CRONEM Seminar: New Ethnicities and Old Classities: Respectability and Diaspora

In this presentation, I shall explore the contrasts between the flexibility and openness of interethnic and diasporic identifications and the fixity of class distinctions in contemporary Britain. To do this, I draw on fieldwork conducted in the Midlands area and a suburban town in the South East of England. I trace the ways in which project participants mobilised their biographies and ancestries to express feelings of empathy and relatedness across black, white and Asian identities. But I found, the same people articulated a strong sense of classed distinction between themselves and others who were thought to lack respectability, social ambition and mobility. These observations have led me to reflect upon the theoretical contrasts between what Stuart Hall has famously called ‘new ethnicities’ and what I call ‘old classities’.