Cultural Identities And The Aesthetics Of Britishness

This book examines British imperial, colonial and postcolonial national identities within their political and social contexts. By considering the export, adoption and creation of such cultural identities, these essays show how nationhood and nationalism are self-consciously defined tools designed to focus and inspire loyalty. The contributors present these ideas with particular reference to English cultural identity and its interaction with the "Empire". They examine the national, imperial and colonial aesthetic--how architecture, landscape, painting, sculpture and literature were used, appropriated and re-appropriated in the furtherance of social and political agendas, and how this impacted on the making of "Britishness" in all its complexities. It is demonstrated that not only did the dominant aesthetic culture reinforce the dominant political and social ideology, it also re-presented and re-constructed the notion of British national identity.

This book offers a major exploration of the social and cultural importance of popular music to contemporary celebrations of Britishness. Rather than providing a history of popular music or an itemization of indigenous musical qualities, it exposes the influential cultural and nationalist rhetoric around popular music and the dissemination of that rhetoric in various forms. Since the 1960s, popular music has surpassed literature to become the dominant signifier of modern British culture and identity. This position has been enforced in popular culture, literature, news and music media, political rhetoric -- and in much popular music itself, which has become increasingly self-conscious about the expectation that music both articulate and manifest the inherent values and identity of the modern nation. This study examines the implications of such practices and the various social and cultural values they construct and enforce. It identifies two dominant, conflicting constructions around popular music: music as the voice of an indigenous English ‘folk’, and music as the voice of a re-emergent British Empire. These constructions are not only contradictory but also exclusive, prescribing a social and musical identity for the nation that ignores its greater creative, national, and cultural diversity. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive critique of an extremely powerful discourse in England that today informs dominant formulations of English and British national identity, history, and culture.

The new town of Milton Keynes was designated in 1967 with a bold, flexible social vision to impose "no fixed conception of how people ought to live." Despite this progressive social vision, and its low density, flexible, green urban design, the town has been consistently represented in British media, political rhetoric and popular culture negatively. as a fundamentally sterile, paternalistic, concrete imposition on the landscape, as a "joke", and even as "Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire". How did these meanings develop at such odds from residents' and planners' experiences? Why have these meanings proved so resilient? Milton Keynes in British Culture traces the representations of Milton Keynes in British national media, political rhetoric and popular culture in detail from 1967 to 1992, demonstrating how the town's founding principles came to be understood as symbolic of the worst excesses of a postwar state planning system which was falling from favour. Combining approaches from urban planning history, cultural history and cultural studies, political economy and heritage studies, the book maps the ways in which Milton Keynes' newness formed an existential challenge to ideals of English landscapes as receptacles of tradition and closed, fixed national identities. Far from being a marginal, "foreign" and atypical town, the book demonstrates how the changing political fortunes of state urban planned spaces were a key site of conflict around ideas of how the British state should function, how its landscapes should look, and who they should be for.

A clear introduction to British culture and 'identity', giving readers an insider's view on the way British people perceive themselves, and are positioned by their culture. Tables, photo- graphs and exercises make this an ideal text.

The concept of Britishness – and its constituent facets – has, over the past decade, come increasingly to the fore. In particular, this can be seen in the politically and socially engaging debates surrounding the Scottish Referendum in 2014. It is an idea – manifested both physically and cognitively – that every Briton is aware of and engages with to a greater or lesser extent. Thus, the concept of Britishness is extremely current and crosses cultural, political and socio-economic boundaries. Nevertheless, Britishness is a challenging term to define and explore, given its tremendously wide-ranging nature and dynamic, personally shaped characteristics. Considering historical ideas of Britishness, however, can enhance the understanding of national identity in the modern world. This volume does just that by gathering together original academic essays that explore the expression and understanding of Britishness in literature, philosophy, music, historical documents, art and design. Each contribution offers a detailed investigation of primary material, including architecture, furniture, historical literature, plays and sermons, and marketing. As a collection, ideas are marshalled to reveal a rich tapestry of Britishness and its forging.

This book focuses on British efforts to suppress the traffic in female slaves destined for Egyptian harems during the late-nineteenth century. It considers this campaign in relation to gender debates in England, and examines the ways in which the assumptions and dominant imperialist discourses of these abolitionists were challenged by the newly-established Muslim communities in England, as well as by English people who converted to or were sympathetic with Islam.

The actions of Irish nationalists in Britain are often characterised as a 'sideshow' to the revolutionary events in Ireland between 1912 and 1922. This original study argues, conversely, that Irish nationalism in Britain was integral to contemporary Irish and British assessments of the Irish Revolution between the Third Home Rule Bill and the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Darragh Gannon charts the development of Irish nationalism across the Irish Sea over the course of a historic decade in United Kingdom history – from constitutional crisis, to war, and revolution. The book documents successive Home Rule and IRA campaigns in Britain coordinated by John Redmond and Michael Collins respectively and examines the mobilisation of Irish migrant communities in British cities in response to major political crises, from the Ulster crisis to the First World War. Finally, Conflict, Diaspora, and Empire assesses the impacts of Irish nationalism in metropolitan Britain, from Whitehall to Westminster. The Irish Revolution, this study concludes, was defined by political conflicts, and cultures, across the Irish Sea.

Arguing in favour of renewed critical attention to the 'nation' as a category in art history, this study examines the intertwining of art theory, national identity and art production in Britain from the early eighteenth century to the present day. The book provides the first sustained account of artwriting in the British context over the full extent of its development and includes new analyses of such central figures as Hogarth, Reynolds, Gilpin, Ruskin, Roger Fry, Herbert Read, Art & Language, Peter Fuller and Rasheed Araeen. Mark A. Cheetham also explores how the 'Englishing' of art theory-which came about despite the longstanding occlusion of the intellectual and theoretical in British culture-did not take place or have effects exclusively in Britain. Theory has always travelled with art and vice versa. Using the frequently resurgent discourse of cosmopolitanism as a frame for his discourse, Cheetham asks whether English traditions of artwriting have been judged inappropriately according to imported criteria of what theory is and does. This book demonstrates that artwriting in the English tradition has not been sufficiently studied, and that 'English Art Theory' is not an oxymoron. Such concerns resonate today beyond academe and the art world in the many heated discussions of resurgent Englishness.