South Asian Popular Culture Communities, audiences, and multi ...

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South Asian Popular Culture

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Communities, audiences, and multi-functions: British cultural politics and the showcasing of South Asian art Marta Bolognania a Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, Bristol, UK Online publication date: 05 April 2011

To cite this Article Bolognani, Marta(2011) 'Communities, audiences, and multi-functions: British cultural politics and the

showcasing of South Asian art', South Asian Popular Culture, 9: 1, 71 — 80 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2011.553891 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2011.553891

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South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 9, No. 1, April 2011, 71–80

Communities, audiences, and multi-functions: British cultural politics and the showcasing of South Asian art Marta Bolognani*

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Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, Bristol, UK The development of South Asian arts in the UK has gone from using typical colonial and ‘high culture’ showcases to using particular but still far more ‘mainstream’ formats, and has been publicly subsidised in a number of ways, including through community projects. In many respects, South Asian arts is not a ‘niche product’ any more due to the (mainly political) tension towards creating a distinctively ‘British Asian’ (or BrAsian) rather than a strictly ‘South Asian’ product. This paper draws upon two case studies of South Asian ‘cultural producers’ (Dudrah ‘Cultural Production’ 223) in Northern England to argue that showcasing South Asian art in Britain is a peculiar endeavour, the existence of which must account for multiple functions, multiple audiences and even international politics. The paper argues that recognising this fact has profound implications for the future of British Asian identities and for the negotiation between popular culture and politics.

Introduction On 6 March 2010 the symposium Beyond Borders took place in Leeds, in West Yorkshire, the centre of a South-Asian-Yorkshire heritage uniquely developed in the post-war period. Multicultural conviviality (Gilroy xv) is here challenged by the profound economic, political and cultural strains that characterised Northern England in the last quarter of the past century, together with more recent global events such as the post 9/11 backlash against Muslim communities around the world (see McLoughlin for an account of the historical transformations that tie the global and the local in Yorkshire). Although this social environment is popularly represented in the UK as rather dire, especially thanks to cinematographic ventures such as Mischief Night (see Bolognani et al.), the symposium singled out two local case studies of ‘cultural producers’ (see below) that have been successfully contributing to creativity and heritage celebration by working towards the creation of new audiences for South Asian arts. The first one, SAA-UK, is a Leeds-based charity that aims, among other things, to promote South Asian arts, and is led by Keranjeet Virdee; the second is embodied by Irna Qureishi, a freelance curator who has participated in all the most prominent events related to popular study of South Asian heritage in West Yorkshire since the publication of the Bradford Vision book, Here to Stay. These two examples are representative of the struggles and peculiarities of South Asian arts in Britain in creating their own audience. This essay will identify their common predicaments by contextualising them against the historical processes of post-war Britain and against the political choices predicated by multiculturalism a´ l’Anglaise.

*Email: [email protected] ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online q 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2011.553891 http://www.informaworld.com


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From cultural subjects to cultural practitioners Holt and Turney (331) have argued that the display of South Asian artefacts in Britain has gone through momentous changes in the last century or so: from being material objects dating back to the colonial era, and stored in the Victoria and Albert and British museums, nowadays South Asia and all things related to that geo-cultural region have become much more visible, popular and mainstream. A century ago, the colonial elite would have decided which works were worthy of attention and study, and which artists should be beneficiaries of patronage, while prioritising those who resonated with their orientalist tastes. Artists would travel from South Asia for limited but sometimes extensive periods in view of making the most of the British educational institutions, often with controversial results (Holt and Turney 335), as they were constrained in their production by patrons and inflexible institutions. The audience of South Asian art in Britain was thus very limited, and it was the audience (including patrons) rather than the artists who decided what was to be encouraged in cultural production. Although there are still a number of artists from South Asia who travel to Britain to engage formally with British institutions (see, for example, A.R. Rahman), much more is now produced and consumed nationally. The demographic increase of South Asians in Britain, and their transformation from sojourners to settlers; the desire of pursuing continuity with their heritage; cultural resistance, but also the implications of ‘celebrate diversity’ policies, may all be said to have played a role in the changing production and display of South Asian art in Britain. It is in the context of demographic change in Britain that the term ‘cultural producers’ becomes useful. The more South Asian sojourners became settlers, the more their time outside work was diversified. The moment labourers changed their idea of a workingsaving-returning plan into a settler’s vision, all sorts of needs and desires emerged in relation to the once migrants and also their families (Bolognani ‘The Myth of Return’ 66). This experience is obviously affected by transnational dynamics, both in terms of shaping those needs of emotional and cultural continuity with ‘back home’ and in terms of politically negotiating rights outside the work place in their immigrant-labourer capacity (while often facing institutional racism: see Dudrah ‘Cultural Production’ 198; Kaur and Terracciano 352). Organizing one’s time outside work may have consisted of the organization of religious facilities or provisions in one’s area or at one’s children’s schools, but the more creative expression of such shift in settlement-induced needs satisfaction may be considered the one related to the arts. It is at this historical moment that we can start speaking of ‘cultural producers.’ According to Dudrah (‘Cultural Production’ 223), ‘cultural producers’ are not only the artists who partake in artistic endeavours, but are also those who contribute to ‘social processes of cultural identity formation for themselves and audiences.’ In a transnational setting, with multiple links with ‘back home’ still alive but also with a newly found identity as ‘settler,’ the social process of identity formation is also fed by the engagement with one’s heritage, that is at the same time a way of publicly defining one’s particular place in British society. ‘Doing arts’ as a minority, in fact, predisposes a dialogue with British institutions (Dudrah ‘Cultural Production’ 198), making the field of race and local politics an important backdrop for ‘producing culture.’ ‘Doing art’ or ‘being a cultural producer’ goes beyond performing and includes an array of political and pragmatic issues. The presence or not of institutional racism, the national agenda about minorities, and other local or national political constraints are then a very important part in the negotiation between the cultural producers and the structure that has important ramifications for the audiences. Of course, the characters of the South Asian population, part ‘here to stay’ (Bradford), part deluded by a myth of return (see Bolognani



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‘The Myth of Return’), created particular predispositions among the audience about what was to be showcased. In the diasporic context, art production inevitably takes up controversial (at times painful, at times celebratory) forms. The ‘cultural producers’ thus went beyond the high culture of colonial museums and faced an audience whose interests went beyond the purely artistic or aesthetic. If the flux of visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum can be described as a ‘scopophiliac’ activity, or the interest in looking and watching and concentrating on the pleasure given by the gaze, the expectation driving the new cultural production carried a different significance together with a different audience. The experiences of (often predominantly musical) arts as produced by South Asian settlers had great social, identity and political purport. The switch from ‘scopophilia’ to ‘epistephilia’ or the desire to ‘get to know’ (Naficy) has been the subject of many studies on exile populations cultivating their links with their abandoned land through the study of its cultural heritage. Whether this is true or not in the British South Asian context is perhaps the topic for another paper. However, there is no doubt that the switch between the institutional national museum spaces and the more local art spaces is now different both in form and in production. In the latter, cultural producers are at the same time brokers and audience of artistic endeavours with a kind of very emotional and personal involvement. The causes behind the new cultural production of South Asian arts in Britain seems then to be related to the diasporic demographics as well as to the diasporic condition; their shape and form seem to be related to both the audiences and the institutions at particular historical times. It may be wrong, however, to ascribe the fertility of South Asian art in Britain only to demographics, when we know that not all densely South Asian populated areas are automatically transforming into cultural hubs, and, furthermore, that preferences for different kinds of arts change according to locality. In this essay, I will argue that the demographic argument needs to be matched by a political one in order to satisfy questions about the popularity and the form of South Asian arts in Britain. Diversifying art production A few reviews of what is present on British territory in the form of South Asian art suggest that the most densely South Asian-populated areas are not necessarily the ones where South Asian arts flourish, and that local interests are highly specialised. For example, Holt and Turney (339) argue that Manchester, courtesy of Shisha, has become a unique locus for raising the profile of South Asian visual arts; further south, in the Midlands, music has become the centre of cultural production, with courses, bands and singers who have become quite famous beyond national borders (Dudrah ‘Cultural Production’ 210). There are many sociological explanations as to how religion, ethnicity, class and geographies of migration may have affected different intensities and quality of art production; for example, most South Asians in Bradford come from the Mirpur district in Azad Kashmir, a place that has historically been at the margins of politics and thus patronage in the Indian subcontinent, has low education rates that are reproduced to some extent in Britain, and in many instances has a conservative Muslim view of public performance by women (for an overview of the history of Mirpuri migration and settlement to Britain see Sokefeld and Bolognani). It is not in the scope of this essay, however, to analyze the factors within the social-cultural milieu of specific South Asian communities in Britain; rather, my interest is to chart how British politics have affected the development of South Asian arts.


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In the West in general, South Asian arts are much more visible than they used to be, at least through Bollywood, fashion and music collaborations with South Asian artists. Apart from the most mainstream outputs, there are also a high number of local or regional organizations which cover more specific activities. In addition to numerous Bollywood dance classes catering for a very heterogeneous public, in Britain there are many groups that cultivate classical dance and music generally less palatable to a non-South Asian audience: indeed, one such group (SAA-UK) will constitute one of this essay’s two case studies. Any investment in South Asian arts, however, cannot simply rely on donations from the South Asian community in Britain, as the crisis of melas confirm (Qureshi). Efforts need to be sustained by public funds or private investors; to do so, cultural producers may need to find a more universalistic frame for their particularistic projects. Either at the organizational level, at the participatory level or at the audience level, diversity needs to be part of the artistic project in search of funding. It has been argued (Murray 42) that in Britain museums are still mainly the dominion of the white middle-upper classes and thus they have at some level started reaching out to a diverse audience (for example, through education outreach, visitor experience, collection management, research and scholarship, governance and staffing: De Joia 21). The same needs to happen wherever South Asian arts aspire to more than being relegated to a back room in a terraced house, or to marriage halls. If cultural producers of very specific traditions want to survive and increase their audience, they have to take diversity politics very seriously, implementing locally what is discussed nationally, as exemplified by the case study below. SAA-UK: arts, engagement and empowerment SAA-UK is a charity founded in Leeds in 1997 with the aim of promoting ‘engagement with traditional and contemporary South Asian arts’ (SAA-UK). Its activity can be roughly defined as community education in arts, as well as performances and protection of South Asian arts through investment in art development. Its activities are addressed explicitly both to children and their parents. SAA-UK was founded the same year New Labour came into power, when Britain had relatively little in terms of equality and diversity policy. The new government actively promoted a broad new agenda to fight social exclusion, where art institutions, museums, libraries and other similar actors were asked to get involved in some form of inclusion strategy (Vincent 86). Rather than the pedagogical value of cultural institutions and activities, another function seemed to be prioritized: the one that contributed to the benefit of the community at large – be it in the name of social cohesion or ‘keeping the kids off the streets.’ Such a framework worked both as an opportunity and as a constraint, giving fledgling cultural producers a better chance to get funding but also by leading organizations such as SAA-UK to prioritize certain activities and frame them in terms that were relevant to the social inclusion agenda. This is clear in browsing the organization’s website, which is dense with political jargon. The ‘core values’ of the charity are defined in terms of ‘power of the arts enabling individuals to transcend boundaries and limitations,’ ‘art as cultural bridge’ encouraging ‘dialogue and community cohesion,’ ‘empowerment,’ ‘positive contribution to society,’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ (SAA-UK). SAA-UK openly acknowledges one of its objectives as empowering and supporting those from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups to work in governance and management positions in the arts. SAA-UK also expresses its own version of Yorkshire identity and British identity when it argues that ‘South Asian culture is integral to the UK’s cultural diversity and deserves to be championed’ and wishes



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to ‘cross-cultivate and develop audiences for South Asian arts and hence bring them into the mainstream of Yorkshire cultural life’ (SAA-UK). SAA-UK is committed to its regional base in Yorkshire and continues to grow and work in partnership with organizations and community groups in order to provide opportunities for all members of society to participate in the arts. Putnam’s idea of bridging social capital (22) and campaigns against divisive or segregationist practices are, since 2001 (more as a result of the Northern disturbances than 9/11) some of the most important parameters used by politicians in order to decide whether to finance community projects or not (Furbey and Macey). Activities that are seen to be able to connect people from different heritages, be they religious or ethnic, stood a better chance of getting funded, as the New Labour Government kept publishing guidelines for community engagement (see for example the National Community Forum). Many activities that are taken up by mainly South Asian children and youth are thus still funded through an approach that has got more to do with community concerns than artistic concerns per se. In other words, many South Asian arts can still be pursued and protected through public funding that does not have as much to do with art as it does with politics. According to SAA UK’s Keeran Virdee, most of the funders read such activities in terms of ‘keeping the kids off the streets’ (SAA-UK) rather than with a genuine interest for the preservation of certain art forms, as she explained during the symposium. Although SAA-UK is clearly a charity for the promotion of South Asian arts, its agenda is expressed in very political terms that resonate with social policies of the more than a decade in which it developed. Whether consciously or not, this vision functions as a translation of public policy into public culture. Its statements about children’s and young people’s positive engagement and its vision of cross-cultivating audiences and participants are testament to the organization’s agenda, and do significantly influence the kind of audience that may attend its events. In the panorama of community cohesion and the discussion of bridging social capital as fundamental to the ‘good society,’ doing South Asian arts in Britain is almost like walking a very fine line, where in order to produce very particular forms of art, and in order to survive economically, one has to argue for each art form’s universality rather than for its specificity. Politically, in order to be funded, an association such as SAA-UK has to implicitly prove that there is no potential for divisiveness in promoting the specificity of South Asian arts. How free is a freelance curator? Irna Qureshi’s work is even more political than that of SAA-UK, as dealing directly with history, sometimes willingly and sometimes inevitably, brings political concerns to the fore. In the foreword to her latest work (2010), the book Coming of Age: Celebrating 21 Years of Mela in the UK, Keith Khan argues that melas1 (and by extension we could think of the showcasing of South Asian arts in general) have been at the crossroads of ‘social, cultural and political agendas,’ where all types of creativity mingle by erasing boundaries between high and ‘low’ culture, making them accessible to everyone, including non-Asians. ‘Music, dance and food was something [even a non South Asian audience] could grasp’ (Tim Smith qtd. in Qureshi 13). Melas have been the occasion, opportunity and excuse for identity and political endeavours both on behalf of the organizers and the audiences, as we will see below. Looking back at the history of melas in the UK is only the most recent step in Qureshi’s journey into recording the contribution of South Asians to UK history rather than simply describing their arrival here. Taylor (33, 36) argues that the only way to sustain diversity


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inclusion at an institutional level (avoiding short-lived ad hoc attempts as in the 1980s – 1990s) is by embedding minorities in mainstream history, that is to say highlighting the organic role of a minority in that history rather than making an exception out of it. Let me illustrate what I mean by ‘embedding’ through a hypothetical situation arising from the preparation of an exhibition about the Second World War. If such an exhibition had at its heart an agenda of sustaining diversity, it would have to account for the contribution of minorities in a way that explained what role they played in the greater picture, allowing this aspect of an often marginalised history into the greater narrative. The museum structure and narrative can result in a much more oppressive than liberating expression of identity if inclusion efforts go wrong (Dewdney 50). This is a sensitive step as minority audiences also do not want to be singled out and targeted (and thus constituted) by race and ethnicity categories (Dewdney 51); inclusion means being woven into a cultural programme’s set up rather than finding ways to impose an institution’s cultural programme onto a resistant audience. Qureshi’s endeavours seem to point in the same direction, and include weaving significant elements from South Asian history into the texture of the British one in order to create a less colonial and more grass-roots kind of history. When talking at the symposium, she also recalled the difficulty in involving a South Asian audience (that too in Bradford!) during one of the first exhibitions on their migration history she organized. Museum spaces were somehow still uncomfortable for many, and Qureshi’s major work, she says, was to explain to the ‘missing audience’ (in this case the principal subject of the exhibition as well) what the interest in doing the research was and convincing them to visit the exhibition. Once they did arrive, though, they found it was an enjoyable activity, as Qureshi described at the symposium. A visit to an exhibition that benefited from the constant presence of the curator meant that many more questions were asked and the exhibition space became interactive. The audience slowly blurred into the maker through additions to the knowledge and the collection of anecdotes about Bradford migration history. During the symposium, Qureshi highlighted that the ‘PR job’ in the Asian context has to do with a particular set of skills, such as making the visit personal for the audience and involving the curator directly in the process. This PR exercise, however, is only part of audience inclusion policies. Only when diversity is captured at the creative stage of a cultural endeavour, and embedded in history, not as an exotic snapshot, but woven into the narrative, can diversity be sustained. Thus, when organizing a photographic exhibition around the history of South Asians in UK, care must be taken that scopophilic concerns do not fossilize images of a never-changing home as separate from the UK, but, rather, reflect historical narratives of the migration process (Werbner) shared by what would be otherwise a ‘missing audience’ in spite of their being the exhibition subject. As for the agenda of SAA-UK, even in the current historical and political context it is essential that South Asian culture (or history) is seen as an integral part of the British one. Looking back at her work over the years, Qureshi sees the beginning of the new millennium as a time of very important changes in her work as a curator, with the intensification of politics brought about by both national and international events and the consequent restrictions on her creative freedom. The first change was the one during the campaign to promote Bradford for the bid as European Capital of Culture, when British community cohesion concerns came to the fore (for an overview of the historical significance of such campaign, see Bolognani ‘Good Culture’). In 2002, in order to make the mela the pie`ce de resistance for the bid for Bradford as European Capital of Culture, its organization was passed onto an agency not connected with Bradford. Subsequently,



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all the relationships that had grown out of the mela crumbled as the most important part of the process leading to the summer festival, the involvement of different communities in bringing it alive, had been obliterated (Qureshi 30). As argued for photographic exhibitions in more institutionalized contexts such as that of museums, diversity cannot be sustained long-term if it is not included in the planning stages of the organization of a cultural event. With the external organization of the event, melas have become one or two-day events that have scarcely any significance for the rest of the year. The social consequences of melas in the 1990s went beyond the more abstract notions of cohesion: Qureshi argues that the simple realization of the economic power of South Asians and the emergence of Asian youth scene were greatly propelled by melas; delegating their organization to professional agencies pushing the multicultural agenda may reduce melas to a fetish with scarce community involvement at the creative stage and consequently a different impact on audience formation. However, the most ‘critical event’ (Das) of what has been popularly called ‘the Noughties’ (2000 –2010) was surely 9/11, shortly preceded in northern England by what have gone down in history as the ‘Northern riots.’ The urban disorders in which ‘Asian youth’ participated that summer were probably the last event in which British Muslim individuals of South Asian descent were called simply ‘South Asians’ (Gimson 14). Since September 11, British Pakistanis, for instance, have been publicly broadly defined as British Muslims, with a clear dilution of their cultural South Asian heritage that would go on to strongly singling them out in public policy. Just as with SAA-UK, the bigger picture of national and international politics had a crucial effect on the development of more localised art spaces. Qureshi is now persuaded that finding financial support for any kind of cultural project under the South Asian banner would become problematic, as the institutional interest lies more with Muslims than with South Asians in general. By adapting Sue Benson’s famous comment on different widespread perceptions of minorities in the UK, we could say that ‘South Asians have culture, Muslims have problems.’ Such an attitude cannot but carry very important consequences in the public sphere as well as in the arts, as Qureshi testified at the symposium. In this context, quite similarly to that of the SAA-UK, the tension between the particular (Muslims, locality) and the universal (community cohesion, national policy agenda) becomes paramount in influencing projects and follow funding guidelines. Can we celebrate the birth of BrAsian arts and BrAsian audiences? How much can the forms of South Asian art mentioned above be considered a part of Britain? They are indeed part of a South Asian heritage, but the audience is constituted mainly of British citizens and is heavily affected by national policy agendas. Are these practices then compatible with the definition of ‘BrAsian’? The definition of BrAsian, not yet popularised in spite of its use in a public speech by Prince Charles (Prince of Wales) and its limited use on the BBC Asian network, was scholarly defined by Sayyid in 2006. The invention of the word ‘BrAsian’ was allegedly a response to the need to historicize the South Asian presence in Britain, freeing it from the orientalizing label that has stuck on South Asian residents or UK-born individuals, freezing them in a position outside time. In this perspective, ‘British Asians’ are seen as ‘ironic citizens’ as they live through all the contradictions that such projection brings to their everyday lives – such as the conflating of their ‘other’ identity and their citizens’ rights of which ‘British’ is metonymy. Sayyid argues in favour of a different term that may not be perfect but is one of those that lead to ‘erasure’ processes, that is to say, in Derrida’s terms, a concept that satisfies the function


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of moving towards a ‘better answer’2 (Sayyid 7) than existing ones. Given the multiple and contradictory connotations of the term ‘British,’ Sayyid conflates ‘British’ and ‘Asian’ in order to avoid the juxtaposition of two terms that may create the effect of a dyad of opposites (i.e., Western and non-Western). It has been argued (Bolognani et al.) that the sociopolitical contingencies of the post-9/11 world are in their real-life consequences rather at odds with the invention of a ‘BrAsian identity’ outlined as such, especially in terms of its pan-Asian vision, at a time when pan-Asianism in Britain is progressively waning due to the pathologization of South Asian Muslims, the specific consequences of Islamophobia (Davids), the strengthening of transnational Muslim identities (Lewis), and the backlash of South Asian current affairs (Banaji). If marketing-motivated pan-Asian media experiments such as Zee TV (Dudrah ‘Zee TV-Europe’) are thoroughly influenced by class dynamics, and the creation of a quintessentially pan-Asian radio station, the BBC Asian Network, is facing closure (Plunkett), can localised examples of South Asian arts like the ones described above be considered ‘BrAsian’? In establishing their various activities, both Virdee and Qureshi have created new audiences. They have reached out to new people, and they have created audiences that are somehow also makers. The two case studies that were presented at the symposium are manifestations of the effectiveness of the creation of multi-audiences when including and recognizing diversity from the start and recognizes embeddedness in the history of multiple subjects from the planning stages themselves. Orna-Ornstein (58) argues that success in diversifying audiences is only achieved when the organizations with such targets reform themselves and include a diversity agenda in all their parts, including staffing from top to bottom, just as SAA UK has done, with staff members who belong to different heritages but share a common vision regarding both cultural sensitivities and social commitment. These organizations’ embeddedness in past and contemporary history and politics conflates the South Asian experience into a British landscape, in a process consistent with Sayyid’s conceptualization of ‘BrAsianness.’ These organizations are the living proof of how much politics shape cultural endeavours in a very pragmatic way, and whereas at times such constraints can be transformed into opportunities (by for example being able to access funds related to community development and cohesion while doing art), often, cultural endeavours are bound to absorb the semantics (such as the one dividing South Asians from Muslims) of the politics of the time. This process can be related to the ‘erasure’ of disjuncture between the particular (in this case ‘South Asian’) and the ‘universal’ (in the national frame of ‘British’3). As argued above, doing South Asian arts in Britain is to maintain a fine balance between promoting and preserving a particular heritage and at the same time arguing for its (race-free) national or local value. As Holt and Turney affirm, there is a tension between ‘that which is described as “the particular” being recognised for its particularity’ while suggesting, at the same time, that ‘“the particular” is no less part of the “universal” than that which is already considered “universal”’ (329). Those culture makers I have talked about in this article are not specifically pursuing ‘South Asian endeavours’ as epistephilia (Naficy xv) or creating a panAsian non-resident identity, but rather contributing to building notions of Asian Britishness, or BrAsianness (Sayyid 7), in their being historically grounded from the creative to the production stages. BrAsianness is much more useful, in my opinion, as a political vision and a project, rather than as a label that pretends to be responsive to an already existing reality, at least because of the problematic use it may have for the particular British Pakistani case, where issues related to the marginalization, pathologization, and politicization of religion make this particular side stand out of this very categorization (see Bolognani et al.). The two


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case studies presented at the symposium, however, seem to fit comfortably with an idea of ‘cultural producers’ espousing ‘BrAsianness,’ as they are well embedded both in form and content with the contemporary history of citizenship in Britain and embody the concerns outlined by Sayyid.


Notes 1. A ‘mela,’ in the Indian subcontinent, is a kind of ‘fair’ and in Britain it has come to signify a multicultural summer event where people meet to indulge in ‘ethnic’ (mainly South Asian) music, foods, and shopping. 2. The fact that the definition of ‘BrAsian’ is very much still in the making is testified to by the fact that the collection A Postcolonial People where Sayyid introduces the term ‘BrAsian’ contains slightly different uses of the same concept – for example by Kaur and Terracciano, who use it to describe ‘unsuspected similarities and cross-fertilisation between Eastern and Western traditions’ (353). This paper refers mainly to Sayyid’s broad definition. 3. In order to clarify the notion of ‘race-free’ British identity (as we call it later in this paper), it may be useful to refer to a couple of examples. It has been argued, for instance, that there are forms of popular culture that produce counter-hegemonic accounts of European identities as not white such as Zee TV Europe (Dudrah ‘Zee TV-Europe’ 165). By this it is meant that European identity (in this case British) is seen as an identity that has nothing to do with race and ethnicity and may even been seen in contrast to similar ethnic identities of people who live in different continents. You thus have ‘Brit Asian TV’ as well as programmes dedicated to the music of British Asians on Indian cable channels. The point of contention, however, is that a very small minority of other British groups would engage with such channels, even the UK broadcasted ‘Brit Asian TV’, not to mention the BBC Asian network which is going to be closed due to the poor results in audience numbers. This ‘race-free’ British identity can thus be considered a project rather than something that has already taken root.

Notes on contributor Dr Marta Bolognani is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol. She has undertaken doctoral and postdoctoral research in British Pakistanis’ criminological discourses and has held senior faculty positions in South Asia and the UK. Her research interests include: Muslim practices in the contemporary world, Pakistani diaspora, Muslim popular culture and urban studies in multicultural settings.

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