Racism, Muslims and the National Imagination

This qualitative study investigates the relationship between racism and nationalism in two multi-ethnic British neighbourhoods, focusing specifically on the construction of 'the Muslim' as a racialised role sign. Through in-depth interviews with 102 'white' and 'non-white�...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of ethnic and migration studies 2009-02, Vol.35 (2), p.289-308
Main Authors: Kyriakides, Christopher, Virdee, Satnam, Modood, Tariq
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Belonging
Cultural interaction
Cultural Pluralism
Cultural Values
Ethnic Identity
Ethnic neighborhoods
Ethnic relations
Ethnicity
Everyday life
Fundamentalism
Identity
Imagination
Interethnic relations
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Muslims
Nationalism
Neighborhoods
Otherness
Perception
Qualitative research
Racism
Referents
Statehood
Terrorism
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Summary:This qualitative study investigates the relationship between racism and nationalism in two multi-ethnic British neighbourhoods, focusing specifically on the construction of 'the Muslim' as a racialised role sign. Through in-depth interviews with 102 'white' and 'non-white' participants in Glasgow (Scotland) and Bristol (England) we investigate the extent to which 'the Muslim' is being demonised as an oppositional identity in the construction of English and Scottish codes of cultural belonging. We find that whilst Scottishness and Englishness draw on historically founded racialised (e.g. biological, phenotypical) referents of 'whiteness' at the level of the 'multi-ethnic' neighbourhood, such racialised codes of belonging are undermined in everyday life by hybridised codes: signifiers such as accent, dress, mannerisms and behaviours which destabilise phenotype as a concrete signifier of national belonging. However, those signifiers that contest the racialised referent are themselves reconfigured, such that contemporary signifiers of cultural values (e.g. terrorist, extremist) reinforce, but not completely, the original racialised referent. We conclude that a negative view of 'the Muslim' as antithetical to imagined racialised conceptions of nationhood cannot easily be sustained in the Scottish and English 'multi-ethnic' neighbourhood. The sign 'Muslim' is split such that contemporary significations perpetuate the exclusion of the 'unhybridised foreign Muslim'.
ISSN:1369-183X
1469-9451
DOI:10.1080/13691830802586443