Before considering the implications of the existence of a dominant narrative about Bradford, I would like to remind the reader that beyond the stories and images of the city, the realities of living in the city are complex and multiple, and include real challenges of living in a place that has faced a great loss of industry. Although Dunbar’s portrayal of the city reached a wider audience and as such became part of the popular culture, I want to highlight that contrary to many of the other stories I
explored in the chapter, her voice is that of an insider. As such, she reminds us of the very challenges that the city faces. Malik’s tale (2010) was also an insider story, in which she shares her own experience of racism and segregation in the city, again affirming the complex issues confronting Bradford. The stories and discourses about Bradford are therefore not “simply distortions.” (Munck, 2003: 14) Rather they can reflect some of the conditions of life in the city. Then, we need to go further than just looking at popular culture and explore the resonance of these dominant stories within individuals’ stories. This will be the focus of Part Two. For now though, I would like to focus on a range of implications of these dominant stories for Bradford specifically in the national imagination.
The first implication of the existence of a dominant narrative is that there is a readily available recognisable story about Bradford in the national imagination. It is a simple story in which complexities tend to have been ironed out. As it “sticks” in the national imagination, it is easily summoned to interpret future events. Also, it leaves little room for alternative stories to develop. This is especially so as there may be little interest for alternative stories, as the seemingly low national interest in the BBC programme Bradford City of dreams indicates. In the case of the image of the North, Russell (2004) has noted that there was little interest on the part of outsiders and insiders in believing that the region may have changed.
A second implication, as pointed out throughout the chapter, is that the stories construct Bradford in terms of its distinctiveness from other cities in the country (McLoughlin, 2006b). The city is othered in many ways due to its characteristics, and this process of othering is reinforced by the stereotypes in the readily available national story of Bradford (Russell, 2003). In particular, the orientalisation of Bradford’s “Asian” population is common (Schmid, 1997) and contributes to creating an idea of Bradford as an “exotic” place (Schmid, 1997: 177). Nowhere is this more visible than in the volume in which Kureishi’s travel account is published, in which Bradford stands as a subject of travel writing along with faraway places such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and China. But the city is also othered in
relation to its loss of industry. The identity of Bradfordians themselves seems limited to an unemployed, unsuccessful underclass destined to failure. This is not to deny that Bradford as a city and Bradfordians as its inhabitants have not faced or are not facing some serious economic challenges due to deindustrialisation. Rather, it is the choice of Bradford as epitomising this story for the nation which is interesting.
Thirdly, in the dominant story, Bradford’s identity tends to be constructed negatively as a place of struggle. For example, the city is constructed as a contested urban space in relation to its “Asianisation.” As other cities in the UK like Leicester are synonymous with successful multiculturalism (Herbert, 2008) and pride within the community (Cantle, 2001), Bradford has become over the years the symbol of tense and conflictual “race relations.” It is telling that a TV show like Make Bradford British, although broadcast in 2012, mentioned the segregation and division of communities, and the 2001 riots but failed to draw attention to the successful peaceful protests against the English Defence League, which took place in the city centre in 2010. Like in other dominant storylines about the city, the narrative of
“Asianisation” constructs Bradford as a place of difference, resulting in an
“othering” of the city. Through this narrative, the complexities behind immigration are ironed out and the “Asian” group tends to be homogenized (Schmid, 1997), which means that stereotypes, simplification and amalgamation, notably between ethnicity and religion, are rife. The story has also fuelled the resentment within White working-class communities, whose identity seems threatened by the settlement of immigrants, reinforcing the identity of the city as a contested urban space.
Chapter Conclusion
To conclude, I first want to highlight that there is no “definitive” dominant storyline, and remind the reader that this chapter is the result of my analysis and interpretation of a small selection of documents and sources amongst the many available about Bradford. Although my own observations concur with those of
others in the academic literature, it is possible that presented with the same evidence, different interpretations could be offered. Indeed, this has been the case about Bradford before as I will explore in the next chapter. In addition, although I have argued that the sources I chose belonged to British national popular culture,
“It is [...] impossible to measure the exact impact of these representations upon the city’s image – not all will have reached large audiences – or to gauge how a visit to the city or a little critical reading might challenge or defuse them” (Russell, 2003:
66) or for that matter reinforce them. There can also be debate about what gets included under the contested term of “popular culture.”
Overall, we have seen in this chapter that it can be argued that there is a set of familiar narrative tropes which when weaved together form a culturally dominant storyline about Bradford in British culture, which has emerged and grown in the national consciousness mainly since the 1970s. But what is the place of the negative story of Bradford in the national imagination and in the story that the UK tells itself? Each aspect of this storyline reinforces the others in telling a negative story about Bradford, portrayed as a city of difference and division, othering and problematising the city for the rest of the country in the process. There was little evidence of counter-stories emerging within the national culture. The ones that did emerge, as in Bradford City of Dreams, did not seem to attract the same level of attention as the negative stories and gain their currency, except perhaps amongst Bradfordians themselves.
Chapter 4: Academic tales: Storying Bradford in academia
Introduction
There is a vast body of academic literature on Bradford, spanning several decades (at least since the 1970s) and many academic disciplines (from ethnography to sociology, economics and health studies for example). Accordingly, academic research is another public source of knowledge on Bradford and as such deserves some attention here. As research interest in the city has increased over the years, academic research has become an intrinsic part of the city, so much so that certain areas are considered to be over-researched (Sanghera and Thapar-Bjorkert, 2008).
Academics have the power to tell stories about Bradford, so how do they story the city? What are the academic stories of Bradford? What do they mean for representations of the city and for its identity? In addition, theoretically, there is an argument that academic stories feed into popular culture (see for example Alexander, 2004) but also that as researchers, culturally dominant storylines frame how we can think about the issues that we research (see for example Andrews, 2004b). Another reason to look at academic stories is that we might expect them to be more objective and detailed, freer of some of the influences that shape other forms of knowledge (as discussed in the previous chapter). So, not only has there been a lot of research conducted in Bradford, but we can hypothesise that the nature of this research might generate a different view. What knowledge is academically produced about Bradford? What is the relationship between the academic and popular stories? To what extent do the academic stories about Bradford concur with or challenge the common sense stories? The objective of this chapter is to address these questions. In the first section, I look at academic stories as a source of knowledge about Bradford and argue that they have contributed to the story of Bradford in a specific way. In the second section, I explore some examples of academic stories that either concur with or reinforce the culturally dominant storyline, but also complicate and challenge it.