Books by Anne-Marie Fortier
"Multiculturalism is and always has been a deeply emotive and highly contested issue. The intensi... more "Multiculturalism is and always has been a deeply emotive and highly contested issue. The intensity of feelings that multiculturalism invariably ignites is considered in this timely analysis of how the ‘New Britain’ of the 21st century is variously re-imagined as multicultural. Introducing the concept of ‘multicultural intimacies’, Anne-Marie Fortier offers a new form of critical engagement with the cultural politics of multiculturalism, one that attends to ideals of mixing, loving thy neighbour and feelings for the nation. In the first study of its kind, Fortier considers the anxieties, desires, and issues that form discourses of ‘multicultural Britain’ available in the British public domain. She investigates:
-- the significance of gender, sex, generations and kinship, as well as race and ethnicity, in debates about cultural difference;
-- the consolidation of religion as a marker of absolute difference;
-- ‘moral racism’, the criteria for good citizenship and the limits of civility.
This book presents a unique analysis of multiculturalism that draws on insights from critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, post-colonialism, and psychoanalysis. The book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers interested in the cultural politics of neo-liberal ideals of diversity management, tolerance, and the national fantasy.
"
Papers by Anne-Marie Fortier
This thesis is the study of two Italian organisations in London and their role in constructing an... more This thesis is the study of two Italian organisations in London and their role in constructing an Italian 'community', at a time when the Italian population is fragmented and dispersed. In order to understand the languages of solidarity expressed in the two research settings, I use the concept of 'identity formation' and show that institutional practices of identity combine competing definitions to project meaning onto the indeterminate character of the Italian population of London. The essence of my argument is that within these settings, new forms of identity are developing which defy simple notions of 'community' and continuity based on a primary ethnicity. Similarly, models of radical pluralism are inadequate to grasp the complex articulation of roots and routes in the formation of group identities for immigrant populations. Languages of solidarity, in the two organisations, are generated by a group of claims about the historical, political and cultural p...
As we consider what post-Brexit citizenship might look like, it is crucial to understand the perv... more As we consider what post-Brexit citizenship might look like, it is crucial to understand the pervasiveness of anxiety and its integral role in shaping policy processes. Here, Anne-Marie Fortier discusses how anxiety is attached especially to English language ability for applicants, whilst also highlighting the role it plays for those on the other side of the process: the registrars checking applications for citizenship or settlement.
Uprootings/Regroundings Questions of Home and Migration, 2020
Multicultural Horizons, 2008
Understanding the emotive concept of multiculturalism is essential for everyone who is involved i... more Understanding the emotive concept of multiculturalism is essential for everyone who is involved in healthcare delivery, and not just from a practice perspective. Multiculturalism has an impact on education, research and development.
Critical Social Policy, 2016
This article empirically grounds the ‘psychic life of power’ (Butler, 1997) by demonstrating the ... more This article empirically grounds the ‘psychic life of power’ (Butler, 1997) by demonstrating the psychic form that power takes as immigrants or agents of the state make their way through the British ‘citizenisation’ policy – i.e. the ‘integration’ policy that requires noncitizens to acquire ‘citizen-like’ skills and values in view of seeking citizenship or other statuses (e.g. settlement). The framing argument is that an ambivalent relationship between desire and anxiety mediates the state-citizen relationship (following Honig, 2001). Taking this argument further, the article offers an in-depth analysis of how citizenisation policy’s frames of desire (the assumed desirability of citizenship and the desire for desirable citizens) also take the form of anxieties. Drawing on a multi-sited study of citizenisation in Britain, the article explores some of the different forms anxiety takes: fetishisation, enervation, and uncertainty. The analysis reveals how the uneven distribution of anxi...
This paper is an edited version of an email interview conducted by Debra Ferreday and Adi Kuntsma... more This paper is an edited version of an email interview conducted by Debra Ferreday and Adi Kuntsman with Anne-Marie Fortier, the author of Multicultural Horizons: Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation (Routledge 2008). Fortier’s work has been informative in the development of some of the arguments explored in this special issue; in their conversation Ferreday and Kuntsman asked her to comment on the ideas of haunting, racial imaginaries, nostalgia, national anxieties, political feelings and hopes for the future.
Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2012
This chapter is an exploration into what I call the migration imaginary and how it informs practi... more This chapter is an exploration into what I call the migration imaginary and how it informs practices of inclusion and exclusion. Migration has become a key issue at the heart of political debates in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century Europe (and elsewhere). In this chapter, I consider how idea(l)s of national identity, cohesion, and futures are shaped through migration imaginaries.
Migrant Belongings : Memory, Space, Identity
Revista Latino-americana de Geografia e Genero, 2012
Theory, Culture & Society, 1999
Focusing on discourses and practices of identity in an Italian organization in London, this artic... more Focusing on discourses and practices of identity in an Italian organization in London, this article examines the relationship between the construction of the identity of places and the construction of terrains of belonging. Various forms of cultural practices that mark out spatial and identity boundaries for the London Italian population are discussed in relation to the deployment of gender and ethnicity. Advancing a corporeal approach to identity formation, it is argued that displays of the Italian presence in London operate through the repetition of regulatory norms that produces the effect of materialization of cultural belonging through the ethnicizing and gendering of individual bodies. Gender and ethnicity are deeply embedded in one another and their entwinement is to be understood as the outcome of their construction along similar bodily lines. Also, the author shows that gender and ethnicity are mutually dependent on each other for their construction; imperatives of gender s...
Science as Culture, 2012
In 2007, Channel 4 screened Face of Britain, a documentary about the genetic mapping of Britain. ... more In 2007, Channel 4 screened Face of Britain, a documentary about the genetic mapping of Britain. Face of Britain promised to reveal ‘who we really are’ by tracing genetic links back to ancient Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. This article situates Face of Britain within the wider racial and national politics that it is invariably caught up in, and examines
Political Geography, 2014
Modern Italy, 2006
This paper analyses the role of the Centro Scalabrini in London in defining a sense of belonging ... more This paper analyses the role of the Centro Scalabrini in London in defining a sense of belonging and identification for Italians in Britain. The essay broadens the conventional focus on how community organizations contribute to constructing an ‘imagined community’ for minority or migrant populations by suggesting that organizations are used as cultural objects and collective props for enacting and experiencing collective affective belonging abroad. The paper examines the processes through which community spaces themselves are constructed as scenes of ethnicity, for example, in the visual and narrative accounts of events found in the community press. However, rather than arguing that ethnic organizations simply reproduce an identity and culture, it is argued that the community centre offers intimations of ethnicity, as well as ‘intimate ethnicity’, for those who use it and move through it. As a locale in which Italians and other migrants can find themselves again (ritrovarsi), what t...
Citizenship Studies, 2013
This article takes the naturalisation process as a vantage point to consider how citizenship cons... more This article takes the naturalisation process as a vantage point to consider how citizenship constitutes a site of emotional investment not only on the part of applicants and ‘new’ citizens but also on the part of the state. The premise of this article is that naturalisation is more than solely the admission of foreigners to the position and rights of citizenship, and it approaches naturalisation as a state practice that needs to be understood within a politics of desire. The article asks three questions: what makes naturalisation a thinkable and desirable means of acquiring citizenship? Second, what do practices of naturalisation tell us about ‘the state's attachment to particular embodiments of desirable citizens’ (S. Somerville, 2005, Notes toward a queer history of naturalization. American quarterly, 7 (3), 661)? Third, ‘who may desire the state's desire’ (J. Butler, 2002. Is kinship always already heterosexual? Differences, 13 (1), 22)? Using policy documents and auto-ethnographic material, the article examines practices through which the state selects its own objects of desire and produces them as citizens, while it also produces itself as desirable. The article concludes that naturalisation distinguishes desirable from less desirable citizens through fantasies of English proficiency and birthright citizenship. In addition, the staged performance of the citizenship ceremony assures the state of its desirability by subsuming ‘as if’ enactments of citizenship.
Sociology, 2017
This article examines the colonial legacies shaping current language requirements for immigrants ... more This article examines the colonial legacies shaping current language requirements for immigrants applying for settlement or citizenship in Britain. The article argues that common sense understandings of ‘national language’ and monolingualism/multilingualism were developed in the context of imperial expansion, the legacies of which resonate today in a disdain for multilingualism and other Englishes conceived as hampering cohesion. Put simply, other languages and other English are spoken here because English was there. Drawing on interviews with applicants and English teaching professionals, the article discusses how participants variously experience English language requirements. The analysis shows how the colonial legacies supporting the rise of English as a ‘world language’ cast it as the locus of a regime of audibility that establishes a hierarchy between ‘the English’ and the ‘anglicised’. In today’s Britain, the multilingualism of the other is not external and prior to Britain, ...
It’s possible, too, that there is no such thing as one clear line or strand of probability, and t... more It’s possible, too, that there is no such thing as one clear line or strand of probability, and that we live on a sort of twisted braid, blurring from one to the other without even knowing it, as long as we keep within the limits of a set of variations that really make no difference to us. (Russ, 1985: 7) This is the most difficult paper I have ever chosen to prepare. ’ Difficult because it is an attempt to bring my personal voice into an analytical account of my field research observations. Difficult, because it stems from the destabilizing challenge of my conceptual and theoretical understanding of identity formations. Difficult, because this paper grows from the pleasures and pains of walking on boundaries... the pain of refusal and of (self) denial on the very grounds I question. This paper is about my personal experiences in ’the field’, that is in two Italian Catholic ’community centres ’ in London. More specifically, I wish to examine my gendered positions in ’the field’, and...
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Books by Anne-Marie Fortier
-- the significance of gender, sex, generations and kinship, as well as race and ethnicity, in debates about cultural difference;
-- the consolidation of religion as a marker of absolute difference;
-- ‘moral racism’, the criteria for good citizenship and the limits of civility.
This book presents a unique analysis of multiculturalism that draws on insights from critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, post-colonialism, and psychoanalysis. The book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers interested in the cultural politics of neo-liberal ideals of diversity management, tolerance, and the national fantasy.
"
Papers by Anne-Marie Fortier
-- the significance of gender, sex, generations and kinship, as well as race and ethnicity, in debates about cultural difference;
-- the consolidation of religion as a marker of absolute difference;
-- ‘moral racism’, the criteria for good citizenship and the limits of civility.
This book presents a unique analysis of multiculturalism that draws on insights from critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, post-colonialism, and psychoanalysis. The book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers interested in the cultural politics of neo-liberal ideals of diversity management, tolerance, and the national fantasy.
"