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December 6–13, 2001

book quicks|nonfiction

Accent on Privilege: English Identities and Anglophilia in the U.S.

By Katharine W. Jones
Temple University Press, 284 pp., $19.95

Since the British Empire is dismantled, argues Katharine W. Jones, the few remnants of its legacy shouldn’t be coddled as traditions. If Accent on Privilege proves gently, as it sets out to do, that Englishness is an act, supported by curious Anglophiles, it’s driven not by the axiom that the English are repressed, socially awkward traditionalists, but that they’re pulling their boots out of the mud of the sceptered isle and leaving in droves. Concentrating on U.K. migrants to the U.S., Jones exploits, brilliantly, the propensity for expats to talk about, glorify, commiserate with and reanalyze their homeland in an attempt to frame themselves within, or outside, ideas of what is English. The resultant interviews that form the base of Jones’ study throw up plenty of recognizable shorthand tropes — English as posh; English as The Enemy — burdensome, perhaps, to those interviewed, but not as threatening to their confidence as the abiding sense of Englishness as a set of social ideas tied together by a secret sense of loss of identity, sandwiched by stereotypes (Churchill, Basil Fawlty, Rick of The Young Ones). Jones assays the benefit of a usually favorable American reception — accents and Anglophilia weave through both anecdotes and analysis — against their desire not to disappoint those perceptions, nor to be judged as shards of colonialism, even as they create tiny English bubbles in which to live and hide. Several of the subjects themselves, in their constructed Englishness, appear as dusty and two-dimensional as pressed flowers; Jones’ greater point demonstrates that the English national identity, granted so many allowances from the classist, hierarchic system that it once helped to build, can easily be played up or down: one minute exotic, the next its members tiptoeing between society’s other clans without anyone even noticing.

—Juliet Fletcher

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