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| TIMELINE 6/03-9/03 Research 8-12/03-4 Publication FUNDING STATUS FUNDED Pilot funding recieved REGION UK (London), US (New York) TEAM Ayumi Takenaka, Bruce White. PARTNERS Department of Sociology, Bryn Mawr College, US. DISSEMINATION Various. Journal publications. Possible book. This internet site.
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One
Nation, One People (Thank you to all those who have contributed to this research in London and New York. Results will be published here soon.)
Competing for a piece of the National Narrative: Alterity within the immigrant mainstream. Few projects have tried to understand the relationships that immigrant groups have with each other. A recent documentary film by the acclaimed researcher Somon Scorrer is one notable exception. In the film Black on Black, we see how Black African Britons understand their place in British society as the ‘original’ and ‘educated’ black populations in opposition to West Indian Blacks. West Indian immigrants have increasingly seen these African Blacks as a threat to their need for an all-encompassing idea of British Blackness. Social conflict between these two groups has thus ensued due to a need to compete for space within the British national narrative. Taking its cue from cutting-edge research and perspectives such as this, this research hopes to further the understanding of how the interplay between immigrant groups reveals some of the ways in which incoming populations use national narratives to construct themselves vis-à-vis other immigrant groups, and in so doing facilitate a sense of place within their host culture.
We want to be born in the USA: Secondary migration as a selection of coherent narrative over complex. Traversing the often-difficult dialogues of foreign cultural identity, first generation immigrants often connect first with the ‘exterior’ facets of national identity and sovereignty in their building of themselves into the fabric of their host culture. In the UK this can present a real problem: not only are notions of cultural membership – white Anglo-Saxoness – historically linked to England as a Nation, but the history of colonisation presents a further obstacle to cultural/national membership on an equal footing with ‘original’ inhabitants. Conversely, the USA’s harnessing of a ‘melting pot’ narrative is more easily accessible from the outset; simpler to negotiate and find place within. How far does the respective complexity of the British national narrative, and the relative accessibility of the US model affect the choices that British immigrants make to embark on second-step migration to the United States? In attempting to answer this question, this part of the project proposes to examine the degree to which people will change their lives in order to comfortably locate ethnic identity within a ratified national narrative.
Tools of the Trade: Writing cultural narratives to sell national images. In this third interrelated research theme, the project hopes, while tracing the views of immigrant populations towards particular aspects of UK US national narratives, to reveal some the agendas behind the making of these narratives by the respective government and media agencies. How do these narratives aid the wider need to ‘nation-build’? Are they made relevant to non-immigrant populations, or are they primarily designed for them? Stepping into the fray of different interpretations of what is it to be British and American in a new nation-building age, the researchers hope to help to deconstruct the making of cultural and national identities both from the perspectives of the nation builders themselves, and those who exist at the receiving end of their conceptions.
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The Organisation for Intra-Cultural Development (OICD) | |
Strategies
of Belonging: Observations of Choice, Membership, and Identity amongst
three immigrant groups in the UK and US.