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common, everyday practice for people to identify and interact with
others across the borders of ethnicity, culture, and nationality.
I. The “Failure” of Multiculturalism, the Ghetto,
and the Asian Gang
In
Londonstani
, when the rudeboys’ teacher asks them: “Have
you watched the news? Are you familiar with the debate around
multiculturalism?,” Hardjit, the leader of the gang, replies: “Forget
it, man, dis politics shit” (Malkani, 2006a: 125). Nonetheless, the
novel’s complex pseudo-ghetto world lends itself to the debate on
the “failure” of multiculturalism, which I shall approach at two
levels. First of all, the “failure” refers to the decline of
multiculturalism as a set of governing practices for dealing with
community relations when the political climate in Britain began to
change in early twenty-first century. In Britain, multicultural
policies were developed in the 1950s and 1960s as a response to
the post-war influx of non-white immigrants. Commentators have
commonly taken the speech given by then Home Secretary Roy
Jenkins in 1966 “to signal the moment of the beginning of British
multiculturalism” (Gabriel et al., 2012: 268). At a time “when
racism and intolerance was leading to real community tensions”
(Cantle, 2012: 65), Jenkins’ speech offered a nearly positive vision
of multiculturalism: “Integration is perhaps rather a loose word. I
do not regard it as meaning the loss, by immigrants, of their own
national characteristics and culture. [. . .] I define integration,
therefore, not as a flattening process, but as equal opportunity
accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual
tolerance” (as cited in Cantle, 2012: 65). Clearly, just as the
politics of ethnic identity developed during the late 1960s were
viewed “as an attempt by those with little power to affirm their
threatened identities and to assert their claims for material
resources and political clout” (Leach, Brown, & Worden, 2008:
759), the goals of the early and defensive forms of multicultural