TY - JOUR
AU1 - Haylett, Chris
AB - Political attention to the plight of the ‘socially excluded’ in contemporary Britain suggests a renewed interest in issues of class and inequality at government level. This paper addresses the nature of that engagement by analysing the dominant discourse of welfare reform as a cultural reconstruction project which references goals of modernisation and multiculturalism. The centrality of the white working-class poor to the realisation of these goals is examined as a racialised positioning, a stage in the reconstruction of nation through the reconstruction of white working-class identities. The shift from naming the working-class poor as ‘underclass’, a racialised and irredeemable ‘other’, to naming them ‘the excluded’, a culturally determined but recuperable ‘other’, is pivotal to the recasting of Britain as a postimperial, modern nation. Analysis of the modes of modernisation and multiculturalism through which new definitions of nation are being established shows the constitutive role of neoliberal and class-based interests. The use of the white working-class poor as symbols of a generalised ‘backwardness’ and specifically a culturally burdensome whiteness, is examined as a form of class racism, the product of a dominant class-based anglocentrism. The paper concludes with a consideration of class as an illegitimate discourse within the dominant representational fields of media, politics, and academia and the author argues the need for a politics of representation that can recognise difference where it may not be visibly marked, that can see class through whiteness.
TI - Illegitimate Subjects?: Abject Whites, Neoliberal Modernisation, and Middle-Class Multiculturalism
JF - Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
DO - 10.1068/d237t
DA - 2001-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/sage/illegitimate-subjects-abject-whites-neoliberal-modernisation-and-IsEYRIe576
SP - 351
EP - 370
VL - 19
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -