Where Are You Really From? Raman Mundair's Poetic Resistance to Asian-British Cultural Objectification

Raman Mundair's poetry interrogates the cultural and political tensions between subject and object, and powerfully contributes to the canon of transformative Black British writing in the early twenty-first century. Her collections confront scenes of racism and interrogate the possibility of a genuinely multicultural Britain, as she grapples with some of the ugly complexities of the racism she has faced as a first-generation South Asian migrant to the UK, particularly through the signifier of skin as a visual benchmark against which self-identity is constructed. Raman Mundair tells the stories of a new generation of Britons, for whom skin and accent are less significant than intellect and voice, and for whom the constraints of history will eventually become a distant memory.