Lecture overview

1
Lecture overview

• Section 1
• Lack of academic interest in the study of rural
  racism
• Section 2
• Key features of rural racism
• How is it different to the urban?
• Death of community discourse
• the pastoral ideal idealised notion of
  Englishness
• rural and the nation
• nationalism spills over into racism
• whiteness
• experience of non-white settlers
• class middle class

2
Lecture overview 2

• Section 3The rural idyll
• The myth of the countryside
• The icon of the village
• Historical origins
• Section 4 The rural idyll and racial discourses
• Facism
• New Right discourse

3
Overview 3

• Part 5 Banal nationalism to racism
• Part 6 Ethnographic studies of rural racism
• Malory Nye Bhativendanta Manor Letchmore Heath
• Tyler Greenville

4
Lecture Overview 4

• Part 7 the black experience
• Part 8 Media representations
• Part 9 Anti-racism

5
Fascist discourse

• The National Front in Britain believes that
• . through contact with the soil the British
  people were to recover their spiritual and racial
  identity.
• (Coates 1993 cited in Agyeman and Spooner
  1997, p.201)

6
New right discourse

• I remember sitting out after supper on
• a beautiful hot summer evening, looking at the
  fields and trees of Burnham Beeches. It was a
  perfect, peaceful English scene. Was it really in
  the same country as the riot towns and cities,
  which I had visited that week? Was it really in
  the same vicinity as parts of London a few miles
  away which were at that moment full of troubles?
  Surely, I thought, this peaceful countryside
  represents more accurately the character and mood
  of the vast majority of British people. (Whitelaw
  1989, quoted by Newsinger 1992, p. 86, cited in
  Gillborn 1995, p.25).

7
John Major in a speech in 1993 on the UKs
membership of the EU

• Fifty years from now Britain will still be the
  country of long shadows on county grounds, warm
  beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and
  pool fillers and - George Orwell said - old
  maids bicycling to holy communion through the
  morning mist and - if we get our way -
  Shakespeare still read even in school. Britain
  will survive unamenable in all essentials
• (Major 1993, p. 9, cited in Gillborn 1995, p.
  28).

8
Winstone Churchill, grandson of PM

• He (Major) promises us that fifty years from
  now, spinsters will still be cycling to communion
  on Sunday mornings - more like the muezzin will
  be calling Allahs faithful to the high street
  mosque
• (Winston Churchill, May 1993 cited in Gillborn
  1995, p.28).