Places of Sameness : Integration Policy, Localism and the Big Society

Abstract

This chapter looks at integration policy narratives under the Coalition and relates them to government policies on localism and the Big Society. It explores the underlying assumptions about the nature of ‘place’ that underpin all three policy areas, and that instate place as ‘naturally’ tied to familiarity, sameness and stasis. This then becomes a way to tell a singular story about the local that produces difference as inevitably problematic and that sites that difference in the racialized bodies of minoritized populations, especially migrants and Muslims. Much of this narrative works through a mobilizing of notions of ‘the common’—the common good of ‘the people’, a common culture of ‘the nation’ and a naturalized common sense. Rhetorical moves to foreground these various versions of the common become a way to instate sameness as the necessary precondition for belonging. Difference is something that is imported from an elsewhere, and which threatens an already settled British way of life, values and principles. The role of the austere state, here, is to limit the amount of difference that can be allowed to penetrate the spaces of the local, and to ration its entitlements to those who will not seriously unsettle these imagined places of sameness. Muted, but nevertheless persistent, intersections of race with gender permeate this narrative, in the ways in which place is attached to the feminized sphere of reproduction, and gender equality itself is culturalized and turned into a fixed quality that marks the boundary between a settled British majority and a racialized minority resistant to integration on majority terms.