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This book analyses how racism and anti-racism influence Black British
middle-class cultural consumption. In doing so, this book challenges the
dominant understanding of British middle-class identity and culture as being
‘beyond race’.
Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital
and cultural repertoires, this book puts forward the idea that there are three
black middle-class identity modes: strategic assimilation, class-minded, and
ethnoracial autonomous. People towards each of these identity modes use specific
cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption. Those towards
strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural
equity, consuming traditional middle-class culture to maintain an equality with
the White middle class in levels of cultural capital. Ethnoracial autonomous
individuals draw on repertoires of browning and Afro-centrism, removing
themselves from traditional middle-class cultural pursuits they decode as
‘Eurocentric’, while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift Black
diasporic histories and cultures. Lastly, those towards the class-minded
identity mode draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation. Such
individuals polarise between ‘Black’ and middle-class cultural forms, display an
unequivocal preference for the latter, and lambast other Black people who avoid
middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally
uncultivated.
This book will appeal to sociology students, researchers, and
academics working on race and class, critical race theory, and cultural
sociology, among other social science disciplines.
4 Middle-class medicine It is well known that Englishmen are in the main opposed to any and every new system with which they are not familiar. Probably to this influence is due the fact, that, with a few exceptions, pay wards are as unknown in this country as the pay hospitals themselves. 1 Sir Henry Burdett
2 ‘Middle-class shits’: political apathy and the poetry of Derek Mahon ‘Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man’ Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge And grasped the principle of the watering can. Clothes pegs litter the window ledge And the long ships lie in clover; washing lines Shake out white linen over the chalk thanes. Now we are safe from monsters, and the giants Who tore up sods twelve miles by six And hurled them out to sea to become islands Can worry us no more. The sticks And stones that once broke bones will not now harm A
socialism. This chapter will examine the role of music in the reform culture of middle-class liberals such as Haweis and John Pyke Hullah. 5 Common to the two organisations examined here in detail, London’s South Place Chapel and Melbourne’s Australian Church, was both an eschewal of orthodoxy, dogma and creed replaced by openness and inclusiveness in outlook, and a vibrant musical culture. Thus we look at
2 Towards a triangle of Black middle-class identity S ociologists are often committed to the view that identity is ‘restless, fickle and irresolute’.1 Contrastingly, the very reason that ‘race’ (and particularly ‘Blackness’) was brought into existence was to deny human difference to certain people. 2 As critical social scientists, therefore, we must walk a tightrope between appreciating that individuals are individuals while also appreciating that systems of domination often aim to homogenise people into restrictive categories. One way that sociologists
spate of discoveries of counterfeit or adulterated milk and milk products. 3 Solely in terms of the importance that has been historically attached to it, therefore, the subject deserves to be examined in its own right. More importantly, it presents us with an opportunity to examine middle-class notions of health, hygiene, food and, through it, the closely related questions of
3 Social distinctions and social actions among the upper and middle classes It was an era of practical jokes and being young and carefree it all seemed as it was, natural, innocent and harmless. No one got hurt, but the kind of life we led didn’t include much thinking about a larger world. Soon afterwards that was unavoidable. (Grenfell, 1976: 85) A lot of nonsense is talked about the strike and the 1920s. It was not really like that. The 1920s, for example were not gay if you had no money. (Hodgkiss, Letter, 1986)1 In Great Britain between the wars there was
In Ann Radcliffes The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, the sublime in nature represents a benevolent patriarchy which works in tandem with ‘the heightened awareness’ that characterizes sensibility in order to educate and empower Emily St Aubert and Ellena di Rosalba. Both of these forces work symbiotically within the gazes (read ‘spectatorship’) of the heroines. Conversely, these forces are threatening to the heroes, in that they limit Valancourts and Vivaldis ability to gain their desires and to influence the events surrounding their beloveds. This gender-based disparity reflects eighteenth century familial politics and suggests that, despite Radcliffes apparent protofeminism in giving her heroines agency over the patriarchal weapons of the sublime and sensibility, her reinventing these forces to empower her heroines at the expense of the heroes actually buys into and supports patriarchal ideals of the roles of difference and sameness in heterosexual desire.
about entrepreneurial individuals and bridge-actions in the unlikely context of studying the Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal church. On the surface Harvest Ministry sermons advocated a shift away from the ethnic pluralism and hereditary rank that organize Fijian society toward creating middle-class identities based on professional achievements and facility in the world outside
This article examines James Baldwin’s late text The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) as one of his substantial attempts at “forging a new language,” which he tentatively mentions in his late essays and interviews. As an unpopular and difficult text in Baldwin’s oeuvre, Evidence carries the imprint of a new economy of time, casting the past into the present, and a new economy of space, navigating across other geographies in appraising the serial killings of children in one of Atlanta’s poorest Black neighborhoods. This article suggests that a new economy of time emerges earlier in No Name in the Street (1972), as a result of Baldwin’s self-imposed exile in Europe. The article then analyzes his spatiotemporal logic in the specifics of Evidence with reference to a Black middle class, urbanization, the ghetto, gentrification, and other colonized spaces.