Foregrounding new ethnicities. Hall’s (1988) ‘new ethnicities’ thesis was situated within the changing conceptualisation of the ‘black’ ethnic/racial category during 1970s and 1980s Britain. Xxxx maintained that such a category was changeable because it had been politically, culturally and discursively constructed by ‘historical formations of hegemony’ rather than being fixed by nature (Xxxxxx, 1996, p. 454). He pinpointed two conceptual changes in the meaning of the ‘black’ category within the ideology of anti-racism. The first change occurred in opposition to the essentialist conceptualisation of the black/white binary, when the category of black was used by Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities as a term of reference to unify a common experience of racism and marginalisation, which became hegemonic over other new ethnicities24 (Hall, 1996, p. 443). This conceptual change produced new ethnicities25 in the 1970s (Hall, 1992a). However, this meant that the black category had been further simplified and stereotyped. The second change occurred with the recognition of the diversity of the black category in terms of social variables, such as class, sexuality, ethnicity and gender. This meant that the essentialist racial category of ‘black’ together with the language of binary opposites were no longer viable (Hall, 1996). New ethnicities would seem to be constructed by blurring traditional ethnic boundaries as people from Africa and Asia have settled in Britain. Xxxx called for the re-theorisation of ethnicity and difference so that such people could be referred to in less essentialising ways. It would seem that Xxxx is offering a third way between essentialist ‘race’ rhetoric and the emptiness of free floating ethnicities offered by post modernists (Xxxxx, 1999). New ethnicities refer to anti-essentialist notions of ethnicity, which are fluid and changeable as they are socially and politically constructed through discourse rather than being biologically formed. This means that Xxxx is taking an instrumentalist approach to ethnicity in that he believes that ethnicity is socially constructed and that individuals can forge their ethnicities from a variety of ethnic heritages and cultures (Xxxxxxxxxx and Xxxxx, 1996). It is Xxxx’x way of conceptualising ethnicity which is particularly useful for my research into the A-Js, which I will examine later. First I want to mention some potential problems and limitations in Xxxx’x work on ethnicities in relation to my A-J ethnic formation.
