This volume provides a unique perspective on elderly working-class West Indian migrants in the UK, particularly examining how they negotiate their sense of belonging. Utilizing the life span gaze and including elements of oral history and narrative, this ethnography provides rich insight into the ordinary lives, migratory circumstances, social networks, and interactions with the state as residents in a sheltered housing scheme in Brixton, London. The author further compiles a variety of genealogy charts, providing a uniquely vivid scholarly analysis of the Caribbean migrant experience both in a “place” and through space and time. Ultimately, this work contemplates how communities face change whilst at once developing a local symbolic cultural site, navigating adaptation to new economic and social environments.
When twelve-year-old Steve Brixton, a fan of Bailey Brothers detective novels, is mistaken for a real detective, he must elude librarians, police, and the mysterious Mr. E as he seeks a missing quilt containing coded information.
Queer Cities, Queer Cultures examines the formation and make-up of urban subcultures and situates them against the stories we typically tell about Europe and its watershed moments in the post 1945 period. The book considers the degree to which the iconic events of 1945, 1968 and 1989 influenced the social and sexual climate of the ensuing decades, raising questions about the form and structure of the 1960s sexual revolution, and forcing us to think about how we define sexual liberalization - and where, how and on whose terms it occurs. An international team of authors explores the role of America in shaping particular forms of subculture; the significance of changes in legal codes; differing modes of queer consumption and displays of community; the difficult fit of queer (as opposed to gay and lesbian) politics in liberal democracies; the importance of mobility and immigration in modulating queer urban life; the challenge of AIDS; and the arrival of the internet. By exploring the queer histories of cities from Istanbul to Helsinki and Moscow to Madrid, Queer Cities, Queer Cultures makes a significant contribution to our understanding of urban history, European history and the history of gender and sexuality.
This collection of essays interrogates literary and cultural narratives in the contexts of the incidents following 9/11. The collected essays underscore the new and (re)emerging racial, political, and socio-cultural discourse on identity related to terrorism and identity politics. Specifically, the collection examines South Asian American identities to understand culture, policy making, and the implicit gendered racialization, sexualization, and socio-economic classification of minority identities within the discourse of globalization. The essays included here relocate the discourse of race and cultural studies to an examination of transnational labor diasporas, reopen debate on critical constructions of U.S. racial and cultural formations, and question the reconfiguration of gendered and sexualized discourses of the South Asian diaspora within the context of national security and terrorism. This book provides a multifaceted account of South Asian racialization and belonging by drawing from disciplines across the humanities and the social sciences. The scholars included here employ methods of ethnographic studies as well as literary, culture, film, and feminist analysis to examine a wide range of South Asian cultural sites: novels, short stories, cultural texts, documentaries, and sports. The rich intellectual, theoretical, methodological, and narrative tapestry of South Asians that emerges from this inquiry enables us to trace new patterns of South Asian cultural consumption post-9/11 as well as expand notions and histories of “terror.” This volume makes an important contribution to renewing scholarship in the key areas of representations of race, labor, diaspora, class, and culture while implicating that there needs to be a simultaneous and critical dialogue on the scope and reconnections within postcolonial studies.
This book traces the formation of Italian migrant belongings in Britain, and scrutinizes the identity narratives through which they are stabilized. A key theme of this study is the constitution of identity through both movement and attachment. The study follows the Italian identity project since 1975, when community leaders first raised concerns about 'the future of invisible immigrants'. The author uses the image of 'invisible immigrants' as the starting point of her inquiry, for it captures the ambivalent position Italians occupy within the British political and social landscape. As a cultural minority absorbed within the white European majority, their project is steeped in the ideal of visibility that relies on various 'displays of presence'. Drawing on a wide range of material, from historical narratives, to political debates, processions, religious rituals, activities of the Women's Club, war remembrances, card games, and beauty contests, the author explores the notion of migrant belongings in relation to performative acts that produce what they claim to be reproducing. She reveals how these acts work upon the historical and cultural environment to re-member localized terrains of migrant belongings, while they simultaneously manufacture gendered, generational and ethnicized subjects. Located at the crossroads of cultural studies, 'diaspora' studies, and feminist/queer theory, this book is distinctive in connecting an empirical study with wider theoretical debates on identity. Nominated for the Philip Abrams Memorial Book Prize 2001.
In Compassionate Leadership for School Belonging, Kathryn Riley draws on 40 years of international research and professional practice to show how schools can be places of safety and fulfilment, even in the most difficult of circumstances. When belonging is a school’s guiding principle, more young people at all levels experience a sense of connectedness and friendship, perform better academically, and come to believe in themselves; their teachers feel more professionally fulfilled, their families more accepted. The originality of this highly readable book lies in its scope. It offers international analysis from the OECD alongside insights from the author’s extensive research in schools, powerfully supported by observational vignettes and drawings from the children, young people and teachers who have been her co-researchers. The book reveals patterns of dislocation, disaffection and exclusion, and highlights the points of intervention in policy and practice needed across school systems to create the conditions for school belonging. The methodologies, concepts and research tools offered can be used by practitioners and researchers in their own contexts, and to guide school leaders towards creating their own places of belonging. This is an urgent book of hope, offering knowledge so that schools can open up possibilities to all children and young people in an increasingly uncertain world.
