Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas

"In 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act hastened the process of South Asian migration to postcolonial Britain. Half a decade later, now is an opportune moment to revisit the accumulated writing about the diasporas that have been formed through subsequent settlement, and to probe the ways in which the South Asian diaspora could be re-conceptualised. Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas takes a fresh look at South Asian diasporas in the postcolonial period and will have multi-disciplinary resonance worldwide. The meaning and importance of the local, multi-local and trans-local is explored through a comparison of five British-Asian cities: Bradford, the East End of London, Manchester, Leicester and Birmingham. Analysing the 'writing' of these differently configured cities since the 1960s, its main focus is the significant discrepancies in representation between differently-positioned texts reflecting both dominant institutional discourses and everyday lived experiences of a locality. Part I offers a complete, yet still highly contested, reading of each city's archives. Part II examines how the arts and humanities fields of history, religion, gender and literary/cultural studies have all written British Asian diasporas, and how their perspectives might complement the better-established agendas of the social sciences. Providing an innovative analysis of the growing South Asian communities and their multi-local identities in Britain today, this interdisciplinary book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, Migration, Ethnic and Diaspora Studies, Sociology, and Anthropology"--