"Daniel Burdsey's book 'Race, Place and the Seaside' is quite simply a jolly good read, in the true sense of the word 'jolly'. But it is also so much more than just that. This is - for me - a ground-breaking book." (George W. Leeson, Journal of Population Ageing, Vol. 11, 2018)
Part I.- 1. Introduction: race, place and the seaside.- 2. Shifting sands? Theories and concepts of contemporary life at the water’s edge.- 3. Shifting sands? Theories and concepts of contemporary life at the water’s edge.- 4. Between the city and the sea: race, ethnicity and space at the periphery.- 5. Race, whiteness, and the spaces and places of seaside leisure.- Part II.- 6. “It still felt like I was going to the end of the earth”: race, identity and community formation in a seaside town.- 7. “Sometimes, you know, I feel happy when I see the sea”: landscapes of race and spatial im/mobilities in a seaside town.- 8. “It’s just the culture of the town, they’re not used to different people coming”: racialised inclusions and exclusions in a seaside town.- 9. Conclusion: the tides they are a-changin’?
Daniel Burdsey is a Reader at the University of Brighton, UK. He is Assistant Head of School (Research) in the School for Sport and Service Management, and co-leads the ‘Spaces, Power and Justice’ cluster in the university’s Centre for Research on Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics.
This is the first academic monograph to focus exclusively on issues of race, ethnicity, whiteness and multiculture at the English seaside. The book calls for acknowledgement of the racialised nature of this environment, and proposes that its distinctive spaces, places, traditions and narratives should be included within broader analyses of race in contemporary Britain. Introducing the concept of ‘coastal liquidity’ to explain shifting ethno-racial demographics, migratory politics and spatial dynamics at the edge of the sea, along with the relative im/mobilities of the minority ethnic communities who move and reside there, the author provides a relational exploration of seaside experiences: both as a locus of racialised categorisation, exclusion and subjugation, and one of resistance, conviviality and intercultural exchange. Combining theoretical insight and empirical fieldwork, the book disrupts dominant thinking that fixes ontologically minority ethnic bodies to urban spaces, and overcomes their erasure and silencing from the seaside landscapes of the popular imagination.