In this section I’ll be criss-crossing from my usual research sites, coastal spaces around the Indian Ocean (Kerala, India and the Gulf states of U.A.E and Oman) and my home-site of Worthing, to think about ‘coastal identities’.  Over summer I’ll be reading Burdsey’s new book. Then I’ll be roaming Worthing and talking to people about the place of whiteness in the English seaside town.

This is where you can access the full text of one of Burdsey’s articles. ‘Strangers on the Shore’.

The abstract (summary) runs:   This article presents an alternative reading of the English seaside – one that centralizes race, specifically the effects of whiteness and racialized notions of belonging and exclusion. It addresses three main issues. First, it provides a theoretical discussion of the racialized production of social space and place, and outlines the implications for minority ethnic groups at the seaside. Second, it offers an examination of the manner in which discourses of whiteness and (neo-)colonial fantasy are reproduced through amusements and other elements of seaside popular culture. Third, it demonstrates the centrality of the seaside to analysing dominant, racialized interpretations of English national identity and demotic responses to contemporary immigration. The article argues that the seaside is an enlightening site for understanding contemporary constructions, manifestations and repercussions of whiteness, and thus provides an important insight into the cultural and spatial politics of race in 21st-century Britain.

For a truly Brit-sarky look at English coastalness, see this series: http://rubbishseaside.com/

For a blog written by a Worthing based expat mum about living here, see Bringing Up Brits.

And if you want to read something that I wrote about one of the other coastal spaces that I move in – Calicut / Kozhikode, Kerala – you can find it here.