Sivamohan Valluvan

Conviviality and Multiculture A Post-integration Sociology of Multi-ethnic Interaction

Revisiting Gilroy’s After Empire alongside Amin’s recently mooted ethos of ‘indifference to difference’, this article explores how conviviality constitutes a more radical ideal of urban interaction than ordinarily appreciated. Based on interviews and observations in two London locations, it is argued that as opposed to being a concept which simply names everyday practices of multi-ethnic interaction, conviviality speaks uniquely to a sophisticated ability to invoke difference whilst avoiding communitarian, groupist precepts. It is consequently this article’s contention that sociological accounts need and can assume a bolder line in disaggregating contemporary formations of multiculture from the orthodoxies of integration and the normativity of communitarian belonging and identity.

Notes on theorizing racism and other things

ABSTRACT In the spirit of ‘furthering debate and reflection’ in this response to Theories of Race and Ethnicity, we consider here the pertinence of the theme of resistance that occupies particular chapters within the collection and that has been central to key works within the wider race critical scholarship. Yet, when the larger field of contemporary race study is considered, we also note that other contiguous concerns – including capitalism, religion, nation, and war – are key factors in thinking through racism. Here, we further elaborate on how future theorizations of race and ethnicity must engage with these domains.

Critical Consumers Run Riot in Manchester

This article attempts to unpack the manner in which the “shopping riots” narrative – a narrative of consumerism gone awry which became increasingly prominent in the popular characterisation of the 2011 riots – was operationalized. In doing so, we look to uncover the political saliences of the riots which this discursive terrain conceals. Whilst it is unsurprising that the violence which the riots staged met ritual denunciation, the historical significance of this rebuke lies in its discrediting of the riots as putatively lacking in any protest motive or grievance. The considerable stress laid on the imagery of looting alongside explanatory motifs of nihilism, vulgar materialism and gratuitous criminality all foregrounded a hubristic consumerist drive absent of an intelligible political subjectivity. Through specific reference to the riots as they transpired in Manchester, four related points of discussion will be adopted in critically assessing this portrayal of the riots as apolitical consumerism. We ask: (a) how does this framing result in the eliding of institutional and structural circumstances (e.g. police relations and labour market factors); (b) to what extent does such a characterisation of crass materialism borrows from already established racialised mappings of urban pathology; (c) what is the ideological status of the policy response which this characterisation licences; (d) and finally, how might we consider the political legitimacy of the riots from within the interpretative terrain of consumerism itself.

Racial entanglements and sociological confusions: repudiating the rehabilitation of integration

In line with the broader nationalist advances currently remaking the Western political landscape, the concept of integration has witnessed a marked rehabilitation. Whilst many influential critiques of the sociology of integration are already available, this article contests the concepts renewed purchase through addressing its own internal incoherence. Based on research in Stockholm, this critique concerns the relationship between ethnic identity and cultural integration. It will be argued that integration and the production of difference are intertwined, entangled dualities, and far from being a benign entanglement, this duality is premised on the force and reach of everyday civic racisms. Of pivotal and unique analytical significance here is the observation that racism should not only be considered an exogenous process that impedes integration, but as a multifaceted phenomenon folded into integration.

What is ‘post-race’ and what does it reveal about contemporary racisms?

ABSTRACT In this paper, I will critically engage those aspects of Goldberg’s Are We All Postracial Yet that I found to be particularly generative for thinking about contemporary racisms. These foci include the place of post-racial mystification vis-à-vis liberal market capitalism, animalization and synchronic global relationalities. A case will be made for post-race being best understood in terms of how it both incorporates as well as exceeds the explanatory terrain already serviced by the concept of ‘Cultural Racism’ and/or ‘New Racism’. A unique connection to Chamayou’s recent Manhunts will also be advanced. I will read contemporary processes of post-racial animalization via Chamayou’s key contention that Power is always about who is to be the object of force, who shall do the enforcing and how is it to be enforced – a historically contingent force that results in particular technologies of classification, hunting, surveillance, internment, killing and fortification.

The Status of Multiculturalism and the Retreat from Difference

Any collection which aspires to sketch the state of race, as particular to the contemporary British and European conjuncture, is necessarily compelled to grapple with the term multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has come to be the site at which much of the popular discussion concerning racialised ethnic diversity, whether accommodating or hostile, is hosted. The question that multiculturalism then raises vis- a -vis race is double pronged. It is about the state of race in society (the accommodation of difference racially and ethnically manifest) and the state as always-already racialised (the exclusions rationalised by normative narratives concerning racially construed ethnic difference). Multiculturalism is of course ‘a deeply contested idea’ (Hall 2000, p. 210) and thus, predictably polysemic. It can, for instance, be read as a state doctrine (insofar as, a government policy is no longer overtly assimilationist); a mere descriptive ‘statement of fact’ (Younge 2010, p.187) concerning some shared spaces (i.e. multiculture or diversity); or, as has been recently described by Lentin and Titley (2011, p. 2), just a messy ‘patchwork of initiatives, rhetoric, and aspirations’ broadly sympathetic in tone to the presence of ethnic difference in the public sphere. In spite of this expected range, it is adequate for the purposes of this chapter to distinguish between two chief strains: one possessing an ideologically symptomatic, anti-minority resonance whilst the other fosters an understanding of diversity consistent with a broader politics of ordinary multiculture (conducive to inclusive, cross-ethnic undertakings).