Constructing racialised masculinities in/through affective orientations to a multicultural town

Introduction

In this paper we examine how young men in Luton, a medium-sized British town, construct narratives about the place where they live. We argue that these men’s attachment to place is a process that is mediated in part through the representation of multiculturalism as having ‘failed’, but also through gendered and racialised everyday discourses and practices. Their individual narratives engage with broader cultural stories about the place of immigration and of migrants in British society. Such stories are involved in the production of hierarchies of citizenship and belonging that construct different bodies as more or less legitimate British citizens, associated with different levels of value (Ahmed, 2004). We argue that the construction of masculine identities intersects with young men’s sense of national belonging. By shedding light on the socio-spatial dimensions of the affective practices involved in the construction of masculinities, we demonstrate the ways in which gendered practices may simultaneously reinforce and transcend national, ethnic, ‘race’ and religious formations. This study addresses the lack of research on the spatial dimensions to the construction of masculinities, a need identified by geographers (Hopkins and Noble, 2009) and, more broadly in the social sciences (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). We also contribute to the analysis of the affective dimensions of ‘race’ and whiteness (Wetherell, 2012), and how they intersect with the construction of masculinities.

We begin by describing the ways in which Luton is represented in popular discourse as a site of failed multiculturalism. We then develop our theoretical framework employing the concepts of ‘affective intersectionality’ and ‘belonging’. In the next section we describe our research methods. The remainder of the article explores the gendered and racialised modalities of belonging that emerged in the differentiation of the narratives of the young men we interviewed. This is organised into four sections; the first explores participants who celebrate Luton as a site of successful multiculturalism and the second considers those who discuss and debate the idea that the ethnic diversity of the town is evidence of its decline. These narratives were contested or fraught with internal contradictions. The third section examines participants’ sense of safety and security as this related to their construction of an anti-authority ‘protest’ masculine identity (Connell, 1991; McDowell, 2002). Finally, we discuss the ways in which the effects of the spectacular and extreme nationalist events organised by the English Defence League (EDL) articulate with the more mundane sense of place and belonging of different participants. It is worth establishing from the outset, however, that it is not our intention to suggest that racist ideas and exclusionary identities are the sole preserve of working-class people. As Garner (2010) demonstrates, there is mounting evidence that racism in the UK, particularly towards Muslims, as well as increasingly negative views of multiculturalism, are held across class lines, even if expressed in different ways. In fact, dominant discourses were often appropriated by participants as the discursive building blocks for masculinities premised on racialised othering. It is precisely the lack of readily available alternative narratives about collective class relations, for example – in contrast to the ample availability of public discourses which currently tend to construct migrants, asylum seekers and Muslims as a threatening presence – which we argue contributes to creating the context through which marginalised young men construct their identities. We conclude by reflecting on some key implications of our findings in relation to the theorisation of how affective practices are related to the construction of urban social divisions.

Formations of the imaginary geographies of Luton

Luton is a town of about 200,000 located 30 minutes by train from London. For an outsider to the UK, if it is known at all, Luton is primarily associated with its international airport. For those more familiar with the British social imaginary, its name often evokes snobbery, derision or revulsion. It has been labelled by journalist Sarfraz Manzoor (2004), who grew up there, as a ‘crap town’. Indeed, a privately sponsored organisation called ‘Love Luton’ was formed in 2010 ‘to improve the image and perception of Luton and to enhance belief in the town which drives a thriving economy’ (Love Luton, 2013: 9).

The negative image of Luton is connected to its associations with working-class marginality and its representation as a manifestation of the purported failure of ‘multiculturalism’ which dominate contemporary policy and media accounts of ethnic diversity in Britain and across Europe (Gilroy, 2012). Luton’s working-class associations trouble the spatial conception of the North–South divide in the UK which positions industrial economies, working-class cultural life and marginality as endemic to the northern regions of the country (Shields, 1991). It was the site of a landmark British quantitative sociological study of working-class life conducted by Goldthorpe et al. (1968–1969), which examined the changing lifestyles and affinities of the largely male workforce of Luton’s Vauxhall car plant, owned by General Motors. Luton’s image continues to be associated with a working-class masculinity, lingering from the symbolism of the masculinised car industry, although increasingly it is public administration, the feminised service sector and the airport that are the town’s main sources of employment.

Luton was devastated by the economic recessions of the 1970s and 1980s in which the car industry declined, and was also hit hard by the most recent economic downturn. Luton’s unemployment rose in line with recent national trends, although it exceeded the average for Great Britain of 4.0% in April 2012 at 4.9%, well above the East of England rate of 3.2% (Luton Borough Council, 2012). Unemployment was particularly marked amongst men, with 6.1% of men out of work compared with 3.6% of women (Luton Borough Council, 2012). Unemployment amongst those aged under 24 in April 2012 was below the national average and the average for the East of England region of 29%, although still high at 26% (Luton Borough Council, 2012). Nonetheless, the town was flagged as containing a youth unemployment hotspot, an area with concentrated levels of youth unemployment (Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO), 2012).

Luton is also known for being home to significant Asian and Muslim communities. According to the 2011 census, Luton’s largest ‘ethnic’ grouping is ‘White’ at 55%, followed by ‘Asian’ at 30%, ‘Black’ at 10%, ‘Mixed’ at 4% and ‘Other’ at 2% (Luton Borough Profile, 2011). Luton’s ethnic diversity is far above the average for England and Wales, in which 86% of the population identifies as ‘White’, while 8% as ‘Asian’, 3% as ‘Black’, 2% as ‘Mixed’ and 1% as ‘Other’ (Luton Borough Profile, 2011). The largest religious faith grouping professed by Luton residents is Christian at 47%, while 25% identify as Muslim and 17% as not having a religion, compared with 60%, 5% and 25% for the entire population of England and Wales. Despite a vibrant civil society and the high profile of multicultural events such as the annual Luton International Carnival, it seems that Luton’s diversity is sometimes a contested dimension of its public image.

Reinforcing its tough working-class masculine image are more recent associations with football hooliganism, extremism and racist violence (Francis, 2012). The English Defence League (EDL), an extreme nationalist and anti-Muslim street-based political group emerged here (Copsey, 2010). In 2011, for example, Luton was in the national media as the site of the largest demonstration in the EDL’s history involving 3000 far right and Islamophobic supporters from around the country (Taylor and Davis, 2011). In addition, the high media coverage given to actions of a small Islamist militant group of a dozen or so 20- to 30-year-old men, and the arrests of four terrorist plotters in Luton, have reinforced the town’s image as, in the words of the tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail, ‘a known hotbed of Islamic militancy’ (Walker, 2010; Wright and Taylor, 2004).

Politicians and the media typically attribute the purported failure of multiculturalism policies to the claimed tendency of self-segregation of Asian communities, with Asian Muslims arising as a particular focal point of moral panic (Phillips, 2006; Smith, 2009). It has been widely recognised that since the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 (9/11) and 7 July 2005 (7/7), the everyday lives and the political orientations of Muslims in Britain, as in other countries in Europe, have been disproportionately scrutinised under the banner of pre-emptive anti-terrorism measures (Fekete, 2009; Hopkins, 2007; Mythen et al., 2009). Young Muslim men, in particular, are constructed as ‘risky subjects’ prone to involvement in terrorism, as well as in illicit activities such as drug dealing, violent conflict and welfare fraud (Mythen et al., 2009). Their portrayal as unruly subjects is fraught with contradictions, as Muslims are constructed both as a potential danger to society, but also, in the context of the purported problem of segregation, as needing to put more effort into social integration (Mythen et al., 2009).

While visible in Britain as subjects to be feared, the overpolicing of racialised groups has been a longstanding concern amongst anti-racist activists and black liberation groups (Lentin, 2004; Smith, 2009). The Brixton ‘riots’ of 1985, often imagined as symbolic of ethnic tensions in Britain were actually the result of a community’s response to unjust policing of youth in the largely African-Caribbean neighbourhood rather than being an expression of racially motivated violence between white and black communities (Mythen et al., 2009; Smith, 2009). At that time, the media constructed Asians in Britain as a model minority as they were assumed to be less implicated in unrest and criminal activities. This was attributed to the perceived characteristic of Asians as capable of sustaining their cultural practices in the British context (Lentin, 2004). What was then viewed as a positive has been radically refigured more recently as a negative attribute in the discourse of ‘failed multiculturalism’ and the accusation that these same communities are unwilling to ‘integrate’. In response to the unrest in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001, the head of the Commission for Race Equality, Trevor Phillips, suggested that Britain was at risk of ‘sleepwalking to segregation’ (Anonymous, 2005). Yet, research has shown that tensions between Asian and white communities arose in the context of significant social exclusion, economic deprivation, the alienation of youth, and poor relations between Asian communities and the police (Phillips, 2006). Furthermore, the disturbances were directly related to the rise of extremist right-wing groups and the sense among Asian communities of a lack of protection from these threatening groups (Bagguley and Hussain, 2008; Phillips, 2006). We argue here that the differential sense of belonging, comfort and safety in navigating Luton bears some relation to the consequences of infrequent, but spectacular, displays of extreme nationalism.

Theorising affective intersectional belonging

The emotional dimensions of the young men’s sense of place are of particular interest in understanding feelings of belonging. Nayak (2006, 2010) develops a sophisticated account of race as ‘more-than-representational’, that is, as ‘an assemblage of event, performance and affect’ (Nayak, 2010: 2388). His theoretical lens sheds light on how the ways in which race materialises in place is linked to ‘the emotional connections of being and belonging’ (Nayak, 2010: 2389). Nayak’s insight that the emotional dimensions of felt connections are key to understanding the construction of race as it happens in particular places and, importantly, we develop here, that this process is embroiled in the construction of masculinities. In order to theorise the feelings of belonging and sense of place that emerged through our interviews, we draw from the ideas of Avtar Brah (1996) and Ghassan Hage (2000).

Both Brah (1996) and Hage (2000) highlight the significance of the difference between a sense of feeling at home and a sense of proclaiming and asserting a place as one’s home. Hage distinguishes the concepts of ‘passive belonging’ and ‘governmental belonging’ to bring to the fore the distinction between a sense of being at home and a sense of entitlement to make what he describes as ‘managerial’ statements about a place. Passive belonging refers to a sense that one belongs in a place or nation, while governmental belonging refers to a sense of ownership of the place or nation, ‘the nation belongs to me’ (Hage, 2000: 45). His useful conceptualisation relies on Bourdieu’s notion of ‘cultural capital’, the sets of knowledge, aesthetic taste and embodied dispositions that are valued within a social field (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984). Precisely which kinds of social and cultural styles and embodiments are valued is subject to on-going social struggles in an urban space. What is crucial is that the accumulation of cultural capital results in a concomitant accrual of legitimacy to a person or group who subsequently become well positioned to arbitrate the kinds of cultural capital that matter, thereby securing a privileged position vis-à-vis others. Hage analyses national belonging through this framework and demonstrates how it emerges from the accumulation of cultural capital, where certain dominant groups define the dispositions and traits deemed necessary for people to lay claim to belonging to the nation. Hage argues that in the case of Australia – although the point is also relevant to the UK – whiteness, not simply as a skin colour, but as a form of identity which groups have more or less of, matters as a form of cultural capital (see also Garner, 2010, for a formulation of whiteness as a form of national entitlement).

It is our contention that the complex and differently situated positioning of the young men in relation to the social relations of gender, ‘race’, class, ethnicity and religion shapes the ways in which they are affected by the representations of Luton and how they experience and narrate urban space. Hage’s distinctions between passive and governmental belonging helps in highlighting the contested nature of what is included and excluded in the construction of any given social boundary. However, we also seek to combine this distinction with the complexity and heterogeneity of an intersectional lens, which insists on the multiplicity of social relations that produce both a given subjectivity, and a set of affective practices in a particular place. An intersectional approach sheds light on how the connotations attached to social boundaries of different kinds are themselves contingent and the subject of contestation, rendering them fluid to a certain extent (McDowell, 2008; Valentine, 2007; Yuval-Davis, 2006, 2011). Given this complexity and liveliness, drawing from Wetherell (2012), we argue that affective experience is by no means determined by any single social location in a straightforward way: ‘affective practices will routinely effloresce over the conventional, demographic boundary-lines of class, gender, ethnicity, religion and nation, communal life and personal life’ (Wetherell, 2012: 117). However, with Wetherell, we suggest that social locations contribute to certain ‘tendencies towards figuring and gathering’ of affect (Wetherell, 2012: 139). Wetherell’s ‘affective intersectional’ approach is a fruitful lens through which to capture the tensions between the multiplicity and heterogeneity of affective practices that are mobilised, and mobilise, different people’s experience of their lives, while at the same time, recognising that social formations in a given context may stabilise, to an extent, certain repertoires of affect (Wetherell, 2012: 118–119). She explains, ‘stabilised affective practice and affective necessities emerge as fragmented and heteroclite subjectivities form and engage in the plurality and polyphony of shifting social relations’ (Wetherell, 2012: 119). Wetherell’s formulation, which places affective practices firmly in the realm of the inter-subjective, emphasises, paradoxically, how stabilities in affective practices may themselves emerge through the ‘kaleidoscope of contradictions and fragments that refuse to cohere’ (Wetherell, 2012: 119). Hierarchical social orders, such as racialised inequalities, may emerge through the incoherence of contemporary ideologies and their respective affective practices. These jostle uneasily in different combinations of contradictory and fragments rather than through a totalising and rigid overarching narrative. This insight resonates with Nayak’s (2010) call to explore ‘the emotional politics of race’ by examining ‘the ambiguous ways in which multicultural intimacies and visceral hatred coexist’ (Nayak, 2010: 2389).

Methods

In 2012–2013 a series of interviews were carried out in Luton by two of the three of us, (Hardgrove and Rootham), both of whom are young white women, one from the USA and the other from Canada. Forty-four young men between the ages of 18 and 25 were interviewed who were, for the most part, un(der)employed, although a small number were students. Approximately half the initial participants were revisited for one or two follow-up interviews over a period of the next year. Many of the young men were recruited through the networks of five youth-serving organisations in Luton and subsequent snowballing with initial contacts, as well as through encounters in sites such as gyms and youth hang-outs in the town. Interviews were semi-structured and explored a range of themes including growing up in Luton, family life, work and schooling, leisure and political activities. The majority were recorded and transcribed. Pseudonyms have been assigned to protect the anonymity of participants. In describing our participants through categories we are forced to summarise and render static what are actually complex, dynamic and multiple identities based on an interpretation of the information that emerged through interviews we carried out. The interview process itself served as a formative context through which such details were shared with us. Details of the ‘race’, ethnicities, migration histories and religions provided here are based on participants’ responses to direct questions about how they identify in terms of migration history, ethnicity and faith as well as through an inclusion of relevant aspects that emerged at other times in the conversations in which participants emphasised a dimension of their identity that they felt was particularly important. Overall, just over one-third of the participants classified themselves as white British (but amongst these a minority mentioned an additional ethnicity such as Irish and Scottish heritage), while about 45% identified as having some South Asian heritage (using a range of ethnicity and religious categories in various combinations to do so, including British, Bangladeshi/Bengali, Pakistani, Muslim and Sikh). In addition, seven participants identified as having African heritage (Congolese, Zimbabwe and Somali and sometimes also indicating religious affiliation of Christian or Muslim) while the remaining three participants indicated Caribbean heritage (also sometimes indicating a specific country of family origin).

Feeling at home: Racialised modalities of belonging

Drawing from Hage’s distinction between ‘passive belonging’ and ‘governmental belonging’, we argue in this section that the modalities through which participants narrate and practice their individual spatial sense of belonging reflect wider policy and political discourses which position them as differently regarded citizens. Racialised young men held, on the whole, more positive feelings of being ‘at home’ in their neighbourhood and in Luton as a town than white young men. Yet, significantly, they were also less likely to express a sense of governmental belonging.

A constant refrain amongst racialised participants who had migrated to Luton, either as children or young adults, was the way in which the visible ethnic and racial diversity of the town was a factor in their sense of feeling at home. In the case of newcomers, this diversity facilitated a sense of belonging to their new place of inhabitancy. For example, Terry (Black African, Zimbabwean) ¹ talks of arriving in Luton from Zimbabwe in his teenage years and appreciating the multicultural nature of the city; in his words, ‘I guess I blended in quite well, real soon’. This sense of being able to disappear and not stand out translated into a sense of being at home which also gave him the desire to discover more about the UK: ‘It made me want to go out more and find out how the UK really is’. Fhami (Somali) was similarly impressed with what he regarded as the harmonious and multicultural nature of the town. Fhami also migrated to Luton from elsewhere in Europe where he spent most of his childhood and remembers, ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen Asian people, first time I’ve seen like all of them different cultures come together, working together, so that kind of gave me a good impression’.

A particularly strong attachment to what was known as the Asian neighbourhood of Bury Park was persistently expressed by British South Asian young men, most of whom had lived their entire lives in Luton. When asked, ‘What’s it like growing up in Bury Park?’ replies were usually upbeat:

I like it, the area’s nice, the neighbourhood’s good, the community is wicked as well. (Rashid, British Muslim)

It’s fun, basically, in that area we have all the, our community people, like all the Asians and our community but so many communities, so when I was growing up, I seen people, now since I grow up, particularly now, I basically know half of Bury Park people, I know everyone, they see me and say, ‘Hello’, so yeah, it’s good fun, it’s more fun, you know? (Shaz, British Bangladeshi)

Significantly, British South Asian young men, like young men of other ethnicities, tended to describe Bury Park as space where people of different ethnicities live side by side peacefully and newcomers are welcomed, as Zahir (British Bengali) explains:

Polish people coming in, Eastern Europeans, yes, everyone’s getting on together. Some … minorities I mean is messing about and it causes trouble but everyone gets along well. You could walk down Bury, even though you see a lot of Asians in Bury Park, but if you walk down you won’t have a problem because everyone’s just friendly and all that.

Aadil (British Asian), whose mother was also born in the UK and whose family origins are in Bangladesh, reinforces the point that while Bury Park is perceived as an ‘Asian’ area, it is not exclusionary:

It may seem as if the whole Bury Park community is just Asians, but what other people fail to understand is that there’s no, we haven’t got a problem with you coming into Bury Park. We do welcome you coming into Bury Park, but they’re just scared of the fact they, they might get slayed off or badmouthed. I think its sometimes surprising for them to come to Bury Park and they definitely think that we might have some hatred against them and all that sort of stuff, but we don’t. We don’t.

Aadil’s sense of ‘governmental’ belonging to Bury Park is revealed here as he clearly positions himself as a member of the collective ‘we’ whose stake in the neighbourhood positions them to welcome others.

While inhabitants of Bury Park were particularly likely to express a sense of attachment to the neighbourhood where they grew up and, often by extension, Luton as a town, they were paradoxically not among those who felt most entitled to the entire city. Aadil, who clearly describes feeling a sense of ownership of Bury Park, feels that he is not treated as an equal citizen elsewhere in the town. In this passage he describes his sense of frustration at being made to feel he is not entitled to full belonging when he attends his college, located beyond Bury Park:

Obviously we all ought to be treated equally. I mean, it’s not everyone but at college I get a sense of negativity. I feel like telling them, we’re not that bad, it’s just the media and other people. I mean, you get good and bad in every types of people, but not everyone’s bad, and I just feel, like, I do tell a few people here and there, I do explain to them the differences between us and extremists and other people in the area and they do listen to me and they do take it well.

Diversity as discourse of decline: Contradictions and ambivalences

The existence of a largely South Asian neighbourhood was viewed with more negativity and ambivalence on the part of white participants. For example, Alex (British), who grew up in Luton bemoans feeling out of place in Bury Park: ‘There’s been times when you go out and you just really feel like the minority in your own town, I don’t know if you’ve been to Bury Park but obviously you have …?’.

Jamie (English), who plans to leave Luton, describes, in explicitly racist terms, why he is not particularly attached to the town where he grew up:

You get a lot from the Asian community, Polish, from all community backgrounds are in Luton and sometimes it’s too much, too soon … I think it’s just too many people at once, all coming over in a big flood, maybe if it happened slower then it would work out better. I believe that the people from Britain are complaining about because all of a sudden there’s whole Asian communities, there’s hardly any white people and that’s too much of a takeover and that’s what I believe English people are fighting for, basically, their country. I’m English, brought up here and that’s my views on it.

These perspectives reveal a sense of invasion, paralleling Garner’s (2012) research into affective dimensions of whiteness (see also Clayton, 2009). These white participants clearly articulate a managerial stance and a sense of entitlement to determine who might legitimately belong to a town they claim as their own: ‘I think it’s just too many people at once, all coming over in a big flood, maybe if it happened slower …’. This is even more explicit in Alex’s later statement:

There is clashes because as welcoming as you want to be to them, you can only do so much because sometimes you’ll say to someone, open the door for them and go, ‘Go on, in you go’, and instead of thank you, you get almost a dirty look, it’s like, ‘What’s going on here?’ Yeah, it’s quite hard.

As Alex describes, investment in a white identity in the diasporic spaces of Luton bestows on some participants a sense that those they interpret as immigrants ought to be grateful to have been allowed to settle in the first place.

Yet a ‘governmental’ sense of belonging was not universally enjoyed by all white participants. Curtis (British), who was born in Luton, dislikes the council estate where he grew up and feels unsafe: ‘Shit, it ain’t good for kids. Community, that’s when people are meant to help each other around their area, yeah? It doesn’t happen in my area’. However, he later explains how he sees racism as pointless:

Yeah but other people on the other hand might be racist … I think that’s pointless as well, it’s like, survive, they ain’t gonna go, they’re going to be here for the rest of their life, you might as well put up with them so I blend with everyone pretty much, apart from the hoodies [gangsters] that I don’t like.

His narrative reveals a lack of cultural capital that translates into a sense of displacement and the resignation to his disempowerment in relation to articulating a claim about who might be welcome and who might be kept out. Instead, he feels positioned as simply having to endure – ‘You might as well put up with them’ – the presence of racialised groups that he views as tolerable, especially compared with the aggressive gang members with whom he also shares his neighbourhood.

Governmental belonging to the nation was also marked by contradictions and ambivalences. Alex, whose national exclusionary discourse was quoted above, reveals some of these contradictions as he returns to his earlier negative portrayals of Luton and revises them, arguing instead that his Luton is ‘a blend of heaven and hell …’. As he explains with reference to convivial banter amongst men of different ethnicities:

It can be a really good place to live sometimes because what’s quite weird is although there’s a lot of different cultures and a lot of different ethnicities, Luton kind of has the same banter, so to speak, like a laugh and a giggle, regardless I’m talking to an Asian man or a black man or a white man, a Chinese man, if they’ve lived in Luton a long time and they’re used to everything, you could have a joke or a pop about something that’s happening in Luton and they’d find it really funny. That’s quite good.

While more commonly expressed by white youth, occasionally racialised youth such as Joel (Caribbean) who was born in Luton espoused prejudiced views of Bury Park. Here he shares his resentment that it is, in his view, an iconographic neighbourhood standing in for all of Luton:

Bury Park, I’d say its like their own section of crime, its like a new town to Luton, everyone outside Luton, when you say Luton, they think it’s full of Asians, it’s an Asian town and it’s not, they come and built their own place up in Luton and then that’s like their own little community as I’d call it, of their own crime, that’s what I’d say.

These sentiments suggests that, like the white youth discussed earlier, Joel feels his sense of ownership of the town threatened by what they see as the image of Luton as having become ‘an Asian town’. This example supports the argument developed by Back et al. (2012) in their research in London that the hierarchies of belonging do not necessarily map straightforwardly along race lines but are reworked in the postcolonial setting. Joel associates the neighbourhood with crime, and thus it would seem that fear and insecurity are, as Back et al. argue, key modalities through which the social landscape is interpreted. Yet it is interesting to note that it is the fear of crime that animates Joel’s narrative, as he refers to examples to drug dealing in other passages of the interview. Considering that Bury Park was controversially referred to as ‘Al Qaeda Street’ and associated with the risk of terrorism by The Daily Mail (Anonymous, 2005), Joel’s more mundane worries about petty crime resonate with Pain and Smith’s (2008) argument that geopolitical and everyday fears often do not coincide neatly: ‘the new “global” fears simply do not figure that highly in everyday lives … or else they have more indirect impacts, or affect marginalised groups rather then the wider population’ (Pain and Smith, 2008: 5).

Fhami, who spoke of feeling at home in Luton earlier, although not nearly as negative when speaking of Bury Park, nevertheless ventures what might be identified as a managerial standpoint in relation to his neighbourhood:

It’s alright. The only thing that was wrong was that like everyone tends to stay with their own people, they don’t socialise with others, Asian people stay with Asian people, black people stay with black people, but recently it’s been developing and everyone’s just mixing together, which is really a positive step ahead.

Here Fhami taps in to the ‘mixing’ agenda in which he assesses his neighbourhood’s shortcomings in not fully meeting the required format of mandated social relations. The critique is turned here by a racialised participant on his own neighbourhood and was rarely echoed by a white participant in relation to majority white areas of town.

These statements taken together begin to reveal the interconnections of the emotional experience of place and how these intersect with ideas of national and local level ownership and belonging. Participants’ sense of place is deeply entwined with the on-going struggle over the definition of legitimate belonging. In terms of British South Asians’ sense of belonging, within Bury Park at least, participants attribute their sense of home and belonging, and their enjoyment of their city to the communal feel of a neighbourhood where they feel in the majority. This argument converges with the findings of Reynolds (2013) who uses ‘comfort zone’ to express how black youths value spaces constructed as ‘black’ neighbourhoods, showing how they can be important for providing a sense of belonging and wellbeing even when marked by social exclusion and marginalisation. Reynolds suggests that despite the lack of cultural capital in stigmatised neighbourhoods, social bonds are extremely important in shaping young people’s attachment to place. In our research, British South Asian men’s sense of belonging to neighbourhood was strongly related to their sense of being located in dense social networks. This positive sense of neighbourhood also often intersected with attempts to redefine the symbolic value and, hence, the cultural capital associated with the town of Luton. In other words, they would typically defend Luton as a town unjustly stigmatised in the national imaginary. The Caribbean and Black African participants we spoke to enjoyed the sense of diversity of their neighbourhoods and town for the most part, although they were not as obviously located in a dense web of spatially defined social relations located in a particular neighbourhood as experience by many of the British South Asian participants.

Feeling safe: Masculinities and navigation of the city

Many young men pride themselves on their masculine street savvy skills in navigating what they describe as a rough city, as stated simply by Michael (White British), who grew up in Luton: ‘It’s very violent.’ Alex expands as follows: ‘The reason I love [Luton] is because its moulded and constructed me to be who I am, like to adapt to things very quickly, I walk into a room, I like to assess everything, what’s going on?’. Later, however, he expressed ambivalence about having to develop a tough persona:

Regardless of where you’re from, if you’re rich, poor, middle class, you have to put out a front otherwise you’re going to get preyed upon and it’s not nice at all, man, it’s really aggravating because I’m quite a chilled person, I like to relax and get on with things, I don’t like fighting, if I have to, I have to, but I’d prefer not to.

The investment in a ‘tough’ masculinity crossed ethnicities. Here Shaz’s narrative echoes Alex’s:

But one thing I learned in life, whoever you are, wherever you be, you always have to get prepared to stand up for yourself or you will be attacked for no reason or for a reason, so I will always be prepared for what’s coming to me. This is how I grew up in, basically, every time I walk down the street, I can look left and right, I’m prepared, who’s going to attack me? Who’s going to come to me and what they gonna do to me …

Being able to handle oneself in rough parts of town was for many who could claim it, a source of working-class masculine distinction, as Robert (White British), who had grown up in Essex but moved a couple of years ago to Luton to join his girlfriend explains: ‘I’m a bit of sandpaper, me, nothing will faze me … I’d feel safe anywhere but if you’d have asked someone else this question then you would get a different answer’.

Not all participants expressed or performed a masculinity premised on being willing to engage in violence; others emphasised their skills at manoeuvring situations to avoid being embroiled in fights. Tauya (Black African), who moved to Luton as a teenager from Zimbabwe: ‘I’m not scared. If you just go out and mind your own business and not to be caught at the wrong place at the wrong time, then yeah, you’re fine. That’s my mentality, but I’m not scared’. Similarly, Jacob (Black British/British Caribbean), who grew up in Luton and whose parents migrated from the Caribbean, prides himself on managing to avoid any trouble: ‘My neighbourhood is kind of rough, but I feel quite safe walking around it because I’m not involved with none of the [fighting/trouble making] …’.

The construction of masculinity in relation to street violence implicitly is linked to part of the construction of Luton as a rough town in the first place, as well as an attribute of what Connell (1995) termed ‘protest masculinity’ among working-class youth, that is, an exaggerated, rebellious and potentially aggressive performance of masculinity in the face of the disempowerment endured through class marginalisation. For many, the roughness of the city is associated with the construction of the prospect of violent racial tensions and extremist groups as well as the existence in some areas of what was described as loose postal code forms of territoriality and gangs. Although not rendered necessarily explicit, it might be argued that the existence of these types of ‘social problems’ is itself imaginatively construed as part and parcel of life in a multicultural urban setting (Sibley, 1998), a tendency only exacerbated by the recent policy and political discourse promoting the idea of a ‘broken’ multiculturalism (Back et al., 2012; Clayton, 2009; Garner, 2010). Thus, to a certain extent, being able to keep one’s cool in the face of the presence of what the mainstream media largely paints as the tensions associated with multiculturalism is part of the narrative through which young men construct their masculinities. Recall Alex from the previous section, who perceived himself as being ascribed minority status in the Asian parts of the town. This tendency is also implicit in an anecdote recounted by Tauya who describes his calm disposition when he was walking a young woman home through Bury Park and was confronted by a group of Muslim men:

I remember I was walking through the Bury Park with a girl, a Muslim girl, she had the hijab, the headscarf, I met her through town, we went to the same college, so I met her in town and she had a number of bags with her and it was getting too much for her to carry … I said, ‘I can help you carry your bags, where do you live?’ She said Bury Park. ‘That’s not far from where I live’, so we were walking through Bury Park and a group of people were promoting Islam and they said, ‘This cannot happen.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ They said, ‘You’re not allowed to walk with a girl unless she is a relative or your wife; we don’t do girlfriends.’ He said, ‘You might get beaten up if people see you walking side by side.’ I said, ‘Yeah?’ I just carried on walking. From then, I kind of could sense something because I would walk with her and I could see looks that I’d receive from people who were passing us by, it’s fine.

In contrast to these street savvy narratives, some young men who felt unable to defend themselves or avoid being victimised sometimes described living in perpetual fear. Many young men’s everyday lives were marked with anxiety about the threat of being the victim of an attack (see also Pain, 2003). For example, Terry, who in the previous section described his sense of belonging in relation to Luton’s multicultural dimensions, had recently moved to a small area outside the town where he feels safer than his previous city-centre neighbourhood. Here he describes the unease he experiences walking around his former neighbourhood:

Some people just don’t want you to look at them on the same street, you live in the same street but they don’t want you to look at them or walk on the same street and they walk and they block your path walking with dogs and whatnot, it was uncomfortable on that note. I’m not the type of person who likes too much trouble and so much drama going on … I’m the type of person to avoid violence and only as necessary … It’s hard but I guess it’s just a matter of knowing who you are, it’s not that I can’t defend myself, I’d rather us talk about it and resolve it and just solve the situation cos you realise in the UK its more like, it’s not just fighting, it comes with more and it escalates and ends up becoming something really big.

Terry is reluctant to relinquish a narrative of masculine street savvy – ‘It’s not that I can’t defend myself’ – but he suggests that his fear in the city centre is connected to a broader national tendency to escalate violence. He does so by emphasising the magnitude of the risk of violence in a tough town like Luton.

Other participants also expressed uncertainties about their personal safety on the streets of Luton, often in relation to certain council estates on the outskirts of town portrayed as particularly dangerous:

Sometimes you have to be careful, depending on what type of people live in that area of course, there’s a lot of people, they’re naturally troublemakers and if you bump into one of them, they won’t be a nice look so … (Fhami)

Well if there’s people down the road in a gang, they’ll either try and rob you or beat you up and take stuff off you. (Jack, British, [white])

I did before until I got mugged but not so much now. (George, White English)

In this way, the presence of a certain degree of street violence shaped the majority of our participants’ experience and navigation of their neighbourhoods and the town in general. Yet this experience was also variegated to some extent by participants’ positioning in diasporic space as well as in relation to the different areas of town in which they lived. We have already discussed contrasting ways in which participants weave their sense of perpetual threat of violence into a narrative of their masculinity exemplified by that of Alex, who paints himself as strong enough to handle violent encounters that come their way; and Tauya, who articulates a more cerebral shrewdness for avoiding engagement in violence in the first place.

A tendency in the narratives which we argue is relevant to the process of producing a racialised Muslim identity was the more limited sense of access to the town, expressed by British Asian Muslim young men, as Hopkins and Smith (2008), Hopkins (2007) and Phillips (2006) found:

I don’t really do the other side, it’s this part of Luton. (Imran, British Bangladeshi, Muslim)

The only place I do feel safe is cos, it’s in Bury Park, cos Bury Park is, the whole area is full of Bengalis and there’s like a little group that runs Bury Park, basically, runs all the side streets and all the activities that goes on and I’m very close with someone that actually runs everything there, so if say something happened, then I know nothing would happen to me in Bury Park because everyone in Bury Park knows me and they know they can’t do nothing to me. (Arif, Bengali)

Town and my neighbourhood is probably the only area I do go. I don’t tend to go out to other areas. That’s probably because I don’t know many people in other areas. (Aadil, British Asian)

The level of discomfort experienced outside of Bury Park was sometimes explained in relation to the way in which young men felt they were perceived by others:

I always get eyes, people will look at me different cos they’re not used to seeing Asians in that area … Faisal (British Bangladeshi)

Nayak reminds us that ‘there is much that goes unsaid in modern multicultural encounters – gestures, fleeting glances, strained silences and the discreet performances of othering that have come to mark difference’ (Nayak, 2011: 554). In the passage above, Faisal captures the unspoken body language that constructs him as ‘Asian’: ‘I always get eyes’.

The articulation of spectacular racism with the already differentiated everyday sense of the city

Luton has been the site of periodic demonstrations by the EDL. We argue that these spectacular episodes serve to reinforce a differential sense of the town and nation experienced in the mundane everyday perceptions just described. Muslim participants remembered the days of the EDL demonstrations in Luton and described their sense of Bury Park being under siege. One of the strategies that the EDL deploys is the deliberate provocation of Muslim young men in hopes of sparking violent unrest and subsequent police arrests of Muslims (Copsey, 2010). This is in part successful, as a degree of street fighting is reported to take place during these demonstrations. In order to stay safe and avoid the deliberate baiting from EDL marchers, Aamir (British Asian Muslim) explains how a system of community response springs into action:

Normally you won’t see people like that but you do get warned when they protest because they do get a bit outrageous and that’s the days when everyone stays home. The council, they warn you, town hall people warn you, the MP, they just warn you about the protest going on. Stay home, stay safe and that’s the only day it feels a bit scary.

His response to a question about whether disengagement is a more appropriate strategy than responding through active participation or confrontation follows: ‘It’s better to step aside. They’ll stop one day … well hopefully they’ll stop one day so us keeping quiet, hopefully that prevents them from getting too violent, too outrageous, keep them a bit controlled’.

However, the effects of the EDL incursions extend beyond the isolated incidents in which violent confrontations take place. The EDL’s spectacular and extreme expressions of anti-Muslim sentiment confine many young Muslim men to their homes at the time of the event. Yet these ‘exceptional’ events articulate with, and reinforce, the mundane and everyday finely differentiated sense of the town that lead to the insidious containment of young Muslim men to what they perceive as their own neighbourhood (see also Hopkins, 2007). Part of what demobilises young Muslim men is their experience of being perceived as risky, aggressive and threatening in other parts of town and especially beyond Luton. The image of racial violence initiated by the confrontational approach of the EDL becomes associated with Asian young men. Tariq (Asian British) describes how he and his friends are immediately associated with the reputation of Luton as tough:

And so when we go … out of town, they’re asking us you know where are you from? Luton. And its like they already before you can say something they already made a judgement about us … People think that we’re aggressive, that we’re violent, obviously they think we have fights with the EDL every day or something. But it’s not everyday, it’s not everyday. They don’t actually understand that it’s not actually what the media turns it out to be.

As shown by Mythen et al. (2009) and Hopkins (2004), Muslim young men are often simultaneously the victims of crime while also being cast as the likely perpetrators of violence. In Leicester, Clayton (2009) observes that in the face of the constraints of racisms, what might otherwise be theorised as fluid ethnic identities can become relatively stabilised. In Luton, this interplay of subtle and extreme forms of racisms help to fix British Asian young men in place, literally and figuratively, by working to essentialise a racialised masculine Muslim identity.

Conclusion

While this research is based on analysis of spoken words, our interviews nonetheless captured dimensions of young men’s affective practices in relation to their sense of belonging to their hometown, not least because they were able to articulate how they felt in certain places and contexts. While keeping in view the messiness of human emotional life evident in the ways participants express feelings were fragmentary and sometimes contradictory, we have nonetheless argued that affective orientations to place are not without a certain degree of patterning which is constitutive of, and constituted by, social divisions. Without attending to the way in which affective practices constitute subjects and social divisions, the theorisation of affect misses what we consider important: the ability to capture the important consequences of affective practices for social life, and especially, the reproduction of inequalities that much critical geographic enquiry seeks to prioritise. We advocate Wetherell’s theorisation of ‘affective intersectionality’ because it permits a recognition of the ‘complexity and heterogeneity of people’s actual social locations and affiliations’ and conceptualises affect as a practice that is both ‘open and evolving’ but also, to an extent, capable of sticking, and stabilising (Wetherell, 2012: 115–119).

Through this theoretical lens, we have situated the narratives of affect within ‘broader patterns of intelligibility’ (Wetherell, 2012: 101) dominant in the UK, and thus attended to how ‘affective practices sediment in social formations’ (Wetherell, 2012: 103). In foregrounding participants’ spatial sense of belonging, we centre the emotional dimensions to the process of attributing meaning to racialised and gendered social divisions that manifest in everyday life. Thus, we contribute to a growing body of research which centres the situated and contextual nature of emotions and the important role that they play in constituting social life and social hierarchies (Pain and Smith, 2008). In particular, we have highlighted the ways in which subtle everyday racisms are confining and containing young Muslim men in place. Recognition of new hierarchies of belonging are only recently emerging in scholarship on racialisation (Back et al., 2012) and our research provides a start to exploring these shifting boundaries in the context of Luton. While Watts and Stenson’s (1998) work in the 1990s suggested that Caribbean and Asian youth were relatively less likely to experience extensive mobility beyond their local areas in comparison with white youth, amongst our participants, this experience of containment was most pronounced amongst Muslim young men. Further research is needed to investigate how the experience of the city produces femininities as well as masculinities and the extent to which masculine narratives are constructed in relation to differential power relations that disadvantage women.