Part 2: Britain: A history of shopkeeping, empire and racial tensions

Space, smells and cosmopolitanism in the British Asian corner shop by Sita Balani In my last post I sketched out a history of the corner shop as a key and mundane site of English nation building, subverted and reconfigured by post-war migration and the movement of colonial others into the heart of this national institution.… Read More

Britain: A history of shopkeeping, empire and racial tensions

by Sita Balani   This Is England directed by Shane Meadows (2006) is explicit in its concern with race and national identity: eponymous England is a place heaving with racial tension in the story of Shaun, a white working class boy in the North East in the early 1980s, who finds friendship and guidance in… Read More