'Contesting Dominant Discourse: Women and Anti-Racism in East London'

When?

Monday 7 March 2005, 17:00 to 18:30

Where?

19AD04

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Speaker:

Dr Georgie Wemyss

Dr Georgie Wemyss

“…the streets will not only stage glorious insurrection they will also witness the fact that it is upon young male Bengali heads that the fully armed apparatus of the state will fall; it is they who will be attacked in the streets at the vigil of Quddus Ali outside the London Hospital, and they will be confronted by and confront the BNP gangs who increasingly conspire to roam the streets of Tower Hamlets to go Paki-bashing. Street politics is easy for the absent"
(Michael Keith 2000: 530)

This paper examines the construction of Bengali women as newly ‘politicized’ and ‘passive’ subjects in the dominant discourse of Britishness. It explores how Bengali women, individually and as activists in a multi-ethnic, anti-racist women’s group, organized both to oppose racial violence and to contest the ways in which they were represented in the discourses of local and national media and of politicians. It demonstrates how that dominant construction contributed to the erasure of Bengali women’s experiences of racism and of the effective organization of women from many backgrounds, against it.

The paper is part of a wider investigation into cultural processes whereby a dominant notion of Britishness is asserted and reasserted in the context of late twentieth century east London. It names the dominant discourse as white and liberal and through analyzing several discursive challenges to its dominance, the study explores how it works to erase the historic and contemporary activities of people from the (ex)-colonies. Fieldwork was carried out in Tower Hamlets in 1993-4, a period of local political conflict and violence that had national reverberations. The paper weaves together data from participant observation of women’s political organization, interviews and discourse analysis of the representations in the media of events recorded during fieldwork. It argues that the discourses of the national, local media and ‘ethnic minority’ media combined to marginalize past and present political organization of Bengali women. It contributes to the argument of the wider study that in late twentieth century Britain, cultural hegemony was maintained through the flexibility and ambiguity of the dominant discourse.