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inauthentic representation of street boys are just as controversial as
the authenticity of desi, or more generally South Asian identity,
portrayed in the novel.
3
Some reviewers, for example, misread
Londonstani
as belonging to the black urban novels set in inner city
estates, or the ghettos, and as being about the violence of street
boys and gangs, or at least expect the novel to be of such a
character because of the author’s ethnic minority identity.
4
In
some initial critical reviews, as pointed out in James Graham’s
interview, Malkani is criticized for not providing the street boys
with an authentic voice, and for having little understanding of the
ghetto, inasmuch as the novelist himself is Cambridge-educated
and the Creative Business editor of the
Financial Times
(Graham,
2008a). In a sense, this kind of criticism implies an association of
the clustering of immigrants with the ghetto, violence, and poverty;
it may also, to some extent, strengthen the popular, yet rather
misleading, view that “it is indeed the very presence of people from
many different backgrounds that somehow poses a threat to social
stability and solidarity” (Cantle, 2012: 53). In response to such
criticism, Malkani first argues that “[t]he authenticity hurdle that
reviewers have required me to jump implies Thomas Harris should
have been disqualified from writing ‘Silence of the Lambs’ because
he’s not an authentic cannibal or serial killer” (Graham, 2008a).
Secondly, “[i]t also implies that there’s a single authentic British
Asian experience and that authentic experience can’t be shared”
(
2008a
). Most importantly, and also paradoxically, Malkani argues
3
For a sampling of criticisms, see Manzoor (2006) as well as Malkani’s interview
with James Graham, especially Malkani’s answers to the interviewer’s questions 4
and 7.
4
One of the most well-known ghetto novels is the crime story
Yardie
(1992) by the
Jamaican British writer Victor Headley. Following Headley’s success, there are a
number of writers who, when writing about London, write with a perspective that
Andy Wood has called “a ghetto perspective” (2002: 18). The examples include
Courttia Newland’s
The Scholar
(1997) and
Society Within
(1999), both of which
are set on the fictitious inner city housing estate of Greenside in West London and
depict Afro-Caribbean immigrants’ poverty, segregation, and lower-class life.