6 Summary of Session 4

By the 1920s, the British government tried to encourage Asian and Black immigrant workers in the United Kingdom to return to their places of origin. They even offered to make payments to encourage repatriation. However, despite facing racism in the city, the Yemeni community in Cardiff continued to thrive. Butetown remains one of Britain’s longest established Muslim communities. Subsequent immigration in the post-1945 period increased the number of Yemeni families in the city, and we also see the emergence of hybrid identities within the second and third generation diasporic community: British-Yemeni, or Welsh-Yemeni. As Ansari tells us: ‘Muslims living in the beginning of twenty-first-century [Britain] are creating a range of identities that combine their consciousness of the global [community]... with their British citizenship.’ (Ansari, 2018, p. 421).

In the next session, you will learn about how a group of Algerians grappled with questions of identity and loyalty to the French state after the end of the Algerian war of independence in 1962.

You can now go to Session 5.