Ethnicity, Race and Question of Englishness

Abstract

Robert J.C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell Publication, 2008), Page 291, ISBN: 9781405101295. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Over the past decade, more specifically since power devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in June 1999, there has been a revival of the discourses on Englishness and English national identity. Apparently the terms such as English or Englishness may sound overtly familiar to us; however, their discursive formations are complex and varied, suggesting deeper cultural and historical implications. Is one's English identity synonymous with a common political citizenry of England? Or is it framed in terms of common membership of an ethnic community based on one's affinity with language, religion, history, and blood or 'race'? What constitutes true English national consciousness? Robert J.C. Young's The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008) is a remarkable contribution to this renewed debate on the issues of Englishness and English national identity, which go beyond "the challenges of devolution, or even the end of empire" (1). For him, these issues are an outcome of complex historical and cultural discursive formations, in which "Englishness was never really about England, its cultural essence or national character, at all" (1). Framing the discourse of Englishness within the diverse discourses of "race"--in which "race" is evoked variously as the concepts of biology, genetics, lineage, physical typology, ethnicity, nation, and so on, Young fascinatingly explores the cultural implications of the racial discourses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He avers that English national identity is a diasporic global identity. To explicate the cultural aspects of unstable English national identity, Young's book, from the very beginning, examines different race theories and the contesting ideas of race in English cultural history and science, where the term "race"--more particularly 'Saxonism' or 'the Anglo-Saxon'--is used interchangeably with the concepts of both nation and ethnicity. Similarly, he shows a dialectic between the English race and the Irish race, or Saxon and Celt, as a part of the popular racial discourses of the nineteenth century. For the English as a race was usually conceived and defined in terms of their relationship with the Irish as a race. Although Young alludes to different scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses about race, such as the notions of Aryan superiority supported by the scientific evidence of cranial measurements and similar other practices, the main purpose of his book seems to lay emphasis on the heterogeneous and dynamic global English identity. In his attempt to define global English identity, what he prefers to call English ethnicity, Young uses the lens of a binary dialectic between Saxon and Celt, especially the Irish Celts, again and again. Mainly in chapter four "The Times and Its Celtic Challenges," he not only discusses different race theories but also shows the role of print media in disseminating a dominant racial ideology. …