Tribes: How Our Need to Belong Can Make or Break the Good Society. Authored by David Lammy, Constable (Little Brown). 2020. 352 pages.

Abstract

In an era marked by heightened polarization, populist resurgence, and the fracturing of democratic discourse, David Lammy’s Tribes: How Our Need to Belong Can Make or Break the Good Society arrives as a timely intervention. Rather of generating another diatribe on identity politics, Lammy, Member of Parliament for Tottenham and a prominent voice on race and social justice in the United Kingdom, delivers a hybrid text that is part memoir, half sociological study, and part political reflection. His core focus is the human desire toward group affiliation, an instinct that can either reinforce the social fabric or accelerate societal breakdown. The book is solidly grounded in the transatlantic context, wrestling with the repercussions of Brexit, the racial anxieties propelling Trumpism, and the historical responsibilities of empire. Yet, its analytical lens reaches considerably beyond Britain and the United States. Lammy’s insights give conceptual and empirical tools for understanding plural, postcolonial cultures attempting to reconcile ethnic difference with national coherence. For Malaysian scholars, politicians, and readers attentive to the complexities of multicultural governance, Tribes provides a powerful lexicon with which to analyze the dynamics of belonging, exclusion, and solidarity in a varied society.