AHRC Diasporas, Migration and Identities Programme
Workshops and Networks
From Diaspora to Multi-Locality: Writing British-Asian Cities
www.leeds.ac.uk/writingbritishasiancities
Symposium
Centenary Gallery, Parkinson Building,
Woodhouse Lane,
University of Leeds,
LS2 9JT
17-18 March 2008
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Contents:
Thanks & Welcome
p3
Network Outline
p4
Symposium Programme
p7
List of Participants
p8
Paper Abstracts
p9
Appendices:
Appendix I: Report of the Bradford Meeting
p18
Appendix II: Report of the Tower Hamlets Meeting
p26
Appendix III: Report of the Manchester Meeting
p31
Appendix IV: Report of the Leicester Meeting
p36
Appendix V: Report of the Birmingham Meeting
p42
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Thanks & Welcome:
Many thanks indeed for accepting our invitation to attend this symposium at the University of
Leeds. The symposium is part of an AHRC Diasporas, Migration and Identities (DMI)
programme network: From Diaspora to Multi-locality - Writing British Asian Cities. Funded April
2006 to September 2008, the network is co-ordinated by the four of us here at Leeds with the
help of a steering committee comprising members inside and outside academia and from across
the UK.
The network aims to reflect upon the ways in which the ‘local’, ‘multi-local’ and ‘trans-local’
social, political, economic, cultural and religious dynamics of five distinctive ‘British-Asian’ cities
(Birmingham, Bradford, Leicester, Manchester and London’s East End) have been ‘written’ at
particular moments in time, from the 1960s to the 2000s. With an emphasis upon the existing
and potential contributions of the Arts and Humanities and the Social Sciences, we are
interested in a variety of genres of ‘writing’, representation and performance: ethnography; local
and oral history; literary and cultural production; newspapers and the media; official reports. The
network also considers the contributions of, and interactions between, differently located
‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, seeking especially to interact with, and be challenged by, those active
and / or working in civil society and the ‘cultural’ and ‘community’ sectors.
Thus far the planning and holding of events in each of the five cities has taken up most of our
time. In appendices to this booklet you will find records of these meetings, the first of which was
held in Bradford during June 2006 and the last in Birmingham just last month. The meeting
records are also available via a developing website - www.leeds.ac.uk/writingbritishasiancities/.
Here you can read existing work, register your own research interests and follow links to sites of
interest.
Against this background, the aim of the symposium is to provide the network organisers and
steering committee with an opportunity to make presentations both to each other and to a select
audience on the five cities and some key perspectives and themes. In many ways the
symposium marks the beginning of the last leg of the network, a time when we shall principally
be concerned with thinking and writing as a collective with a view to publishing an edited
volume. Numbers at the symposium have therefore been kept deliberately small so as to
facilitate an informal and productive interchange of ideas, something that has also characterised
our city events.
In the pages of this booklet you will find some more background on the network taken from our
original application to the AHRC. You will also find details of the final symposium programme, a
list of all participants and abstracts of the various presentations.
Finally, as you know, all expenses in Leeds have been covered by the AHRC. For this we are
very grateful. We are especially pleased to welcome the DMI programme director, Professor Kim
Knott, as well as other DMI grant holders working on aspects of British-Asian diasporas,
migration and identities. The Leeds Humanities Research Institute also deserves our thanks,
both for the reception it is sponsoring at the end of our first day and its support for networking
around South Asian Studies at Leeds, which first facilitated the four of us coming together.
Drs Seán McLoughlin, William Gould, Ananya Kabir & Emma Tomalin
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Outline of the Network:
Summary:
The diverse local character and trajectories of the South Asian diaspora in Britain today is the
product of post-war immigration from particular parts of India, modern Pakistan and Bangladesh,
as well as East Africa. Recognising that there is now an urgent need to reflect historically upon
60 years of this presence, the network will be the first to compare the changing dynamics of five
British-Asian localities. It will examine how each presence has been ‘written’ by different
constituencies in scholarly ethnography, novels and other forms of cultural production, as well as
in the (local) media and official reports.
Fit to Programme:
This network revisits the study of South Asians in Britain. It interrogates the concept of ‘diaspora’
by probing the ways in which the ‘South Asian diaspora’ might be reconceptualised as
comprising communities whose identity, on both individual and collective levels, is grounded in
‘multi-locality’. For the first time, the meaning and importance of ‘multi-locality’ will be explored
through a comparison of five British-Asian cities, with ‘the local’ simultaneously speaking to
precise regions people have migrated to and from. The ‘multi-local’ captures more effectively, we
believe, the divergent experiences, cultural capital and mobilising energies of Asian groups in
Britain—be they Bradford’s Mirpuris, Manchester and Birmingham’s Punjabis, Leicester’s
Gujeratis and African Asians or Tower Hamlets’ Sylhetis. At the same time, we acknowledge the
influence of still emergent, transnational forces, such as pan-Islamism, which are also
deconstructing the idea of a ‘South Asian diaspora’ in Britain.
In terms of complicating the dominant ‘race and ethnicity’ paradigm of the social sciences, firstly,
there is a need and opportunity now to examine the multi-local dimensions of Asian-Britain
historically. Almost sixty years after post-war immigration began, a sophisticated historical
narrative about the changing dynamics of these communities is waiting to be written. Secondly,
there is a pressing need for literary and cultural studies to scrutinise the cultural production of
the grassroots as well as cosmopolitan intellectuals, exposing the fraught and nuanced
processes of memorialisation, celebration, mourning and self-fashioning to fresh analysis.
Thirdly, given the role of religious affiliations in reinforcing trans- and multi-local ‘ethnic’
communities, but also in the sustaining of more cosmopolitan and ‘universalising’ transnational
circulations, the network will also prioritise new reflections on the explanatory power of religion.
Finally, ‘multi-locality’ also signals the comparative nature of the proposed network. We ground
an innovative understanding of Asians in Britain within regional micro-histories that in turn
foreground the ways in which locality and community have been ‘written’, both by ‘outsiders’ and
‘insiders’, in terms of ethnography, literature, oral histories and official reports. Regional microhistories have also structured and shaped distinct modes of British-Asian cultural production –
newspapers, novels, bhangra, film. By involving scholars working on any of these areas in
specific cities of the UK, the network will question the very notion of ‘South Asians in Britain’ by
uncovering the multi-local choices and forces shaping communities and their expressive
practices. Providing opportunities for historical, comparative, practice-lead and innovative case
studies, the network aims to extend in necessary and timely ways, the very understanding of the
terms ‘diaspora’, ‘migration’ and ‘identity’.
Rationale and Context:
Alongside the maturation of British-Asian communities and their distinctive contours, there is the
ever-increasing infiltration of mainstream popular culture by ‘Asian Cool’ in the form of fashion,
food and fiction. Yet between that appropriation of easily assimilated cultural production and the
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lived, variegated experiences of divergent South Asian communities in Britain, there are gaps
and discrepancies which are symptomatically re-inscribed within policy-making, media
reportage, and a general perception of the crisis of multiculturalism. The fragmentation and
reformation of a composite ‘Asian’ identity since the rise of religious nationalism in South Asia
and international politics post 9/11, have placed unprecedented pressure on diasporic
communities. With this context comes new responsibilities on academia to shed light on the
context of such pressures. Given the embeddedness of British-Asian communities within
regional politics both in the UK and in South Asia, it is imperative that scholars enquire how far
locality has (re)emerged as an axis of identity (re)formation. Through disciplinary and
interdisciplinary reflection, a systematic comparison of multi-localities, and the careful
involvement of ‘cultural’ and ‘community’ sector representatives, the network aims to generate
fruitful and novel interaction, offering the results of our collaboration to policy-makers, arts and
cultural initiatives, and a wide range of civil society actors.
Aims and Objectives:
Apart from the creation of a web resource on Asian Britain and other outcomes detailed below,
the main aim of the network will be a forum for arts and humanities discussion of the South
Asian presence in the UK. As an initial vehicle for this, we propose five meetings in Leeds,
Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester and Tower Hamlets between June 2006 and February 2008.
We also propose a symposium in March 2008 to consolidate and reflect upon the work on each
locality. A steering committee will select invited speakers for each network meeting, briefing
them to reflect upon the ways in which they themselves (or their organization / institution) have
contributed to the ‘writing’ of the British-Asian city in question at particular moments in time.
Looking to the future, the most important aim is to provide an environment of sustained and
focused interchange for scholars based at different universities.
Speakers and Participants:
Speakers at network meetings would be drawn from academics (local and oral historians,
ethnographers), representatives of the local media and local authorities, as well as
representatives of British-Asian community organisations and writers (or film-makers, artists,
musicians). Workshops in each locality will be open to wider members of the academic and
other communities, although there will be a limit on total numbers of 30 to retain the intimacy of
the network.
Management:
During the first two years the network will be coordinated from Leeds by the principal and coapplicants in collaboration with steering group partners from other universities and two nonacademics. The applicants have recently secured ‘pump-priming’ from Leeds Humanities
Research Institute to co-ordinate South Asian Studies research in the Arts and Humanities
across the university and a seminar series is up and running. The team has an excellent working
relationship as well as individual experience of directing / consulting on research projects,
organizing networks and conferences, and co-editing research outputs.
The steering committee, chaired by the principal applicant, would meet in advance of, and
immediately after, each network meeting. Its main business would be firstly to monitor planning
and publicity, finalise invited speakers and other participants, approve web resources and
manage the administrative support. Secondly, it would ensure the ongoing academic fit to
programme priorities, reflecting self-consciously upon interdisciplinary themes and
interpretations raised by each local meeting.
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Outputs and Dissemination:
a) A web resource for academic and non-academic audiences, containing: i) five openly edited
papers on the ‘writing’ of British-Asian Bradford, Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester and Tower
Hamlets; ii) webspace for the collation of new and existing electronic historical, literary-cultural
and religious resources relating to these British-Asian cities; iii) a virtual exhibition explicitly
comparing each locality.
b) A conference paper presenting the findings of our exchanges.
c) A book edited by the applicants publishing the five synthesized accounts / analyses of Writing
British Asian Cities, together with a substantial introduction and conclusion.
d) A collectively authored refereed article for reflecting on our research methodology and main
conclusions.
e) Invitations to the local press to contribute to (and report on) each workshop. At the end of the
project national media will also be briefed with a view to special coverage.
f) A short, accessible, electronic version of the final report available via the web resource for
interested individuals, community organizations and institutions including non-academic
participants in the workshops.
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Symposium Programme:
Monday 17th March 2008
Tuesday 18th March 2008
11.00 – 11.30 am: Arrival and Coffee / Tea
9.00 – 9.30 am: Arrival and Coffee / Tea
Session I: Introductions
Session III: Disciplines, Perspectives,
Themes
11.30 am – 11.45 pm: The Programme
(Kim Knott, Diasporas Programme Director)
11.45 am – 12.30 pm: The Network
(Seán McLoughlin, William Gould, Ananya Kabir
& Emma Tomalin, Leeds)
12.30 – 1.30 pm: Lunch
9.30 – 10.00 pm: Migrants & Multiculturalism:
Discourses of ‘Brit-Asian’ in the Social Sciences
(Shailaja Fennell, Cambridge)
10.00 – 10.30 pm: History, memory & the
postcolonial: decolonising British-Asian histories
(William Gould, Leeds, & Irna Qureishi, Oral
Historian)
Session II: Writing Five British-Asian Cities
1.30 - 2.00 pm: Writing British-Asian Bradford
(Seán McLoughlin, Leeds)
10.30 – 11.00 pm: General discussion lead by
Avtar Brah, Birkbeck (unconfirmed)
11.00 – 11.30 am: Coffee / Tea
2.00 - 2.30 pm: British Bangladeshis in London’s
‘East End’
(John Eade, Roehampton / Surrey)
2.30 - 3.00 pm: Writing British-Asian (Greater)
Manchester
(Virinder Kalra, Manchester)
3.00 – 3.30 pm: General discussion lead by
Bobby Sayyid, Leeds
11.30 – 12.00 am: The British-Asian City &
Cultural Production
(Ananya Kabir, Leeds, & Aki Nawaz, Nation
Records)
12.00 – 12.30 pm: Writing Religion in BritishAsian Diasporas
(John Zavos, Manchester, & Seán McLoughlin,
Leeds)
3.30 - 4.00pm: Coffee / Tea
12.30 – 1.00 pm: General discussion lead by
Pnina Webner, Keele
4.00 - 4.30 pm: From the Belgrave Road to the
Golden Mile: Asians in Leicester
(Pippa Virdee, De Montfort)
1.00 – 2.00 pm: Lunch
Session IV: Open Session
4.30 - 5.00 pm: Writing British-Asian
Birmingham: Towards a Spatial Historiography
(Richard Gale, Birmingham)
5.00 – 5.30 pm: General discussion lead by
discussant Rajinder Dudrah, Manchester
2.00 – 3.00pm: Opportunity to hear about other
projects on British-Asian diasporas, migration &
identities
3.00 – 4.00 pm: Final discussion lead by Ato
Quayson, Toronto
5.30 – 6.30 pm: Reception hosted by the
Leeds Humanities Research Institute
4.00 pm: Coffee / Tea and Departures
6.30 pm: Transfer to Ibis Hotel & dinner at
Hansa’s Restaurant, 72/74 North Street.
NB Slavoj Žižek will be talking about his
book, Violence , at the University today 6-8pm
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List of Participants:
Seán McLoughlin, Religious Studies, University of Leeds
William Gould, History, University of Leeds
Ananya Kabir, Postcolonial Literature, University of Leeds
Emma Tomalin, Religious Studies, University of Leeds
Irna Qureshi, Oral Historian and Freelance Researcher
Aki Nawaz, Fun^da^mental & Nation Records
Jasjit Singh, Religious Studies, University of Leeds
Kim Knott, AHRC DMI Director & Religious Studies, University of Leeds
Ruth Pearson, AHRC DMI large grant & Politics & International Studies, University of Leeds
Sundari Anitha, AHRC DMI large grant & Politics & International Studies, University of Leeds
Ceri Peach, Geography, University of Oxford
Bobby Sayyid, Sociology, University of Leeds
John Eade, Sociology & Social Anthropology, Roehampton University, London
John Zavos, South Asian Studies, University of Manchester
Pippa Virdee, History, De Montfort University Leicester
Shailaja Fennell, Development Studies, University of Cambridge
Richard Gale, Sociology, University of Birmingham
Ato Quayson, Postcolonial Literature, University of Toronto
Clare Alexander, AHRC DMI large grant & Sociology, London School of Economics
Shahzad Firoz, AHRC DMI large grant & Sociology, London School of Economics
Rajinder Dudrah, Drama, Music & Screen Studies, University of Manchester
Eleanor Nesbitt, Religions & Education, University of Warwick
Pnina Werbner, Anthropology, Keele
Avtar Brah, Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London
Tariq Mehmood, Writer& Film-maker; AHRC Moving Manchester, University of Lancaster
Virinder Kalra, Sociology, University of Manchester
Anandi Ramamurthy, Film & Media Studies, University of Central Lancashire
Georgie Wemyss, Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity & Multiculturalism, Surrey University
Rehana Ahmed, AHRC DMI large grant & Postcolonial Literature, Open University
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Paper Abstracts:
Session II: Writing Five British-Asian Cities
Writing British-Asian Bradford
Seán McLoughlin, Religious Studies, Leeds
Whether for its mela, said to be ‘Europe’s biggest Asian event’, or for the burning of Salman
Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), the story of ‘Brad-istan’, as it is sometimes dubbed
locally, has been consistently documented, perhaps more than any other centre of the South
Asian diaspora world-wide. Over a period of forty or more years, the iconic status of Bradford
has been very publicly inscribed: ‘a miniature Lahore’ (Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 9 July
1964); a ‘Black Coronation Street’ (Sunday Mirror, 4 June 1978); and ‘the Mecca of the North’
with Ayatollahs of its own (Ruthven, 1991: 82). My argument here is that, beyond the headlines,
a body of writing about Bradford now exists that is worthy of a new sort of reflection.
Considered individually, works some will have read many years ago and perhaps forgotten,
provide only snapshots of a British-Asian city from particular perspectives at particular moments
in time. However, considered together, such snapshots can also begin to map, in broad outline,
the emergence and changing shape of ‘Brad-istan’. My intention is to present a historical
retrospective of sorts, based upon a close reading of a small selection of the many writings
about the city. I want to dwell on the detail of these accounts and allow them to speak more on
their own terms, and of their own contexts, than would normally be the case. Moreover, as we
shall see, as well as pioneering the study of ‘British-Asian’ cities in the diaspora per se, many of
the authors that have written about Bradford have made definitive contributions to their own
academic disciplines or genres of literature.
I shall first be re-examining the pioneering work of two anthropologists, Badr Dahya (1974) and
Verity Saifullah Khan (1977). Taken together, their writing represents some of the earliest
accounts of the social, economic and political functions of Pakistani ‘ethnicity’ as migrants
settled in Britain during the 1960s and early 1970s. My second snapshot revisits Tariq
Mehmood’s political novel, Hand on the Sun (1983), which is a unique account of resistance to
the realities of racism in the 1970s. Set against actual events in Bradford, it provides much of the
context for the emergence of a militant and politically ‘black’ Asian Youth Movement in 1978.
Snapshot three focuses on Bradford Council’s trailblazing, but ill-fated, experiment in
multicultural policy-making during the early 1980s. My main interest here is the insightful
assessment of these new policies advanced by travel writer, Dervla Murphy (1987). Finally, a
monograph by Philip Lewis (1994 / 2002), interfaith adviser and scholar of Religious Studies,
provides my fourth and final snapshot. Set against the impact of local-global events such as the
Rushdie Affair, as well as recent ‘race riots’ and 9/11, more than a decade after its first
publication Islamic Britain remains one of the pre-eminent studies of the contemporary valency
of religious identity amongst South Asian Muslim diasporas.
As my narrative unfolds, account by account, I further contextualise the particular significance of
each of these snapshots, adding my own extended analysis of the sum of their parts by way of
conclusion. However, one of my overall arguments, worth anticipating here, is that unless we
have a better understanding of social and historical change in ‘British-Asian’ cities like Bradford,
we can not properly evaluate the reality of their contemporary dilemmas. While Bradford has, for
example, often been represented, and presented itself, as an icon of ‘the multicultural society’,
former chief of the Commission for Racial Equality, Herman Ouseley, has identified the city as
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representing, ‘a unique challenge to race relations’ (2001: 1). The publication of Community
Pride Not Prejudice: Making Diversity Work in Bradford, is an overdue admission of the failure of
‘multicultural’ policies in the city. However, set against the political context of a revived
government emphasis on ‘integration’ under the banner of ‘community cohesion’ and
‘citizenship’, one of my main concerns with Ouseley’s report is that, read alone, it is in danger of
decontextualising the emergence of Bradford as a particular sort of post-colonial, trans-national,
‘British Asian’ city, that has been in the making for at least half a century now.
Representing others through text & performance: British Bangladeshis in London’s ‘East
End’
John Eade, Sociology & Social Anthropology, Roehampton / Surrey
This chapter will explore the ways in which people seek to represent the British Bangladeshi
‘community’ through writing texts and acting out those texts through public performance. I will
begin by placing the locality – the ‘East End’ – in the broader context of London as a global city
and urban sociology. I will then outline the contradictory character of dominant discourses about
the ‘East End’ as Other – a place where the west London middle class were careful to tread and
wrote about through certain interconnected negative tropes (poverty, criminality, immigration etc)
co-existing with positive tropes of strong community, family and kinship ties. While London’s vast
suburban hinterland has been largely ignored in most textual representation – reflecting most
observer’s view of suburbs generally as ‘boring’ (see Hanif Qureshi’s journey from Beckenham
to Barons Court in The Buddha of Suburbia – and the ‘West End’ has been celebrated by the
tourist industry, the ‘East End’ has been explored in much greater detail by an array of writers
(novelists, playwriters, poets, academics, missionaries, social reformers, community
representatives, politicians, organisations and urban planners).
This wealth of textual representation would seem to exhaust the possibility of gaps and silences.
However, many gaps and silences remain and this will be as much a focus in my analysis of a
particular representational process as the utterances and performances. To demonstrate these
general reflections I will reflect on the meeting which we held at the Kobi Nazrul Centre and the
exchange between the baul singer, the Centre’s Director and the three journalists. The
exchange involved a performance in front of ‘insiders’ (Bengalis) and ‘outsiders’ (the rest of us)
where certain themes were established. The exchange between the singer and the director
could be interpreted as engaging implicitly with the issue of authenticity and who had the right to
represent the 'community'. It could also be seen as a performance shaped by the intersection of
gender, generation and class as well as ethnicity. In a broader perspective we can place the
exchange within two different performative traditions - the hybrid tradition of baul singing in the
Bengal cultural region and a more recent hybridised mode of using Bengali music to speak
about racism and anti-racism in Britain.
The media representatives gave another performance which revolved around what they could
and could not do in terms of journalistic writing and the community constraints on them. Through
these different performances we also see the mutual engagement of performer and the
audience in the event and how the performers adapt to the audience’s reactions across the
insider/outsider boundary.
Integral to the event was the ways in which people used language – English, standard Bengali
and Sylheti – to communicate with each other and to signal the boundary between ‘us’ and
‘them’. Implicit too was the power of language and the status of English as the dominant mode
of discourse during the meeting and within British society generally. However, what did not
emerge from this encounter was the significance of Islam as another dominant discourse. This
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absence was a product of my own selection of contributors – secular Bangladeshi Muslims – in
the desire to set a boundary around what would be acted out at the meeting. A different group
might well have voiced Islamist critiques of the baul tradition and secular anti-racist politics. This
critique would have reflected what I and others have written about as the glocal process of
Islamisation.
So, having established the key themes though this vignette I will place the event in the wider
context of the history of the East End and the development of the Bangladeshi community in the
locality from the 1960s/1970s first generation to the anti-racist struggles of the late 1970s and
the 1980s to the process of Islamisation from the late 1980s onwards, which have engaged the
second and third generations. I will then pull the two sections together through an examination of
particular texts by certain writers performing for different audiences, specifically academics,
novelists and community activists. Through this analysis I will explore further the limits of
representation, the tension between different claims to authenticity inherent within identity
politics and the ways in which writing undermines claims to be a ‘real insider’ as places change
within the cosmopolitan global city.
Writing British-Asian (Greater) Manchester
Virinder S. Kalra, Sociology, Manchester
Normative accounts of Manchester write the city in two halves which represent a social,
economic and to some extent cultural divide. The North, South split of the conurbation is
demonstrated in multiple genres of writing: academic, literary and policy. South Manchester is
produced through a dominant narrative of vibrancy, in the economic and cultural sphere, with
Rusholme and the Curry Mile an iconic space in which the City Council can celebrate
multiculturalism. It is this road where the entrepreneurs, that are so central to Pnina Werbner’s
anthropological account of Manchester, ‘The Migration Process,’ also find their businesses’
homes. A further textual representation is offered through the novel, ‘Curry Mile’ written by parttime writer, full-time local authority worker, Zahid Hussain. ‘Curry Mile,’ was published by a
South Manchester based Black and Asian writers publishers called Suitcase Press, in turn
funded by the Arts Council. In the Northwest, cultural policy in this area has written extensively
about Asian exclusion from the arts. Yet Wilmslow Road is also the site where a visual arts
project, managed by the Asian Visual Arts company, Shisha and art a South Asian lesbian and
gay group (Sphere) can `mix-it-up'. Indeed, it is the ways in which academic, policy and cultural
texts entwine to create a normative account of the sheen and shine of multicultural Asian Britain
that creates a blurring, at the level of production as well as creation, of the various genres of
writing about Asian Manchester.
Similar narrative harmonies are present in the writing of the Northern part of Greater
Manchester, but here the story is somewhat different. Rather than the optimism of the
multicultural city, with its entrepreneurs and hybrid cultures, there is a story dominated by
accounts of urban and social decay, civil unrest and endemic racism. Oldham is only 8 miles
from the City of Manchester and a seamless urban sprawl merges their geographies.
Nonetheless, Oldham has primarily been written from a policy perspective in terms of local and
central government reports on riots and social deprivation. Indeed, the Ritchie report that
followed the 2001 civil disturbances and its follow up is replete with stories of decay and decline.
Academic work on these areas, such as that by Kalra (2000), also paints a picture of industrial
decline and subsequent under-employment. Recent government statements depict these areas
as ripe for Islamic extremism, further serving to create narratives of marginalisation. The shine of
Rusholme is lost in the grime of the post-industrial landscape of inner-city Oldham with its
apparent lack of economic success and irresolvable communal strife.
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These dominant modes of writing the North and South of Greater Manchester belie the
continuities that emerge from a focus on other types of writing, particularly those in vernacular
languages. Rochdale, another town of Greater Manchester, is also home to the writer of the first
Urdu novel about the journey to England, Hamara Safar, by Hashmi. South Manchester may be
home to the only British based Pakistani satellite channel, but its’ staff is drawn from the North.
Oldham and Rochdale are part of the Urdu newspaper and literary circuit with each town
producing its own media in the form of free newspapers. The Pakistani community centres in
Manchester and Oldham both play host to Urdu poetry which also writes the city in vernacular
context. Breaking the North, South divide of Manchester is clearly possible in the way in which
Rusholme is a regional centre for festivals such as Eid. Local mainstream media regularly
reports on Eid, sometimes in celebration at others in terms of nuisance to residents or police
harassment.
Perhaps more fundamentally, the diversity and fluidity of Manchester, ossified in textual
representations, belies the easy labelling of a British Asian City or of any ethnically marked
identity space. For example the publication in the 1980s of the Pakistani Workers Association,
Pekaar, was produced in South Manchester but its political message and campaigning work
stretched way beyond the bounds of the city. This local focus with broader concerns is
something that was prevalent in the event that was organised by the Writing the British Asian
City project in Indus 5 restaurant in South Manchester. The participants, rather than producing
something distinctively local about Manchester as a cityscape, evoked cross-cultural,
cosmopolitan concerns. The glocal nature of Manchester can be seen in the shift of Pnina
Werbner’s work from a local account of Pakistani entrepreneurs in the book The Migration
Process to an overt concern with transnational political mobilisations, ostensibly with the same
group of people, in the book, Imagined Diasporas amongst Manchester Muslims. In this second
text the Manchester locality is almost incidental to the concerns that are being expressed. From
the academic commentators through to the poetic performances the city was a site from which to
make more general comments about Asian Britain. The writers and commentators present were
using the city as an exemplary from which to push out from its boundaries or representing
Manchester as a transnational rather than local space. These forms of writing are perhaps more
aptly seen as part of an emergent South Asian or Asian Muslim transnational cultural sphere, in
which writing the local becomes a conscious act, rather than an intrinsic part of the textual
production.
From the Belgrave Road to the Golden Mile: the transformation of Asians in Leicester
Pippa Virdee, History, De Montfort
From a reputation for racism in the 1960s and 1970s Leicester became a model of successful
multiculturalism in the late 1980s and 1990s, one which has attracted – and continues to attract national and international attention. Analysis of the so-called ‘Leicester model’ has focused
primarily on the role of local political leadership, the relatively prosperous and diverse nature of
the local economy and the entrepreneurial skills of certain migrant groups (Singh 2003). Valerie
Marett (1989) offers an historical study of Leicester in the ‘crisis’ period of East African Asian
migration in the 1960s and early 1970s. Though the community was discouraged from entering
Leicester the East African Asians still chose to settle down in the city and consequently played a
pivotal role in the transformation of Leicester during the 1970s and 1980s.
In the grand narrative Leicester is a city of East African Asians, home to one of the largest
Gujarati communities in the UK, and a model of successful multiculturalism. Beyond this
narrative Leicester is a city which is segregated, communalised and shortly to become the first
minority white city. How do these identities, sometimes conflicting, feature in the writings of
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Leicester? Surprisingly there is little written on Leicester outside the genre of racial and political
history. Yet the city has a strong cultural identity and is one of the most vibrant. The Belgrave
Road serves as a metaphor in the history of Leicester; from derelict and abandoned to economic
prosperity and from all-embracing to exclusive.
Writing British Asian Birmingham – Towards a Spatial Historiography
Richard Gale, Sociology, Birmingham
A regional, ‘second city’ with global aspirations, a service-sector economy of which the heritagetrail is founded upon pride in an industrial past, an increasingly buoyant node in an emerging
network economy of which 40 percent of the metropolitan area is within the top 10 percent most
deprived areas on a national scale: Birmingham is a city which is all too easily characterised in
terms of paradox and contradiction. Such contradictions also find expression in the widely
discrepant accounts of the British Asian presence in the city: for instance, the narration of
Birmingham as a conduit for ethnic entrepreneurial success jostles uneasily with its portrayal as
a racialised city in which examples of ‘success’ arise against a backdrop of structured exclusion
from the formal labour market (Henry et al 2001; Ram et al, 2002, 2007).
As this chapter seeks to show, however, at least some of the paradoxes that characterise the
city generally and its British Asian communities specifically are a function of the differences of
perspective of different authors, corresponding in turn to the varied paradigms and narrative
traditions within which these authors write. Emblematic of this is that Birmingham has been
home to two distinct and not infrequently opposed academic ‘schools’, the Cultural Studies
approach of Birmingham University’s erstwhile Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(CCCS), and the Weberian urban sociology of John Rex and his collaborators, both of them
profoundly influential in shaping the trajectory of research around ‘race’ and ethnicity in
Birmingham, Britain and beyond. Drawing on recent developments in critical urban studies, and
in particular, the work of Henri Lefebvre (1991), Dolores Hayden (1995) and Leonie Sandercock
(1998a, 1998b, 2003), this chapter develops a spatial historiography of writing on ‘British Asian
Birmingham’, interrogating the varied ways in which constructs of space and South Asian
ethnicity have been articulated together in different genres of urban writing – geographical,
sociological, ethnographic and creative. The premise of the present chapter is that, whilst each
of these genres of writing is inevitably partial, a critical juxtaposition of the different notions of
‘urban space’ upon which such writings rest, enables a much fuller account to emerge of the
complexity and ‘dynamic tension’ that characterise at root South Asian experiences in and of
Birmingham in the post-war period.
Following a short introductory section on the history of South Asian settlement and community
construction in Birmingham, the chapter is divided into three principal sections, each examining
the notions of space – latent and manifest – that are brought to bear in different genres of
literature. Part one examines the writing of urban geographers (Jones, 1970, 1976; Woods,
1979), revealing how cartographic representations of Birmingham’s ‘minorities’ have served to
codify the locales of South Asian settlement in the city predominantly in terms of areal
measurement and ‘segregation’. In the first section, I examine the urban sociological
contribution, and in particular the seminal work of John Rex, as reflected in a series of major
studies of ‘race relations’ in Birmingham written between the 1960s and 1980s (Rex and Moore,
1967; Rex, 1976; Rex and Tomlinson, 1979; Ratcliffe, 1981; Rex, 1988). Here, I consider the
usefulness – as well as the excesses – of sociological theory building around ethnicity, class and
urban systems. In particular, I examine how attempts to recast the Chicago School ‘concentric
zone’ model of the city within a Weberian class perspective enabled issues of ‘race’, economic
stratification and urban location to be addressed relationally, but in ways that arguably invested
too much importance in the ‘status defining’ role of the housing market.
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In the following section, I trace this critique out further through an engagement with ethnographic
writing on South Asians in Birmingham, focusing particularly on the work of Dahya (1974) and
Desai (1963), as well as the responses of the CCCS collective to Rex’s work (Hall, 1980; CCCS,
1982; Solomos and Back, 1995). In the following section, I move on to consider work straddling
the period between the late 1970s and early 1990s, during which Birmingham’s economy
underwent major economic restructuring, exploring the ways in which different authors have laid
differential stresses on the constraining and enabling potential of the ‘new’ Birmingham economy
for South Asian and other minority groups. Here, I also address the emerging literature on
emerging ‘hybrid’ cultural forms in Birmingham, such as Dudrah’s recent work on bhangra (2002;
2007), and how these forms stand in a relation of ‘dynamic tension’ to other prominent strands of
South Asian identity, such as the religious.
In the final section of the chapter, I conclude by reviewing the scope for developing ‘alternative
histories’ of South Asians in Birmingham, to encompass ‘moments’ that have so far been muted
or eclipsed in existing accounts. Here, I consider how such alternative histories might be usefully
facilitated by recent archival initiatives undertaken under the auspices of Birmingham City
Council’s ‘Connecting Histories’ project, as exemplified in the collation and use of the Indian
Workers Association archives (Dar, 2007). However, in a return to the core premise of the
chapter, I make a case for the reflexive engagement with such archival materials, which are by
definition not less selective or paradigmatically inscribed than materials used in extant accounts.
Session III: Disciplines, Perspectives, Themes
Migrants and Multiculturalism: Discourses of ‘Brit-Asian’ in the Social Sciences
Shailaja Fennell, Development Studies, Cambridge
The image of the South Asian migrant both reflects and reconfigures the changing face of the
city in post-war Britain. The earlier political economy of labour market requirements of the 1960s
has given way to debates around political allegiance and cultural differences in the 1990s. The
movement from studying the ‘outsider’ migrant to engaging with notions of belonging provides a
fertile area to understand how Brit-Asian has been constructed in social science analysis and to
re-examine the conversations that abounded in that academic space.
The shifting premises for migration are located in the global circuits of capital where the need for
cheap labour which formed the backdrop to migration theory has been replaced by worries
about control and containment of labour. Capitalist accumulation models have been replaced by
cultural theories while the South Asian worker has transformed from the industrial worker to the
taxi driver and from the newsagent to the restaurateur. It is in this context of the replacement of
economic imperatives by cultural frameworks that the discourse of race sees a replacement of
the term migration by the diaspora and with it the attendant concerns with multiculturalism. Postcolonial geographies of space and gender have been made an important contribution to
broadening social science analysis of the South Asian presence in Britain as have theories of
gender and race that have provided us with the tool of cultural imaginaries to traverse the lives
and livelihoods of Brit-Asians.
The intention of the chapter is to address the shifts in the terrain within which social science
discourses have taken place, particularly to interrogate the move from work to word. This
chapter will examine theories of migration that emerged in the early models of international
development within British academic discourses (starting with the classic work of Arthur Lewis
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and the Manchester school). The chapter will then examine the language of migration and the
migrant that emerged in official documents and the manner in which labour markets were
regarded by local council officials and other ‘outsiders’. The implications of the industrial
workplace for communities of South Asians and how they constructed their own identity provide
the first set of ‘insider’ readings that are available in the UK, from oral history archives and early
labour union records. The chapter will then move on to analysing the shift from the migrant
literature to that of multiculturalism, with a particular focus on how the move from work to word
has impacted of the nature and space for ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ commentaries. The chapter will
conclude by returning to the world of social science theorising and draw out how shifts such as
work to word, and migrant to multicultural have impacted on the academic sphere, and more
generally on how the current intellectual concept of the cityscape/global city sits alongside the
everyday lives and the emergent identities of being Brit-Asian.
History, memory & the postcolonial: decolonising British Asian histories
William Gould, History, Leeds & Irna Qureishi, Oral Historian
This chapter will survey a collection of oral histories on the five cities on the one hand and
broader survey histories in the academy on the other, looking primarily at the power dynamics
inherent in the ‘doing’ of history. How have such histories ignored the voice of the unofficial –
the common man, women or the family? The notion of silenced histories of British Asians also
encompasses literary forms and genres, and the problems of English as the dominant medium
of expression and presentation. The British Asian presence since the end of empire in the
subcontinent has not been well documented by academic history, shy as it is to accommodate
local oral histories, or historical memory. As a result, the oral history tradition around British
Asians has tended to be dominated by popular histories or ‘surveys’ on the one hand (for
example, Visram, Ansari), and by social science disciplines, which provide a kind of structural
historical background to their field research on the other. The disciplines of oral history have
been a stronger part, importantly, of the writing of academic histories in non-European contexts,
and particularly where oral traditions have been so important to how history has been imagined.
Much of this work has offered a challenge to the European Enlightenment traditions of positivism
and textual representation – seeing them as an intrinsic mechanism of colonial power and
expansion. An element of ‘othering’ (Abu-Lughod) takes place when one (colonized) world is
represented for another (colonizer). British museum collections (British Museum, V&A) have
also preserved and represented the authoritarian voice of Indian history. Tipu Sultan’s tiger,
Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s golden throne, and Emperor Shah Jehan’s wine cup are among the
V&A’s most prized Indian artefacts. Does this explain why the lacuna of the British Asian voice
(particularly early migration experience) has been filled by oral history accounts generated from
within the community? Oral history sources however help us to understand the ‘incredible
variance’ in how these facts are perceived by different witnesses, languages and cultures
(Young).
The chapter will go on to explore how and why British Asians have been marginalised to the
periphery of mainstream British histories. As a result, their narratives are ambiguously
positioned in relation to the British state and establishment, reflecting ambivalent ‘British’
identities. Has this process produced parallel ‘subaltern histories’ in Britain too? Our treatment
of the core cities (covered by the framework of the project) epitomise a kind of meta-history of
Britain’s cities – covering issues which rarely feature in mainstream accounts and local histories,
which tend to push the historical narratives of British Asians into the realm of public policy. The
marginalisation of British Asians to the fringe of British history is also gendered. Texts on British
Asian migration histories usually leave out the experience of women. They usually also omit
histories of emotion and feeling and history of the family. Most accounts present a male
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perspective, particularly with stories of pioneers (seamen, soldiers, mill workers). In turn, this is
reflected back again in public policy, through race relations policies or the official celebration of
‘difference’ and multiculturalism. What does this tell us about the politics of ‘writing’ history
around the ‘British Asian’ presence? To what extent are the historical silences linked to the
British concentration upon and celebration of, a lost imperial past – something tied up with a
concentration on the key moment in the process of decolonisation (see for example, Paul Gilroy)
and the skewing of a British historical consciousness towards the ‘greatness’ rather than the
injustices of imperial power.
There has been however, a recent resurgence in the interest, for example in the links between
British Asians, and events on the colonial past – the celebration for example of Indian
independence and the discussion of partition. This was much more marked in 2007 than in
1997 - something which indicates a shift in the relationship between Europe and the Indian
subcontinent. Recent debates in ethnography have helped oral history to flourish (first person
narratives, life stories, or the idea of the creative historian or fieldworking historian).
Ethnographers are now more acutely aware now of what difference who they are makes to what
they see and experience, for example, the pros and cons of being a halfie (Abu Lughod),
suggesting a notable power shift in ‘speaking from’ rather than ‘speaking for’. Has this
contributed to the recent growth of British Asian writing, and what implications does this have for
the emergence of more nuanced ‘British Asian’ historical narratives?
The British Asian City and Cultural Production:
Ananya Jahanara Kabir, English, Leeds and Aki Nawaz, Nation Records
This chapter will examine the importance of cultural production within the British Asian
communities/ cities that have been studied through the network. (nb: the phrase 'cultural
production' is used to cover the range of self-expressive, self-consciously cultural practices that
emerge from the communities under discussion. They can be proclaimed as straightforwardly
'insider' productions; alternatively, more complex relationships between author/ producer,
audience and community may be triangulated. The work of analysis needs to attend to these
complexities). It will focus on those cultural productions that have been on 'display' in the
workshops organised by different steering committee members. In each workshop, certain
'products' were showcased by inviting appropriate community members/ practioners/ cultural
producers. These productions were both witnessed by the workshop participants and made the
subject of academic discussion. I am interested in analysing these double dynamics of the
cultural product that is both performed and analysed, participated in and commented upon. The
insider-outsider axis will thus be stretched to reflect on the workshop as a methodological space
for the network. Issues of vernacularity and multiple voices, the body in performance, somatic
memory and the relationship between the space of the workshop (always deliberately chosen as
representative of the community under scrutiny) and the practice(s) and production(s) in
question will be examined thereby. With food, music, sport, dance and performative poetry
comprising, together with the more obviously visible 'novel in English', the full range of cultural
productions displayed and discussed, the very notion of 'writing' the British Asian city will be
interrogated and critiqued. Does 'writing', and its attendant politics of publishing and marketing,
not close us off from the most vital and dynamic spaces of cultural production and contestation?
The necessity of a nuanced literary critical mode of analysis, that is attentive to issues of genre,
voice and symptoms of anxiety, self-assertion and pleasure within the text (broadly defined) will
accordingly be foregrounded. Yet it will be argued that, for a project such as ours, this literary
critical mode is most productive in conjunction with the other disciplinary perspectives the
network brought together.
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Writing Religion in British-Asian Diasporas
Seán McLoughlin, Religious Studies, Leeds & John Zavos, South Asian Studies,
Manchester
In this paper, we explore the variety of approaches and themes which characterise how religion
has been written in constructions of the South Asian presence in Britain. In postcolonial as in
colonial contexts, religion has been projected by a variety of differently positioned agents insiders and outsiders, academics and non-academics - as a critical if not the defining element
of South Asian identities at home and abroad. At the same time, historical and anthropological
as well as religious studies approaches to the subject matter all emphasise the dynamic
development and transformation of religious beliefs, practices, institutions and identities through
time and across space, not least in contexts of migration, diaspora and trans-nationalism. Our
intention here is to analyse something of these key processes of religious, social, cultural and
historical change since the 1960s, as well as their representation in and through various forms of
writing during the same period.
In theoretical terms, during the 1970s and 1980s, accounts of migration from South Asia to
Europe and North America were dominated by Sociologists, Anthropologists and others working
largely within paradigms of race and ethnicity, with their respective emphases on the
significance of social structure and cultural agency. During the last decade, however, accounts
of diasporic South Asian popular and youth cultures inspired largely by Cultural Studies’
accounts have also emerged. However, none of these literatures provides a sufficient basis for
thinking about the category of religion in its multi-local diasporas, not least in terms of the
overwhelming persistence and continuing world-wide significance of ‘tradition’ in the face of
cultural ‘translation’.
Against this context, we reflect firstly on those in Religious Studies who pioneered the empirical
study of religion and migration from South Asian to the UK from the 1980s onwards, paying
special attention to the Community Religions Project at the University of Leeds (Knott 1986;
Barton, 1986; Bowen, 1988; Kalsi, 1992; Lewis 1994). At the same time we argue that important
recent theoretical developments in Religious Studies (Asad, 1993; McCutcheon, 1997; Flood,
1999; Fitzgerald, 2001) are beginning to impact the empirical study of religion in the South Asian
diaspora. Taking this agenda forward, we explore the work of a number of scholars – mainly
anthropologists and scholars of religion (for example, Baumann, 1999; Nye 2000; Leslie, 2003;
Nesbitt, 2004; Knott, 2005; Mandair, 2006) - who have sought to locate empirical accounts of the
diasporic reconstruction and public recognition of religion in terms of a broader set of questions
concerning cultural reproduction and power – debates which have dominated the social
sciences and humanities in recent decades.
Only against such an exploration will it be possible to explore the problems and potentials of
religion as a field for the elaboration of diasporic consciousness in the context of its growing
significance as an identity marker in South Asian multi- and trans-localities. Moving between
vignettes from the five city events and the dominant and demotic ‘texts’ that ‘write’, construct or
perform the category of religion, we explore what we see as four key processes: i) migration,
settlement and reconstruction / institutionalisation in urban environments; ii) public recognition by
the local state; iii) multi-local and trans-local political networks, movements and imaginaries; iv)
the more demotic and resistive interstices of syncretic traditions including the persistence of folk
religious formations.
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