A pub for England: Race and class in the time of the nation

Abstract

The pub is often romanticised as a site of idyllic English ‘working-class’ sociability that is now under threat. Such melancholic invocations of the pub’s plight are invoked amid the wider resurgence of a racialised English nationalism that makes particularly effective claims to a ‘white working-class’ and their putatively ‘left-behind’ anguish. This article challenges such dominant accounts, juxtaposing such racially defensive readings of the working-class pub against the otherwise overlooked phenomenon of England’s ‘desi pubs’ (Indian-run pubs) through recourse to David Jesudason’s Desi Pubs as well as drawing upon the accounts of the founder of Glassy Junction, a historic desi pub in Southall. Importantly, this overdue engagement of ‘desi pubs’ is considered not through frameworks of race and nation alone but also within conjunctural webs of capitalist stratification and subjectivity. Ultimately, we argue that attentiveness to desi pubs helps draw out convivial modalities of working-class sociability that exist outside of both otherwise ascendant racial and nationalist grievance frames and the sanitised but also prohibitive consumerist webs of aspirational distinction and individualism.