This look offers a close look at contested communities through the lens of Rotherham, an English town struggling to survive in terms of its image, profile and identity. Recently divided, and left reeling, from the powerful impact of the Jay report on Child Sexual Exploitation, and increasingly used as a center for activism and agitation by the far right, Rotherham could be seen as an exemplar of a contested community. But what happens when a community confronts an identity that has been forced upon it? How does a community re-define itself? More than simply a book about Rotherham, this is a book about history, culture, feelings, methods and ideas that will help to articulate the lived meanings of political cultures in Britain today.

Too often we are told about 'deprived neighbourhoods' but rarely do the people who live in those communities get to shape the agenda and describe, from their perspective, what is important to them. In this book the process of re-imagining comes to the fore in a fresh and contemporary look at one UK town, Rotherham. Using history, artistic practice, writing, poetry, autobiography and collaborative ethnography, it literally and figuratively re-imagines a place. It is a manifesto for alternative visions of community, located in histories and cultural reference points that often remain unheard within the mainstream media.

This title brings together renowned scholars to analyse historical revisionism in politics, historiography, education, and the media. Drawing on theoretical, cross-national and comparative perspectives, these essays demonstrate how and why historical events have been revaluated in social, political, and cultural contexts.

Why are national identities imagined in one way rather than in another? The book analyses national imaginations as an on-going reconstruction process in a political and social context in which several imaginations of the nation struggle to impose their conception. Focusing on a fundamental element of any collective identity, namely the «Other», the book looks at the reconstruction of national identities by actors in political debates on immigration in the late 1980s and 1990s, particularly associations and political clubs which were in favour of and against the presence of immigrant minorities in their respective countries. Thus, the book investigates different ways of imagining the same nation in two old European nation-states, namely France and Denmark, which differ with regard to their nation-building processes, their Second World War history, their memory of colonialism and their experience of immigration. It is thus possible to illustrate that existing ideas of the nation and memories of historical events shape the way in which the nation could be re-imagined in the 1980s and 1990s.

In recent years the British mass media have discovered a new and urgent social problem - the Asian gang. Images of urban deprivation and the Underclass have combined with fears of growing youth militancy and masculinities-in-crisis to position Asian, and especially Muslim, young men as the new folk devil. This reimagination of Asian young men has focused on violence, drug abuse and crime, set against a backdrop of cultural conflict, generational confusion and religious fundamentalism. The Asian gang, it seems, is the inevitable product of these social forces. But what is the reality? Based on three years fieldwork with a group of Bangladeshi young men in inner-city London, this book attempts to explore the complex mythologies and realities of contemporary Asian youth experience. Taking the gang as its starting point, the study examines the interaction of representation and reality, ethnicity and masculinity in a textured, in-depth and personal perspective that challenges traditional views on Asian communities and identities.