British Asian Culture and Its Margins in East London

During the summer of 1999, references to South Asian culture abounded within London—from the painstaking recreation of Hindi film star Dimple Kapadia’s bedroom in the Selfridges department store to McDonald’s introduction of the Lamb McKorma sandwich. This so-called “Indian Summer” served as a backdrop to the prominent commercial and critical success of British Asian musicians such as Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, and Asian Dub Foundation and the emergence of British Asians in the mainstream media as poster children for Britain’s campaign to present itself as a vibrant cosmopolis. However this celebration of British Asian musicians, writers, artists, and actors sat uneasily alongside the socioeconomic reality of the Bangladeshi population in East London. The author explores two concurrent events—the Arts Worldwide Bangladesh Festival and the 000: British Asian Cultural Provocation Exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery—and attempts to navigate the quagmire of geography, music, and cultural identity they exposed.

Innovation

Chapter 1 theorizes flexibility in relation to neoliberal demands for innovation. In the late 1990s, during an era of expanding economic globalization and increasing European integration, Britain capitalized on the diverse cultural practices of its postcolonial communities to showcase the country’s “cool” cosmopolitanism and global investment appeal. However, the state was keen to promote a certain kind of diversity, one that was legible and assimilable. In order to be considered for funding, South Asian dance had to be both diverse (i.e., ethnically marked) and innovative (i.e., ethnically unmarked)—different but not too different. After decades of racial division and growing fears that British Asians were a threat to social cohesion, innovation was key to cultural integration. Balancing the dual demands for innovation and diversity required great flexibility on the part of British South Asian dancers, including the ability to stretch the boundaries of the form through experimentation; to be fluent and versatile in multiple techniques; and to adhere to competing demands to make work that was both culturally distinct and legible to a wider (and whiter) public. This chapter shows how one particular British South Asian dance company, Angika, struck a balance between ethnic particularity and mainstream appeal through an array of flexible choreographic and artistic choices. In doing so, Angika’s performances not only helped audiences reimagine Britain as inclusive, cosmopolitan, modern, and “cool,” but also allayed public fears about South Asians in the UK as unassimilable outsiders.

Toponymy, Pioneership, and the Politics of Ethnic Hierarchies in the Spatial Organization of British Colonial Nairobi

Toponyms, along with other urban symbols, were used as a tool of control over space in many African countries during the colonial period. This strategy was epitomized by the British, who applied it in Nairobi and other parts of Kenya from the late 1800s. This paper shows that toponymy in colonial Nairobi was an imposition of British political references, urban nomenclature, as well as the replication of a British spatial idyll on the urban landscape of Nairobi. In early colonial Nairobi, the population was mainly composed of three main groups: British, Asians, and Africans. Although the Africans formed the bulk of the population, they were the least represented, socially, economically and politically. Ironically, he British, who were the least in population held the political and economic power, and they applied it vigorously in shaping the identity of the city. The Asians were neither as powerful as the British, nor were they considered to be at the low level of the native Africans. This was the deliberate hierarchical structure that was instituted by the colonial government, where the level of urban citizenship depended on ethnic affiliation. Consequently, this structure was reflected in the toponymy and spatial organization of the newly founded city with little consideration to its pre-colonial status. Streets, buildings and other spaces such as parks were predominantly named after the British monarchy, colonial administrators, settler farmers, and businessmen, as well as prominent Asian personalities. In this paper, historical references such as maps, letter correspondences, monographs, and newspaper archives have been used as evidence to prove that toponyms in colonial Nairobi were the spatial signifiers that reflected the political, ideological and ethnic hierarchies and inequalities of the time.

Funky Days Are (Not) Back Again: Cool Britannia and the Rise and Fall of British South Asian Cultural Production

This article explores the conditions that led to the rise and fall of British South Asian cultural production. Following a high point in the 1990s when for the first time a South Asian diasporic presence was felt in British popular culture, across television, film, music, literature and theatre, Asians have now returned to the periphery of the cultural industries. But this is not a simple case of British Asians falling in and out of fashion. Rather, as this article explores, British Asian cultural producers were enabled but then ultimately constrained by shifts in cultural policy (and specifically ‘creative industries’ policy) and, more broadly, by the politics of multiculturalism in the UK and beyond. In particular, it focuses on the moment of New Labour and ‘Cool Britannia’ as a significant cultural and political moment that led to the rise and subsequent demise of British Asian cultural production. Through such an analysis the article adds to the growing body of work on race and production studies. It demonstrates the value of the historical approach, outlined by the ‘cultural industries’ tradition of political economy, which is interested in how historical forces come together to produce a particular set of institutional and social arrangements that shape the practices of British Asian creative workers. While the article foregrounds television and film, it explores the field of British Asian cultural production more broadly and, in doing so, marks the ascendency of the ‘diversity discourse’ that characterises cultural policy in the present day.