Race, Place and the Seaside

Postcards from the Edge

Daniel Burdsey

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137450128
• Thema: Sozialwissenschaften
• Thema: Soziologie

This is the first academic monograph to focus exclusively on issues of race, ethnicity, whiteness and multiculture at the English seaside. The book calls for acknowledgement of the racialised nature of this environment, and proposes that its distinctive spaces, places, traditions and narratives should be included within broader analyses of race in contemporary Britain. Introducing the concept of 'coastal liquidity' to explain shifting ethno-racial demographics, migratory politics and spatial dynamics at the edge of the sea, along with the relative im/mobilities of the minority ethnic communities who move and reside there, the author provides a relational exploration of seaside experiences: both as a locus of racialised categorisation, exclusion and subjugation, and one of resistance, conviviality and intercultural exchange. Combining theoretical insight and empirical fieldwork, the book disrupts dominant thinking that fixes ontologically minority ethnic bodies to urbanspaces, and overcomes their erasure and silencing from the seaside landscapes of the popular imagination.

Part I

© The Author(s) 2016

Daniel BurdseyRace, Place and the Seasidehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-45012-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Race, Place and the Seaside

Daniel Burdsey¹

(1)

School of Sport and Service Management, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

End Abstract

Setting the Scene: Three Vignettes

In August 2014, a photograph was posted on the Twitter social networking site by Nadine Morano, a former French Minister for Families and supporter of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy. The poorly focused image, taken by Morano at an unnamed seaside resort in France, framed a Muslim woman sitting on the beach, wearing a hijab, trousers, and long-sleeved tunic. In the short distance between the woman and the shoreline, a handful of white men and women could be seen sitting, standing, or lying down in various states of un/dress. Alongside the image, Morano proclaimed her disdain for the Muslim woman’s behaviour, arguing that residents of France should be obliged to respect the dominant norms and values of “French culture.” “The [woman’s husband] got into his swimming trunks, showing off his well-made body, while she sat quietly on the sand dressed from head to toe,” opined Morano. She added that, “He went off alone towards the sea. Delighted to be having a swim, he waved to his submissive companion as she sat entirely surrounded by people in swimsuits” (cited in Lichfield 2014). Embellishing the ethnic, cultural, religious, and gendered juxtaposition she was trying to create, Morano uploaded another photograph to the post: a classic image of the white French actor and model, Brigitte Bardot, dressed in a bikini.

That same month, the BBC reported an initiative put in place by the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea for a section of its local residents. As it had done for the previous decade, the council organised and paid for some older people in the borough to take a short excursion away from the capital. This took place over the Bank Holiday weekend, the three days in August during which the Notting Hill Carnival is held annually in that part of London. Beginning in the mid-1960s, with roots in London’s African-Caribbean communities, the event now represents a broader celebration of the city’s multiculture, and it has become Europe’s largest street festival (Henriques and Ferrara 2014). The destination for the residents’ holiday was Eastbourne, a sedate seaside resort on the East Sussex coast with an overwhelmingly white population. Being part of a family that lived for generations in the streets of North Kensington (now subsumed in the popular imagination as part of Notting Hill) through which this vibrant carnival travels, and working currently on a university campus in Eastbourne, I found the dis/connections between the two places in this story to be particularly intriguing. The BBC stated that people living on the carnival route had been given the opportunity to “escape” the crowds, noise, and smells of the carnival, and to “swap sound systems for garden centres and bingo” (BBC News 2014). In the short video that accompanied the online version of the news item, a predominantly white group of smiling pensioners boarded a coach to embark on their trip. A soundtrack of Max Bygraves’ songs and Country ‘n’ Western music was noted as being particularly popular among the passengers.

In early September 2014, I visited Blackpool to undertake some observational fieldwork on the entertainment and amusement facilities in this world-famous seaside resort. Having spent the morning at the Pleasure Beach theme park, located at the town’s southern end, I ambled slowly along the sunny Promenade towards the Blackpool Tower. Passing the seemingly endless line of guest houses, bed and breakfasts, pubs, and souvenir shops, I contemplated the town’s dominant construction and representation as a white leisure space. I also considered the potential engagements and experiences of minority ethnic communities here. Thus far, my only observations of references to multiculture had been the neo-imperial—and at times cartoonish—leisure imagery found within the Pleasure Beach’s rides and attractions (see Chap. 4 of this book). On the Promenade, however, encountering a handful of fried chicken and chip shops advertising halal produce (permissible according to Islamic law), my thinking began to shift. As I approached the Central Pier and the crowds of tourists began to swell, I spotted a minibus pull up on the road in the distance. The doors slid open and a group of about 20 British Asian older women stepped out. Each held a plastic carrier bag, packed to the brim with various items of food and drink. The women strode confidently towards the concrete stepped terraces that sit between Blackpool Tower and the sandy beach, where they settled down to enjoy a picnic lunch. This was an activity, I interpreted, that this group had likely done many times before.

These brief and diverse vignettes are chosen to begin this book because they indicate powerfully many of the issues, themes, trends, experiences, engagements, and incongruities that are developed subsequently within its pages. For instance, the anecdote from France highlights the manner in which the beach and the seaside, more generally, have been constructed as symbolic sites for (re)affirming dominant national, cultural, and ethno-racial identities, facilitating the biopolitical function of citizenship, and (re)producing the racialised “biopower of beauty” (Nguyen 2011) within many countries in the Global North. The seemingly benign, open, and free leisure spaces of the beach are, in fact, contested, regulated, and sometimes exclusionary (see Chaps. 2 and 4 of this book). The beach is, then, one of those “geographic locations where conflicts in the form of opposition, confrontation, subversion, and/or resistance engage actors whose social positions are defined by differential control of resources and access to power” (Low and Lawrence-Zúniga 2003: 18). It acts as a canvas on which racialised ontological scripts have been imprinted and enacted, historically and contemporarily. This allows hegemonic groups to dictate access, usage, conduct, discourses and images of representation, and modes of authentic belonging. In turn, the beach intensifies a fascination with bodies, determining which types of people are made un/welcome, what clothing those individuals should or should not wear, and how they are expected to behave or perform in those spaces.

A council’s decision to pay for its residents to take a seaside holiday is ostensibly a benevolent gesture. A more contextual, critical reading uncovers a great deal about dominant imaginaries, both popular and academic, regarding the respective landscapes of the city and the seaside (see Chap. 3 of this book). Juxtaposing the Notting Hill Carnival and its vibrant, multicultural, urban location in London W11, with the serene, “traditional” seaside town of Eastbourne places the two types of environment in a social and geographical binary, rather than in a relational, fluid, and dialogic configuration. The largely positive characteristics associated usually with seaside and coastal spaces (which are distinguished in the conceptual mapping undertaken in the next chapter) are differentiated from the often pejorative connotations of the town and city (Huq 2013b; Keith 2005; Williams 1973). A series of dichotomous attributes are created in relation to landscape, bodies, tone, affect, and im/mobility. The BBC report (along with other coverage) about the Eastbourne visit did not hint explicitly towards matters of race, whether in relation to the carnival, the residents, or the respective places. Yet, the suggestion that a trip to the seaside was an opportunity to “get away” from the noise, smells, and crowds of the carnival, and, fundamentally, from a “black” space to a predominantly “white” one made racialisation an implicit feature of this story. The narrative “fixed” or “stuck,” ontologically, certain racialised bodies, cultures, and practices to distinct geographical spaces, rendering their movement outside them extraordinary and transitory.

In addition to illuminating the inveterate, racialised forms of exclusionary social relations of/at the seaside, this book engages critically with the more relative, variable, and unpredictable power dynamics of this environment. The Blackpool example is instructive, speaking to the ambiguities and anomalies, and the intricacies and contradictions, which characterise this book’s analysis of the relationship between race, place and the seaside. Moreover, this vignette highlights the vibrant and indefinite relationship between power, space, bodies, and identities at the coast, through an appreciation of subversion and resistance, as well as domination and control (see later in the text). The British Asian women at Blackpool, unavoidably inviting comparisons with Gurinder Chadha’s 1993 movie, Bhaji on the Beach (see Chap. 2 of this book), offered one of several critical moments during my research. These instances forced me to challenge my assumptions and preconceptions about the seaside—to pause, to think again, to reflect differently on how the seaside might be experienced, read, imagined, and felt. In particular, they were points at/from which to appreciate the disjunctures between the ethnographic gaze and those of “ordinary” people—a chance to consider the multiple meanings, uses, histories, memories, futures, and possibilities of the seaside; and the manifold forms of engagement undertaken by consumers, residents, and tourists. These ideas are captured in this book, which disrupts dominant imaginaries, ontologies, and epistemologies about which types of people live and work at the English seaside (and, by association, other types of place). It outlines and explains the reasons underpinning forms of racialised change and mobility (as well as stasis); that is, literally how and why certain minority ethnic communities have come to live at the coast and why they stay there. For purposes of ontological consistency, this book troubles popular ideas about what different groups actually do at the seaside as well. Minority ethnic working and leisure practices, the content of their “everyday” lives, and their patterns of community formation and mobilisation are given detailed consideration. These components all contribute to the objective of overcoming the silencing of minority ethnic voices, and the erasure of their bodies, from the seaside landscapes of the popular imagination.

Each of these introductory vignettes offers a particular, personal reading of an ephemeral episode. Yet, the brevity and eclecticism of the examples should not obscure the social significance and historically ingrained nature of the underlying issues, structures, and struggles they illuminate. Taken together, they point to the fact that the seaside is Janus-faced. Many elements of the seaside are rigid, timeless, and resistant to change; however, it is also, in numerous ways, a dynamic, shifting, and unpredictable environment—culturally, economically, politically, socially, and geographically. The seaside represents a locus not only of exclusion and subjugation, but also of conviviality and inter-cultural exchange—attributes that themselves are fluid and contradictory across different times and spaces (see Chaps. 5, 6, and 7 of this book). Coastal spaces have been diverse and inclusive during distinct periods, historically and globally, but have then taken on, or been preceded by, a contrasting role within emergent politics and practices of racial segregation (see Chap. 4 of this book). The seaside is what Caroline Knowles (2003: 96; emphasis in original) refers to as “a moving landscape with no predictable relationship to race/ethnicity,” continuously (re)produced by, and (re)producing, the activities that take place there and the people that inhabit it (Lefebvre 1991; Massey 1994). The vignettes also speak to the need to understand the material, representational, symbolic, affective, and emotional elements of the seaside. This is a case o...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Part I
• 2. Part II
• Backmatter