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Identity Politics of South Asian Enclaves
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prominent examples in the United States, as cited by
Encyclopedia
Britannica
, are the African Americans who “have been compelled
to live in ghettos, not so much by legal devices as by economic and
social pressures.” In general, “ghetto” in both its historical and
current usage has been a negative and derogative term, meaning
that the residential areas are segregated and that the residents are
of ethnic minority groups, poor, underprivileged, and unwelcomed
in mainstream society. Moreover, as previously discussed, in
contemporary Britain and, in particular, after the race riots in 2001,
and the bombings in 2005, residential segregation in British cities
has been increasingly associated with British people’s fear of
extreme violence stemming from the ghettoization of ethnic
minority groups.
Is residential segregation equivalent to racial segregation? Is
assimilation the only way to deal with race relations and enhance
community cohesion? What are the risks of confusing racial
segregation as an ideology, that is, “a politically constructed
problem,” with racial segregation as a practice, namely “a feature
of the material world” (S. J. Smith, 1993: 129)?
In
Londonstani
, except that the residents of Hounslow are
mostly desis, Malkani clearly represents no ghetto at all. His desi
characters are, firstly, not poor, nor do they belong to the lower or
working class. They drive luxury cars, such as Benzes and BMWs,
and wear designer clothes, shoes, and the watches of famous
brands. Hardjit’s father, for example, is a successful businessman,
running “nine twenty-four-hour local convenience shops in
partnership with two a his cousins” (Malkani, 2006a: 71), and
Ravi’s father has been “offering financial advice from behind an
IBM Thinkpad” and has “made good bucks by it” (2006a: 73).
Also, in sharp contrast to the decayed, deprived, and over-crowded
council estates where ghettos are often found in many parts of the
world, the house of Amit, another desi boy in the novel, has
“expensive coffee tables with the golden legs” and “expensive silk
an satin sheets that’d been laid down especially to protect the