Multicultural Britain: A people’s history by Kieran Connell

It would be a grave error to see the title of this book as signalling yet an another compilation of Britain’s ethnic minority cultures. It is more than just ‘saris, samosas and steel bands’.

Kieran Connell has deployed his skills as a social historian, a cultural theorist, an academic researcher and consummate raconteur to examine the complex, shifting, at times contradictory nature of racism in a Britain still wallowing in ‘a post-colonial melancholia’.

He skilfully weaves his personal story into an analysis that sets the history of continuous migrations of minorities against a background of inner-city deprivation, discrimination, poverty and miscegenation that throws a light as much on the victims as the perpetrators of racism.

Unusually, he circumvents London, commencing his journey with the ‘brown babies’ of Tiger Bay Cardiff, before moving to Nottingham and its serious race riots. He returns to the ‘red lights’ of Balsall Heath, his home town, before he goes to Bradford to examine the rise of ‘black powers’ , finally finishing where he began in  Balsall Health  by critiquing the ‘ white flight’ of the sex workers driven out by local ethnic minority campaigners. Wherever he goes, he humanises the statistics, with moving stories of people caught in the racialised (and sexualised) maelstrom of inner cities.

This personalisation is however properly balanced against an analysis of the political dimensions of the ‘race problem’ and the persistent efforts by the state to solve it through racist policies and practices. 

The epilogue, with its powerful multi-cultural imagery, will be of special interest to BRIG colleagues engaged in passing the anti-racist baton to the next generation of activists. Through an evocation of emerging hybridised cultural practices, art forms, music codes and lifestyles, he welcomes everyone, black and white, to ‘migranthood’.  It is not only Britain’s ethnic minorities that should be asking the question ‘Who Am I?’ but everyone rethinking the national story.

For all those who are looking to breathe new life into the stale concept of ‘multiculturalism’, Kieran Connell’s book is an unavoidable read.