

Identity Politics of South Asian Enclaves
57
II. The Ethnic Enclave and Interculturalism
Not only can it be argued that
Londonstani
presents a mockery of
the racist ideology of wider British society, both through the
characterization of a desi-loving white narrator, and through the
creation of a group of affluent middle-class Indian youths who, in
the heavily segregated residential area of Hounslow, pretend to be
a gang living in a ghetto. The novel also provides an alternative
perspective from which to rethink the question of residential
segregation in terms of the ethnic enclave as opposed to the ghetto.
According to
Merriam-Webster
and
Oxford
Dictionaries
, the word
“enclave” entered English in mid-19th century as a jargon of
diplomacy, whose etymology can be traced to the French word
enclaver
, with a sense inherited from the Latin phrase
inclavare
,
meaning literally “in key” or “to lock up” (enclave, 2014a, 2014b)
In political geography, an enclave is a country, or part of a country,
mostly surrounded by the territory of another country, or wholly
lying within the boundaries of another country, such as Vatican
City, within the city of Rome, Italy, or the Kingdom of Lesotho, in
South Africa. More generally, however, as defined in
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
, an enclave refers to “a distinct
territorial, cultural, or social unit enclosed within or as if within
foreign territory” (enclave, 2014a), such as an ethnic enclave,
inside which an ethnic community resides. Chinatown, in San
Francisco, and Little Havana, in Miami, are well-known examples
of ethnic enclaves. Despite the fact that “ethnic enclave” has
already entered into very common usage in English, in current
scholarship, as David P. Varady points out, “[f]ar less attention has
been given to what is considered a more positive form of
residential segregation
—
the ethnic enclave
—
defined as segregation
by choice” than that given to the ghetto (2005: vii).
Even though, as discussed previously, Hounslow is an
in-between place for the white British, as well as the South Asian
diaspora, it is also true that, in Malkani’s novel, the majority of the