Research Network Reading Group: Europeanness? Stuart Hall and Anikó Imre

Please note the event will take place at Chelsea College of Arts, Billiards Room, 45 Millbank, SW1P 4RQ.

If you have any access requirements, do get in touch at info@iniva.org or call 020 7630 1278 for more information.

Following on from The Invisible Other Research Network event around the invisibility of Eastern European identity in the discourse of diversity in the UK, we will be reading about identity and self-representation as self-care in migrant communities.

Stuart Hall reflects on the politics of representation and the notion of ethnicity in post-colonial Britain in the essay New Ethnicities (1997). Promoting the value of difference in the human experience, Hall explore the concept of ‘Englishness’ for those identified as ‘other’ in the complexities of Britain’s social reality:

“I am familiar with all the dangers of ‘ethnicity’ as a concept and have written myself about the fact that ethnicity, in the form of a culturally constructed sense of Englishness and a particularly closed, exclusive and regressive form of English national identity, is one of the core characteristics of British racism today.”

We will also be reading Anikó Imre‘s essay Whiteness in post-socialist Eastern Europe: the time of the gypsies, the end of race (2005) in which she uses Hall’s thinking around “new ethnicities” to explore Roma and other minorities in Eastern Europe:

“…in order for racialized minorities, most prominently the Roma, to decolonize the “ethnic” label imposed on them, and transform themselves into a Hall-style “new ethnicities” on the non-innocent ground of differences within similarities, it seems necessary for them to come into representation first. Their status of the stereotyped other needs to be acknowledged and analyzed in terms of political and economic justice which has been carried on for centuries with the help of racist representations.”

We will finish with a discussion on transcontinental Europeanness and everyday migrant realities.

Disclaimer: Anikó Imre’s text uses the term “gypsy” throughout when referring to Roma communities. Sometimes it is used critically, other times it is not. We encourage discussion around this contention.

This group is open to all, it is a supportive and peer-led space for thinking and learning together. It is a space for constructive disagreements and critical engagement that is always based on mutual respect, interest and care.

All readings are read aloud and together in the group, you don’t need to read them in advance. Please contact the library if you have any questions or wish to pick up a copy of the texts in advance: library@iniva.org

Image credit: Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire (Suny Series in Postmodern Culture), edited by Alfred J. Lopez, SUNY Press, 2005