Abstract
A good deal of contemporary public history is concerned with the exploration, and often the promotion, of cultural diversity. Whether the subject is cities, classes or peoples, cultural diversity appears as a key theme, its recognition important not just for reasons of historical accuracy, but also as a method of promoting positive social identities and community cohesion in Britain. As David Lammy, the former Minister for Culture put it when arguing for the importance of a more pluralist version of national history, ‘Whether or not our country can learn to thrive amidst its diversity will depend in no small measure on how we turn the heritage of our past to our greatest comparative advantage for the future’.1
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Notes
Paul Gilroy, ‘Foreword: Migrancy, Culture and a New Map of Europe’ in Raphael Hernandez-Heike (ed.) Blackening Europe: The African-American Presence, (London: Routledge, 2004).
Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi, ‘Introduction: Immigration and British History’ in their Histories and Memories: Immigrants and their History in Britain since 1800, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 16. For the judgement on doldrums see Keith Laybourn, ‘IX Twentieth Century’, Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature, 91, 1, 2007, 148. See also Kevin Myers and Ian Grosvenor, ‘Birmingham Stories: Local Histories of Migration and Settlement and the Practice of History’, Midland History, 36, 2, 2011, 149–62.
An important starting point, critical of the mythological status of much of this popular memory, is Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Michael Bentley, Modernising England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) stresses, for example, the continuing influence of ‘Whiggism’ in the period beyond the Second World War.
John Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 294.
Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
On the shifting definitions of Asian see Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, (London: Routledge, 1996). I use migrants inclusively here to refer to both first (those born in India or Pakistan) and second generation (those born in Britain) migrants.
Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Dennis. D. Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Post War Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies, (Durham SC: Duke University Press, 1997). Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005). Paul Long, Only in the Common People: The Aesthetics of Class in Post-War Britain, (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008).
Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca: New York, 1997). For a longer historical view see Panikos Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism since 1800, (Harlow: Longman/Pearson, 2010).
Bill Schwarz, ‘Not Even Past Yet’, History Workshop Journal 57, 2004, 101–115.
Kevin Myers, ‘Immigrants and Minorities in the History of Education’, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 45, 6, 2009, 801–816.
For a retrospective view of the philosophy of historical recovery see Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990).
Paul Long, ‘British Radio and the Politics of Culture in post-War Britain: The Work of Charles Parker, The Radio Journal, 2, 3, 2004, 131–152.
Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 edn).
John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness or the Remembered Past, (New York, Schocken Books, 1985 edn.), 27. See also Bhikhu Parekh, ‘The Spectre of Self-Consciousness’ in his edited collection Colour, Culture and Consciousness: Immigrant Intellectuals in Britain (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), 59 for an interesting exploration of cultural difference and the sense that the Indian lacks ‘a sense of history’.
This is the argument of Ann Dummett, A Portrait of English Racism (Pelican, 1973), 206. For other interpretations see Jeffrey Richards, Happiest Days: The Public Schools in English Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Chapter 12 attempts to rehabilitate the novels and the figure of Heree Jamset Ram Singh in particular.
BHAS, CPA, 4000/2/127, ‘Asian Teenager’. Post-transmission, An Audience Research Report. 2 April 1968. There appears to be a very limited literature on the history of BBC audience research and the best account is that by the highly influential originator R. J. Silvey, Who’s Listening? The Story of BBC Audience Research (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974).
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 24.
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), chapter 9.
Bill Schwarz, ‘Unspeakable Histories: Diasporic Lives in Old England’ in Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford (eds), Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity (London: Continuum, 2002), 82–85.
Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society, (London: Macmillan, 1996), 183–193.
Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country and Race: Constructing Gender, Class and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Long, Only in the Common People.
George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: My Country, Right or Left 1940–43, volume II, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 edn.), 76.
Edward Said, Cultural and Imperialism, (London: Vintage edn. 1994), 406.
Alan. G. James, Sikh Children in Britain, (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 101.
See, for example, Dilip Hiro, Black British, White British, (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971), 192. Kenan Malik, ‘Born in Bradford’, Prospect, October 2005.
Hiro, Black British, White British, 294–305. For the importance of history: Ian Grosvenor and Kevin Myers, ‘Engaging with History after Macpherson’, Curriculum Journal, 12, 3, 2001, 275–289.
Gifford Report, Loosen the Shackles: First Report of the Liverpool 8 Inquiry into Race Relations in Liverpool (Liverpool: Karia Press, 1989), 35.
Kevin Myers, ‘Historical Practice in an Age of Pluralism: Educating and Celebrating Identities’ in Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi (eds), Histories and Memories 35–56; Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, After Multiculturalism, (London: Foreign Policy Centre, 2000).
Eugene McLaughlin and Sarah Neal, ‘Who Can Speak to Race and Nation? Intellectuals, Public Policy Formation and the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain Commission’, Cultural Studies, 21, 6, 2007, 910–930.
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Myers, K. (2012). Cultures of History: The New Left, South Asians, and Historical Memory in Post-War England. In: Glynn, I., Kleist, J.O. (eds) History, Memory and Migration. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010230_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010230_2
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