Over the past two years the Kilburn Manifesto has been at the centre of a wide-ranging public debate initiated by the journal Soundings and its founding editors Doreen Massey, Michael Rustin and Stuart Hall. In the penultimate instalment of the Manifesto, Sally Davison and George Shire consider the historical links between race, migration and neoliberalism and argue for a Gramscian approach to challenging the common sense about race in the UK towards a pluralist, inclusive and multi-cultural concept of citizenship.
Gramsci’s concept of ‘common sense’ is useful in helping to understand the complex articulations between race, migration and nation and the way they are mobilised within neoliberal ideology. In an early instalment of the Kilburn Manifesto Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea argued that common sense is a form of everyday thinking that offers us frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the world:
It is a form of popular, easily-available knowledge which contains no complicated ideas, requires no sophisticated argument and does not depend on deep thought or wide reading. It works intuitively, without forethought or reflection. It is pragmatic and empirical, giving the illusion of arising directly from experience, reflecting only the realities of daily life and answering the needs of ‘the common people’ for practical guidance and advice.
