Blog post by Marcus Nicolson, Institute for Minority Rights, Italy

Scotland has been described as having a progressive politics towards immigration and migrant integration, which is closely tied to the civic brand of nationalism that has been promoted by the Scottish government in the 21st century.

But what effects do these narratives have on young adult migrants who have made Scotland their home, and how do they relate to these narratives when negotiating their own identities? These are the key questions which are explored in my Identities article, ‘Transnational identities and agency: navigating everyday life as a young adult migrant in Glasgow, UK'.

Blog post by Sudip Sen, University of Portsmouth, UK

In my Identities article, ‘Belligerent shyness and puzzlement: a discursive analysis of ‘not racism’ and the post-racial on UK phone-in radio’, I investigate ‘the talk about the talk’ about racism –  including when that talk is about how we shouldn’t talk about it. In particular, I analyze commercial phone-in radio calls in the UK, where speakers seek to minimize or deny the relevance of racism, and find that there is a persistence of performed shyness and puzzlement.

Shy people are usually not belligerent, and people genuinely puzzled by something are not usually quite so adamant about their answer. So, what is going on here? The speakers’ ‘shy’ and indirect utterances emphasize their view that they cannot speak anymore, and their puzzlement and shock frames racism as exceptional. In other words, these small public performances, rehearsed and repeated, are (re)generative of a post-racial discourse.  

Blog post by Jamella Gow, Bowdoin College, USA

What makes a migrant ‘Black’? Frequently, negative rhetoric surrounding migrants in the United States and Europe have used race and culture as a means through which to contrast the inherent ‘belonging’ of citizens with the seeming ‘non-belonging’ of migrants. Migrants’ presence and cultures are, at worst, feared due to assumptions derived from 16th-19th century rhetoric which drove the colonization of people broadly conceived as Others. This is particularly the case for Black migrants.
 
We can draw a line between the transformations of nations in the Caribbean under colonization to the migratory waves of the 20th and 21st century. Historically, the colonization of the British Caribbean anticipated the arrival of the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants (1948) who sought to build new lives in the centre of Empire. The imperial forays of the United States in Central America and the Caribbean also generated pathways to migration for Haitians who have been coming to the US since Haiti’s founding in 1804.
 
The arrival and reception of Black migrants to the US and Europe, therefore, cannot be understood without these deeper historical links that draw the Caribbean and the West together. These linkages are explored in my Identities article, ‘From colonial subjects to Black nations: racializing the Caribbean within global Blackness’, where I trace the history of Blackness in the Caribbean to better understand how mobility became a feature of Blackness both under slavery and more modern iterations of Black migration today.