Re-Mapping the Ghetto: Rebellious Migrant Labour in Recent Multicultural Fiction

My research is largely focused on contemporary literature that depicts Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi diasporic communities in Britain. I am interested in the way such writing represents the lives of individuals within these communities within postcolonial British society. Contemporary British writers such as Zadie Smith and Monica Ali grapple with complex aspects of racism as faced by first and second-generation South Asian immigrants to the UK within their novels White Teeth (2001) and Brick Lane (2003)
My research is largely focused on contemporary literature in English that depicts multicultural aspects of British society, particularly novels that thematically question how postcolonial British identity is constructed in an age that has witnessed the crumbling of the last remnants of Empire.

Multi-racial Britain is certainly not a new phenomenon. But the existence of a genuinely multicultural British society is very much debatable. Tariq Modood describes genuine multiculturalism as ‘allowing individuals and communities the right to be culturally different from their neighbours and to be understood in their own terms rather than in the terms of racist and anti-racist stereotypes’ (Modood 1002: 6). This is the definition I will be using in this paper.
Scholars such as Rozina Visram and Susheila Nasta argue that there has been a recorded South Asian presence in Britain since 1600, when East India Company merchants set up trade links with the subcontinent.