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.Such a development is nicelyconsonant, in fact, with Gilroy s postulation of a black Atlantic.Nevertheless,while issues of blackness and British identity may have benefited from thisconnection, it may well have assisted in confining discussions of race within,largely, the consideration of black and white identities.Other mixed-race identi-ties Chinese, Pakistani and Indian, for instance are still the subject of muchless specific discussion and research.In Britain the resonance of Gilroy s attack on British cultural studiesresidual nationalism was considerable.It is notable that this attack occurred atthe time it did: when issues of national identity and the process of national defi-nition were once again becoming highly visible in British cultural politics, bothcontradicted and provoked by the chimera of the united Europe of 1992.Gilroy s diagnosis of the Euro- and ethno-centricity of post-Gramscian culturalstudies is telling; whether the case for the black Atlantic is ultimately a persua-sive one or not, it is easy to see why this book has been regarded as an importantintervention.211CENTRAL CATEGORI ESIDENTITYStanding in the wings throughout much of this chapter has been the issue ofidentity.For many years, identity was an issue that was folded either into debatesabout the construction of subjectivity or about the process of identificationaddressed by psychoanalytic theory.The turn towards issues of gender and racehas helped to reorient the discussion of identity: overwhelmingly in recent years,its focus has been on the politics of particular cultural identities within specifichistorical conjunctures.Considering the degree to which the Britishness of British cultural studieswas disavowed in its early days, the current prominence of debates specificallyabout British cultural identities is remarkable.Some have argued that there is adirect line through black British cultural studies to the kind of interests I amsuggesting now dominate the current field.In their history of black Britishcultural studies, Houston A.Baker Jr, Manthia Diawara and Ruth H.Lindeborg refer to the two phases through which, Stuart Hall argues, blackcultural studies has developed in Britain.The first phase deals with issues ofaccess to representation and the interrogation of the accuracy of media stereo-types and so on.The second phase moved black British cultural studiestowards the question of the cultural construction of identities (Baker et al.1996: 7).The consequent challenge to assumptions about the normative white-ness of British identity, their account suggests, had a more general effect: itdrew attention to the processes through which cultural identities wereconstructed, and onto their social and political consequences.Identities weresuddenly problems to be examined conjuncturally or contingently, rather thanfixed permanent entities to be policed or protected.The consequence,according to Baker et al., was liberatory for definitions of British identity ,breaking free of exclusivist or essentialist approaches to ethnicity, nationality,identities of all kinds (p.7).Those who witnessed the media s promotion of Cool Britannia in the late1990s can testify to how vigorously the project of identity formation has beenundertaken within popular and political culture in the UK since the early 1990s.From the Spice Girls to British Airways updated livery, to the Blair-ite project of rebranding Britain in ways which more accurately reflected its new identities particularly that of Britain as a multicultural society British industries andinstitutions alike seemed interested (for varied reasons, of course) in activelyparticipating in the production of new national identities.In its own way, this toowas a response not only to a fracture in the connection between an unspokennormative whiteness and British nationality, but also to a fracture in the assumedrelationship between ethnicity and cultural identity.The gates were suddenlyopen to a broad and lively project of identity formation
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