First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

There is a gap between the Britain that most people imagine and the Britain that really is. Myth: The Royal Family, fish and chips, Shakespeare. Reality: multicultural families, curry, Zadie Smith. The New Britain is a multicultural society, where there are more biracial couples than in any other western nation, and where Islam is the fastest-growing religion. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown investigates this new multiculturalism in post-colonial Britain. Drawing on her own experiences, wide research, and over one hundred interviews, Alibhai-Brown offers a fresh look at such topics as racism, imperialism, immigration, and identity politics. Imagining the New Britain offers a startling portrait of the vastly changing face of British citizenship and identity. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

In a direct investigation of both the private and public spheres of British life, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown asks difficult questions and posits some complex responses to interpret the massive transformations and realities of Britain today.

Why and how did the British people come to see themselves as living in a society centred around a middle class? The answer provided by Professor Wahrman challenges most prevalent historical narratives: the key to understanding changes in conceptualisations of society, the author argues, lies not in underlying transformations of social structure - in this case industrialisation, which supposedly created and empowered the middle class - but rather in changing political configurations. Firmly grounded in a close reading of an extensive array of sources, and supported by comparative perspectives on France and America, the book offers a nuanced model for the interplay between social reality, politics, and the languages of class.

This book studies everyday forms of creativity. Comparing ethnography from three rural areas in Papua New Guinea, it analyses popular visions of utopia and dystopia. Distrustful of government promises of development and church expositions of heaven and hell, villagers cultivate their own clandestine versions of hope, of an alternative future, as a way of subverting existing governmental structures and pastoral powers. Through dreams, visions, rumors, sorcery accusations, cults, myths, and local fairy tales, villagers explore other versions of modernity. They imagine other ways to be Melanesian and other ways to be White. They combine Western and local culture in novel and often startling ways, which are never random or haphazard. Instead, villagers' inventiveness is structured and political. It strives to refigure the possibilities of social change, including contesting how subjects and subjectivities should be formed. Through sorcery fears and accusations, villagers voice their ambivalence towards modern commerce, urbanization, commodities, Western forms of personhood, and the new social inequalities of race, class, and ethnicity. Just as sorcery has been modernized, so has divination, with villagers incorporating Western technology into their practices for disclosing evil. In their new knowledge-making practices, villagers combine the traditional disclosing powers of dreams and the dead with the modern disclosing powers of Western forms of communication, perception, and travel. This creates almost a Melanesian form of science fiction. Villagers' novel experiments draw on local mythological understandings of hidden creative powers derived from solitude, singularity, transgression, and madness. These customary modalities of creativity and alterity have often been "Whitened." Thus, whereas previously bush spirits and the dead caused madness, today, Western culture (and especially Christianity) provides the extraordinary meanings, which entrap and alienate whilst offering hope and power. The dangerous ambiguous nature of Whiteness and modernity is also a prominent feature of local fairytales, which warn against the beguiling charms of beautiful Western objects and strange White people who have many customary Melanesian characteristics. It is the uneven, unfinished processes of Westernization that are being reflected upon and caricatured through new portraits of monstrosity and hope. This book is part of the Ritual Studies Monograph Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh.

A history of the relationship between Great Britain and the United States ranges from the establishment of the first English colony in the New World to the present day, examining both nations in terms of what connected them and what drove them apart.

Factory jobs in “the Hardware City of the World” began attracting Polish immigrants to New Britain in the 1890s. The Poles soon became the city’s largest ethnic group, centering their family, business, social, cultural, and spiritual life on Broad Street. Their Polonia was unparalleled in New England. Three parishes and dozens of organizations shared a strong commitment to Polish education, military service, political representation, and “Dozynki” and “Dzien Zaduszny” traditions. Continuing waves of immigration contributed to Polonia’s ceaseless self-renewal. The Polish Community of New Britain celebrates this magnetic vitality and cultural continuity with rare photographs drawn from family albums and local archives.

How did South Africans become black? How did the idea of blackness influence conceptions of disadvantaged groups in England such as women and the poor, and vice versa? Bringing the Empire Home tracks colonial images of blackness from South Africa to England and back again to answer questions such as these. Before the mid-1800s, black Africans were considered savage to the extent that their plight mirrored England's internal Others—women, the poor, and the Irish. By the 1900s, England's minority groups were being defined in relation to stereotypes of black South Africans. These stereotypes, in turn, were used to justify both new capitalist class and gender hierarchies in England and the subhuman treatment of blacks in South Africa. Bearing this in mind, Zine Magubane considers how marginalized groups in both countries responded to these racialized representations. Revealing the often overlooked links among ideologies of race, class, and gender, Bringing the Empire Home demonstrates how much black Africans taught the English about what it meant to be white, poor, or female.

In this provocative book, now reissued with a new introduction, Paul Gilroy contends that race-thinking has distorted the finest promises of modern democracy and champions a new humanism, a new political language and a new moral vision for what was once called 'anti-racism'.

This is a book of failure and mistakes; it begins with what is stolen from us and proposes only an invitation to imagine. In these playful written experiments, Lola Olufemi navigates the space between what is and what could be. Weaving together fragmentary reflections in prose and poetry, this is an exploration of the possibility of living differently, grounded in black feminist scholarship and political organising. Olufemi shows that the horizon is not an immaterial state we gesture toward. Instead, propelled by the motion of thinking against and beyond, we must invent the future now and never let go of the otherwise.