darkmatter

Review of: Kester Aspden (2007) Nationality: Wog - The Hounding of David Oluwale, London: Jonathan Cape

This is an important, even ‘must-read’ book for anyone interested in the history of crime in the UK, especially if that crime has racial horror hovering all over it. ‘Race’ was ‘hovering’ because, during the trial of the two Leeds’ police officers accused of abusing and killing the Nigerian vagrant David Oluwale in April 1969, ‘race’ was never an explicit issue.

Review of: Tejaswini Niranjana (2006) Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. London: Duke University Press.

Review can be read at anti-babel. (Due to copyright restrictions, this article can only appear on the reviewer’s own website).

Review of: Infidel: My Life (2007), Free Press.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has hurled herself violently into the eye of the storm with her polemical pronouncements on the threat of political Islam, the dangers of multi-culturalism and the need for tight immigration control. She came to international prominence in 2004 after the murder of Theo van Gogh, her collaborator on a short film about Islam, was murdered by a religious extremist. Her memoir, Infidel, covers her upbringing as the daughter of a rebel leader during Siad Barre’s regime in Somalia, the family’s moves to Saudi Arabia and Kenya amid civil war and her ruthless self-reinvention from bogus asylum-seeker and devout Muslim to Dutch MP and Infidel.

A Review of: N. Ali, V. Kalra & S. Sayyid (eds) (2005) A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain. London: Hurst.

In Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, the last sentence of the book urges that we must seek “a reconciliation between reality and men [sic], between description and explanation, between object and knowledge”.1 I feel this fitting of A Postcolonial People, a narrative which fulfils Barthes very objective; this volume of essays challenges the myths about South Asians which have prevailed and become internalised within a racialized discourse.

Review of: Gautam Malkani (2007) Londonstani, HarperPerennial; and Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal (2006) Tourism, Vintage.

With last year’s protests surrounding the filming of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane the debate on authenticity and representation yet again reared its head. It seems a shame that novels produced by anyone of ‘ethnic’ descent are reduced to these racialised discussions but sometimes framing texts within such discourses is unavoidable. This is particularly the case with two debut novels published by British Asian authors over the past year: Londonstani by Gautam Malkani and Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal.

Review of Gayatri Gopinath (2005) Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public, Duke Unvirsity Press.
Welcome to Gayatri World, a place of many myriad shining surfaces in which the globe is shrunk wrap into theoretically dazzling snippets of books, films and music. Like the infamous, ‘Its a Small World Ride’ at Disney World, Gopinath’s book collapses all geography under the guise of public culture.

This is a review of Matt Wray (2006) Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, Duke University Press.

Coming to prominence over the last decade, the critical study of whiteness has proven a welcome addition to the interdisciplinary study of race and racism. Aimed at identifying and decentring the hitherto unnamed axis of racial normativity, the field of whiteness studies has helped to construct interpretations of race that highlight its equal significance to both the racialized and racializing. While, as Matt Wray rightly argues, scholars of whiteness have been adept at dealing with questions of white power and privilege, they have been less successful when tackling ideas of whiteness defined not by supremacy, but relative disadvantage. It is in his desire to explore such non-dominant conceptions of white identity that Wray has written this historical sociology of ‘poor white trash’.

Review of Anthony C. Alessandrini (ed) (1998) Franz Fanon - Critical Perspectives, Routledge.1

Since his untimely death at the age of 36 in 1961, the Martinician-born psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon has become something of a looming spectre in radical Black politics. From Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power militancy to Homi Bhaba’s postcolonial poetics, Fanon’s name has been constantly invoked in charged debates or to animate wider political and intellectual concerns. Unsurprisingly, his writings still stir antagonisms but with a recent collection of essays on Fanon, the metropolitan academia in the US and to a lesser extent, Britain, exhume a contentious legacy.