Racial otherness: ‘Ain’t no black in union jack’- His book

Civilisation:

For Gilroy, the 9/11 World trade Centre terrorist attack in 2001, and it’s aftermath, radically altered both the tone and nature of the media-orientated representations regarding race and racial difference.

Legacy of the Empire:

Gilroy suggests that we live in a ‘morbid culture of a once-imperial nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige’ (Gilroy, 2004) He argued that the British are undergoing a crisis of national identity: the loss of the British Empire has forced a collective question regarding British identification.

Postcolonial Theory :

– Racial Otherness : Gilroy studied the importance of black representation. The ‘ There ain’t no black in the Union Jack relates back to the race relations from the Second World war. Thus where the poster-war wave of immigration from the West Indies produced a series of worries and anxieties regarding immigrant behaviour. The black community are constructed as a racial ‘other’ in the predominantly white world of 1950s Britain. There were worries that immigrant communities would swamp / take over white Britain. These fears were further noted in the news in late 1970s and 1980s and routed the black community with assaults, muggings and other violent crimes.

‘It is not then a matter of how many blacks there are, but of the type of danger they represent to the nation’ – Gilroy 2008

– Post-colonial Melancholia :

-The story of UK race relations post W.W. 2 : In 1950’s, the black community such as Indians and the Caribbean came to England as ‘we’ were in desperate need of filled job spaces.

– Legacy of the Empire : Gilroy suggests that we live in ‘morbid culture of a once-imperial nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige’. England couldn’t accept the fact that it was loosing its empire power.

Ghost Town – BBC

Quote – “It was clear that something was very, very, wrong,” the song’s writer, Jerry Dammers, has said.

Quote – “I saw it develop from a boom town, my family doing very well, through to the collapse of the industry and the bottom falling out of family life. Your economy is destroyed and, to me, that’s what Ghost Town is about.”

Quote – “No job to be found in this country,” one voice cries out. “The people getting angry,” booms another, ominously.

 Specials grew up in the 1960s listening to a mixture of British and American pop and Jamaican ska. 1981, industrial decline had left the city suffering badly. Unemployment was among the highest in the UK. The Specials, too, encapsulated Britain’s burgeoning multiculturalism. It expressed the mood of the early days of Thatcher’s Britain for many. 

paul gilroy coined the word ‘racial otherness’ and how this racial otherness caused stigmatisation within the black community.

he also shifts his gaze upon the post british industialism as well as the ‘colonial melencholia’ as a result of englands decline within their global pressence this is a result of WWII

Gilroy’s study of ‘there is no black in the union jack’ where he discusses the post war wave of immigration also known as the wind rush generation this lead to a series of anxiety’s and the rising suspicion that England will be ‘swamped ‘ and that there is no longer a ‘white Brittan’ the rise of these suspicions lead to subjugation upon the black community and the rise of riots and inequality and the rise of neo’ Nazis’ and ‘paki bashers’ the cause of all the turmoil started with the colonial melancholia where people chose to rise against the immigrants taking ‘white British jobs’ and the rise of steady unemployment surfaced the riots and the band the specials created a vision of multiculturalism where they took reggae with pop and turned it into something new called ska a new music of cultural reggae and a mixture of pop creating a unity of the races.

Reggae: the sound that revolutionised Britain:

It was punk’s “Summer Of Hate”, 1977, and the required pose was a sneer, a leather jacket and something hacked about – a spiky haircut, a ripped T-shirt, a sawn-off school tie. And, of course, no flares, the despised flag of hippiedom. But at the cold, concrete roots of Britain a very different aesthetic was also in the ascendant, one calling for an oversized tam, dreadlocks and a display of “the red, gold and green”, the colours of Rastafari.

In reggae terms, it had taken the emergence of Bob Marley to effect the uneasy coalition of rock fans, black youth, lofty Rastas and proto-punks that confronted each other at his celebrated 1975 Lyceum shows. After Marley, reggae was taken seriously as music of substance and innovation, where previously it had been treated at best as a novelty or simply ridiculed.

Key concepts:

● Cultural resistance
● Cultural hegemony
● Subcultural theory

Cultural Hegemony:

• Theorised by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian philosopher in the 1930s
• Hegemonic – dominant, ruling, most powerful
• Hegemonic Culture – the dominant culture
• Cultural Hegemony – power, rule or domination maintained by ideological or cultural means

Cultural hegemony functions by encouraging the ideologies of the dominant social group as the only legitimate ideology. Their ideologies are expresses and maintained through economic, political, moral and social institutions. These institutions surround the people in their every day life, and eventually influence their subconscious into accepting the norms, values and beliefs of the dominant social group. As a result, oppressed groups are lead to believe that the social and economic conditions of society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by the dominant group.

Context:
● Race Relations
● Thatcher’s Britain

Thatcher’s Britain

• Prime Minister 1979-90
• Militant campaigner for middle class interests
• Extreme attitude towards immigration
• British Nationality Act 1981: introduced a series of increasingly strict immigration procedure and prevented Asian people from entering Britain

Resistance and political protest:

• laws don’t necessarily equal change
• change is much more likely through culture- which is normally more subtle and isn’t always riots and big gestures.
• everyday people
• Overt political protest is uncommon. When it occurs, it often results in a backlash.- doesn’t change public’s opinion

racial otherness- Gilroys study of black representation ‘there aint no black in the union jack’ focuses on the story of UK race relationships from WW2. The immigration from the west indies caused anxieties.

post-colonial melancholia- substandard living conditions produced racial representations. There were intensified fears that immigrant communities would fill up Britain.

quotes- john Kelly

 a depiction of social breakdown that provided the soundtrack to an explosion of civil unrest.

“It was clear that something was very, very, wrong,”

Paul Gilroy

Paul Gilroy explores the construction of racial ‘otherness’ as an underlying presence within print media reportage during the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that criminalised representations of black males regularly stigmatised the black community.

Gilroys theory:

Paul Gilroy believed “unstable” and politicised identities are “always unfinished, always being remade” and ethnicity is an “infinite process of identity construction”. In other words, ethnicity and national identity are not actually fixed or permanent.

Gilroys main points:

• WW2 immigrants were seen as an alien ‘other’ to an imagined white Britishness.
• Black immigrants were perceived to be ‘swamping’ white communities.
• Black communities were demonised through the representations that associated them with individual acts of criminality – knife crime and muggings were particular media concerns. These representations construct a ‘common sense’ notion of the criminal black male.
• Later representations constructed the black community in general, and black youths in particular, to be naturally lawless and incompatible with British white values.
• Later representations suggested that black otherness had a corrosive effect on white youth culture too.

Info from TheConversation.com:

• ‘Ghost Town’: a haunting 1981 protest song that still makes sense today
• It was their last song before splitting up and reforming as The Special AKA and stayed at the top of the UK charts for three weeks.
• The music video was directed by Barney Bubbles and filmed in the East End of London, Blackwell Tunnel and a before-hours City of London.

Gilroys theory:

Paul Gilroy believed “unstable” and politicised identities are “always unfinished, always being remade” and ethnicity is an “infinite process of identity construction”. In other words, ethnicity and national identity are not actually fixed or permanent.

Gilroys main points:

• WW2 immigrants were seen as an alien ‘other’ to an imagined white Britishness.
• Black immigrants were perceived to be ‘swamping’ white communities.
• Black communities were demonised through the representations that associated them with individual acts of criminality – knife crime and muggings were particular media concerns. These representations construct a ‘common sense’ notion of the criminal black male.
• Later representations constructed the black community in general, and black youths in particular, to be naturally lawless and incompatible with British white values.
• Later representations suggested that black otherness had a corrosive effect on white youth culture too.

racial otherness

Gilroy’s hugely important study of black representation.

‘there aint no Black ibn the union jack’ -The story of UK relations from WW2 onwards, the post war wave of immigration from the west indies produced a series of anxiety’s regarding immigrant behaviours.

‘Lurid newspaper reports of black pimps living off the immortal earnings of white women’ – Gilroy 2008, 95.

The black community are constructed as a racial ‘other’ in the predominantly white world of 1950s Britain. There were worries that immigrant communities would swamp / take over white Britain. These fears were further noted in the news in late 1970s and 1980s and routed the black community with assaults, muggings and other violent crimes.

‘It is not then a matter of how many blacks there are, but of the type of danger they represent to the nation’ – Gilroy 2008

post-colonial melancholia

substandard living conditions produced racial representations. There were intensified fears that immigrant communities would fill up Britain. Racial representations were “fixed in a matrix between the imagery of squalor and that of sordid sexuality” Gilroy argued that this was gated the black community out by saying they are a “other” race in the majority white Britain.

The story of UK race relations post W.W. 2: After Gilroy’s study of how black people and immigrants where being pushed aside by people instead of being included and recognised. After that, 2 decades later, Britain was flooded with “fear” that immigrants and other races were going to “swamp” Britain.

Ghost Town – BBC:

Quote – “It was clear that something was very, very, wrong,” the song’s writer, Jerry Dammers, has said.

Quote – “I saw it develop from a boom town, my family doing very well, through to the collapse of the industry and the bottom falling out of family life. Your economy is destroyed and, to me, that’s what Ghost Town is about.”

Quote – “No job to be found in this country,” one voice cries out. “The people getting angry,” booms another, ominously.

 Specials grew up in the 1960s listening to a mixture of British and American pop and Jamaican ska. 1981, industrial decline had left the city suffering badly. Unemployment was among the highest in the UK. The Specials, too, encapsulated Britain’s burgeoning multiculturalism. It expressed the mood of the early days of Thatcher’s Britain for many. 

As Ghost Town reached number one, its lyrics were horribly borne out. “Can’t go on no more,” sang the Specials, “the people getting angry.” As if on cue, the worst mainland rioting of the century broke out in Britain’s cities and towns. For the first and only time, British pop music appeared to be commenting on the news as it happened.

Levi Strauss

Binary Oppositions

This theory suggests that NARRATIVES (=myths) are STRUCTURED around BINARY OPPOSITIONS eg: good v evil; human v alien; young v old etc etc. 

E.G from blinded by the light

dad and son

Uni and no Uni

old and young

Pakistani and English

Pakistanis vs skinheads

It therefore creates a dominant message (ideology) of a film, TV programme, advert, music video, animation etc. So in this way audiences are encouraged to make a judgements about characters, groups, places, history, society etc. In this way, texts can be seen to either support the dominant ideologies of a society, which would make it a reactionary text ,or to challenge, question or undermines the dominant ideologies of society, in which case it could be seen as a radical text

Key concepts:

● Cultural resistance
● Cultural hegemony
● Subcultural theory

Cultural Hegemony:

• Theorised by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian philosopher in the 1930s
• Hegemonic – dominant, ruling, most powerful
• Hegemonic Culture – the dominant culture
• Cultural Hegemony – power, rule or domination maintained by ideological or cultural means

Cultural hegemony functions by encouraging the ideologies of the dominant social group as the only legitimate ideology. Their ideologies are expresses and maintained through economic, political, moral and social institutions. These institutions surround the people in their every day life, and eventually influence their subconscious into accepting the norms, values and beliefs of the dominant social group. As a result, oppressed groups are lead to believe that the social and economic conditions of society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by the dominant group.

Context:
● Race Relations
● Thatcher’s Britain

Thatcher’s Britain

• Prime Minister 1979-90
• Militant campaigner for middle class interests
• Extreme attitude towards immigration
• British Nationality Act 1981: introduced a series of increasingly strict immigration procedure and prevented Asian people from entering Britain

Resistance and political protest:

• laws don’t necessarily equal change
• change is much more likely through culture- which is normally more subtle and isn’t always riots and big gestures.
• everyday people
• Overt political protest is uncommon. When it occurs, it often results in a backlash.- doesn’t change public’s opinion