Identifying the English: essentialism and multiculturalism in contemporary English folk music

Recent trends in ethnomusicology have included a growing concern with indigeneity. A conceptual alternative to the discipline’s long-standing preoccupations with diaspora, indigeneity is frequently characterised through a narrative in which ‘native’ groups assert their identity in opposition to an invading—historical or contemporary—oppressor. The recent explosion of interest in the expression of an English identity within contemporary, multicultural Britain offers a very different narrative. Amid wider public celebrations of Englishness, and popular concerns about immigration, UK devolution, EU federalisation and US-led globalisation, a resurgence has taken place in the profile of specifically English folk music and dance since around 2000. The last 10 years have seen an emerging movement to reclaim Englishness by the political left, yet the folk arts pose specific problems for such a project—namely, the reification of nostalgia for a rurality that is necessarily pre-multicultural. Through examining some case studies of the current English folk resurgence, this article will discuss how contemporary English folk artists (the majority of whom share left-of-centre politics) attempt to negotiate Englishness in relation to their multicultural and multinational British context