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Identity Politics of South Asian Enclaves
43
Heathrow Airport, Hounslow borough “lends its unique character
to
Londonstani
,” for “[i]t’s an in-between kind of place where sixty
percent of the population comes from the Third World and where
most people have their eyes fixed on the airport, whether for
cheap trips abroad or for its links with the home country” (Basu,
2007).
Hounslow is a diverse community notorious for the
disengagement of local youth from mainstream society, providing
evidence, to some critics, of the “failure” or the “end” of
multiculturalism (Cantle, 2012: 53; Elia, 2010: 8; Gabriel,
Gomez,
& Rocha
, 2012: 271; Murphy, 2012: 1-2).
1
In 2003, the first
UK-based suicide bomber to strike in Israel was from Hounslow;
since then, a couple of Hounslow youths have been subject to
investigation about their involvement in the London bombings and
1
According to Cantle, however, the notion of the failure of multiculturalism “has
confused rather than assisted a debate about how we learn to live together in an
increasingly interdependent and interconnected world” (2012: 53). The notion is
perilous when one confuses multiculturalism as a descriptive reality for most
immigrant countries around the world with multiculturalism as state policies and
blame immigrants for threatening the security and solidarity of the host country.
It is thus important to make the distinction between state policies and social
reality and to know that “[t]he reference to ‘failure’ is based on the perception
that the
policies
of multiculturalism have been an inadequate response to the
changing composition of societies” (2012: 53; emphasis original). In his book,
Cantle proposes “interculturalism” as a new model and encloses “failure” inside
the quotation marks to emphasize his special use of the word as a reference to the
failure of state multiculturalism which is based on ethnicity identity politics and
which advocates color-consciousness. Murphy has also limited his discussion of
the “failure” of multiculturalism to policies and political philosophy (2012: 1, 3).
I take my cue from these critics for my reading of Malkani’s novel. I argue, on the
one hand, that the “failure” of multicultural policies in Britain paradoxically
proves the inadequacy of ethnicity and the need to redefine multiculturalism that
“is now much more complex” and that is “no longer simply revolving around
majority/minority visible distinctions” (2012: 5). On the other hand, I perceive
the “failure” of multiculturalism as an irony and attempt to point out how easily
and popularly the notion is manipulated to equate the failure of multicultural
policies to the failure of multicultural society.