she came to power in ‘79. And the way that she dealt with what was called the Vietnamese boat people crisis, in ‘78 to ‘79, very much fit with that. She wanted none of them really to come. And as you see in the second paragraph here, a confidential memo, she ordered civil servants to explore the elements of a political and legal basis for refusing to accept Vietnamese refugees, including plans for the possible withdrawal from the UK's existing international obligations. OK, so you know, this was in ‘79.
Alongside that, you know, there was dispersal of Vietnamese migrants to Britain. You know, this was at the end of the Vietnam War. Britain was drawn in because, of course, it had colonies in that area. And Margaret Thatcher in the end said: ‘Well, the fact that some are going to Hong Kong meant that we're really doing our..., taking our responsibilities seriously’. But people were dispersed, so three or four families in an area was thought to be enough, which had ramifications for language learning, et cetera. But it's very much like what was happening at the time in Britain, which was that Asian and West Indian children were being bussed away from Ealing in order that there weren't too many in schools there.
So, the point being that what this does is set a rationale and agenda for contemporary immigration legislation and for the treatment of black and Asian Britons and anybody else who comes along in the meantime, although with slight differences with Ukraine. We could come on to that in discussion. So, the point is about limiting reducing numbers of migrants, it sediments notions into common sense of justifiable fears of migrant migration and migrants. It links good race relations with low numbers, ‘the more you have, the worse it is’, and there is an implicit sanctioning of inequalities and a reproduction of racialised hierarchies, as well as an advocating of an end to immigration. So, what's happening is the doing of racialised bordering of the British character and migrants from the new Commonwealth and Pakistan that Thatcher very much put into words.
Not surprisingly, in 1981, when the police in Brixton clamped down on black young people by using what was called the ‘Sussex Law’, ‘Stop and search’, they called it Operation Swamp 1981 following Thatcher. And it led to riots in Brixton that spread as well, because it was just so unfair what was happening, and people had really had enough. Those uprisings... And here's Paul Gilroy, in a book that I've put there (on the slide), that was key to what we discussed. So, for example, Berry Male, who we know is a sociologist of childhood, she's now died unfortunately, she cornered me in the kitchen at Thomas Coram, to speak for half an hour about this book, and what I'd read about, you know from it and so on. The ‘Empire Strikes Back’, it's really important from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Paul Gilroy, who's now at UCL, wrote various things in it, including this chapter: ‘Police and thieves.’ Yeah, and what it does is show how policing attitudes towards migration and racialization and racism are interlinked.
That wasn't the only context, though. There were also black feminist movements going on. And really, although it wasn't called it at the time intersection, intersectional perspectives were already at play. So, in terminology, was therefore very much debated and on the left I've got the terminology... Mette mentioned already integration... Well in the ‘60s and ‘70s there was also the notion that there would be assimilation. When it didn't work out, people talked about integration, integration being the migrants making themselves like the British, rather than genuine integration. That was contested and gave way to debates about multiculturalism, which was for people who were into anti-racism, very derided, and it was really interesting that not that long after, people who'd been attacking multiculturalism for, you know, for its, the three 'S’ of multiculturalism: saris, samosas and steel bands, that trivialising essentialising that, you know. People then began defending multiculturalism because integration came back and talk about social cohesion became problematic. But at one of the same time, people like Phil Cohen, who was then at the Institute of Education himself, were talking about the contradictions of multi-racism and multiculturalism, so not multiculturalism, but multicultures. And Paul Gilroy really thought about issues, and this is a 2006... I think it's in his inaugural lecture, but in he'd written about it before, convivial cultures that sometimes people just live together, that it isn't all antagonistic by any means.
OK. So just quickly then, what I got from that is the agenda setting resistance always being part of the theoretical complexity. That the many scholars, including some at Thomas Coram, were prescient around these issues, thinking about contingent alliances not being essentialist. Theories having to be dynamic and change, and that political claims to belonging were always important and that we thought about intersectional plurality, even if it wasn't called that yet. And generational shifts too.
And I wanted to say one thing about thinking about Brexit and so on, which is what we have to do is reimagine the world and its boundaries, because when we're thinking about Brexit, when we're thinking about Europe, it is the case that frequently Europe is seen as a very specific location and yet so many European countries still have colonies, or ‘department’, and therefore, if you were really to reimagine Europe as entangled, it would have, you known, places in the Caribbean. This paper by Manuela Boaka is dealing with the Caribbean and its entanglements with Europe. But as she points out, the label of Europe always includes both Western Europe and its white populations, but Eastern Europe needs to be named in full in order to be included in the overarching term. Black Europe for a long time, unthinkable in most social science, still needs to be argued, defended and explained. And yet, there's black Europe in the Caribbean, in the African continent, there's certainly a black Europe in (it), or Asian Europe, in lots of countries and so on. Thank you.
Mette Berg
Thank you so much, Ann. Les, over to you.
Les Back
Well, the first thing I want to say it's such a... It's so wonderful to follow Anne in this celebration of 50 years of Thomas Coram. I've scripted my contribution, trying to, wanting to stay at the time. But I am going to try. You can talk forever as far as I'm concerned. And to be interested, to find things interesting, come on! That's what it's about, isn't it?
So, before joining TCRU in 1988, yes, that is in the last century, I was languishing really as an unfunded PhD student studying part-time and a youth and community worker hustling to try and make a living, and to do research. I was trying to find ways to make sense of what it meant to be young in that moment, within urban multicultural context in Southeast London, where I was working as a youth worker, and here social divisions and racism coexisted in the same streets with kaleidoscopic forms of urban culture that couldn't be reduced to unitary or singular identity labels. And it was through Roger Hewitt, actually, who had become a sort of informal mentor, he took pity on me, I think, that I found out about a project being conducted by Barbara Tizard and Ann Phoenix on the experience of mixedness, that was in many ways stimulating, or at least trying to respond to the thinking around transracial adoption that would result in 2002 in Ann and Barbara's historic study ‘Black, white or mixed-race? Race and racism in the lives of young people of mixed heritage’. And the clue to the critical style of this research is in the title. Here, identity, and subjectivity is treated less as a fixed fact, but an open and undecided question.
And I was employed. It's hard to, you know, I use that word and it makes me smile thinking about it, to try and contribute to the development of this project through providing ethnographic portraits and field notes of how the experience of identity and racism and exclusions were being lived in the everyday lives of young people. I've been doing field work, by this point, for about four years, you know, most of the time feeling lost in this kind of extraordinary world of division and transcendence. For most of that time, I wasn't really sure whether I was going to write about that experience in these communities or work within them. So, getting this opportunity was a real turning point for me. I would never have finished that project and the book that came out of it, that Mette kindly mentioned at the beginning, without that year at TCRU.
So, the first thing I want to say is a massive ‘thank you’ and a chance to recognise that for everyone who's worked at TCRU, but specifically Ann, Barbara and Roger, I simply wouldn't have had a career without that period of reflection. I learned so much in it and during it. And I remember the very first day that I walked through the old building over in cornfields. Did you go into the building and there are all these soft chairs as you kind of walk and people would sit around and have coffee and things like that, anyway. So, and I remember the very first coffee morning and, you know, given that I was, I wasn't really quite sure whether or not I would have finished this PhD that I started, or whether I would really have any future as a researcher. And I remember Ann introducing me during the coffee. People come out of their rooms, you know, it was... And I imagine in my mind, there was some kind of sign or a bell or something... People would come out of their room, yeah, they would come out and sit and drink coffee together and so, and sometimes would stand. And so, Ann at one point turns and says, you know being, you know, a good colleague in every way: ‘This is Les. He's an urban ethnographer!’ And I thought that sounds quite cool. And I've been trying to live up to that vocation ever since.
And I want to make just a few observations in my time about TCRU not only in terms of the ideas, and the ideas really matter, and research really matters, but also as a place for the crafting of knowledge. And I shared an office and we sat back-to-back, and at the time, or the late autumn of ‘88, I think, was finishing her book on young mothers, where meanwhile I was sitting, literally a metre away, pouring over, you know, years of field notes, transcribing interviews and trying to make sense of that paradoxical, complex reality of London's multiculture. I also, I should say, not only learn to appreciate the Arches (laughs) from Ann, but also the main thing that I want to say is that it's been really interesting going back to that time. I think I learned that virtue of painstaking attention and to see the process of doing research not simply as collecting data or capturing it somehow on our recording devices, but attending to the complex human texture of doing research, of listening, listening, listening, and listening again. For I think it's in that crafted attentiveness that some of the value of what we do together in our different ways is to be found. It takes time. There are no shortcuts. And I think that's what we were doing every day, and the fact that Ann was just over my shoulder, behind me, helped me stay to that task in the calm of the environment of TCRU.
The silence was not only broken by the sound of The Arches. I have such vivid memories of working there and hearing the sound of children laughing, from the..., during playtime and lunchtime, in the primary school next door. The research kind of ethos that was cultivated, I think at that time, or that I that I feel, you know, shape me in so many ways, was not just about attentiveness and this kind of goes on to the points that Ann’s already touched on. That was such a heart. It was about trying to attend to the experience and the realities of what it meant to live through these this complex moment and how London was changing. What it meant to come of age during that time. But I think the important thing I also want to signal is that, you know, the scholars and writers who came through at that time were very often of, from, or proximate to those communities. There was a sort of shift going on and the experience... and I think it was a generation of thinkers who were fearless and brave. And I want to sort of signal and acknowledge that bravery and fearlessness. I think it's Ann, and but also you Parminder (Bhachu), sitting over there, who also worked at TCRU at that time. Who wrote a brilliant ethnography of South Asian experience called ‘Twice migrants’ that was published in the mid ‘80s, actually, and then two subsequent books, ‘Dangerous designs’ in 2004 and, more recently, ‘Movers and makers: Resilience, uncertainty and migrant creativity in worlds of flux’. They were, you know, intellectuals who are trying to make sense of complex realities, introducing new theoretical languages and grammars that were appropriate to the serious attention to the complexity of those experiences.
Also, Paul Gilroy was on the Advisory Board of the project. That was really Ann’s and Barbara's project that I was kind of employed to do sort of development work and pilot work, I guess. And it was quite something as a young researcher to submit these ethnographic reports to this kind of a Board or Committee of eminent readers. But it was they were all incredibly encouraging. They instilled conviction and purpose. And I want to say, you know, without any apology for it actually, that those new voices that were coming through, like Ann and Parminder and Paul and many others actually, often had to face, you know, at the hands of academic establishment in sociology and criminology and anthropology less than fair and quite hostile treatment. It wasn't an easy time. It wasn't an easy time to open up this imagination theoretically as well as politically, and I think it's important to say that and at TCRU that was happening. The fact that, you know, there were conversations that were possible there, I think is something to remember and to honour actually.
Minority communities, as Ann's already said, were subject to pathologizing ways of both being researched and being conceived. Racism in this moment took on a decidedly cultural kind of turn and language, and as Paul Gilroy commented in his influential book, ‘There Ain't No black in the Union Jack’, young people were cast as either victims or problems, caught between cultures, or suffering from identity crisis. And I think in a way the work that was going on at TCRU was trying to challenge those... that that way of conceptualising that experience. You know, in a sense, it was a few years later that Norman Tebbit, the Conservative politician, said in an interview with Los Angeles Times: ‘A large proportion of Britain's Asian population failed to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It's an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?’. This became known as the infamous ‘Tebbit test’ and served, I think, to issue a kind of politically conservative challenge to minority communities to show their commitment to the nation and their right to belong here.
And in that moment, I think, many writers were trying to open up alternative ways of thinking about the emergent forms of multiculture. You know, notions like cultural hybridity, associated with Homi Bhabha, or cultural syncretism, that was coined by Paul Gilroy, were different attempts to present a kind of alternative conception of selfhood. This might be characterised in a way as replacing the either-or models of identity and the sense that young people of migrant heritage were somehow caught between, with a sense of and-and selfhood, and patterns of culture that were made not between, but across place and time. And I think that those shifts were really important and significant. And I think in a way offered a resource, really important intellectual and interpretive resource for those who came after.
I think one of the other aspects of the work going on at TCRU at that time was it anticipated the complexity at the heart of how racism worked. Thinking of racism as not just a process of exclusion that distances and others absolutely, but rather as a filtering device or mechanism, or an ordering and ranking process. Ann mentioned the experience of the Vietnamese refugees at this time, you know, there were 7000 refugees settled in Lewisham where I was doing the field work at that time, the so-called ‘boat people’. And it's interesting to go back to that moment and how, you know, the boat has been figured in the political consciousness in recent times. But you know, one of the things that was really challenging in that moment too was that experience of refuge and seeking asylum often placed those young people in a vulnerable position where they could be attacked by multiracial peer groups who had kind of, in a sense, re-established the terms of belonging for them amongst themselves, but then could mark a difference that would make a difference to the new incomers. And there was a kind of powerful warning in that really, and perhaps in anticipation of the future face of racism, not only in every everyday life, but more latterly in the diversity conservatism of government ministers who can be somehow simultaneously anti-immigrant and of migrant heritage.
I want to end by reiterating the importance of research, craft, and political sensibility that I associate with that time. The new theoretical tools and political and intellectual voices that were emerging out of multicultural London at that moment and were present inside that very sort of tranquil bubble. But those ideas weren't necessarily popular. They were challenged across the political and cultural spectrum. You know, it manifests in different ways that resistance, you know, white professors blocking colleagues of colour from getting jobs without any pretension, and openly, on the one side, and ‘ethnic absolutist’, to use Paul Gilroy's phrase, dismissing syncretic cultures as a form of ‘half-breedity’, as one reviewer characterised it. But looking back, I think their style of attention that I learned at TCRU was and is hopes’ work to attend to those experiences that are unremarked upon or ignored and try and give them a name that both honours those experiences and changes the terms of understanding. And I think you know, as always, I learn a new thing to read from a conversation with Ann. It kind of charms with Ghassan Hage’s idea of co-hoping to note and notice the accumulation of this legacy in the generations of scholars that have followed, I think is part of where I find hope actually. This is to me represented, this might seem a bit strange, in the literature reviews of PhD students, two in the last month, that feature extended engagements with Ann and Barbara study ‘Black, white or mixed race?’. This, to me, is the realisation of scholarship as a shared commitment to listen, to think and hope.
Mette Louise Berg
Thank you so much Les, and now, Vallu.
Sivamohan Valluvan
Thank you all, thanks. I do feel very much an interloper to be here. But whatever! What not! So obviously I'm not from TCRU. I don't really even know how to pronounce this phrase: Thomas Coram? Yeah. (laughter) I'll just take this opportunity if we, if we are taking stock over the last X decades, before I get going on anything more substantive, I do think I just want to pay homage to both of you, people like you. I've only met you recently, Ann, but Les, I've known for some time. But, as you alluded to, people like them who in much, much more inhospitable hostile and seemingly adverse circumstances forged a place for race in the social sciences. You know, I have such a jolly time in academia (Laughter). I do. That's. It feels sometimes quite odd. I'm very happy, amicable, the route has been frictionless. Smooth, but generationally, I think we owe you a debt. Both of you. Actually, on behalf of my whole generation, it's just not me, but we are very thankful to both of you.
So, to be honest, I'm going to speak about nationalism. It’s what I write about. Increasingly, my work has centred a lot around nationalism, particularly the reconsolidation of quite sweeping and as Ann alluded to a kind of electorally, electorally triumphant reconsolidation of a British, but no, properly put English, English nationalism. And this being an English nationalism, amongst other indicators of cruelty, of which there are many, is now threatening to, is embarking upon such intense forms of anti-migrant bordering that it does threaten to kind of conclusively renege on the very possibility -residual possibility- of asylum to this country. And I say that as someone whose father was an asylum seeker granted asylum and via him myself. So, there's a particular..., there is a personal stake in these developments as well. Admittedly, the charge sheet of English nationalism's colonial and racial ills would constitute such a lengthy tome that 12 minutes really wouldn't do it justice, and it will take up all our time. So, what I think I will do is actually maybe something you hinted towards the very end, to be a little more, like to flag some complications that have arisen for some of us who were thinking through anti racist research. How the shape of this new nationalism also unfortunately stands to reinvent itself in particular ways that I do think pose certain challenges to some of the conventions of anti-racist research characteristic of a previous era.
So firstly, it seems what has changed quite noticeably, naturally, is the ability of this nation to a significant extent not in total of course, but to some significant extent to expand its remit, to reconfigure more accommodating multiracial sense of its natural, national citizenry yourself would yet, and yet simultaneously and equally cruel and reactionary iteration of that remaking. And I think you did allude to this towards the end. If we're really taking stock of the, say, last 30 years, it does become particularly salutary to note the less than pale complexion of our governing front benches over the last couple administrations and the active plays, the genuinely, the active plays of black and brown demagogues. Some in as such inventive spearheads, or innovators of a post Brexit, UKIP-ified post, a new right Tory party. And I hasten to add, I hasten to add that I don't think the present of the presence of such kind of non-white cabinet headliners can any longer be credibly dismissed under the simple notion of tokenism. If it is in fact tokenism, they're doing an awful lot of it. It's a windfall of tokens, honestly (laughs). You know, some master puppeteer of the Tory party has misplaced, way-laid the dictionary definition of what a token is, quite frankly. So, something’s amiss, at the very least. But rather, and it becomes it seems more straightforward to actually think of these things: the cabinet, the Prime Minister. Indeed, some recent electoral but also the Brexit referendum, some voting patterns within it. It does become easier, I think, for all of this to be better construed as essentially inside a metonym, if you like of an emergent reconstitution of a politics of British narcissism and fortified cruelty, in ways that exceed a simplistic analysis of all this being chalked up to recidivist whiteness, or as put colloquially as the authors, the extraordinary authors of Empire Endgame. I was very happy just before I came to UCL, today I went past Waterstones, and it was still there. A couple of editions written by a remarkable collective of anti-racist writers. At the moment, they all happen to be my friends (laughs). I’m very happy to concede that, but I don't, you know, I'm not hyping them out of nepotism. I do happen they’re amongst the best going on this matter, but as they put it, the task of anti-racism is not to analytically deny the ways in which Preeti Patel reveals a kind of wider set of multiracial entry points into the politics of cruel Britannia, but rather to actually adapt our own anti-racism in ways that can better anticipate, foresee and reckon with a very, very likelihood. I should move on. I'm doing quite well I reckon, isn’t it? I speak quickly (laughter). I'm sorry. For those of you (unclear) After your very measured, so you know you’re very poetic, patience in your delivery, I certainly don't.
But anyhow, moving on. Notwithstanding the - what can we call this? - the kind of diversification of, of nationalist conservatism, if you like? I do think actually we might also want to pay attention, some attention to the shifting poetics of reactionary whiteness itself. Namely, we might want to observe how whiteness has anchored to English belonging. Seems, to me anyways, increasingly less formally about privilege and superiority and such like, and much more about a resentful, revanchist melancholia. In other words, as Western economies and certainly our English economy, which is in a very sorry state, so I'm surprised any of us are here still I mean if we're trying to earn a middle-income salary (some laughter). Nonetheless, but you know, as we experience world historical economic decline, incremental decline as it may be, what some, you know the economists in our ranks called secular stagnation, or where the kind of wages of whiteness to coin a phrase, the wages of whiteness in its kind of putatively literal sense no longer obtained as confidently or easily as before then we do, I think see a texture of whiteness that that is less obviously about the safeguarding of privileges or supremacy per say, but is instead about the distinctly fascist emotional keys that emerge from a sense of thwarted or frustrated -I don’t know what to call it- entitlement really, where the masochism, if you like the masochism of perceived decline and loss, is converted into an externalised sadism of nationalist identity and nationalist demagoguery. You know, basically in my opinion, it seems like we currently inhabit an uncanny dystopia. OK, where one has in part escaped one whiteness, only thereupon encounter, another one scored by a new set of kind of psychosocial repertoires. Repertoires of loss, repertoires of decline, repertoires of resentment, repertoires of mournful, morbid more than festering melancholia. Put differently, it seems to me I mean this, what I write about is, but it's a..., it's a politics of white English pain often symbolically indexed to a kind of symbolism of small town provincial geographies, which doesn't really want anything except it asks for a monopoly on the public staging, a monopoly on the public visualisation of authentic deserving victimhood. That it doesn't intend for anything to get better, it just wants that dignified monopoly. So obviously, I mean, if less I be misunderstood, this whiteness is herein just as dangerous, just as paranoid, if not more so than the ones that preceded it or came before. But also, let's all this sound like a kind of fashionable pessimism. Unfortunately, a pessimism that looms too large and too much on my own generation's kind of anti-racist writing. Uh, I do want to expand on what remains of my time. A few minutes, still, no? Mette, I'm doing well, you know, it's OK. I am doing quite well. (Other panellists agree) I'm surprising myself. You know, I do three-hour lectures. I just did one last Monday, but even then, I struggle to stop. Whatever, I will stop.
I just want to expand on the remaining time and also the new possibilities that also arise within this very self, same context of perceived decline and perceived dissipation of former privileges and in other words, I do believe that those of us who care the anti-racist research must stay acutely alert to the ways in which such reconfigured conjunctural circumstances also yield distinctive scopes for particular forms of multi, meaningful, enduring multiracial pro migrant working class solidarity. So, I'm just going to finish with some notes on some of the shared terrain to be honest, but on the shape of our everyday urban kind of convivial, multiculture as it exists in our large towns. Of course, London being the most iconic of that, I suppose. But also, of course, many of our, in many a corner of our provincial towns, many a corner of our suburbs and many a corner, indeed of our public, more popular digital screens. So, I'll be the first to concede, however, that I'm forging a lot of research in this field that all too easily succumb to various just quite platitude, like descriptive platitudes, about a very, quite generic observations about diversity, and that more akin to a kind of corporate liberal representation of politics at best, really. But on the contrary, and these names have already been invoked, but certainly, in the tradition of, say, someone like Paul Gilroy, or, who remains foundational, or in as picked up by someone of much younger vintage like Luke de Norohna in his and another friend, and it is very nepotistic, isn't it? But you know, his own very recent piece, very poignant, very moving piece on the convivial areas that are forged amidst the crucible of brutality and dehumanisation that is otherwise known as the detention centre. But for them, you know, conviviality, or whatever else it may be, at its most fundamental sense, it's still about working class mutuality as it comes through with and across difference, amidst wider pains and distresses, and how these various forms of cultural and social entanglement, how through those forms what slowly unfolds is some significant loosening of that very need, that very practised impulse to otherwise police space, culture and politics along defensive indices of group identity, not least defensive indices of white English normativity, white English centrality and or white English entitlement. So the sort of research you know, let me put like this, what remains for me anyways particularly powerful for the work on multiculture that is more avowedly class conscious, if not a card carrying Marxist that doesn't always give for good analysis, but you know class conscious in any case, what they do make the observation that these are never just solidarities and anti-racism that just come out of suddenly people being better able to kind of name their privileges, guilts, so on and so forth or like taking on a different kind of etiquette of virtue, which unfortunately is how I do feel sometimes in my more exasperated moments otherwise extraordinary, rejuvenated, refreshingly rejuvenated anti-racist well beyond anything I could have imagined, when I was younger, where I grew up, but nonetheless it does feel sometimes very circumscribed by external scripts which are not of our own doing. And so, the research that I have in mind is precisely that I, for kind of convivial mutuality, as it comes out of everyday cultural undertakings, as it comes out of without an obvious, which isn't particularly trained or practised or rehearsed, which isn't sourced in a neat sense of script, and acts. As a result, is necessarily clumsy and messy, and where it is unfolding, therefore in still close proximity to the continued appeal of racial nationalisms, vicious, vicious, enduring logics. So, I think at least researchers like myself, what I try to remind myself anyways, is to stay, to still try to stay within the mess and complexities of working-class life and possibility. So really my fear is that sometimes research, I mean, I appreciate that we are a particular kind of audience. But I do sometimes think sometimes our research is geared to only kind of one class of white person, namely white liberals, really, as overconcentrated in a kind of professionalised liberal culture sector, be it the arts, be it the museums, or be it, indeed even our own university settings and therein on campus life for students, whatnot. And there is, let's be frank, there is something about didacticism and politics as an injunction, politics qua politics that is, for some reason, particularly harnessed as it is by the alt-right is seen as somehow, well, prohibitive, and is seen as presented as only appealing to kind of self-confessional progressives, a confessional style that however we look at it, does seem to be very moulding in an extraordinary classed register which is very forbidding for assorted reasons. A kind of forbidding lifestyle liberalism, if you like, even though many of these people would often say they're not liberals and they're radicals, but that that tells you a lot about the culture industry and its penchant for radical chic in various ways, be it on Netflix and otherwise. But you know, so let me. I'll just finish in a sec. But you know, at least people like me, to be honest, I'm only addressing myself. It's a kind of personal psycho drama, to be honest, like a generational psycho drama (laughs), but you guys know you already know this. So, what do you care? Well, at least people like me, people like me, we I do sometimes think the price of success. That's why I do think it's different and you're going. You have to forge something, but we kind of move into a cleaner space and it's easy to get too comfortable with only addressing this particular class. And when we do that, when we get too comfortable, what we neglect, the basic truism that the practise of kind of naming privilege, guilt, shame etcetera, etcetera. Whatever its strengths is not going to appeal to the much more expansive classes that still constitute this country, certainly not the petty bourgeoisie who are styled in a very particular sense of perpetual fear that, whenever confronted with anything moralising, they're quick to turn and quick to find solace in a much more kind of reactionary politics of defensive closure. Certainly not the bourgeoisie, who are so stratospherically, aloof and exist amongst a rarefied global elitism that they couldn't care less about our lives anyhow and remain fundamentally indifferent. But and not least and not the working classes either, who will simply, and justifiably in my opinion, will simply assert their own sense of harried and abject victimhood whenever we try, you know, some people, someone like me, will ask them to acknowledge or renounce their previous privileges. So, for me, at least, I hope it has become clear that the research that I am very close to it is the last of these classes that the urban multiculture that I take seriously remains most interested in, and as such, and I'll just end here, really. But it is my hope anyways that contemporary research of this variety can continue to kind of name and amplify this alternative tradition, these alternative horizons of lived working class anti racism. Horizons, which are about common entanglement and the political collectives that can take improvised, improvised shape. And they should, they emerge not from defensiveness, but they emerge from something quite affirmative, affirmative, mutually enchanting unlearning of the very racial and nationalist logics, which otherwise both here and in, both England and elsewhere, which otherwise monopolise the ways in which we are invited to think about political belonging and shared purpose or something as sentimental as that. Thank you. (Applause) Just under 12 minutes, wasn't it? No?
Mette Louise Berg
I think you were the longest.
Sivamohan Valluvan
Really? No, well. That is not possible.
Mette Louise Berg
Thank you very much all three of you. And as promised, you're now going to have a chance to briefly respond and I will ask you to please be brief because I'm sure the audience will have lots of questions, comments as well that we do want to have time for as well, so. Ann, do you want to start?
Ann Phoenix
OK. Thank you very much and thank you both for really thought-provoking presentations. And since you've just finished Vallu, I'm going to start with yours. One of the things that I will say immediately is that what I so frequently feel is missing in accounts, is feminism. Feminisms in the plurality and the reason that I say that is that one of the reasons I put black feminist work from the 70s, eighties and so on is even though it didn't name intersectionality, it was looking at difference. It never thought that whiteness was all the same. It never thought that women were all the same. And that is exactly the analysis that we have to have if we are to understand how it is that we have cabinets that have, you know, are much more diverse than ever before. And not make the mistake that, you know, some sort of politicians, Asian and Black, have made, of saying, well, it's because they're not really Black or it's because they're not really Asian, because that's just not true. People are never one category. They're never in one context, they're always, you know, sort of in, in shifting context. It's another reason that it's it really crucial to think about the shifting of alliances. Why would you ally with a particular person from particular groups at certain times? And whiteness has always been different, differentiated, fragmented by class, gender, all those things that we talk about. So, that's what I think. So, I think that all the things you're saying are right, but actually we do need analyses, whether one calls them feminists, whether one calls them intersectional or whatever, but that do that complexity much more, and therefore recognises difference in order to think about what is really hopeful. So, for example, one of the, one of the PowerPoints that that I had was around hope was of the Trevallions, because you know just last weekend, it says a great deal that they did not know that their wealth came from enslavement, and once they discovered it, you know, they've had lots of discussions in the family and many of them agree that they have to apologise, they have to give some token money, not as much as the equivalent as they got, but at least something (agreement) and that they have to go and see the plantations, you know, sort of… That's very different from those who say it's in the past. Do you see? So that I think that we also need the complexity of thinking difference. You know, ‘What does it really mean?’ ‘What does whiteness mean?’ You know, sort of. The study that Les mentioned for example was actually, although we only published a book on the mixed parentage, young people also black and white young people and, you know, the change there from whiteness as unmarked to, as you say, many more white working class people feeling that they're the victims, you know, in the States, the replacement thesis and so on really, really matter. So, I think that’s really crucially important. And I sort of really agree with you with thinking about the conviviality of the everyday, because I think that one of the things about being interested in the psychosocial is that one needs to think about how things are reproduced in the everyday. That's why partly I'm also interested in hauntology and the way in which in the everyday things that you would not expect are actually haunting behaviours and so on. And then Les, well, thank you so much for both what you have to say about Thomas Coram. I do agree that it was a place that for many of us, not everybody, because that culture of impermanence meant that some people were spat out when they didn't want to go actually, but that for many of us it was so productive in allowing us, and actually, you find it hard to believe, but many of us were young at the time (laughs). And you know, that made a big difference because it also meant that we spent time together, we had energy, we did all sorts of things that meant that we could spend hours talking and so on and so forth and to some extent, hanging out as well. It's sort of, but now some of us are not so young, some of us still are! I mean, there are those in the audience who really are still. OK and I think you also talk about complexity, complexity at the heart of how racism works. And you know how it acts as filtering devices and so on. And how we have to think about, you know that legacy of the past and I think that attention to that careful attention you're talking about to detail is really important, but I think another point that you made is, not only about attention to theoretical tools and that sort of thing, but your story that you. So, just now talks to us about why. capacity building is not just an empty notion, but there are people who could do fantastic work if they're nurtured. And that's one of the things about racisms and the academy, for example, that means that you get lots of people who do not get that opportunity to be part of, you know. So, to become professors, to do things and so on. And that also means that some of some of us who do, are not necessarily about social justice, just as you're saying, if we're thinking intersectionally, you can't assume that everybody, -just essentialist colour of skin- is going to think in the same way, so I think that, you know, that's also really important. And I talked for three minutes probably
Mette Louise Berg
Bit more.
Ann Phoenix
Oh my God, I'll stop.
Les Back
Yeah, well, well. So much to say really. And I’d be interested on what other people got to say too. But, you know, I think that I feel like there was a real beneficiary of that, not in a scripted way, but a lived way. And, you know, feel the responsibility is to pass that kind of encouragement on and that you know that is. I wasn't being glib when I said you know just yesterday reading a, you know somebody who's been struggling to finished their PhD, that little passage about your book, and others as well you know and think that those things they do matter. You know, and the academy, I think is a very uneven place in terms of the pla-. There's those sites where there is encouragement and not actually. And so it's a very, the Academy is no less complex than the thing that I think the idea of conviviality captures, which is the sense that there is the possibility of something that is emerging, shared alliance recognition, renegotiation of terms in the very same moment when there can be the reinscription of those kind of toxic, hateful nativisms or, you know, wounded, wounded forms of white hatred that are expressed through woundedness, you know. So it's in a sense, it's complex to say something as complex as not to say very much, actually, that other. But I think it's more than that to say these forces are, in a sense mutually alive. There's not a linear progress, there's these very, there's very messy. It's. There's no clear resolution to those, that mutual quality of existence, you know, the forces that are kind of they're. It’s not a conflict that is easily resolved. Rather, a much more paradoxical condition where there are openings and closures that are happening in ways that matter and that are important to pay attention to.
Sivamohan Valluvan
I was really taken by what you said, at the beginning and of your own, about the strategic alliances, the co-hoping as premised on the strategic alliances of cultural contingencies. And I take a lot from Spivak here, actually, I mean my route into some of the more, kind of feminisms largely through postcolonial theory, but particularly as staging of what she understood to be strategic essentialism. Which he repudiates because it was so badly misread in various versions. But I often hear, because I do run with the left quite often, and they're always talking strategy, strategy, strategy, right, you know. And I say don't make a mechanical arithmetic of it, and I that's why I think you and I, you're talking about co-hoping as contingent energies, which then we manipulate or harness or try to name, that the prefiguring of politics will have to be in the cultural, will have to be shadowed in the social entanglements. The strategy isn't a kind of Marx’s bro. script dreamt up on Novara Media one day. Do you know what I mean like? I mean, I'm not. I'm not hitting on anything. Like it's good. It's all fine. But let me put it differently, actually, about what Les was also talking about. Sometimes I think the best of cultural studies has been forfeited by the left and they are in a wild race back to Marx, which is fine and great, and we do like Marx. But there was a reason why cultural studies happened in the first place. And I mean, Richard Hoggart, I mean Raymond Williams, I mean, Stuart Hall. They weren't abandoning Marx ‘cause they thought Marx didn't have answers, they’re just inadequate. Formal Marxism was inadequate, and to understand the culturalization of political subjectivity, to understand the enchantments of collectivity prior to it being named as collectivity, comes through in the cultural and we are interested in those intimate textures. As it is happening in the most banal ways, and we all. People like you and. At least I am often accused of being banal. Fine, but you know, it is the banality that rehearses the radical and that the politicisation. So when one talks about strategic allia- I think it's right that this convers- panel can have that conversation. I'm excusing myself in a way, but nonetheless this panel can have that conversation precisely because it is about finding its queuing in culture and, you know, as Spivak famously says, I find it very arresting, of course, we should know our own. No, we don't have to know it. But of course we feel our particularities. Of course, to know the particular particularity of your suffering, of the way you've been constituted, the way you've been received and humiliated and sufficient indignities as obtained from a particularity, not a generic suffering. A particularity, but we don't have the luxury of particularity when we mobilise for collectives. So it is that interesting synthesis of how you move. The luxury today, when the planet is burning and the West is dying and you know, I mean, like the luxury of taking stock, of hierarchies, of who has it worse? But without, but also knowing that we have to name some of these particularities and I'm always interested in that tension. But again, going back to Spivak, and I think the best of black British feminism too, it's one thing to know particularity, but if the end goal is minoritarian building, we're going nowhere. Do you know what I mean? Post colonial theory is very good at that, actually, because they weren't messing with minority. They were about to be majorities, claiming the state and all the peril and jeopardy of that. But sometimes in my circles, in my own classrooms, indeed in my own conversation with myself, sometimes, it seems like my politics ends up with the kind of minoritarian purity which might be great, who knows, maybe it's analytically coherent and correct, but it's. God knows it's numerically flawed (Laughs). You know, I mean numerically it's dead. So, it's that, that I take from people as feedback as well. And you (unclear) that.
Mette Louise Berg
Great. Thank you. Don't know about you, but I feel my head is exploding with ideas and thoughts and so on.
END of RECORDING.