This text was written for a course developed for the Open University by Ali Rattansi and James Donald on ‘Race, Culture and Society’ in the 1990’s. The course sought to bring to bear some of the new ‘post structuralist thinking about discourse, power and culture on issues of ethnicity and identity politics that were then dominated by essentialist and reductive concepts of who and what was ‘racist’ and this text develops this critique especially in relation to anti racist education.… Read the rest
Psychoanalysis and Racism – Reading the Other Scene
I was asked by John Solomos to write a chapter for his ‘Blackwell Companion on Race and Ethnic Studies’ giving a critical survey of psychoanalytic theories of race and racism. These theories were viewed with great suspicion, some of it justified, by the Anti Racist Left, although much of their dismissive attitude was based on ignorance or misunderstanding. I wrote an essay which introduced the main theories of Freud and the post Freudians, as well as Kleinian and Lacanian concepts.… Read the rest
Yesterday’s Words, Tomorrow’s World: Issues in Transracial Adoption
Transracial adoption was one of the most fraught and contest areas of social welfare policy in the 1990’s in Britain. In this essay commissioned for a book about adoption policy I survey the history of the debate about adoption and about race, focussing on their critical points of intersection. The discussion deconstructs essentialised notions of ethnic identity and the official adoption story as a teleological tale of bad beginnings leading to happy endings. … Read the rest
Playgrounds of Prejudice
This video is based on visual ethnography of a primary school playground in Docklands east London and centres of the fight between a Black and white working class boy, and its various interpretations by teachers, playground supervisors and the children themselves.… Read the rest
Depicting the Gospel of Work: From Moralised Landscape to Mechanical Reproduction
Throughout the nineteeenth century, the association of heroic forms of masculinity with manual work was adumbrated less through political rhetoric than through biblical imagery and also in aesthetics of labour developed by the painters and photographers of the first industrial revolution. We will look briefly at each in turn.
View the full text here: Phil Cohen Gospel
This gallery of 120 images in Body Politics contains the following sections: Elemental Labour-Mummers, miners and sweeps-Time and Motion Studies-Automata- Youth culture and extreme sport-physical culture and the dream of the collective body- masculinity and manual labour in a post industrial world.It… Read the rest
Front Lines Back Yards
This text explores the imagery of race, and nation that has historically been associated with populist narratives of ‘Little Englandism’. It was originally given to a conference ‘Front lines, Backyards’ that I organised at the Institute of Education in London in 1997 and published in a special issue of New Formations, co-edited with Bill Schwartz the following year.
The full text is available here: Front Lines Back Yards
This video presents highlights of the conference, with contributions from the main speakers, interviews with delegates, and presentations from some of the poets and artists who took part.… Read the rest
