‘We’re just like everyone else!’ Rethinking the cultural politics of the London Asian urban music scene

Changing constructions of Asian/Muslim youth: from ‘passive’ to ‘dangerous’ formations

To understand the contemporary terrain of Asian youth cultures and its ambivalent relationship with politicized music expression, it is useful to briefly review how Asian diasporic youth have been positioned in the United Kingdom, both in popular and in academic discourses.

Discourses on Asian communities in the 1970s and 1980s in Britain tended to focus on the relative ‘passive’ and ‘docile’ character of Asians who had ‘strong’ family and cultural ties. While these discourses still exist, particularly for some Asian groups, competing discourses of Asians as problematic, antisocial and now, religious fundamentalists have emerged (Shankar, 2008). Increasingly, from the 1990s, discourses pathologized Asian Muslim youth as dysfunctional and criminal. These constructions of Asian criminality were formed out of specific religious and class-inflected views that targeted Asian Muslims in Britain as the ‘problem’ (Alexander, 2000). The pathology of criminality and deviance was seen as resulting from being part of an alienated, impoverished and unassimilable ‘Muslim underclass’ (Alexander, 2000), particularly after the 2001 Northern riots (Alexander, 2004; Kundnani, 2001).

Meanwhile, Asian women were often perceived as victims of their traditional, patriarchal families (Sharma, 2006). Women were also to blame for their role in being the ‘keepers of culture’ (Anthias et al., 1993) within these traditional families and reinforcing traditional values and customs of their cultures which prevents their children from assimilating to British middle-class values (Alexander, 2000). The reversal of perception, from being considered the ‘good’ minority to a ‘bad’ one for some Asian Muslim cultures, served to cement the image of the ‘Asian’ Muslim youth as an urgent threat to the moral order of Britain. The deployment of the label ‘gang’ within public discourse in Britain toward Black youth became widespread.

Increasingly, after the 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings, discourses on ‘ethnic minorities’ have shifted toward ‘minority faith communities’ (Fortier, 2007). The image of Asian Muslim male youth has become the site of new fears and anxiety symbolizing the failures of multiculturalism. A shared British liberal ‘culture’ becomes positioned as incompatible with Muslim/Asian forms of ‘culture’, which then deems multicultural integration an impossible outcome (Alexander, 2000; Fortier, 2007; Gilroy, 1987, 2005). Furthermore, the emphasis on ‘culture’ reveals how ethnicity and religion have become conflated so that British Muslims and South Asians become one and the same. Thus, the targeting of Muslims brings risk to all members of the British South Asian community and has rendered all Asian youth as hyper-visible as the current source of insecurities and ‘problems’ (Seidler, 2007).

On the other end of the spectrum, however, is the linking of British Asians who are non-Muslim with the ‘model minority’ myth, where those who are most often Indian are considered high-achieving, middle-class, successful and assimilated (Alexander, 2000; Werbner, 1999). Thus, discourses of Asian communities are fractured along the lines of class and religion where there are Indian ‘achievers’ versus the disadvantaged Muslim ‘believers’ (Modood, 1992: 43).

Relatedly, Asian youth cultures have also been invisible as legitimate sites of political and cultural creativity, despite much empirical evidence to the contrary ³ (Banerjea, 2002). That is, the scholarship on youth cultures often read youth cultural formations as forms of ‘resistance’ to social structures, as noted earlier in the introduction. However, the ‘resistance’ model is also a highly racialized reading where only White and Black youth cultures were considered to offer collective forms of ‘resistance’ against the dominant or hegemonic order. The persistent associations of Asians with arranged marriages and religious fanaticism have meant that Asians are constructed as profoundly antimodern, especially in comparison with the hypermodernity of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Banerjea, 2002: 575). Thus, Asian youth cultures have always been excluded from being the ‘restorative site for social relations’ as White and Black vernacular cultures have been presented, and the progressive, postmodern diasporicity of Black vernacular music expressions never quite extended to Asian music cultures (Alexander, 2002; Banerjea, 2002; Banerjea and Banerjea, 1996).

Relatedly, much of popular music scholarship analyzed these formations as alternative public spheres that provide a space for critical practice and act as a challenge to the dominant White order of the public sphere (Back, 1996; Buckland, 2002; McRobbie, 1994; Malbon, 1999). Black vernacular formations such as hip-hop have been understood as being part of Black ‘counter-publics’ (see Dawson, 2002; Neal, 2012; Perry, 2008; Pough, 2004). Yet, it is often the case that these formations, especially hip-hop, are equally problematic sites where its power to challenge dominant and hegemonic forms of whiteness and its ‘overblown defiance’ have become ‘routinized’ (Gilroy, 1994: 51). Thus, the creation of alternative public spheres requires attention to time and place. Equally important, the construction of a subaltern public sphere cannot be applied to all marginalized minority groups. Instead, the specificities of racial and class hierarchies in the United Kingdom must be taken into account when thinking about vernacular forms of popular culture and its potential to be a site of critical practice.

‘We’re just like everyone else’ – identifying with the majority

Ballantyne (2006) argues that during the end of the 1990s, South Asians were becoming increasingly assimilated into the British middle class with a ‘renewed emphasis on the pursuit of material wealth and political influence often at the expense of social justice and the protection of the community’s welfare’ (p. 146). Here, Malkit’s brief statement relates Asian material success to the emergence of Asian music production that reflected different outlooks:

The focus on culture is largely tied to late stage capitalist shifts in racial and class structures in Britain that have helped to remake racial, gendered and class identities. Sivanandan (2006) argues that the politics of ‘race’ is shaped by economic structures but negotiated through culture. The rise of a British Asian, urban middle-class identity was formed in and through practices of consumption as well as through the cultural realm, such as music, film and visual arts. In particular, the rise of neoliberalism and globalization within the last 30 years has brought culture into the very center of production and consumption, where cultural forms become accommodated, absorbed and homogenized but maintain their specificity and particularity, becoming ‘flexible’ regimes that are contradictory, where capitalism lives with and contains difference (Hall, 1997).

Considering this, Malkit’s linking of music to politics and changing material circumstances highlights the importance of music in articulating everyday experiences. The material, cultural and political changes were occurring that meant young Asians were no longer only speaking from (and for) the margins. The once ‘underground’, subaltern space for the practice of a collective, oppositional politics that dominated Asian popular music in the 1980s and most of the 1990s was slowly giving way to a mainly individualized, middle-class, consumption-dominated youth music space. For example, the dominance of hip-hop as a globalized form of popular culture meant the embrace of the materialism often celebrated in the mainstream US-led hip-hop. In contrast to the politics of earlier Asian ‘underground’ music, the practices of consumption have eroded the notion that identity determines a kind of politics. Thus, Malkit’s statement reminds us that a community’s link to a practice of oppositional collective politics is determined by the broader political, social and economic circumstances of those times.

Yet, it is also important to point out that this narrative of prosperity and betterment is more applicable to certain communities than to others. Here, Malkit is referring to his own experiences and that of the local Punjabi community of London. Malkit’s statement reflects how the relatively privileged position of some Asian groups today is a direct outcome of the collective political movements of a previous generation in the United Kingdom. This generation of relatively affluent young British Asians, more conservative and individualized, comes out of those collective movements. To an extent, this link has been devalued or remained unspoken within Asian communities and is largely absent from academic literature on ‘race’ at the time (Alexander, 2011; Ramamurthy, 2006).

In Gautam Malkani’s frank statement, we can see a hint of that erasure and ignorance of a political history within Asian communities in the United Kingdom. The 30-year-old Asian music fan, and author, sat down and spoke with me about how conservative Asian immigrant parents just wanted their children to achieve material success without acknowledging the political history that many first-generation Asians have created through collective action (Alexander, 2011; Brah, 1996; Ramamurthy, 2006; Sivanandan, 1981):

I would argue that people like Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawhney weren’t part of the Asian urban music scene. I would argue that the thing with Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawhney was that a lot of Asians listened to them, but they were part of the art school scene. And by definition, not a lot of Asians, how many Asian kids were in art schools? Not many for all kinds of reasons for that go back to the parental pressures to go into business, law or medicine because we’re immigrants and you don’t want to take risks and get a stable footing and that’s all reasonable but … so there were a great proportion of people who weren’t exposed to experimental art or culture and that included artists like Nitin Sawhney

Gautam articulates a much repeated view that those of the ‘Asian Underground’ music scene of the 1990s, many of whom identified with a particular leftist, radical politics from the margins, were considered to be elitist, niche musicians by those within the Asian urban music scene. His comments exemplify the complex racial and class politics that often are at play within different Asian music circles with the claim that the Asian Underground were often more interested in speaking to and engaging with a White, middle-class audience rather than their working-class Asian counterparts. Gautam raises the astute point that enacting or engaging in a cultural politics of difference was often about having access to the opportunities afforded to those of White, bourgeois, liberal socioeconomic and cultural background. Artists who were seen as musically and culturally ‘marginal’ were often not accessible to young Asians at the time. This notion of access relied upon having a certain amount of (sub)cultural capital.

In academia, arts and culture, notions of the subaltern and liminality are celebrated for their creative potential and often valorized as being the exemplary space of identity and culture (Hall, 1997; Hutnyk, 2000; Julien and Mercer, 1988). Yet this emphasis on the marginal and a politics of difference as reflected in the ‘experimental art and culture’ of Nitin Sawhney and Talvin Singh, largely, were inaccessible to the vast majority of people, who could arguably have seen the ‘marginal’ as a position they wanted to escape rather than embrace. Liminal spaces could arguably be considered desirable only when occupied by a privileged group of people who can choose to exercise this right as forming part of a particular lifestyle. Thus, these forms of political engagement and political positions became associated with a White, bourgeois set of practices – or whom Kolektiv, rapper and producer, referred to as those ‘Guardian-reading-chinstrokers’! Thus, for some within the Asian urban scene, rejecting such cultural forms and embracing an aspirational form of consumerism, often valorized within hip-hop and Black cultural production, became a way of resisting or distinguishing themselves from the White middle class. Thus, it could be argued that a radical politics of difference as expressed by the ‘experimental set’ took on very different meaning for Asian urban youth who perceived and actively constructed their class, racial and cultural positions as distinct from their White peers.

Gautam outlined another problematic aspect of leftist politics which has shifted ground within the last 20 years, to become a location or space that often increasingly excludes the working class and minorities. Instead, the radical margins have become a space for the privileged, university-educated middle classes. Moreover, as with postfeminist identities (McRobbie, 2004), these ‘new’ racial and ethnic subjectivities of minority and working-class youth are primarily constructed and shaped by ‘regimes of consumption’ (Nayak and Kehily, 2008). Arguably, the looting that occurred during the August 2011 disturbances in London exemplifies the extent to which practices of consumption were the dominant framework through which youth resistance was played out and provided the means through which to enact protest against much larger, systemic failures of housing, education and opportunities.

Here, Rav, BBC Radio One DJ and promoter of Asian club night Bombay Bronx, speaks about R&B star Jay Sean and the uprooting of Asian identity from the margins to the center.

He said,

Rav’s statement above exemplifies the ambivalent attitudes within the scene toward collective politics within Asian music from an earlier period, one that challenges the assumption that one’s identity determines a particular kind of politics. This ambivalence around the usefulness of collective political identities suggests that debates around the politics of identity of the 1990s have been effective in bringing about greater recognition of diversity and the instability and non-fixity of identity.

For example, Rav’s statement also brings to light the significance of the continuing politics of race that is being engaged with through an embodied form of politics exemplified by an artist like Jay Sean. His status as the first British Asian urban artist to have been recognized as an R&B artist in the United States is significant toward progressing a politics of recognition for Asian cultural producers without necessarily having to consciously occupy a collective, politicized position. Instead, his recognition as a British Asian artist within a predominantly African American genre increases visibility for Asian Americans and British Asians as being significant hip-hop and urban music fans and producers, a fact that has long since been the case but only more recently uncovered by White and non-Asian popular music audiences. It also goes some way toward challenging certain stereotypes of Asianness of being hardworking, ‘uncool’ effeminate nerds (Banerjea and Banerjea, 1996).

However, as evidenced by Rav’s lauding of Jay Sean’s version of politics as individual material success and ‘getting mine’, neoliberal ideas of individuality have also crept into the language of politics and identity. These ideas often take shape within popular culture, and this idea of an atomized individuality becomes the central way in which ideas of the self within certain forms of youth culture such as in hip-hop are portrayed and understood. The shift away from a conscious and collective politicized identity politics within the contemporary Asian music scene suggests that the neoliberal agenda of individualism of the 1980s dissolved people’s willingness to identify with wider collective social movements. As Angela McRobbie (2004) has noted, there has been a shift as politics has become further individualized.

Thus, the radical, politicized minority position that was carved out from earlier generations of Asian students and youth, which then continued to be articulated through bands of the ‘Asian Underground’ music movement, has given way to a messier, ambivalent space that is less ‘militant’, less connected to a stable collective ‘Asian’ identity. This increasing individualism poses a problem in that Asian youth (at least within the scene) no longer see a space for collective, politicized action as necessary to the struggle for social justice. The individualism that marks these fluid, ambivalent and multiple identities is accessed through modes of consumption where youth, ethnicity and ‘race’ themselves become commodities. The data suggest that to a certain extent, Asian youth who have grown up with affluence have become increasingly more conservative in their politics than the previous generation.

A postracial desiness?

A key element of a neoliberal Asian subjectivity is the disavowal of race and racialization as a central organizing principle in contemporary Britain. This disavowal comes in the form most commonly of a ‘postracial’ discourse that speaks of overcoming racism or moving past it, often through individual successes. In analyzing parts of a rap song called ‘Brown Boys’ and in highlighting popular novel Londonstani and the author’s perspective, I argue that these help to identify a ‘postracial’ discourse that has been taken up and woven into particular Asian ‘desi’ assimilationist narratives of belonging and identity in Britain.

By ‘postracialism’, I mean a particular set of discourses and ideologies, most often favored by Conservatives in Britain (and in the United States), in which there is a core belief that racism is no longer a social problem. Moreover, the project of postracialism works to replace the explicit language of race with that of ‘color-blindness’. Postracial narratives demonstrate how racism retains its power through its mutability, because it is, according to Back and Solomos (2000), a ‘scavenger ideology’ with the ability to pick up and use other ideas and values. Older, overt forms of racism are being replaced by covert, subtler, sophisticated forms, which incorporate ideas of culture and nation into older ideologies of race and inferiority (Omi and Winant, 1994; Winant, 1998). Scholars have identified these forms as ‘cultural racism’ (Back and Solomos, 2000), ‘symbolic racism’ and ‘color blind’ racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2013). Bobo and Smith (1998) call it ‘laissez-faire racism’ in part because of its connection to the neoliberalization of politics. They describe it as being more socially permeable and less extreme than Jim Crow racism.

In the 2008, remixed track entitled ‘Brown Boys ⁴ ’, which was a collaboration between artists Mentor, AG Dolla, Swami Baracus, Menis, Kayvew, Nika-D and Lost Soul-jah, provides a narrative that ‘speaks to the nation/from a perspective of an Asian’ As is common with many contemporary hip-hop tracks, the song tells a narrative of struggle and success, where each rapper speaks from their unique ‘perspective of an Asian’.

I will focus on two particular sections within the track, one by rapper Swami Baracus and the other by Nika-D. In the second half of the track, Swami Baracus raps:

‘Generation Part II/lost in the future/

Barracuda/proud of my culture/

the path that we laid out/the past is played out/

now the racists fade out/

pushed in the Commonwealth/now we’re common in wealth.

Here, Swami Baracus repeats the central tenet of postracial ideology of the ‘dissolved racial subject’ where racism is something that we can leave to the distant past and not have to confront in the present (Jackson, 2005). Here, a ‘postracial’ present and future is also deeply connected to being ‘common in wealth’, where the relative economic success of a few British Asians is held up as proof of this postracial moment. In doing so, it works to reinforce the notion of a meritocracy and social mobility which minimizes the ‘salience of [racism’s] experience’ for racialized minorities (Lentin, 2012: 2). In fact, this ignores the fact that most racialized, non-White members still suffer from racism and that in particular, not all South Asian communities have experienced an equal amount of economic and social success in the United Kingdom. It also ignores the growing evidence that in fact, along with Blacks, South Asians are now suffering from increased surveillance and monitoring by the Metropolitan Police.

Following Swami Baracus’, Nika-D offers his narrative on the song when he rapped:

I’m a mixed race man with skin like a sun tan/

I’m a brown boy man/yeah half white and Asian/

In the new millennium/you see my time for it about/

you see signs for the country are changing/

And color’s just not important anymore/

It’s all about rich and poor/not a phase/

I see many brown faces black faces making a wage

Here, Nika-D’s reference to his mixed race heritage is used as an example to suggest that ‘color’ is no longer an issue. In this case, Nika-D’s mixedness is deeply tied to his validation of a postracial Britain. His mixedness affords him greater mobility in terms of being able to sometimes bypass being of minority status and position. Second, contemporary discourses and representations of mixedness often valorize certain forms of mixedness as attractive and desirable faces of multiculture. A recent example of this was in London’s 2012 Olympic opening ceremony which featured a beautiful mixed race British family heralding a new, cosmopolitan future. Thus, in the contemporary moment, being mixed race affords him a certain amount of flexibility, and he can take advantage of being ‘exotic’ and ‘attractive’ without necessarily being considered a racial or ethnic minority.

As Nika-D demonstrates, a key claim within a postracial discourse is one that asserts that we live in a ‘color-blind’ society where people, and especially Whites, do not ‘see’ or recognize one’s ‘race’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2013). This statement is important because it shows how racism is understood to be limited to one that’s color coded, and therefore, the claim to not see color effectively denies the charge of racism. In the United Kingdom particularly, race as an important structure that shapes life chances and opportunities has always been disavowed in favor of other forms of social inequality, such as class.

Similarly, Gautam Malkani’s (2007) Londonstani stitches together a fictional world in which this problematic antiracialism or a postracial identity becomes part of the overall moral message of this narrative. Yet, the story and characters are filled with ambivalence. At times, it is difficult to tell whether the book supports this antiracialism or a postracial present or whether the book seeks to construct a utopian antiracist future. Through both interviews and the story itself, it suggests that Malkani, at times, articulates both positions.

As one of the only novels to emerge that tells a story about young British Asians and the creation of London youth cultures, it provides fascinating insight into the everyday and lived experiences of young British Asians. The book commences with a pivotal scene in which Jas, the main protagonist, and his friends beat up a young White man for supposedly calling one of them a ‘Paki’. However, by the end of the scene, what the reader gleans is that the young White man never did call any of them a Paki and, instead, is the innocent victim of a perceived threat that is not there. Malkani discussed this first scene with me in June 2008. He said,

While Malkani is careful to not completely deny the existence of racism, it is something that happens to others but not to him and to other (middle-class) Asians like him. Gautam subscribes to the notion that forms of racialization and racism are no longer everyday acts that young British Asian Londoners have to undergo. Here, Gautam articulates an increasingly common feature of a postracial discourse where racism and prejudice are believed to be individual and subjective acts and affect the individual at the level of the interpersonal only, or what Goldberg (2009) refers to as ‘born again racism’ which is a privatized racism with no history and no precedents (p. 23). This view of racism rejects the existence of racism as systematic, organized and structural – forms of racism that are embedded in the legal, political and economic structures and institutions.

As neoliberal economic policies usher in the dissolution of the welfare state system along with slashes in funding across all social institutions especially in higher education, these austerity measures have exponentially increased social and economic inequality, especially for those whose lives were already precarious. The novel in effect, in line with a neoliberal model, serves to decouple ‘race’ from racism. Yet it is still haunted by the traces of racism and its effects. That is, Jas’ whiteness forces us to reexamine with a more critical eye the numerous points at which the characters interact with each other in ways that are supposedly unmarked by racism and ‘racialized’ hierarchies. For instance, the existence of Jas distracts from the way in which embodied forms of racialization and racism still exist, particularly for those who are perceived as ‘other’, which is often the case with young Asian men in London. The message of a postracial Britain is the astute point that Alana Lentin (2012) made that a postracial discourse is exactly how contemporary racism expresses itself. That is, ‘postracialism’ is often framed in direct relation to the backlash against multiculturalism (and its supposed failures) wherein the need for diversity to be recognized and accommodated is seen as being excessive, overly conciliatory, ‘too politically correct (PC)’, or quite simply, there is ‘too much diversity’ (Goodhart, 2004). And as the various plot twists in Londonstani reflect, contemporary racism resurfaces intertwined, mediated, justified and articulated through culture (Gilroy, 2012; Lentin, 2012). Jas’ relationship with Samira, who he briefly dates in secret, and Samira’s brother’s violent reaction when he found out about their clandestine relationship are understood and framed through Samira and her family being Muslim. And the solution too must be one in which culture is central, made evident by the adoption of community cohesion policies and David Cameron’s (2011) ‘muscular liberalism’. With relation to Jas and his whiteness, this too can be ‘solved’ through cultural means. He simply has to adopt ‘desi’ ways, language and practices, and he will be perceived as someone in that youth culture. Yet, the question remains whether Jas will never be perceived or positioned and interpellated as ‘Asian’, nor will the ever-evolving forms of ‘cultural’ racism and increased racial profiling of young Asian men (both Muslim and non-Muslim) that are still very much in effect affect him in the same ways.

But there is also a more hopeful, utopian vision of a ‘postracial’ future present at various points in the story. This is most clearly the case when we come to the final twist at the end that reveals that the protagonist Jas is in fact a White, English young man. This is only revealed by the utterance of his full first name which is ‘Jason Bartholomew-Cliveden’. The surprise ending reveals a challenge to the ethnic absolutist ways in which culture and increasingly religion are used to essentialize and effectively racialize Asian youth cultures and practices. Thus, Jas’ racial identity and positioning are not mutually exclusive of his ‘desiness’ and of being an ‘authentic’ voice of this South Asian ‘desi’ coming-of-age story. In Gautam’s own words, he argued ‘In the 90s, you had this ethnic identity as a proxy for masculinity, and now that subcultural identity as a proxy for ethnic identity’. In other words, Gautam here insists that a subcultural identity supersedes an ethnic identity. This highlights the fact that these Asian youth subcultures exist not as an ‘Asian’ set of cultural practices but are seen as syncretic local cultures, no longer to be read as purely mono-cultural and mono-racial practices. Instead, they can be seen as highly masculine ‘body-reflexive’ practices (Nayak, 2003) that cross-cut ethnic and racial boundaries. And precisely because of the supposed failures of multiculturalism (often the blame is squarely placed on immigrants and diasporic communities and more recently, the British Asian Muslim community especially) and the subsequent rise of the aforementioned ‘community cohesion’ as a backlash to ‘too much diversity’, perhaps Jas’ whiteness becomes an important message about the endurance and the reality of ‘zombie’ multiculturalism (Gilroy, 2012) that refuses to die. Multiculture, rather than having failed, is very much an everyday part of London and British life.

Conclusion

Given how little there has been written with regard to Asian youth cultures, this article charts the significant moments of the interactions between a local ‘desi’ urban music scene in London and the globalized music culture of hip-hop. With an emphasis on this local ‘desi’ music scene, the article documents the disappearance of a space for collective and conscious political activity within Asian popular culture and the inadequacy of understanding these spaces as alternative public spheres.

I argued that within the context of the Asian scene, the lyrics, message and performances articulate a much more mainstream view that suggests that the framework of (subcultural) ‘resistance’ and the creation of an alternative public sphere are overly simplistic and inadequate. The practice of a cultural politics does not automatically entail a resistance toward the mainstream music industry or mainstream views on politics. Often the cultural politics showed a resistance to the marginal and the ‘alternative’ which reveals complicated relationships between class, race and privilege associated with these marginal, alternative positions.

Throughout the article, I highlighted how these changes have led to new articulations of ‘desiness’ that are increasingly individualized and neoliberal and increasingly (and contradictorily) similar to a White, middle-class majority. Thus, the article showed that the Asian urban scene utilizes the now global and very mainstream genre of hip-hop as a medium through which to articulate these messages that often coincide with and support ideas of individualism and neoliberal capitalism that contradict certain progressive ideas of politics.

Within the message of hip-hop, hyper-individualized and specifically neoliberal models of consumption have become central narratives within the music, style and culture of hip-hop. Hip-hop’s corporate brand of multiculturalism symbolized by the ‘hip-hop mogul’ showed that youth, ethnicity and ‘race’ themselves become commodities. This is increasingly apparent when we see someone such as Jay Sean being lauded by Rav as someone who represents progress for the British Asian community. And of course, his success as someone who has defied the stereotypes of South Asians as exotic Orientals or still as foreign ‘others’ is to be celebrated. However, the fact that he reached a level of success outside of the United Kingdom still indicates something about how Asians are continually represented and constructed in British popular culture as ‘Other’.

The neoliberalization of contemporary Asian diasporic identities also manifests itself in the adoption of a postracial sensibility, where racism is seen as a relic of the past and no longer significant in shaping the lived experiences of young, middle-class ‘desi’ Asians. Moreover, racism itself becomes understood as individualized acts or behaviors rather than as structural and institutional formations. The adoption of postracial narratives of the self can be seen in examples of music and in popular fiction. These narratives are especially problematic because they downplay the continuing forms of racism and discrimination that specifically target Asians in the United Kingdom. Paradoxically, the dominance of postracialism has coincided with the return of overt, explicit forms of racism and violence in Europe and the United States against racialized minorities, migrants and asylum seekers.

Discourses that repudiate and deny the significance of racism in our contemporary context have become the way in which racism lives on. These discourses do the work of silencing critique and claims that racism is still alive. Moreover, as the article points out, what we’re also seeing is the shifting nature of racism itself, as a ‘scavenger ideology’, and the belief in a ‘color-blind’ racism that focuses on the common sense of cultural incompatibility, on the failures of diversity, on different ‘ways of being’. Discussions on postracialism and neoliberal identities through the constructions of race in a local ‘desi’ music scene are significant in being able to help build a conversation about the everyday complexities of racism, culture, class and nation.