Adapted by the author from his speech given at the Heritage Lottery Fund's Who do we think we are? forum held at the British museum, London 13 July 2004

Few words have been more abused and damaged recently than that fateful pair: heritage and identity. Though it can be tiresome on occasions like this, when many of you are understandably preoccupied by more immediate and practical concerns, we have to begin by unpacking those key terms and by exploring some of their tacit connections to larger, cultural and political maps of our divided nation.

The paired concepts refer us initially to the founding, historic tension between country and city but, in present company, it is probably too simple to say that heritage gets associated with the past and with rural life, while identity belongs emphatically to the present and to Britain’s urban environments. The national topography becomes more complex when we appreciate that the Irish, Scots and Welsh appear to be lacking in neither of these precious attributes and when we accept that there is a strong sense that the English are, by contrast, deficient in these areas. We can begin by directing our thoughts towards the difficult issue of where that sense of lack--we can call it a heritage and identity deficit--originates?

In thinking about the recent history of England, talk about heritage and identity manifests a larger problem, the boundaries of which they help to mark out. Indeed the sheer frequency with which heritage and identity have been cropping up, can now be read as a sign that all is not well within Britain’s political culture. We must remember that “Identity” is also the name of the British National Party’s official monthly magazine. Its title encapsulates their harsh cure for the country’s ills.

With these problems in mind, I would like to suggest that the timely currency of heritage and identity must be made to reveal the deeper layers of feeling for which it supplies a polite vehicle. I associate the power of these concepts with the widespread desire to elevate Englishness into an ethnicity and the impulse to recast Britishness so that it acquires an almost racial resonance. At root, these impulses are hostile responses to the supposedly disruptive presence of cultural diversity. I would like to suggest that they have been associated with the rise of a disabling anxiety about how to locate the evasive cultural basis of Britain’s ebbing social cohesion. Focusing so much attention on heritage and identity reminds us of another loss. It is the departure of a public culture in which, for good or ill, matters of belonging and inclusion could be taken for granted because everybody more or less knew who they were and where they fitted in to the big hierarchy of the fractious national family.

The pathological desire to become absolutely certain as to who we are is the first substantive problem we must address if we are to replace the old arrangements. A second difficulty resides in the characteristic employment of culture-talk as a means to fix and retain that impossibly-complete national self-understanding. Culture can never, for me, be frozen in the way that this anxious pursuit of identity demands. To seek to fix culture is a problem because, if we arrest its unruly motion, we ossify it. Culture then becomes a dead specimen behind glass, to be contemplated rather than engaged.

Today’s great concern about the cultural content of our national identity which heritage and identity help to solve, is not a general feature of human psychology. It is an unwelcome product of particular historical circumstances that we should be able to recognise as belonging to the country’s post-colonial phase.

What is fast becoming the common-sense explanation of Britain’s recent cultural woes, suggests that this tell-tale anxiety over national identity (and the desperate pursuit of a certainty which can banish it) must both be understood as consequences of excessive and unwelcome immigration. Unlike more recent incomers, the no-longer-wanted commonwealth immigrants of the 1950s were once settler-citizens. Exactly like contemporary asylum seekers and refugees, they were foisted onto an unsuspecting local population by callous politicians remote from the urgent tempo of ordinary urban life. The disruptive and unwelcome presence of all Britain’s aliens was therefore the result of an illegitimate demand. The white working class were not only required to bear the brunt of assimilating these incomers into the British way of life, but they were also expected to protect that ideal community against the intrusion of what Enoch Powell liked to call “the alien wedge”. This argument has been recycled so often that it should be familiar. It was a favourite of Powell and of Margaret Thatcher. Lately, it has become the slyly-articulated viewpoint of Messrs Blunkett, Mandelson and Blair who covet the populist magic it could once accomplish. Luckily, a more thoughtful approach to the issues of heritage and identity can help to repudiate it.

Let me put this another way. I think Britain has outgrown the 1960s model that linked assimilation and immigration. Two generations later, I prefer to see the anxieties which fuel the contemporary concern with heritage and identity as having different sources. They lie not in immigration as such but in the effects of de-industrialisation and de-colonisation, in increased inequality and insecurity, in privatization and in the regressive modernization that was begun under the Conservatives and has been enthusiastically continued by New Labour. Those forces shaped the turmoil into which immigrants, aliens and more recently asylum-seekers and refugees were thrown and for which they were made responsible even though the large social and economic changes involved were not of their making. Successive waves of incomers were, as Stuart Hall argued thirty years ago, caught up in the country’s continuing quarrels with itself.

The loss of the Empire, and the disappearance of the greatness that went along with it, had obvious political and economic consequences. We are far less alert to the resulting cultural and psychological dynamics. In the very moment that colonial settler citizens arrived as a replacement population prepared to take on the dirty and dangerous tasks that the locals no longer wanted to do, Britain found itself unable to mourn and work through its loss of empire. The country also found it hard to adjust to the presence of semi-strangers who, disarmingly, knew British culture intimately as a result of their colonial education. Rather than face up to the reduced geo-political stature embodied in that half-alien presence, Britain developed a melancholic attachment to its vanished preeminence. The colonial settlers and their demanding descendants supplied an uncomfortable reminder of the history of the empire, which still returns spectrally in complex forms that haunt the present and remain as painful and guilt-inducing as they are fascinating.

This arrangement is what I call post-colonial or post-imperial melancholia. It is not the older, simpler melancholy transmitted in Britain’s folk traditions or even the middle-class counterpart to it, first announced by an apprehensive Mathew Arnold standing down at Dover beach listening to the articulate sound of the shifting shingle, watching the lights twinkle from the French coast. Post-imperial melancholia is a neurotic and even a pathological development. It blocks the vitality of the culture diverting into the pleasures of morbid militaria and other dead ends for which heritage and identity supply the watchwords. It becomes impossible to get away from the painful and exhilarating memories of empire and to move beyond the disabling sense that the nation can only enjoy restorative solidarity and healing community when it is at war.

This dangerous situation has been compounded by melancholia’s recent cultural consequences. They have looped back into national consciousness, feeding and extending the basic pathology. The novelist Tony Parsons speaks for and to his generation by arguing that in order to be the right sort of man, one must first have fought in a war. This linkage helps to explain the country’s apparently endless fascination with the second world war. That conflict is imagined obsessively because it seems to have been the last time in which, with characteristic pluck and ingenuity, true brits faced an enemy that was simply and uncomplicatedly evil. This, after all, is why David Brent and Gareth Keenan still want to watch The Dambusters on DVD. Many of the Spitfire pilots in the sky were Polish but down in those famous, culture-conserving air-raid shelters, tea was being ritually brewed to restore national spirit and to revitalise a sense of homogenous community--across class divisions. That elixir was nourishing while it lasted. Once it ran out, togetherness and mutuality were replaced by chronic, nagging pain—something that helps to explain why so many British people identify with the twinges felt by poor, wounded Harry Potter.

After the war, Commonwealth immigrants accomplished what the Nazis had never been able to do. They wrecked an unsuspecting England from within. Traditional white working-class distaste for the aliens was always mingled with the economic fears of those who had to compete in the same labour market, but it was amplified by another, deeper discomfort that arose from discovering what the brutal administration of the British empire had actually involved. As the mechanisms of belated reparation and litigation start to move, we are able to discover the shameful things done in the name of crown and country. However people persist in denying that those crimes could have anything to do with the bitter dynamics of the post-colonial present. The wars and other “low intensity conflicts” in Kenya, Cyprus, Korea, Aden, Malaya, Ireland and many, many other locations, have slipped out of official national memory, but they remain somehow pending and unresolved in the perennial fantasy of conflict with Germany which seems to have grown in potency by being closed off to living memory.

Melancholia’s guilt, self-loathing and depression are all increased first by knowing and then by denying what the empire involved. They are intensified by having to face the extent of national hatred and contempt for immigrants. The populist power of xenophobia and racism augments this complex formation which leaps into life periodically to defend the place of Empire’s memory in the nomenclature of the honours system or to bully would-be citizens about their unsteady command of syntax and punctuation. Those depressive and depressing symptoms are interspersed by periods of manic elation—usually related to spectator sports.

A shocking convulsion of shame and concern attended the saga of official incompetence and indifference staged around the murder of Stephen Lawrence. That event marked the latest episode in the emergence of the country’s racial conscience. There had been many racist attacks before and many since. Sir Stephen Macpherson’s lucid report went on to the same shelf where Lord Scarman’s slim volume had been deposited some years ago. Genuine upset at inadequate judicial responses to the crime were complemented by a bizarre pattern of pretended incomprehension about its character and causes. Britain goes to great lengths to try and avoid accepting that racism could have been a specific factor both in the original killing and in the law’s subsequent inadequacies. This too involves matters of heritage and identity which get compromised and undermined by the failures of the judicial system.

It is also important to see the recent popularity of revisionist histories of the empire in the context of national melancholia. These approaches to the glories of the past have become attractive and inspiring in a geo-political situation where the revival of empire has been explicitly demanded by influential voices. Widely-read historical works, most notably by Niall Ferguson, Linda Colley and Saul David do more than just airbrush and nuance the rationally applied barbarity of Britain’s colonial past. Their implicit purpose is more sinister and more profound. They seize command of the role of victim which has become such a prestigious item in the moral economy of multi-cultural Britain. These authors would have us accept that the British are the primary victims of their own colonial history. That awareness is the best pre-condition for the revival of empire abroad and the rebirth of a homogenous, imperial spirit at home.

If that was not bad enough, promising discussions of the country’s multi-cultural character have been thwarted by the dissemination of civilisationist common-sense. Terror and racial conflict are now explained away as local manifestations of a global clash of cultures. This diagnosis has been projected ever-more widely and authoritatively since the New York towers fell. Of course, in Britain, a similar hard-line culturalism can be traced back to Powell’s speeches, but it was given fresh validity in debates over the electoral successes of Pim Fortyn, Jorg Haider, Jean-Marie LePen, the BNP and UKIP. Spun into valuable populist currency by the New Labour leadership, a timely blend of Powellism with bastardized Samuel Huntington, increased the clamour for more difficult citizenship tests and turned attention towards a cavalcade of terror mosques, veiled women and maimed imams.

The post-industrial riots up north, where dwelling and labour-markets carry the imprint of informal segregation, were loudly interpreted as race riots, meaning that they were supposed to convey something of the inner truth of the unbridgeable ethnic and religious differences that were fracturing the British polity.

It bears repetition that the intensity of all these conversations has grown in proportion to a collapse of certainty as to what the core content of British culture should now be. Was it dumbed down or sexed up? was it Endemol or Murdoch? Mike Skinner? or Paul Dacre? Naomi Campbell or Alistair Campbell?

Civilisationist assertions about assimilation, culture and belonging were initially filtered through discussions of mistaken multi-culturalism in no-longer-homogenous Scandinavia and incorrigible political correctness in the USA. Considerable space was devoted to these topics in the august pages of the respected journal Prospect. These themes were taken over into the liberal mainstream by being re-printed in The Guardian.

Prospect’s editors occupied this controversial ground as a way to establish a reputation for rigor, seriousness and taboo-busting relevance. Their treatment of the hot topic of race, diversity and national identity was dominated by the political problems supposedly introduced by un-assimilable mass immigration, by intrusive refugees and, most importantly, by a conflict rooted in the stubborn adherence of settler-descendants to their original cultures, religions and other ethnic habits. Wherever they found themselves, the perverse attachment of those “second and third generation immigrants” to the dangerous legacies bequeathed by their colonial foreparents, has been deemed inappropriate to their happy new circumstances. For these commentators on the problems that multi-culture poses for joined-up government, increased diversity made solidarity impossible.

The obvious alternative proposition, that not diversity but racism and systematic marginalisation were responsible for Britain’s political divisions was never entertained. Too many analysts preferred to make ready-mix pseudo-politics out of reified ethnic culture and to indulge a defensive desire for the compensation that only brittle, arrested identity and immobile, frozen culture can confer.

Prospect spearheaded the adaptation and updating of well-worn themes drawn from the Powell lexicon. Immigration is always an invasion and the inevitable race war is a culturally-based conflict born from a fundamental, pre-political incompatibility. The only vague novelty lay in folding these ancient motifs into a nominally “left” discourse.

A team of fearless grandees, heavy hitters like David Goodhart, John Lloyd, Bob Rowthorn and Michael Ignatieff were lined up to vent against the special privileges that would accrue to immigrants if the misguided cues from Macpherson’s report were wrongly applied, to lament a lack of attention to the plight of “poor whites” and then, to expand the definition of an immigrant hyperbolically so that it could gobble up three or even four generations of culturally lost-souls adrift between being the aliens they ought to be and the Britons they were unlikely ever to become.

The resulting torrent of lamentation was spiced up by another factor that it is easy to miss. The same “joined-up” obligation to be tough on the misdeeds of immigrants meant that these commentators felt their own liberalism was being painfully taken away from them by their noble commitment to make sense of the country’s intractable problems. Their loud howls of resentment at this additional loss compounded both the characteristic melancholia and the embarrassing antipathy towards blacks, Muslims, illegals and asylum seekers in equal proportion.

Once again, none of them could imagine that Britain’s post-colonial settlers and the various sanctuary and hospitality-seeking peoples who have succeeded them, had been caught up in economic, cultural and historical problems that were not of their making. Nobody could accept that it was the misfortune of these immigrants to try and settle or seek hospitality amidst de-industrialisation, the destruction of the welfare state, privatisation, marketisation and immiseration.

I think it is wrong to hold the strangers and aliens exclusively responsible for the fact that their marginal lives came to symbolize national decline and loss even when they did not themselves actually cause the quarrels with which their presence was associated. Melancholia means that it is easier to go along with the script that makes Britain’s perennial, organic crisis primarily intelligible as a matter of race and nation, heritage and identity.

Many of the continuing responses to Bhiku Parekh’s report into Multi-racial Britain reveal the same dismal pattern. Melancholia’s signature combination of manic elation with misery, self-loathing and ambivalence is evident there too. Where this pathology has taken hold, hostility to the proposition that racist violence and institutional indifference are normal, recurrent features of British social and political life, gets regularly intermingled with absolute surprise at the nastiness of racism and the extent of the anger and resentment that it can cause.

Hostility towards asylum seekers and refugees cannot be concealed, but once again, the idea that it has anything to do with noxious, violent racism or neo-fascist, ultra-nationalism remains a shocking revelation and induces yet more guilt. Confusion and disorientation arise from a situation in which melancholic and xenophobic Britain can quietly concede that it doesn’t much like aliens, blacks, foreigners, Muslims and other interlopers and wants to get rid of them, but then becomes uncomfortable because it doesn’t like the things it learns about itself when it gives vent to feelings of hostility. Both Anne Winterton’s recent joke about the death of the Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecombe Bay and the horrified reaction against it, exemplify this cycle of hatred, outrage and guilt.

Thinking about those watery deaths is shocking and instructive. The bodies on the beach do more than teach us things we cannot bear to learn about the state of our de-regulated labour market. Washed up by the tide, the vulnerable, less-than-human bodies of those would-be immigrants represent the discomforting ambiguities of the British empire’s painful and shameful but nonetheless exhilarating history.

In this precarious national state, individual and group identifications converge not on the body of the sovereign or some other iconic national object—Britannia recast in the guise of gym-trim Diana or the equally-immortal Queen Mum; David Beckham’s various haircuts; or even the beaming, sweaty figure of Prime Minister Blair himself—but in opposition to the intrusive presence of the incoming strangers. Trapped inside the local logic of race, nation and ethnic absolutism their menacing, unwanted bodies refer resentful consciousness to the unacknowledged pain of empire’s loss and the unsettling shame of its bloody management.

Powell’s alien wedge entered here because Britain was once out there, being great in the world it dominated. That basic fact of global history is undeniable. And yet, grudging recognition of it now provides a stimulus for additional forms of hostility. They are triggered by the realization that, even if today’s unwanted settlers are not actually post-colonials, they can still carry all the ambivalence of the vanished empire with them. Even if they are “white”, they can be held hostage by the idea that they too are immigrants. Even they can project dangerous discomfort into the unhappy consciousness of their fearful and anxious hosts and neighbours. Indeed, the incomers may be unwanted and feared precisely because they are the unwitting stimulus for the pain produced by memories of that vanished imperial and colonial past.

John Lloyd’s blustery concern for the plight of Britain’s “poor whites” was also important because it showed how readily the melancholic pattern dovetails with recent US exports. As far as race is concerned, the US is the only future that the brit punditocracy can imagine for our country. Huntington, whose latest work sees the flood of immigrants from Latin America as “the single most immediate and serious challenge to America’s traditional identity”, had articulated the scary linkage between immigration and multiculturalism early on. This linkage has now moved to the centre of reflection on the government of multi-culture.

More than a decade ago, in language that was deeply marked by anxieties over racial degeneration recast in cultural terms that were no less absolute than their bio-logical antecedents, Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations had linked urgent geo-political problems to the ghastly prospect of growing cultural diversity: “Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism abroad threatens the West and the world. Both deny the uniqueness of western culture. The global monoculturalists want to make the world like America. The domestic multi-culturalists want to make America like the world. A multi-cultural America is impossible because a non-Western America is not American. A multicultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible.” His elision of the US and The West is significant but, for the English reader anyway, it is misleading too. Our heritage and identity should be telling us that the United States is not the inevitable destination of our distinctive history of racial politics.

There are many ways in which our country’s long experience of convivial post-colonial interaction and civic life has, largely undetected by our governments, provided resources for a vibrant multi-culture that we do not always value, use wisely or celebrate as we should.

Please note that I say multi-culture rather than multiculturalism, for in Britain at least, there is no such ideology. The desire to forge it died long ago in the ashes of the ILEA and GLC which had tried to challenge and re-work the outmoded discourse of assimilation that had been left untouched since Roy Jenkins, Roy Hattersley and company set it aside forty years ago. The country’s convivial culture sprouted spontaneously and unappreciated from the detritus of their failed social experiment.

In acknowledging the political and cultural force of conviviality I am not saying that racism has been dealt with. It is still at work, souring things, distorting economic relations and debasing British public life. However, we must also face up to the fact that racism is no longer what it was in the rivers of blood days when Powell’s bleak prophecy of racial war was confirmed a few weeks later by the murder of Martin Luther King jnr.. Today’s political geography and the cultural climate around race are rather different.

Years of tokenism have, for example, had significant effects. Sport, pop, advertising and the House of Lords are all superficially integrated. In particular, reality TV has unwittingly done a great deal to situate racial difference among other contending varieties of diversity. Racial and ethnic differences get rendered unremarkable. Instead of adding to the premium of race, we learn that in consumer culture the things which really divide us are much more profound: taste, life-style, leisure preferences, cleaning, gardening and child care.

By making racial differences ordinary and banal, even boring, Britain’s emergent conviviality has promoted everyday virtues that enrich our cities, drive our cultural industries and enhance our struggling democracy so that it cannot operate in colour-coded forms. Conviviality takes hold when exposure to otherness involves more than jeopardy. It inspires us to applaud settler and other immigrant demands for a more mature polity that, even if it is not entirely free of racism, might be equipped to deal with racial hierarchies as a matter of politics without lapsing into unproductive guilt and narcissistic anguish.

That shift could benefit all of us. From a far healthier position, we might even be able to identify the results of ordinary multi-culture’s demands for recognition in various areas of policy: health, education and criminal justice as well as the arts and cultural planning. Couldn’t a confrontation with racism make all those institutions work better—that is, more democratically and inclusively--across the board?

Once sufficient political will exists, that supposedly unbridgeable gulf between civilizations can be easily spanned. This came over very strongly in the tales that the homecoming British detainees told of their Caribbean detention by the US government at Guantanamo Bay. Their being fed with burgers from the Base’s branch of McDonalds, rather than the “culturally appropriate meals” which are a much-vaunted part of the Camp’s humanitarian regime, was a hint at what can be achieved. Even more telling, was the revelation that, in articulating their strongest desires for freedom and relief from the Camp regime, they say that what they really craved was a packet of Highland Shortbread biscuits!

Jamal al-Harith born 37 years ago in Manchester as Ronald Fiddler to a family with Jamaican origins, was held in the Guantanamo Camps for two years before being released and sent back in March. He recounted his post-colonial life story in the Daily Mirror and on Manchester’s local radio and offered a welcome rebuke to all the mechanistic and over-simple conceptions of cultural difference that are currently in circulation. His critique lost nothing by being left largely implicit. In between a shocking account of the stupidity, horror and hopelessness of his long ordeal, he explained how much that famous shortbread had mattered: “We were all obsessed with Scottish Highland Shortbread. We wanted some so much.” It is there, in the message of that traditional hunger, lodged in those battered and humiliated British bodies that the problem of assimilation specified in the 1960s, should be laid to rest forever.

Paul Gilroy is Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, Department of African American Studies Yale University. He has contributed a great deal to African diasporic intellectual and political exchange. He is the author of There Ain't No Black In The Union Jack, Small Acts: Thoughts On The Politics of Black Cultures, and The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. As a DJ and music journalist, Gilroy's work remains close to the sites of Black popular cultural production. His new book After Empire, is a study of Britain's post-imperial melancholia and will be published by Routledge in September.