Everyday multiculturalism: Theorising the difference between ‘intersectionality’ and ‘multiple identities’

Introduction

A common theme running through theories of the everyday is a distinction between ‘surface’ or ‘front stage’ sociability and ‘back stage’ or hidden social forces ‘beneath the surface’. The everyday in this sense is open to deconstructive critiques that probe beneath the surface of daily life, to disclose hidden intersections of multiple inequalities – of class, race, ethnicity, age and gender – pointing further to the need for policy reform. Such critical probing behind the façade of the everyday often fails, however, to recognise the powerful impact of surface solidarities, the egalitarianism and amity produced by everyday sociality whenever actors highlight a shared identity held in common that enables them to engage in positive communication and shared performance across their differences.

In the present paper, I focus on everyday multiculturalism, the routine, unreflective inter-ethnic encounters and interactions occurring daily among first-generation immigrants to Britain in the 1970s, first and second generations in the 1990s, and second- and third-generation immigrants in contemporary Britain, in 2012, in order to demonstrate that although inequalities and discrimination against ethnic minorities or immigrants may persist beneath the surface, everyday multiculturalism also forms the grounds for an emergent positive, shared intersubjectivity. This is so because the surface of everyday life, as Goffman argued, has a normative moral power that cannot, and should not, be underestimated. Scholarly frameworks starting from the stress on negative identities – subject to discrimination – within a field of power relations must thus be grasped, the paper proposes, as quite different from analyses that start from the positive aspects of valorised multiple ethnic and diasporic identities. This paper argues thus for a contrast between positive and negative forms of identification, the former a source of solidarity and taken-for-granted, shared understandings, the latter subject to inferiorising, stigmatising and discriminatory constructions. While positive identities are marked or objectified situationally, often in subaltern diasporic public spheres hidden from the public eye, negative identities, whether of class, gender, race or sexuality, are reified, racialised and essentialised by the dominant society in everyday contexts as fixed and immutable. The contrast I draw is thus between a theory of ‘multiple identities’ (positive) and ‘intersectionality’ theory (a multiplicity of negatively constructed identities). I develop this contrast fully later in this paper.

First, however, in order to embed these two theoretical approaches historically in a theory of the everyday, the need is to develop a further distinction between the experiences of first-generation and second- or third-generation immigrants to Britain, understood in terms of their capacity to communicate effectively across ethnic divisions in everyday contexts. Second-generation immigrants, unlike the first generation, easily practise everyday multiculturalism, I propose here, because they share the taken-for-granted systems of relevancy appropriate to different interactive contexts. This may also point to a historic transformation in Britain’s ‘banal’ self-understanding of itself as a multi-racial, multi-cultural nation as it has moved away from the initial postwar experience of Commonwealth immigration.

I illustrate the difference between immigrant generations arriving into postwar Britain first, by examining the everyday communicative challenges faced by British South Asian first-generation immigrants, before moving on to probe the significance of everyday multiculturalism for successive immigrant generations once they had developed community institutions and finally, as interethnic amity came to be celebrated in the 2012 London Olympics. Despite the surface harmony of Team GB in the 2012 London Olympics, however, I show that media critics and commentators grasped the Games as a ‘text’ to be decoded, interpreted and deconstructed in order to highlight hidden inequalities. Even so, the banal nationalism displayed publicly in the Olympics as an international sporting event, I conclude, appeared to point to a more inclusive, heterogeneous conception of the ‘we’ of the nation, taken as an everyday truth of contemporary Britain.

Methodologically, the examples of South Asian immigrants in Britain are based on my own participant observationary fieldwork in 1975–1976 and 1988–1995 and participant observation by Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz (1982) in the 1970s. Research on the 2012 London Olympics was based on television viewing before, during and after the games, and on newspaper reports and commentary about the Games. These supplemented more general, if casual, observations of everyday ethnicity in contemporary Britain. While there are undoubtedly painful issues regarding relations with Muslims in the decade after September 2011 and even before it which are referred to in my discussion of the Pakistani diaspora, these did not arise during the Games even though at least one key participant was a Muslim.

The contrast between intersectionality, a negative politics of hidden multiple inequalities, and multiple identities as a positive politics of recognition, is analysed in this paper taking as an example of positive ethnicity the situational play of identities in the South Asian diaspora. In the final part of this paper, I consider the force of everyday multiculturalism and the conviviality it fosters in Britain, a country where the state actively encourages the socialisation of children into a shared language and culture, while acknowledging cultural diversity in schools in relation to religious festivals. Despite this hegemonic thrust, public events like the Olympics highlight the way everyday multiculturalism has created common modes of everyday celebration without denying immigrant descendants’ ethnic identities. Against Gilroy’s contention that Britain remains locked in postcolonial melancholia, unable to escape either the glories or guilt of Empire (e.g. Gilroy, 2004, 2006), I suggest that everyday multiculturalism (his multicultural ‘conviviality’) has now become a dominant force within British society.

I begin by considering the ‘worlds’ of postwar first-generation Commonwealth immigrants to Britain, the children of Empire ‘returning’ to the mother country.

Immigrants and their worlds

Writing about the communicative challenges facing recent South Asian immigrants to the United Kingdom in the 1970s, Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz demonstrate that at stake in inter-ethnic communication are ‘subtle cues’ which are ‘not easy to perceive in the course of the interaction itself’. Even ‘an odd word or turn of phrase’, they say, ‘or a misunderstood tone of voice, can seriously affect trust among participants’. When this is so, ‘many individuals from both the majority and minority ethnic groups do not cope well in stressful situations of interethnic communication and then, as they do not recognize the reasons, have various ways of blaming each other’ (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, 1982: 8).

Communicative breakdowns, it seems, are common even when immigrants speak English reasonably well. In immigrant encounters within everyday, bureaucratic situations interaction breaks down repeatedly and attempts to ‘repair’ the breakdown by rephrasing comments and questions merely serve to augment the widening communicative gulf. In particular, ‘indirect’ communication, which relies on knowing the unspoken rules and expectations of the social situation, frequently fails (Jupp et al., 1982).

Faced with such breakdowns in communication, in which new migrants are constructed negatively, stigmatised as beyond and outside society and thus legimately subject to discrimination, immigrants often create alternative ‘worlds’ in which ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions and ‘systems of relevancies’ in Schutz’s terms (1962, 1973) are reconstituted and with them a sense of worth, of positive, valorised subjectivity is re-established. In these hermetic worlds, the surface of everyday life flows smoothly and easily, without shocking interruptions or disruptions that may threaten to reveal immigrants’ sense of foreignness or otherness. Living in an immigrant residential enclave or ‘ghetto’ is one way to recreate a sense of home in a strange land. Take, for example, Longsight in Manchester during the 1970s, the South Asian, central residential cluster, as I described it in my early fieldwork among Pakistani migrants to Britain ¹ :

Second-generation ethnicity and everyday multiculturalism: The 2012 London Olympics

Second-generation immigrants in the UK have been socialised by schools and peers into the commonsense unspoken assumptions of everyday life in Britain. In Schutz’s terms (Schutz, 1962), they share with other locals the same system of relevancies, expectations, communicative skills and modes of typification. They ‘read’ one another’s gestures and facial expressions and ‘know’ how to respond ‘correctly’. Everyday multiculturalism depends on these shared readings and skills. This was evident in Team GB’s presentation of itself in the London 2012 Olympics. The team was composed of athletes and players whose parents had originated from many different countries. In one case, that of Moh Farah, the long-distance runner, Moh, the son of a Somali immigrant to the UK, had arrived in England as a refugee from Somalia at the age of 8 but was nevertheless fully anglicised. Indeed, despite their incredible diversity of origins, all the players spoke with recognisably regional British accents and responded to interviews in an unselfconsciously competent and articulate way, with wide smiles and a mixture of very English elation and modesty, sharing their joy with the crowds and viewers at home. As they wrapped themselves in the Union Jack and ran victory runs around the stadium, or stood for the national anthem with tears in their eyes, there was no doubting their Englishness (or Britishness). They were patriots through and through: their victories were national victories and they were evidently proud to represent their country. They touched the hearts of the nation with their courage, skill and determination.

The Olympics was also a drama of mutual tolerance and friendship among nations. Seen in Goffmanesque dramaturgical terms (Goffman, 1959, 1974; see also Kristiansen, 2009), the Olympic front stage performance was of amity and harmony despite the intense competitiveness of participants. Players hugged or shook hands with one another after each competition. The moral values exhibited were of mutual respect, support, admiration and public civility. These encompassed the audience and media as well. Players thanked the spectators for their amazing support and spoke of the inspiration they drew from the loud cheers that followed them. In this context, everyday multiculturalism involved highlighting a shared British identity and normative values, whatever one’s origins. The Olympics as a ritualised social manifestation of the everyday clearly preserved the sanctity, dignity and worth of participants and protected the structured moral order of national everyday life (on this respect and civility see Goffman, 1967, 1971; Kristiansen, 2009: 223–224). Everyday multiculturalism in Britain, the Olympics highlighted, is routinely marked by public civility, a suppression of embarrassing intrusiveness or disruptive misunderstandings.

Goffman also recognised, of course, the extent to which a person’s stigmatised or ‘spoiled’ identity may be revealed in social encounters despite her or his attempt to disguise it (Goffman, 1963). This points to an alternative route to understanding the everyday drama of the Olympics, one which probes beneath the surface of apparent homogeneity and normative agreement. To take but one example: after the Olympics opening ceremony that celebrated joyous, harmonious, multicultural Britain, an extreme Right-wing Tory MP, Aidan Burley, attacked Danny Boyle’s extravaganza as ‘leftie multi-cultural c—’. He was roundly condemned by a chorus of tweeters and the media for divisive racism. As the games unfolded, the media began to probe beneath the surface by analysing the backgrounds of players – their class, gender and ethnic origins. They approached the Olympics as a ‘text’ to be interpreted, in the sense suggested by Clifford Geertz (1973) following Paul Ricoeur (1981: 207–221). They deconstructed the display of joyous amity by revealing the unsaid and hidden inequalities beneath the surface. While this harmonious surface was sustained in these media accounts, they nevertheless also exposed unmarked power relations and possible inequalities.

At stake, then, in understanding the dynamics of everyday multiculturalism, as revealed in an event such as the Olympics, is a fundamental contrast between two dimensions of identity: intersectional identities, pointing to hidden inequalities in a field of power relations, and ethnic multiple identities, pointing to the situational highlighting of shared, positive identities, defined collectively as moral and virtuous.

Multiple and intersecting identities – Negative and positive scholarly frameworks ²

Intersectionality has become an increasingly important framework for analysing multiple forms of disadvantage, a way of examining how social inequalities are intensified by simultaneous membership in a range of stigmatised or devalued categories with gender, race, age, ability, sexuality, and ethnicity being the most salient. Social gerontologists speak of double or even triple jeopardy, the piling up of such stigmata. Feminists have argued that women are not just women: they are fractured by other social divisions of class, race, age, nationality, ability, sexuality and so forth. Patricia Hill-Collins speaks of a ‘matrix of domination’ (1991). Intersectionality defines ‘positionalities along axes of power’ (Yuval-Davis, 2011: 13).

Studying the intersection between these broad social categories is not, however, quite as straightforward as might appear at first glance. Gender or race are not ‘identities’ in the same way, as Nira Yuval-Davis, for example, argues: ‘each category of oppression has a different ontological basis, which is irreducible to other social divisions’ (2006). Moreover, the categories themselves disguise divisions within them; treating them as homogeneous risks naturalising or essentialising them. This means that a simple ‘additive intersectionality model’ must fail since it cannot capture the nuanced positioning of particular subjects. Nor can one guess at the hierarchy of values in different cultural traditions: for example, the extent to which old age is respected in some societies.

The critique of so-called identity politics is usually taken to refer to the tendency of each identitarian group – the disabled, women, anti-racists, etc. – to form a separate social movement demanding recognition, social justice and rights. But the fragmentation and disconnection among these movements weakens them considerably. Against that, intersectionality in a positive sense refers to the need to form alliances; to use Mouffe's phrase (1992), to create a ‘radical democratic pluralist politics’ which are expansive and inclusive. Intersectionality also allows for the possibility of transveral politics, as Yuval-Davis calls them, in the search for peace between former enemies (1997).

Clearly, the study of intersectionality as the piling up of negatively defined identities has policy implications. It explains why some people are extremely disadvantaged and need a good deal of support. It provides a reasonably complex answer to why some people are more vulnerable than others. The question is: are gender, race, age and so forth in the way they are defined by intersectionality theory to be considered as identities? The key feature they all share, it should be noted, is their negative construction. They are stigmatised social categories that increase the chances of discrimination and disadvantage in the labour market in particular. They indicate the closing off of possibilities, not their opening up. They are narratives of failure. True, the struggle for rights can be creative culturally, but this appears to fall outside the strict definition of intersectionality in the scholarly literature.

Intersectionality seems on the face of it to be a cognate or related aspect of ethnicity, especially when members of ethnic groups stress multiple identities and affiliations or cultural hybridity – but as I intend to show here, such a stress on multiple identities is in fact quite different from intersectionality. As an example of the multiple identities, British Pakistanis in Manchester proclaim, embrace and perform their different identities situationally, in spaces they themselves have constructed materially, symbolically and imaginatively. In this sense, I have argued that,

… identities constitute subjective narratives of virtue and moral commitment. The fact that a person has heterogeneous identities, a multiplicity of identities, does not imply contradiction, ambivalence or a lack of commitment, because identities matter in context. They are played out in different identity spaces and foregrounded oppositionally. (Werbner, 2002: 267)

By contrast to intersectional identities, Pakistanis valorise their multiple identities. In the light of this, I argue for the need to differentiate between processes of objectification, the situational highlighting of positive identities in different contexts, and reification, the violent fixing of subordinated and excluded identities (Werbner, 1997, 2002). Stigmatised identities, defined negatively, are reified and subordinated. In the language of intersectionality, identities of gender or race imply an essentialising definitional move on the part of the wider, dominant society that subordinates and excludes. By contrast, in my reading of ethnicity as an expression of multiple identities, such identities are positive, creative, dialogical and situational. Hence, for example, to draw once again on my research among British Pakistanis, British Pakistanis belong in a taken-for-granted way not to a single diaspora but to several different diasporas – Asian, Muslim, Pakistani nationalist, Punjabi – a complex diaspora, each identity pointing to different aesthetic and ethical expressions, imaginatively performed. Most of the time British Pakistanis keep these identities apart, though at times they fuse them. Different types of cultural performance celebrate different imagined diasporas – the Pakistani ‘nation’, the Asian ‘community’, the Muslim ‘umma’, the South Asian ‘diaspora’. Intersecting with these visionary narratives are the often clashing political ideas held by actors about the nature of democracy, citizenship, power, morality and identity.

Against simplistic celebrations of cultural hybridity, however, the cultural ceremonials and celebrations of diaspora staged by Manchester Pakistanis also highlight the situational co-existence of many valorised cultural purities – Islamic, South Asian, Punjabi – each contextually enacted but nevertheless experienced as emotionally compelling. Being ‘Pakistani’, it becomes clear, far from referring to a fixed, reified identity, encompasses a historically produced multiplicity created in response to diasporic and subcontinental movements: of Islamicisation, Empire, modernism and nationalism, and further embedded in religious, regional and linguistic traditions.

Celebrating these different identities, Pakistani diasporans have created three lived-in diasporic everyday ‘worlds’: the South Asian, with its aesthetic of fun and laughter, of vivid colours and fragrances, of music and dance; the Islamic, with its utopian vision of a perfect moral order; and the Pakistani, with its roots in the soil, in family, community and national loyalties, expressed also in competitive sports like cricket. The identities evoked in the narratives – of nation, local community, religion and diaspora – are at times fused, at times kept strictly separated.

Understanding such diasporic public arenas also reveals the different kinds of silences with which diasporic Pakistanis have to contend. On the one hand are the imposed silences produced by the majority population’s social denial or negation. These are the silences of racism and cultural xenophobia. On the other hand are the voluntary ‘silences’ of submerged identities, highlighted situationally, in social interaction. These highly valued ethnic and gendered identifications – Islamic, South Asian, British, Pakistani, Punjabi, feminist – co-exist for actors, but they are kept apart and elaborated in different public arenas or identity ‘spaces’. Such multiple identities nest and cross-cut each other, dividing or creating wider unities. In their cultural performances, British Pakistanis respond to both racism and xenophobia and also naturalise their multiple identities, vesting them with current value in Britain.

Public events crystallise symbolic complexes (Handelman, 1990). French theorists such as Lefebvre and Bourdieu argue that social spaces are imaginatively and materially constructed, yet unlike institutionalised spaces, they are empowered or negotiated through contestation (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]; Bourdieu, 1985). Because public arenas are symbolically constructed, the ‘spaces’ they open up are also cultural embodiments of historically situated identities. This points to the fact that the creation of diasporic spaces of identity requires significant material investment and hence also social mobilisation. Social space in this sense may be defined as the nexus of financial, organisational, cultural and imaginative investment.

The importance of studying multiple identities lies in the recognition that none of the social unities we evoke – identity, diaspora, community, nation, tradition – are consensus-based wholes; all are the products of ongoing debates and political struggles or alliances. Rather than the ‘clash of civilisations’ posed by Huntington (1993), oppositions between Islam and Christianity or Judaism themselves represent arguments of identity and political struggles for ‘honour’ and ‘dignity’, not fundamental divisions of dogma. It is in the rejection of the possibility of debate that violence occurs. Racial violence is the opposite of everyday ethnicity or multiculturalism – of arguments of identity – because it institutes as truth an absence of dialogue, a silence, a turning away. Instead of mutual recognition and moral responsibility, racism and xenophobia are the products of violation and misrecognition.

Identities are not pre-given but are culturally rooted. They nest within each and emerge situationally. Just as individual Pakistanis have a unique configuration of identities, so too the diaspora, seen as moral community, is not a single, culturally homogeneous whole. But nor is it simply irreparably divided. It is united through its heterogeneity: through the complex web of cross-cutting ties and arguments of identity among its members. To understand the diaspora is to recognise that it is shaped through a political imaginary of heterogeneity, not a homogeneous singular whole. Within the diasporic public sphere that Pakistanis have created in Britain, communication may be conflictual and confrontational, the mutual accusations and recriminations bitter and condemnatory, the political and religious disagreements sharp and unbridgeable. But in being focused around shared celebrations, predicaments and places, these arguments create a bounded arena of focused communal value. The cross-cutting, multiple conflicts themselves create overarching unities. In this sense, differently positioned ideological and interpretive understandings and commitment, first divide and then unite Pakistanis.

The contrast between intersectional, negatively defined identities and ethnic multiple identities may be presented in tabular form (see Table 1).

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Table 1.

Intersectionality versus multiple identities.

Intersectional identities	Multiple ethnic identity/identifications
Field of power and inequality	A demand for dignity and recognition
Multiple positions of disadvantage, discrimination and/or oppression	Multiple expressions of subjectivity and collective imaginaries
Defined negatively	Defined positively
Disempowering	Empowering
Narratives of victimhood and suffering	Narratives of virtue/achievement
Creativity born in struggle	Aesthetic/cultural creativity
Chains of alliances based on shared predicaments	Local/global identifications based on shared aesthetics and morality
Social critique	Desire for recognition and freedom
Demand for social justice	Desire to have social/cultural autonomy
External confrontation	Embodied performance, often intraethnic
Simultaneity (double/tripe jeopardy)	Situational selection
Spaces of protest	Spaces of celebration, debate, oratory
Producers of discourses of oppression	Producers of material ‘worlds’ and rhetoric
Repetitive/predictable social categories/identities irrespective of context	Identities rooted in specific cultural milieus and understandings
Essentialised, reified	Dialogical

The matter can be put somewhat differently: when identities of belonging are performed situationally, all the other identities a person has will remain unmarked; only relevant identities will be marked and thus objectified in situ. To the extent that identities are located on a power grid of inequality, they remain inescapable even when they seem to be unmarked. In this case, we may say that they are reified or essentialised.

Deconstructing the London 2012 Olympics

To return to the Olympics. The early harvest of gold medals elicited the statistic that 44% of the medalists had attended private British schools. The media thus underscored the invisibility of class privilege beneath the victories, implicitly condemning class inequalities in British society. By the final day, the number of public school Olympians had reduced to a third, still well above their proportion in the population, as Jeevan Vasagar (2012), the Guardian Education editor, pointed out:

The proportion of state-educated gold medal winners is broadly similar to previous Games. The proportion of privately educated Olympic winners (37%) is similar to that for MPs (35%), but less than leading journalists (54%) or judges (70%), according to previous Sutton Trust studies ³ .

As one might expect in Britain, class was regarded by analysts as a key identity, defining unequal access to power and entitlement. The predominance of public school Olympians had political significance: state schools had borne the brunt of government cuts in sports education. The public demand after the Olympics was to reverse the cuts. The disproportionate number of private school athletes highlighted continuing inequalities in British society.

As the games progressed, it became evident that many of the gold medalists were women and/or ethnic minorities. Many, like Jessica Ennis, whose father was a Jamaican, or Moh Farah, originating from Somaliland, had attended comprehensive schools. In a remarkable about-turn, even the previously anti-immigrant tabloid Sun newspaper was now celebrating Britain’s ethnic diversity, as Hugh Muir (2012) commented ironically in a Guardian op-ed ⁴ . One reason, perhaps, that essentialised stereotypes had been smashed in the Olympics along with world records was that in their victory and defeat, the athletes’ individual personalities, beyond ethnicity, race, class or gender, shone through on the TV screens. Their ethnic or gendered identity was evident in their appearance, but far more prominent was their humanity, courage, good humour and patriotism. The question nevertheless remained for commentators: would the transcendent, multicultural amity Britain displayed last beyond the Olympics? Muir cites Lord Ouseley, the former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, who predicted pessimistically that ‘black and minority Britons will still fare badly in the labour market, the housing market and other areas’ (ibid.).

But not everyone was celebrating multicultural amity. The Daily Mail, digging beneath the surface, ran a campaign for several weeks reigniting a ‘controversy’ of its own making over ‘plastic Brits’. This followed the revelation that 11% of the 542-strong team GB, 61 athletes, were born overseas, including a recently arrived Cuban triple jumper and a Ukrainian woman wrestler ⁵ . Clearly, if not colour or origins, then lack of authenticity could equally be turned into a national threat. In their responses, the Guardian and New Statesmen condemned this ‘ugly term’ (Katwala, 2012; Eaton, 2012), the latter quoting Mo Farah, who responded to a journalist asking him if he would have preferred to run as a Somali:

Look mate, this is my country. This is where I grew up, this is where I started life. This is my country and when I put on my Great Britain vest I’m proud. I’m very proud. (Eaton, 2012)

The Guardian defended team GB’s composition by arguing that ‘Ours is a shared and civic identity’; indeed, if ‘one in 10 of Team GB were born abroad, […] so were one in 10 of the whole country, along with a rather higher proportion of the Olympic volunteers, reflecting the history and demographics of London today’ (Katwala, 2012).

One notable absence not identified by the media was that of British South Asian athletes. None had won a medal (though Amir Khan, the boxer from Bolton, had won silver in the 2004 Athens Olympics). There is no obvious explanation for this absence: are British South Asians not part of the ‘new’ Britain? Do they not share in its everyday multiculturalism? Athletes of West Indian and African backgrounds dominated both in team GB and in their national teams. This meant that diasporic British Jamaicans, for example, celebrated their multiple Jamaican and British identities, highlighting them situationally, in different identity spaces; no one compelled them to choose between one identity and another. They were not compelled to choose between Essien Bolt, the Jamaican runner, or Jessica Ennis. The Olympics highlighted and objectified a shared British identity, with other identifications remaining unmarked, to be celebrated in other, diasporic contexts (Muir, 2012).

Deconstructive interpretations necessarily ask about absences as well as presences. They trace the politics beneath the surface, the economic and political forces that produce the particular feel of everyday multiculturalism and shape actors’ subjectivities. They highlight the intersection of multiple inequalities of class, race, ability and gender, and the need for policy reform. But such deconstructive analyses cannot fully theorise the power and impact of solidarities, egalitarianism and amity produced by everyday multiculturalism, the routine inter-ethnic encounters and interactions taking place daily in contemporary Britain, in which specific ethnic interests and identities remained unmarked or allowed to surface in joking and humour. This surface of everyday life, as we saw Goffman argued, has a normative moral power that cannot, and should not, be underestimated.

Between banal nationalism and postcolonial melancholia

International sporting events like the Olympics are a prime example of both official expressions of nationalism and, simultaneously, of what Billig (1995) has called ‘banal nationalism’, the unconscious display of nationalism (2009: 348). As Billig sums it up,

Banal Nationalism attempted to look beyond the dialogues of conscious sensemaking towards a psychology of the unnoticed. The flags hanging in the street, or attached to the lapels of politicians, carry no propositional message for the ordinary citizen to receive passively or consciously argue against. Yet, such symbols help to maintain the everyday world as belonging to the world of nation-states. (Billig, 2009: 349)

Although Billig’s theory has been criticised, particularly for not recognising subnational (Scottish, Welsh) or globalising (‘Americanising’) forms of ‘banal’ belonging, and for thus assuming national homogeneity (see Skey, 2009), such critiques fail to recognise that the banality of everyday nationalism as theorised by Billig is key to understanding nationalism’s expansive capacity; the ability of a nation to accommodate over time racial and ethnic heterogeneity in taken-for-granted, unconscious ways. Unlike so-called hot nationalisms which are usually exclusionary and often racist or xenophobic, and include such right wing movements as the Ku Klux Klan or European and British fascist groups and parties, banal nationalism is in many respects benign. It may even encompass non-citizens, for example in celebrations of the Queen’s jubilee.

It could still be suggested, however, that the apparent national inclusiveness enacted in the Olympics by Team GB was in reality artificial and contrived, ‘scripted’ in advance by the organisers. But such an argument would miss a central point of my argument here: that while scripting was undoubtedly there in the very programming of events, rather than undermining the possibility of a positively expressed ‘British’ identity, the existence of such scripting underscores the potentiality of positive ethnicity; namely, that although most everyday social situations are scripted rather than being inherently spontaneous, they open up spaces for the expression and framing of multiple positive as well as negative identities. Framing is key to understanding theories of the everyday: whatever new features are introduced into a scripted social situation must be negotiated among players; in the case of the Olympics, these negotiations took place among athletes, the media and spectators in the context of framed events. They allowed for spontaneous moments, as when Moh Farah kissed the ground after he emerged victorious thus signalling his Muslim identity. But even beyond such specific performances, the very emotional intensity of joyful expression, by the crowds as well as the athletes, the roars of approval, the tears and smiles, created shared moments of effervescence beyond scripting.

A further question arises, given that many of the most outstanding athletes and players were descendents of Empire. Could it be argued that rather than simple patriotism and multicultural conviviality, the 2011 Olympics were a disguised form of postcolonial melancholia, an expression of Britain’s inability to come to terms fully with its loss of Empire and thus its desire to recapture its past glory (see Gilroy, 2005). One simple response to such an argument is that nations do love to win – this is perhaps the most banal feature of banal nationalism, and is certainly not a symptom of a specific British postcolonial melancholia ⁶ . If there were historical echoes of Empire beneath the surface of the Olympics 2011 celebrations, these were of the Commonwealth as a contemporary collective achievement, rather than of British yearning for lost imperial glory.

This is not to deny that there are still anti-racist battles to be fought in Britain today, as Lord Ouseley, we saw, cautioned. Although far less prevalent and pervasive than in the immediate postwar period, everyday racism and institutional racism may co-exist in some places and contexts with everyday multiculturalism. Everyday racism, the taken-for-granted almost unconscious practices of everyday life that reproduce structural inequalities and legitimise racist ideologies (Essed, 1991), can be difficult to root out. This is, of course, the challenge posed by intersectional theory – to identify those ‘negative’ identities like race, class, ability or gender that reproduce inequality and stigma almost surreptitiously, in the interstices of everyday life. But as Philomena Essed points out, and as this paper has proposed, we need also to take cognisance of the fact that knowledge of the everyday is ‘transmitted by each generation to its successors’ (Essed, 2002: 187). Without such a ‘minimum knowledge of how to cope in everyday life’, which includes ‘expectations and scripts’, ‘one cannot handle living in society’, she says (ibid.). Successive generations of migrants, I have argued here, can become adept at switching between their multiple positive identities so that they no longer fail to read the signals and scripts that make everyday life flow smoothly and quite often – as in the 2011 Olympics – joyously.

Conclusion

Everyday multiculturalism may seem like a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. To the extent that actors’ valorised multiple ethnic identities remain unmarked and only one single, shared identity is highlighted, the interactive spaces they create may arguably be construed as the very opposite of multiculturalism. What makes these spaces ‘multicultural’ is that players are recognised and recognise themselves as bearing multiple ethnic identities even if these are played out situationally elsewhere. They embrace this multiplicity while apparently disattending to it for the sake of public civility.

It is significant, I think, that the subtitle to Gilroy’s book is set as a question: melancholia or convivial culture? Whereas the first notion, postcolonial melancholia, he attributes to the ‘political classes’, the latter, everyday multicultural conviviality, is seen as emerging in the interstices of Britain’s multi-ethnic global cities. The 2011 Olympics challenged this dichotomy by displaying multicultural conviviality publicly, officially and massively, a banal achievement of contemporary British society, including the majority of its political classes.

Elsewhere I have distinguished between multiculturalism ‘as usual’ and multiculturalism ‘in history’, the first referring to the public display of diversity in ethnic foods, clothing, religions, modes of celebration and so forth in contemporary Britain, the latter to apparently incommensurable cultural conflicts that arise historically, like the Rushdie or Danish cartoon ‘affairs’ (Werbner, 2005). A further distinction may be drawn between multiculturalism ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, the former a politicised discourse denouncing community funding by the state as leading to cultural separateness, the latter a legitimate demand for recognition by ethnic minorities themselves (Werbner, 2012). In the present paper, I have suggested that despite its apparently tenuous, apolitical invisibility, everyday multiculturalism is an achievement: a cohesive, normative, moral force which resists and transcends fragmentation and division, while allowing for many different identities to be sustained and nourished beneath the surface, in other contexts.