The white essential subject: race,ethnicity, and the Irish in post-war Britain

This article focuses on the history of Irish migrants in Birmingham in an attempt to enhance historical understanding of race, ethnicity and ‘whiteness’ in post-war Britain. To do so, it will look at two Birmingham histories: the Young Christian Workers’ Association’s report on the Welfare of Irish migrants in 1951, and anti-Irish violence in the aftermath of the Birmingham Pub Bombings of 1974. It will consider the extent to which Irish immigrants were victims of racism, what this meant in terms of discrimination and identity, and, in particular, how Irish experiences corresponded to that of black and Asian migrants.     

‘Stepbrothers from the Middle East’: negotiations of racial identity among Jewish-Israeli immigrants in Toronto

This paper explores the complex negotiations of racial identity experienced on migration. Working from a series of 48 interviews with racially diverse Israeli immigrants to Toronto, and drawing on literature on the assimilated Canadian-born Jewish population, I contrast the racial histories of Canadian and Israeli Jews – groups whose identities have historically crossed intersections of race, ethnicity and religion. By exploring the participants’ accounts of being differently whitened and blackened in Israel and Toronto, and their own interpretations of and responses to these processes, I expose the spatial contingencies of racial hierarchies, meanings and identifications. I also introduce the under-studied Mizrahi/Sephardi Jewish community – who are demographically prevalent in Israel yet largely unknown in North America, and are subject to complex racial and ethno-cultural tensions in both spaces – into discussions of Canadian Jewishness.     

Tracing the origin of Chinese early white porcelain in the late sixth century—evidence from Xing kiln

As the criterion used by archaeologists for determining early white porcelain is quite ambiguous, the origin of Chinese white porcelain remains a point of disagreement. In this study, we systematically investigate 61 typical Xing porcelains of the late Northern dynasties to the early Sui dynasty (550–600 CE) using spectrophotometer, X-ray fluorescence (XRF), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), and analyze the differences between early white porcelain and celadon of Xing kiln in terms of their whiteness and raw materials characteristic. The results show that early white porcelain is a new type of ware that differs from celadon, which can be distinguished by whiteness, with a whiteness greater than 8% being early white porcelain and a whiteness less than 8% being celadon. It is assumed that the ancient potters created the whiter wares based on celadon by improving the glaze and selecting new raw materials for the body, but the production of this type of ware was short lived and subsequently refined in the Sui dynasty (581–618 CE) owing to the limited improvement in whiteness.     

‘United by blood’: race and transnationalism during the Belle Époque

The Belle Époque, often thought to be a period defined by nationalism, also saw the remarkable global proliferation of transnational affinities – especially those centred on race. Across Europe and its settler territories, notions of pan‐racial affinity spread alongside imperial nationalism, in the context of technological advancement that permitted novel imaginative possibilities. Meanwhile, texts of political imagination in Africa and Asia during this period – particularly those of pan‐Africanism and pan‐Islamism – demonstrate not only an awareness of the significance of racial thinking for Europe but a theorisation of the connections between Europe's racial imagination and its policies in the colonised world. The same advances in the fields of communication and travel that opened the door for new imaginative possibilities in Europe also enabled disparate communities in the colonised world to conceive of themselves, often for the first time, as collectively racialised subjects of a European world order.     

Commentary on ‘Of Africa's brightest ornaments’

Recent work exploring the racialization of place tends to focus on the racialization of marginalized group space. This paper shifts attention toward the racialization of dominant group space, namely, the creation and maintenance of white places. Using the case study of the software workplace, I argue that white places are formed through a process of whitewashing, which simultaneously denies race and superimposes white culture. Whitewashing wields language and invisibility to deny race and promote a particular kind of multiculturalism, while cloaking the workplace in a culture of informality and business politics. The whitewashed workplace, like a whitewashed wall, is seen as colorless rather than white as white culture becomes universalized as high-tech culture. I draw my findings from in-depth interviews on workplace satisfaction, relationships, culture and diversity with black, Asian and white employees in Seattle-area software firms.     

Portuguese Immigrant History in Twentieth Century South Africa: A Preliminary Overview

Abstract

South Africans of Portuguese descent probably constitute ten to fifteen per cent of the white South African population. Yet it is a remarkably under-researched population. This article attempts to lay out a research agenda to address this large historiographical gap. It begins with an overview of the sparse literature on Portuguese immigrants and then provides a basic narrative of three discernible waves of migration from the late nineteenth century until the late 1970s. The first and longest wave involved impoverished citizens of the island of Madeira. The second involved more skilled mainlanders from about 1940–1980, most coming in the 1960s and 1970s. The final wave involved Mozambican and Angolan ex-colonial refugees. The paper suggest several areas of possible historical research on Portuguese-South Africans: the degree of their coherence as a “community”; their generational continuity and discontinuity; and in general, the nature of transnational hybridised identity in its racial, religious and political dimensions.     

Citizenship and Belonging in the Rural Fringe: A Case Study of a Hindu Temple in Sydney,Australia

Despite Australian multicultural policy that asserts the right of all citizens to maintain and practice their religion, formal citizenship has not guaranteed the welcome or belonging of migrant religious groups at the neighbourhood scale. This is most starkly reflected in contests over the inclusion of minority religious spaces in the Australian landscape, which increasingly take place in the rural–urban fringe of metropolitan areas. This work examines the controversy over a proposed Hindu temple in metropolitan Sydney and reveals insights into the way that rural–urban fringe space is imagined, understood and experienced by land use planners, residents and temple members. Critical discourse analysis of policy documentation along with interviews reveals that land use planners circumscribe belonging in the landscape through the use of zoning ordinances and design controls, local residents mark the boundaries of white privilege through narratives of heritage and cultural difference and temple members claim rights to citizenship based on assertions of sameness.     

‘It was entirely his fault’: constructing white masculinities and the Haga Man assaults in Umeå, Sweden 1998–2006

Several cases of single repeat offenders in urban space have raised public concern in Sweden during recent decades. Few studies have been conducted on the consequences of the ‘hostage situations’ that emerge when one individual offender causes fear and affects a large group of people in a specific place. The concern of this article is to examine consequences of the Haga Man phenomenon: the case of a serial rapist operating between 1998 and 2006 in Umeå, a medium-sized Swedish city. The article focuses on the construction of white masculinities among male respondents in Umeå during the time of the attacks. I examine how men positioned themselves in relation to the public image of the offender as a ‘normal Swede’ and how they related to women's increasing fear of violence in urban space. Three prominent constructions of masculinity emerged from the research data: the dangerous stranger, the suspect and the protector. These three constructions of masculinity were not clear-cut and did not ‘belong’ to specific men – several of the interviewees articulated various forms of masculinities but stressed them in different ways depending on, for instance, age and/or ethnicity/race. I conclude that men largely positioned themselves as protectors as a strategy to distance themselves from the perpetrator (the image of the ‘normal Swedish man’ performing the rapes) and to ensure that they would not be perceived as suspects. However, men largely perceived that women's increased fear of crime was ‘one man's fault’ and broader issues about gendered power relations in space were not raised.     

Untangling the different components of Norwegianness*

ABSTRACT. National identity is under scrutiny in Europe. A new non‐ethnic conception of the nation to replace the traditional ethnic one is needed. National identity is therefore undergoing a public reconstruction. This article is based on narratives of “Norwegianness” that emerged in a qualitative interview study of white majority Norwegians who live in multicultural suburbs in Oslo. I respond to an overlooked need to analytically untangle different components of “Norwegianness” as phenomenological knowledge, to decouple its different constituents from each other. In order to analyse qualitative data where notions of “Norwegianness” and “non‐Norwegianness” are at play, their different aspects must be clarified. I identify multiple discursive oppositions that researchers ought to keep apart, and distinguish between civic aspects (citizenship), cultural aspects, and ethnic/racial aspects. I suggest that everyday notions of the national are fruitfully studied as discursive space constituted by a series of overlapping, but sometimes mutually contradicting, oppositions.     

Formative Geographies of Belonging in White Australia: Constructing the National Self and Other in Parliamentary Debate, 1901

The relationship between nationally unified calls for immigration restriction in the White Australia period and the emergence of an imagined national identity has been the focus of much valuable historical research. Through the method of content analysis, a geographical lens was used to re-examine the Commonwealth Parliamentary debates regarding the development of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 and to provide empirical support to the existing scholarship. The content analysis provided statistical evidence for the ways in which immigration restriction in this specific historical context was legitimised and rationalised by social constructions that reproduced racisms. Constructions of the Self and the Other were fundamental in defining exclusion and inclusion during the White Australia era. The national Self was complexly defined by overlapping constructions of the Self as Australian, British (racially and culturally) and White. This is indicative of the tensions and negotiations between national interests and cultural, historical and ‘racial’ ties to Britain at the time. Additionally, content analysis provided nuanced insight into the ways in which the designation of inherent (and diametrically opposing) racial attributes to the White Self and non-White Other justified the ways in which ‘they’ were different from ‘us’. In this way the Other was characterised as an intrinsic threat to the development of the nation and the wellbeing of its peoples. ‘We’, on the other hand, were integral to the development of White Australia.