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54
E
UR
A
MERICA
Islamphobic Media Personality” (Islamic Human Rights
Commission, 2003)
—
deliberately entitled her book
Londonistan
(2006: x-xi). In
Londonistan
, Phillips targets South Asian
immigrants and “the concentration of Muslim immigrant
communities” (2006: xx) to blame for terrorism in Britain.
Published in the same year as Phillips’ highly racist book, Malkani’s
Londonstani
, whose title is uncannily like, but unlike, Phillips’
Londonistan
, deconstructs the myth of the Asian gang and shows it
to be as artificially constructed as the desi boys’ gang identity.
Commenting on some reviewers’ expectations that the novel
would be about the ghetto, and their refusal to let go of the idea,
Malkani believes that it is “an almost willful misinterpretation”
(Graham, 2008a). It is certainly a misinterpretation, but, to
Malkani, this misinterpretation is willful, as if the reviewers had
wished for it. “The obvious subtext was that,” as Malkani points
out, “as far as they were concerned, the only authentic British
Asian experience is that of the ghetto and anything more
complicated than that is invalid” (2008a). Malkani does not make
it explicit, but it is clear that racism is at work in the reviewers’
insistence on assigning South Asian immigrants to racialized
ghettos. To some extent, the reviewers’ willful misinterpretation of
Londonstani
as an example of ghetto fiction mirrors some
politicians’ (like T. Phillips’) and geographers’ (like Poulsen’s)
manufacturing of the ghettos in certain areas of concentrated
ethnic populations in British cities. As opposed to the ghettos of
reality, Ludi Simpson sees “ghettos of the mind” in these anxieties
about other people’s color and origins (2007: 423).
Susan Smith uses a phrase similar to Simpson’s “ghettos of the
mind”
—
the “imagery of ‘racial segregation’” (1993: 131). The
phrase is coined to underline the fact that imagined racial
segregation expresses and simultaneously reproduces racism in
Britain. It is true, as Ceri Peach points out, that some ethnic groups
have concentrated in certain urban areas of Britain, and yet, the
reality of residential differentiation should not be confused with