Narrative of feminist
agency
 “She is an unspoilt girl. From the village.” (16)
 “What could not be changed must be borne… This
principle ruled her life… So that when, at the age of
thirty-four…when for the first time she could not wait
for the future to be revealed but had to make it for
herself, she was as startled by her own agency as an
infant who waves a clenched fist and strikes itself upon
the eye.”
Nazneen’s sister
 Hasina, Nazneen’s beautiful sister, elopes and runs
away from the village and her family
 “It worried her (N) that Hasina kicked against fate. No
good could come of it.” (16)
Domesticity
 Domesticity and the everyday as sites of feminist
consciousness; “small insurrections” (50)
 “Life made its pattern around and beneath and
through her…” (31-32)
Tower Hamlets
1985
Life in Tower Hamlets
 Represented as a microcosm of immigrant life--working-class
Bangladeshis, poor white on welfare (the tattoo lady)
 the East End—poor, overcrowded, immigrant
 Older networks and histories of immigration: Irish, Jewish,
Bangladeshi
 The city and the village: connections transported. Seen by Chanu
(as through a white person’s eyes): as peasants, uneducated,
lacking ambition (21)
 Different scales of spatial description: the City, the Hamlets, the
flat (“large box”, a tomb)
Two cities
The City of London
 “Nazneen walked… She sensed rather than saw, because
she had taken care not to notice. But now she slowed down
and looked around her. She looked up at a building as she
passed. It was constructed almost entirely of glass, with a
few thin rivets of steel holding it together. The entrance was
like a glass fan, rotating slowly, sucking people in, wafting
others out. Nazneen craned her head back and saw that the
glass above became dark as a night pond. The building was
without end. Above, somewhere, it crushed the clouds…”
(44)
Global city
 global capitalism is figured in the shape, texture and color of
the building in the City.
 The building is simultaneously machinic and natural,
possessing both the vulnerability and transparency of glass
and the indestructibility and opacity of steel.
 It is both a landmark and a space without end.
 It reduces to insignificance the human life it swallows up or
looks down upon. Human relations, too, are subsumed
within the all-encompassing logic and presence of capital as
symbolized by the building.
Global capitalism—its
imperial history

the 1980s deregulation of financial services that severed capitalism’s
connection to state and social control. Thatcher also cut spending on council
housing.

Operating according to its own internal, purportedly supra-rational logic,
capital becomes de-linked from social relationships and social purpose

London’s hyper-capitalist present is a reiteration and a successor to the city’s
accumulating imperial past.

Hywel Williams writes: “Britons nostalgic for the age of empire need only
visit the City to find the heirs of Clive of India seeking the plunder and
dividing the spoils. Here is the great mercenary army of our time, the most
achingly modern and frighteningly efficient of Britain’s imperial
institutions...”
Nazneen in the city
 “Every person who brushed past her on the pavement, every
back she saw, was on a private, urgent mission to execute a
precise and demanding plan: to get a promotion today, to be
exactly on time for an appointment, to buy a newspaper
with the right coins so that the exchange was swift and
seamless, to walk without wasting a second and to reach the
roadside just as the lights turned red. Nazneen, hobbling
and halting, began to be aware of herself. Without a coat,
without a suit, without a white face, without a destination…
 But they were not aware of her… They knew that she
existed … but unless she did something, waved a gun, halted
the traffic, they would not see her…” (45)
Culture and capitalism
 Brick Lane’s commercialisation as a hub of curry
restaurants
 cultural difference and neo-liberal capitalism nestle
together within the space of London as a global city.
 Capitalism reduces culture to a form of
commodification--Nazneen’s cultural difference is
rendered invisible (“they would not see her”) precisely
because it is superfluous to the calculus of commodity
production
Eating curry on Brick Lane
Curry and profit

Jane M. Jacobs writes, “contemporary urban transformation is far more likely
to engage consciously with the local character of an area than rapaciously
obliterate it”; the mobilization of heritage becomes “part of the legitimating
framework of contemporary urban transformation”.

Capitalism’s selective use of cultural difference, in which “immediate and
intense encounters” can opportunistically transform into indifference and
even exclusion.

As the City concentrates and channels global capital through gentrification
and redevelopment projects, a majority of Brick Lane’s residents suffer from
high unemployment rates and subsist on sweatshop work or work in the
down-market retail and restaurant sectors that offer a multicultural experience
of consuming “curry” in the city.
Brick Lane and religious
extremism

Brick Lane as a pathologized site of Islamic extremism—images of girls in
headscarves being pushed into religious schools and radical mullahs
controlling the local council abound in the media and the public imagination
and in reality (English Defense League and the Islamists)

Ali’s novel directly references through its depiction of the radicalization of
Tower Hamlet youths in the post-9/11 context (earlier seen as too
Westernised, going to pubs and nightclubs)

Religious/social conservatism, generational and gender differences—
Nazneen’s daughters; Jorina’s young daughter sent back

See works by Manzurul Islam (The Mapmakers of Spitalfields (Peepal Tree
Press, 1998) and Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses (Penguin, 1989), among
others, for fictional accounts of life in a South Asian-ized Brick Lane.
The personal as political
 Nazneen seems to be only somewhat aware of the communal
politics being mobilized in the context of global capitalism, white
racism and the war on terror.
 Kareem’s involvement in increasingly radical politics that
precipitates the end of her extra-marital romance.
 The narrative refuses a romantic ending in which Nazneen’s
choice of London over Dhaka would in reality be a choice
between her loving but older, secular, less attractive husband
Chanu who decides to go back to Dhaka when his dreams to
succeed in London as a postcolonial subject fail, and her dashing
lover Kareem who seeks to reclaim London as the space of radical
immigrant alterity as signified through Islamic radicalism.
Nazneen’s choice

The novel does not fully reveal the motivations behind Nazneen’s choice of
making London her home.

the triumph of her desire for individual empowerment and self-making?

Is it a notion of a transnational feminist community? Her work as a
sweatshop worker (exploitative and unfulfilling as it is) stitching garments for
London’s fashion industry connects her not only with other women in her
community, but also with her sister in Dhaka who also works in a sweatshop
supplying garments to the world.

But whether Nazneen would go on to participate in any kind of socialist
feminist or secular politics that could challenge the dominant neo-liberal and
increasingly unsecular global city is of course a question that the novel’s plot
does not accommodate, even as its discourse opens up these questions to
critique.
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