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The uses and abuses of class : left nationalism and the denial of working-class multiculture
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Valluvan, Sivamohan (2019) The uses and abuses of class : left nationalism and the denial of working-class multiculture. The Sociological Review, 67 (1). pp. 36-46. doi:10.1177/0038026118820295 ISSN 0038-0261.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118820295
Abstract
This article establishes the importance of recognizing what Satnam Virdee describes as the wider racial history of ‘socialist nationalism’. Attentiveness to this formation attests to a broader attempt to resist the tendency of much contemporary analysis to attribute to today’s reconsolidated nationalism an elite, unitary and generically rightist character. It remains important to observe how racial nationalisms’ heightened contemporary appeal hinges crucially on the convergence of multiple and often contradictory ‘political rationalities’ – only some of which speak to elite machinations and/or attempts to manage the capitalist crisis. Particularly telling here is how nationalist politics ably call upon certain leftist registers: as premised on an iconography of working class plight alongside an institutional programme of welfare state entitlement as tied to exclusive visions of working class community. The second half of the article issues, in turn, an antidote to this class-coded nationalist consolidation. A renewed case for the importance of everyday multiculture, as a decidedly working class formation, is advanced. Whilst rebuking the forms of exotic romanticism and excessively upbeat vigour that characterises some multiculture research – alongside the tendency to only locate such multiculture in more fabled ‘global cities’ – the article argues here that such multiculture is a political repertoire that ably subverts the nationalist attempt to monopolize class for its own political ends.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HX Socialism. Communism. Anarchism |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Sociology | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | The Sociological Review | ||||||||
Publisher: | SAGE Publications | ||||||||
ISSN: | 0038-0261 | ||||||||
Official Date: | 1 January 2019 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 67 | ||||||||
Number: | 1 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 36-46 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1177/0038026118820295 | ||||||||
Status: | Not Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | Valluvan, S. (2019). The uses and abuses of class: Left nationalism and the denial of working class multiculture. The Sociological Review, 67(1), 36–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118820295. © The Author(s) 2019. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 4 February 2019 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 4 February 2019 |
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