We’ve been busy taking pictures at the Intercultural Cities conference. Some of the best are on Flickr here:
http://flickr.com/photos/tenantspin/sets/72157604828236487/

If you also have pictures to share, please upload them to flickr.com and tag them with “interculturalcities” and other relevant tags. Enjoy!

As a child, parents and primary school teachers gave me completely different answers to the question “Why are we here?” I preferred my dad’s answer because it extended me some dignity: England needed doctors. But as a child, I needed a multicoloured explanation, a bit more ammunition to bolster my internal resources and answer the “Paki go home” playground taunts. A poster of the proud Asian suffragettes marching in 1912 might have helped. Or one of cricket star Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, who came to England in 1888 to attend Trinity College, Cambridge, and became the first Indian to play cricket at county level. Or copies of the historic letters between Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and Mountbatten negotiating the terms of Indian independence.

All of these items can be downloaded from a website that pools material from 30 museums and archives on the Caribbean, South Asian, Irish and Jewish presence in England since 1800. The material has been digitally scanned and uploaded onto a searchable online database that is free to the general public. When it is finished, it will hold more than 150,000 items, including: ships’ passenger lists, central government files, photographic collections, maps, paintings, audio recordings of interviews, music, diaries, film clips, military records, internees indexes and duplicate passports. The aim of the Moving Here project is to increase awareness and use of archives in the four ethnic-minority communities.

Technically, this material was already available to the public: the kind of public who already know what archives are, have the time and motivation to use sophisticated indexes, travel to the archives, order original files and pore over them in security-patrolled reading rooms such as the ones at the National Archives. This public knows which questions to ask and how to massage idiosyncratic collections of dense files. This public does not include many black and Asian teenagers or even students.

The Moving Here site has catapulted a large amount of carefully curated primary source material about race relations in England over the past 200 years directly into the public domain. Most initiatives that widen access to some kind of reference material using the web, such as university libraries, simply make available lists of the material held in the real-world library. Moving Here allows users to download the items themselves. This includes entire books. If you search for the SS Windrush passenger list, you will get an index entry detailing the date and basic facts, but you will also be able to download the original Windrush passenger list and examine, print, email or save it.

Sarah Tyacke, the chief executive of the National Archives, explains: “Moving Here is a step forward because for the first time all this material has been digitised so that you can see it in your living room. Archives are moving away from their dusty and musty image by making these documents available at the click of a mouse.”

For anyone interested in the future of archives or in e-access generally, this project represents a quiet revolution delivered by dedicated backroom archivists and curators across England. But race is not a quiet issue.

Although much of the material featured is uplifting and celebrates the achievements of the communities, some of it is shocking, making the Moving Here project a bold move for the heritage sector.
As an editor on the site over the past year, I was pleased by the scope and quality of the material at my disposal, but as a British Pakistani, I was by turns touched, appalled, thrilled and angered by it. I was an archive virgin when I began working on the site and did not know what kind of material it might hold, so I am fairly typical of the target audience. If my own visceral reactions to the material are anything to go by, the response of the Jewish, Caribbean, South Asian and Irish users to the material will be strong.
The local archives, such as Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, contributed photographs and interviews that most closely echoed my experience of growing up in 1970s England: Asian weddings in provincial town halls, shalwar kameez worn with cardigans, Eid celebrations in swirly carpeted houses. These fun portraits were not what I had expected to find in archives.

There were plenty of other surprises. Among Ministry of Information files I found a series of beautiful photographs of 1950s Pakistan taken by Cecil Beaton, including ones of my home town, Bahawalpur. I felt an immediate resonance with the body language and facial expressions in the photographs; these were like pictures of my parents in family albums. Ethnic minorities rarely see themselves or their history reflected in any meaningful way in the halls of power. To do so causes a small but profound shift.

At the other end of the spectrum are the National Archives, which hold records of central government and the law courts dating back to the 11th century. These materials offer a different kind of ammunition. The file descriptions alone grate. Take: “HO213/ 308 This file contains reports on black seamen in British ports and the ‘social problems’ associated with them. The file itemises vice, sexually transmitted diseases and mixed race children as the principal dangers. (1935).”

Or: “HO344/117 Working party to report on the social and economic problems arising from the growing influx into the UK of coloured workers from Commonwealth countries (1955-56).” I know that this file, which pre-dates the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, reflects policies of the time. But my gut response is: “My father worked tirelessly in the National Health Service for 30 years and in Whitehall he’s referred to as an ‘influx’.”

Although strictly observed data protection laws mean sensitive files or those containing a lot of personal information are closed, I was surprised by the information that is accessible, such as some police files. HO344/ 151 contains replies to a Home Office questionnaire about race relations that was sent to police forces nationwide. The replies, dating from 1958, give an insight into contemporary attitudes in the police.
The sheer weight of government documentation from this period demonstrates the level of scrutiny that my parents’ generation of post-war Commonwealth immigrants were under.

Seeing yourself or your parents repeatedly characterised as a problem and a burden in official state documents is a consciousness-raising experience, particularly if, like me, you are generally unfamiliar with cabinet minutes and civil-service jargon. Intellectually, I know that individuals and groups generally register in central government or legal paperwork only when they are regarded as problematic. Otherwise, they just do not appear.

Still, I found the existence of files titled “Marriages of Englishwomen with Moslems/Hindus etc” really creepy.  But complex counter-narratives exist even in the National Archives sources, such as a 1967 report from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research that highlights the positive contribution of migrants and argues that they were less likely than the rest of society to claim benefits.
Stuart Hall’s 1965 report The Young Englanders is another eloquent counterpoint. He writes: “Our cities are full of young coloured citizens of Britain trying to tip-toe through society.”

Whether you find the items empowering or provocative, you can reclaim them for yourself by publishing your own commentary directly on the site along with your own material. Having sifted through just a fraction of the Moving Here collection over the past year, I feel more intimately acquainted with Englishness and more confident of my place within it as a British Asian.
See: www.movinghere.org.uk

Saturday, 3rd May 2008: visit around
Kensington, starting 10.00am

More info on Kensington Regeneration is available at
http://www.kensingtonregeneration.com/

10.00am. Convene at St. Georges Hall, North Entrance & leave in Minibus for Kensington The bus will have two distinct groups going to Kensington, some going to a) METAL in Marmaduke Street; and the rest going on b) Kensington Magical Mystery Tour to end up at the Hindu Cultural Organisation at 10.45pm for our hour’s meeting there on Kensington.

We will first pass Edge Hill Railway Station to show all delegates where the Liverpool Pavillions Festival will take place from 12 noon to 6.0pm the same day with our Kensington Czech Slovak Roma Band playing at 5.30pm

10.10am. Arrive in Kensington from South Central direction coming down Tunnel Road from Upper Parliament Street in the Kensington neighbourhood called Edge Hill, which gives it’s name to the Railway Station where the Liverpool Pavilllions festivities will take place in the afternoon, same day. The following places below will be passed and commented upon. There will not be time for the party to get out and wander about except on request (maximum 2 or 3 times):.

a) Edge Hill Railway Station, & old waiting room, Tunnel Road, L7. One of the first railway stations in the world. Twin entrance drive is site of Liverpool Pavillions event organised by METAL later same day of visit, see below referring to METAL’s Kensington HQs. The Kensington Czech Slovak Roma Band will play here at 5.30pm on the Saturday. METAL intend to convert part of the Station to become an Arts Centre. One group of the bus will shortly visit METAL ( see d).below);

b) Job Bank, 4, Tunnel Road, L7 6QD, an office block serving Kensington, partly paid for with European funds. Tenants mainly statutory or semi-statutory organisations including Kensington Regeneration (co-ordinator of this visit, a “New Deal for Communities” programme), Liverpool City Council JET programme (Jobs, Employment & Training) & Adult Guidance Service, including Minority Ethnic Employability Project; Liverpool Sports Action Zone; and Community Integrated Care (CIC), voluntary organisation;

c) Rocket locomotive wall design (see photo, summary hand-out), Wavertree Road, L7 (on advertising hoarding, on shop building wall adjoining Pizzeria, opposite Job Bank).. George Stephenson’s early railway locomotive inaugurated the world’s first passenger railway, Liverpool-Manchester, on which Edge Hill was one of the first stations;

d) Woks Cooking, Wavertree Road, L7, see summary note photo.. Referred to because a) Chinese are the biggest minority ethnic community in Kensington ( Black African second; and probably Poles third); and b) the Chair of the Kensington-based Liverpool Multiculutural Badminton Club is the owner of Wok’s Cooking;

e) METAL 6, Marmaduke Street, L7, arts & communication organisation with international orientation, based in Claire Terrace next to neighbouring culture organisations, see immediately below.. Chair of METAL is Jude Kelly, Director of London’s South Bank. METAL are organising the Liverpool Pavillion event at Edge Hill Railway Station 12 noon-6.0pm on same day as the ICC Conference party visit. Final reminder, Kensington Czech Slovak Roma Band play at 5.30pm

f) Yellow House, 8, Marmaduke Street, L7 www.yellowhouse.com, arts & youth organisation with international orientation, based in Claire Terrace next to neighbouring culture organisations, see e) &
g). Founder George McKane is a Liverpool icon and his wife and co-director, Gosia McKane, was previosuly Head of Education in Gdansk, Poland. Yellow House won the Radio City Community Organisation of the Year Award for Liverpool last year, 2007. Yellow House recently have been very active in anti-bullying and school trouble-shooting exercises as well as with the recent Liverpool January 2008 National Holocaust event ( subsequently we bumped into George outside the Yellow House and he came into the bus to give us a few words on the coach microphone );

g) Twenty Stories High, 6, Marmaduke Street, L7 based in Claire Terrace next to above-mentioned neighbouring culture organisations is a drama, forum theatre organisation sharing the building and with other links to METAL. Co-Directors Julia Samuels and Keith Saha have a pedigree working together at London’s Stratford East community-orientated, ex-Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal;

h) 4, Marmaduke Street, L7, ex-residence of first UK City Engineer John Newlands based in Claire Terrace next to neighbouring culture organisations, see above;

i) St. Mary’s Church, Towerlands, L7, see summary Note with photo, with stain glass window by artist William Morris;

j) “Free Michael Shields Campaign” Headquarters, Towerlands, L7 Michael Shields is a Kensington young person, currently imprisoned for alleged murder of a barman while on holiday in Bulgaria, wrongly convicted according to many British observers;

k) Asylum Link Merseyside, 7, Overbury Street, L7 3HJ. Voluntary organisation serving asylum seekers and, to a lesser extent, refugees. Currently getting roughly 200 client visits a week, a high figure partly because the Home Office Northern office handling asylum seekers is located in Liverpool (Reliance House, Water Street, the latter referred to in Kensington-sponsored secondary education materials recently developed for 2008 Holocaust Memorial Day entitled “Stories of Migration” from persecution and killing);

l) Edge Hill housing redevelopment area due for demolition (Royston & Dorothy Streets, & Durning Road, L7), see boarded up houese in summary note photo;

m) “Shipperies” pub and old Fire Station, listed buildings, available for conversion for community use, Durning Road, L7, see summary note photo of Shipperies pub;

n) Hindu Cultural Organisation and Shree Rhada Krishna’s Temple, 253, Edge Lane, L7 2PH, site for later meeting, presentations & discussion. Previously a Welsh Chapel;

o) Botanic & Wavertree Parks, Edge Lane & Botanic Road, L7 Visited by Queen Victoria around 1861;

p) Old Jewish cemetary, Deane Road, L7, burial ground of famous Jewish personalities, particularly of the 19th Century, like the founders of Lewis’s (Liverpool) stores and H Samuel jewellers chain;

q) Adjacent site, Deane Road, main accommodation of Chinese cocklers who drowned at Morecambe Bay in February 2004, see also Kensington roller banner featuring a photo from the film “Ghosts” about the Chinese cocklers;

r) Capaldi’s Cafe, Kensington, L7 (Italian origin), owner recently been featured on Kensington FM radio and a photographic exhibition at St. Georges Hall by Stray Cats, a communication and education partnership active in Kensington with school twinning relationships between Kensington, India, Croatia and other countries;

s) Polish shop, Kensington high street, L7 ( opposite, near McDonalds ) with connections with Crewe, Cheshire, which has a significant concentration of Polish population ). Shop shown in summary note photos.

t) Sheil Road, L6 ( named after Irish person )

u) Academy of St. Francis of Assisi, Gardener’s Drive, off Sheil Road, L6 (secondary school with Kensington BME pupils featured in summary note photo, Academy collaborator in video “A Safe Haven” on anti-bullying and anti-racism, featured in Kensington roller banner;

v) African shops, Prescot Road, L7

w) Laurel Road site of old Jewish Synagogue, L7

x) St. Sebastian’s Catholic Primary School, Holly Road, L7, progressive on diversity, national award winner on teaching Spanish;

y) St. Sebastian’s Parish Centre, Lockerby Street, L7, focus for developing Irish activities

z) Holt Pub, Holt Road / Kensington high street, L7 ( ex-local HQs British National Front; now more Kensington volunteer, Siddi Majubah Sierra Leone territory )

11.00am End up at the cul-de-sac end of Needham Road to park by nearby Hindu Cultural Organisation and Shree Rhada Krishna’s Temple, 253, Edge Lane, L7 2PH, where the meeting, presentations & discussions will start at 11.0pm.

12 noon, leave for FACT arts / cinema centre for Conference wind-up, pass on the way, Sacred Heart Primary School (also Polish Saturday School), Hall Lane, L7

Pass Sacred Heart Church, Hall Lane, L7 designed by Pugin, architect of London’s Houses of Parliament and Brideswell Art Gallery, Prescot Street, in converted building.

“Any kind of harmony in a local community is deeply shaped by the character of the media.”
Bhikhu Parekh, 1 May 2008, Intercultural City Conference, Liverpool.

“If media keep highlighting ugly practices and situations of tension then a mood is created where people say ‘Immigrants are never going to settle and its never going to work’,” the author ofThe Parekh Report, the seminal work on multi-culturalism, told DiverCities . “Media plays a very important part.”

Professor Parekh cites the local media in Leicester as an example of good practice. “The city fathers said (to local media during a period of racial tension) ‘Let’s agree about the kind of Leicester we want; a Leicester in turmoil is not good for anyone’, so the media committed themselves – the editor of the Leicester Mercury in particular – to certain minimum principles, and that helped a great deal.”

The East London borough of Tower Hamlets chose a different route to promote intercultural communication. It produces East End Life (EEL), specifically established to reach both ethnic minority and white readers, looks like a conventional local paper with unusually high production values. It attracts more Bangladeshi readers than Bangladeshi papers produced in the area, and promotes positive representations of black and Asian youth.

EEL costs £1.3 million a year to produce. The Council puts in £340,000, with the rest raised through advertising, but half of it comes from the Council itself. Chris Payne, the paper’s commercial development manager, says “It’s the only paper that can ensure council advertisers’ market penetration of hard-to-reach communities. Equivalent ads in other local papers would cost the council six times as much.”
The paper has won awards and has circulation of 90,000. According to ICM market research, 70% of Bangladeshis in the area read EEL regularly compared with 18% who read the Bangla Mirror, while 51% of white readers say it is their favourite London paper.

EEL unquestionably creates a much-needed intercultural forum in an area which has traditionally been fraught with racial tension. It was the scene of clashes between the anti-Semitic British Union of Fascists and local anti-fascists in the 1930s, and the paper itself was created in direct response to electoral successes locally in the 1990s by the fascist British National Party (BNP).

However, its creation raises awkward questions about the limits of fostering intercultural dialogue through a top-down approach – illustrating Parekh’s concern about the danger of interculturalism being ‘prescriptive’.

Malcom Starbrook, editor of its commercial rival the East London Advertiser (ELA), accuses the council of wasting taxpayers’ money and jeopardising independent local journalism. He says it is a council propaganda tool “masquerading” as an independent publication. Seventy percent of respondents to a poll on ELA’s website asking ‘Is Tower Hamlets Council’s East End Life free paper a waste of money?’ said ‘Yes’.
Starbrook argues that the council is acting as a publisher and sees this battle as a test case, saying it threatens the independence of local journalism because it is taking away vital advertising revenue from competitors. “People choose to buy us but they can’t choose to reject the council’s propaganda through their door.”

However when local journalists set up the East End News (EEN) in 1981 to provide more representative local coverage with diversity in its newsroom (the BBC’s George Alagiah cut his journalistic teeth on the EEN) the then ELA management quickly moved to starve their competitor of advertising revenue.

By 2006 ELA’s circulation had dipped by almost two thirds to around 9,500, but that decline has been halted under new owners Archant who realised it was aimed at a traditional local paper readership – elderly white women – while Tower Hamlets has one of the highest proportions of ethnic minority residents in the country.

Starbrook has made a lot of changes and, he claims, it attracts a bigger proportion of young readers than its competitors. He admits, though, that the paper still has no black or Asian reporters.
“Local businesses want to advertise in a paper that’s upbeat and positive about the area, not in an editorial environment that’s all grime and crime.” He ascribes the paper’s popularity among ethnic-minority readers to the rounded and positive representations in the paper, the Somali and Bangladeshi language pages, and the fact that young Bangladeshis are not necessarily attracted to Sylheti language papers.

One perhaps unintended consequence of Tower Hamlets Council’s venture into intercultural publishing has been to challenge attitudes on the independent East London Advertiser and force up the range and standards of reporting up for the whole community. Professor Parekh would prefer such change to come about without the suspicion of coercion.

Effy Tselikas records first and last encounters with difference
Liverpool 01/05/08

Irena

« C’était à Sofia, en période communiste où j’ai passé mon enfance. En sortant de l’école, je voyais souvent des jeunes enfants, des femmes vêtues avec de longues robes bariolées mendier. Je ne comprenais pas ; comment dans mon univers aussi normé, il y avait des gens qui échappaient à la conformité : ne pas travailler, ne pas être habillés de façon sobre, faire la manche, … J’ai demandé une explication à mes parents. Je ne me souviens pas de ce qu’ils m’ont répondu, mais sûrement la même chose que ce que tout le monde pensait à l’époque : ‘Oh, ce sont des Tziganes, des paresseux, des parasites…’ Ce fut ma première expérience de la différence.

« Ma plus récente expérience est plus légère. Lors d’un voyage d’étude dans un pays voisin du mien, qui me semblait appartenir à la même sphère culturelle, la Pologne pour ne pas la nommer, je me suis rendu compte qu’ils n’avaient pas du tout les mêmes horaires de repas que nous. Les séances de travail se succédaient sans fin, j’avais une faim de plus en plus terrible et personne ne semblait vouloir s’arrêter. Finalement, la pause déjeuner est arrivée vers 14h30 de l’après-midi, heure toute à fait méditerranéenne pour un pays situé beaucoup au Nord que le mien (la Bulgarie). »

Gordon

« Ma première rencontre avec des personnes différentes, ce fut à l’école. Dans ma classe à Victoria, au Cameroun, des jeunes garçons métis sont arrivés en cours d’année. J’étais très étonné de leur comportement : ils avaient peur de tout, du bruit, des oiseaux, de la forêt, … alors que pour nous, c’était notre univers quotidien ; à la maison, on vivait avec des poules, des lapins et pour nous autres gamins, notre aire de jeux, c’était la forêt avec ses bruits, ses arbres, ses animaux, surtout la nuit où tout devenait plus mystérieux. J’ai compris plus tard que leur peur venait du fait que c’étaient des enfants de la ville.

« Ma dernière expérience interculturelle est plus difficile à vivre. Cela arrive assez fréquemment qu’en me promenant dans les rues de Liverpool, je vois des mères rattraper leurs enfants quand elles m’aperçoivent, ou même, les enfants eux-mêmes se réfugier derrière leurs parents, comme s’ils avaient aperçu un singe ou une bête sauvage. Ces momentss, assez douloureux à vivre, sont heureusement contrebalancés par les rencontres que je fais, toujours à Liverpool. Dans le bus, dans le train, dans un pub, des gens viennent à moi spontanément et me questionnent : d’où je viens, comment vit on dans mon pays, qu’est ce qu’on y mange, … Le tout avec curiosité et gentillesse. Cela me fait toujours chaud au cœur. »

Milica

« Je me souviendrais toute ma vie de la première fois où j’ai vu un Noir. C’était à la cantine de mon école à Belgrade. Pas loin de là, il y avait l’Université Patrice Lumumba, du nom du célèbre leader congolais assassiné. Cette université recevait de nombreux étudiants venus d’Afrique, dans le cadre de l’ ‘amitié entre les peuples’. J’avançais avec mes camarades dans la cantine, quand j’ai vu venir vers moi … un sourire, un sourire éclatant avec des dents si blanches dans un visage si noir, un sourire qui faisait le tour de la tête (expression serbe), et qui conduisait le charriot à lait pour les élèves. Cet étudiant africain gagnait ainsi un peu d’argent de poche en travaillant durant les heures de repas à l’école. Pour moi, ce sourire lumineux éclaire depuis toujours ma relation à la diversité.

J’ai vécu mon adolescence dans la Yougoslavie socialiste. Un épisode m’a ouvert les yeux sur le monde fermé dans lequel je vivais. Dimitri, un voisin du quartier, est revenu quelques années après avoir passé plusieurs années en France. Lorsque qu’il est arrivé dans notre quartier, la première chose qui nous a frappés, c’était que ses cheveux tombaient en boucles soyeuses sur ses épaules. Nous les gamines, on regardait ce garçon aux cheveux longs comme un extra-terrestre. Nous n’en avions jamais vu. Mais très vite, les filles de sa génération ont commencé à chuchoter et une d’entre elles s’est approché de lui, en lui demandant : ‘Tu es devenu gay ?’, tellement cette apparence lui apparaissait anormale. Si on avait su à l’époque que dans les rues de Londres ou de Paris, les garçons aux cheveux longs se comptaient par milliers …

Mon expérience plus récente de choc interculturel est plus liée à mon métier et à ma présence en Grande Bretagne. Lors d’une séance au Parlement britannique portant sur l’impact des media sur la situation dans les Balkans (on était en pleine guerre yougoslave), on m’avait demandé d’intervenir en tant que journaliste-témoin. J’ai demandé comment on me présenterait, et on m’a répondu, comme ‘Serbe modérée’. J’ai alors exigé d’avoir la liberté de me définir moi-même : Je me suis présentée comme ‘sexy Serbe’.

Une autre expérience récente m’a fait elle aussi sourire, tant elle montrait l’absurdité du classement des personnes dans une identité prédéfinie. C’était lors d’une formation que j’ai donnée en Indonésie, six semaines durant à des journalistes du pays. Nous n’avions pas cessé durant toutes ces semaines de parler d’interculturel, d’images réciproques, de regards croisés, … Lors de la réunion d’adieu, un des participants est venu vers moi et m’a dit : ‘Vous êtes la premier Occidental que je rencontre qui n’ait pas ce regard négatif sur les Musulmans’. J’ai beaucoup ri intérieurement ; me faire traiter moi, la Serbe d’Occidentale, c’était vraiment paradoxal. »

Adil

« Je fis mon premier voyage en France pour entrer à l’Université. J’arrivais de Casablanca, la plus grande ville du Maroc. Quelle ne fut pas ma surprise d’être reçu en ‘étrange étranger’. Moi, qui parlait français depuis tout petit, qui connaissait par mes livres de classe chaque roi et chaque rivière de France, les romans récemment sortis, les derniers films, je retrouvais en face de gens qui ignoraient tout de moi et de mon pays. Ils me posaient des questions d’une telle naïveté : si chez moi, il y avait des lions et des éléphants, si on allait à l’école, si on savait jouer au foot, … J’ai été choqué d’une telle ignorance. A croire que le Maroc n’avait pas été colonisé durant quarante ans par la France.

« J’ai reçu un choc en retour quand je suis justement rentré au Maroc après cinq longues années passées en Italie. Là, les miens ne me reconnaissaient plus comme des leurs. Ils me disaient : ‘Tu n’es plus Marocain, tu as changé, tu ne parles plus de la même façon’. Certains m’ont même traité d’Italien, d’Européen. J’ai senti alors que je ne pouvais revenir en arrière et qu’il me fallait vivre désormais cette multiple appartenance, sans jamais plus être au chaud dans l’une seule.

« Mais mon choc le plus récent a été l’élection de Berlusconi. Vivant désormais en Italie, me sentant partie prenante de ce pays et de son avenir, je n’ai pas compris le vote de mes nouveaux compatriotes. Pourquoi retourner en arrière, pourquoi faire de l’autre le bouc émissaire ? Je n’ai pas compris ce qui s’est passé. Et aucun de mes amis de ma ville Reggio Emilia n’a pu m’expliquer ce vote. Si quelqu’un peut m’éclairer sur ce phénomène qui a eu lieu en 2008 en Europe, je suis preneur. »

As a writer and editor specialising in the history of minorities in Britain, I was excited about the working at the Intercultural Cities Conference – not least because it also gave me a chance to view Liverpool’s much-hyped International Museum of Slavery at The Maritime Museum. The last decade has seen a radical revolution in the heritage sector. Museums and archives are rich resources for stories about nationhood. And, if you ask the right questions and know where to look, they are surprisingly redolent repositories of stories about the long history of immigration. While communities of new and settled migrants are urgently recording their own oral histories, places like The Maritime Museum have begun, imaginatively and creatively, to discharge their duty to tell previously untold histories. The national narratives we choose to recall directly informs our futures together. This shift has coalesced neatly with advances in new technology leading to a tsunami of shiny new mega websites available to all who know they are there.
Here are my intercultural favourites.

Med Voices
The Mediterranean Voices project commenced in June 2002 and represents a three-year ethnographic investigation into the cosmopolitan oral and social histories of 13 historic cites across theMediterranean region, and in particular, certain urban quarters within them.
www.med-voices.org

Moving Here
Discover how and why people came to England over the last 200 years – you can also trace your own roots.
http://www.movinghere.org.uk

Untoldlondon
London history told through the eyes of its cultural minorities. Search London museum collections by the diverse ethnic origins of the city’s inhabitants.

Refugee Stories
Stories taken from interviews with over 150 refugees now living in London.
http://www.refugeestories.org/

Hidden Histories
Eastside Community Heritage tell the story of the last fifty years of East London

Stories Of London’s Refugees
Oral Histories from the Museum of London’s recent exhibition.
http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/belonging

Port Cities – Unearthing Britain’s Maritime Heritage
This packed website offers a great starting place for anyone looking to explore the diverse cultural history of Britain’s great maritime cities, including Liverpool.
http://www.portcities.org.uk
http://www.mersey-gateway.org

St George’s Hall in the middle of Liverpool is a challenging venue for a 21 century European conference on inter-culturalism. The £23 million spent on its refurbishment has done nothing to eradicate the echoes of empire. Opened in 1854 to house music festivals and a courtroom, it remains an over-powering construction. As we set up our ‘virtual newsroom’ amidst its vast gloomy emptiness we all wondered how we could tell ‘the story’ of inter-culturalism from a city that earned its wealth from the slave trade. Unbeknownst to us Brouhaha troubadours will point the way by the end of the first day.

First things first – film the set up. That’s the easy bit. Then get our disparate team together to compare notes and agree a running order, and film that. All very post-modern. Telling a story about story-telling by showing how the story tellers construct the story.

And while we are at it, why not an ironic arty ‘installation’ to demonstrate just how disposable our efforts can be – not a cat tray filled with newsprint but a washing line amid drifts of newsprint, so passers-by can wring out the inevitable lies and distortions that emerge when time constraints limit our professionalism, or when profit-making and propaganda overtake the desire to tell the truth.

And as for deadlines – the adrenalin pump that keeps we hacks alive – let’s premiere the film at the final session before the delegates depart for home stimulant. In the meantime we’ll pick up stories and quotes and pictures as we come across them. The conference is trying to be different so we can try too – but our trade has its own internal disciplines that are hard to abandon. We have spelled them out in notes for those delegate who want to become citizen journalists while they are here – find the facts, check they are accurate, quote eye-witnesses and reliable sources, construct the story clearly, know your audience, and always distinguish between comment and fact.

Our inter-cultural team has print and broadcast and on-line experience and all the digital paraphernalia of the robo-hack. We hail from Cameroon and Greece and India and Ireland and Pakistan and Serbia. Three men, five women pooling our resources to keep the three days covered inside and outside the conference venue.

Our aim: to collect and disseminate material that speaks of inter-culturalism – the debate, the dilemmas, the diversity – and encourages others (especially our media colleagues) elsewhere to find new ways of making space for those whose voices are seldom heard, and using the immense power of mass media for cohesion instead of confusion.

It would help in the Internet was working, but apparently the City Council is worried we’ll spend the next few days viewing porn and stealing people’s identities. Leave that to the ’techies and get on with the story.

Soon the teams are at work, snapping shots of anyone and anything that takes our fancy, shooting footage that will generate instant nostalgia in just a few days time, interviewing cultural gurus and their acolytes, and listening out for gems of wisdom and the gaffes that make people grin.

We select our storytellers unsure what stories they will tell, and send them off on location to places delegates may see on Saturday, or may never see because the local authorities would prefer we did not disturb their plans to up-end ‘the world in a street’ in the name of regeneration.

Journalism is always about uncovering uncomfortable truths, but is also about telling positive stories too. We set to work, hoping our efforts will bear some fruit, here, there and in cyberspace. The legacy of such conferences now last longer than ever thanks to the information super-highway… if anyone can find the way through the myriad spaghetti junctions and the wayside blogs.

We hope our signals will point the way towards a future where diversity is recognised as a force for good, and where journalism will be appreciated because it allows different voices to emerge from the multitude and contribute to common understanding of our shared humanity.

And, of course, we hope there’ll be applause when our story is screened.

“A local Liverpool Roma Band from Kensington played for Conference delegates at Liverpool Town Hall on Wednesday night at a Welcome Reception headed by Liverpool City Council’s Chief Executive Officer, Colin Hilton. ‘Gypsy Brothers’ come from Kensington, L6 and L7, an Inner City neighbourhood which is participating in the European Year of Dialogue Conference in Liverpool on ‘Inter-Cultural Cities’. The Band hails from the Czech Republic and Slovakia and came over to Liverpool since the EU Accession in May 2004 when some 10? countries including the Czech Republic and Slovakia joined the European Union.”

“Band leader and bass guitarist Jan Bendig Snr ( left, background ) is shown here with his son, Jan Bendig Jnr singer (foreground), when they performed with their ‘Gypsy Brothers’ band at Liverpool Town Hall on Wednesday night. Romas ( “gypsies” ) migrated from Radjisthan and Punjab, India, centuries ago to Europe and beyond where they have influence music not only in Europe ( flamenco) but also in North Africa and South America. Indian culture is traditionally passed on from parent to sibling, often with certain castes specialising in different fields. This tradition lives on with the Bendig family in Kensington, Liverpool, where they live. Jan Bendig, son, is a pupil at the Kensington Academy of St Francis of Assisi and sings in Czech and the Roma languages. Jan looks forwad to mastering song in English.”

“A full-turn out of East and Central Europeans was present at Liverpool Town Hall on Wednesday night when the local Liverpool Roma Band from Kensington played for Conference delegates at a Welcome Reception. ‘Gypsy Brothers’ are shown here with guest-of-honour Dr Vladimir Sucha, Director for Culture Communication and Multilingualism at the Directorate General for Education and Culture of the European Commission. Dr Sucha from Slovakia was pleased to see fellow Slovakians and Czechs who make up the band spreading his region’s culture in Liverpool. From left to right, Ales Olah guitar; Geoffrey Brown, Director of EUCLID, organisers of the Inter-Culutural Cities Conference; Rene Gabor drums; Dr Valdimir Sucha; Jan Bendig Jnr, singer; Mario Zeman, guitar; Jan Bendig Snr, band leader and guitar.”

Larger versions of these images available at
http://flickr.com/photos/tenantspin/2459546720/

Is interculturalism desirable?

Why do we want or need intercultralism?

Whose interests does interculturalism serve?

Is interculturalism just a new term for long standing issues? I’ve noticed, for example, that more than one speaker seems to use interculturalism interchangeably with ‘diversity’.

There’s also a sense that interculturalism seems very ‘problem centred’, with the emphasis on conflict or even ‘hatred’ between communities, strangers not getting on, etc.

I share with Bikhu Parekh and Ash Amin a concern about taking interculturalism outside its political and national context. For me, I’d come to see interculturalism as a framework to get beyond the idea of cultures as fixed and immutable, with people locked in boxes or silos defined by their ethnic cultures. In this sense, interculturalism seemed to me to be about how cultures are continually shaped, reshaped and changed, new fusions are borne out of a dynamic process of interaction where people come to form a new sense of belonging around ‘place’ while still being able to assert their own self-defined identity – as black woman, disabled person, Muslim young person.

Some of today’s presentations however seem to take us back to notions of ‘them’ and ‘us’, giving greater value to ‘host’ cultures as somehow more pure and talked about ‘tribal cultures’ clashing with dominant host cultures, which I found disturbing. To what extent this is raising a wider question of whether or not we can engage in intercultural dialogue across national boundaries where language and political contexts are so different is one of the issues that I think needs to be considered. At the very least I think there is a need for a common and shared language to enable effective and meaningful dialogue and debate to take place with people from across different nations.

One final point, there has so far been a complete lack of mention of human rights in the debate. Is this absence an oversight? Do we see human rights as integral to the interculturalism debate and if so, we need to ensure it has a highe profile and visibility in future dialogues.

Lorna Shaw

I personally think that intercultural approachoes should be established by the two parties involved:

the immigrants should want to be part of the host community and make efforts to align him/her to the culture and invironment of the city.

the governments should draw up rules to be followed by everybody: natives and migrants in equal terms. Sometimes, in order to maintain political relationships the police and bodies expected to enforce the law ignore what it is happening in certain communities, and they identify these situations as “domestic incidents”. By so doing the natives will see that there are no special treatements for the new comers and will see them as equals.

The central governments, on the other hand should recognize that after a certain period of honest work, best behaviour and payment of taxes in any country, the migrant should obtain automatically the nationality of that particular country.

These are a few ideas that may help in establishing interculturalism.

nbitco