Anandi Ramamurthy

The politics of Britain's Asian youth movements

The Asian Youth Movements (AYMs) of the 1970s and 1980s were powerful examples of political movements influenced by black politics and a version of secularism that became a unifying force between different religious communities. Drawing on interviews with participants in the youth movements and material collected together for the ‘Tandana-Glowworm’ digitised archive of AYM ephemera, the author contextualises the AYMs in the political history of Asians in Britain, analyses their distinctive political stance and describes the leaflets, magazines and posters which they produced. The legacy of the AYMs, it is argued, lies in their example of organising politically at the grass roots across religious divides.

Absences and Silences: The Representation of the Tea Picker in Colonial and Fair Trade Advertising

Ethical consumption as a form of consumerism suggests that there can be a benign form of globalization where consumers can effect positive change by exercising the ‘choice’ of opting for fair trade. In marketing this choice, fair trade advertising of tea, cocoa and coffee in particular has adopted the image of the smiling and happy worker from the global South, often in their working environment and testifying by their presence and their smile to the ethical and moral nature of the product. They therefore condone our consumption as moral pleasure. This essay explores the history of this image in colonial advertising and considers how the smile works in contemporary advertising to silence these workers who are unable to ‘speak the truth about themselves’ (Michel Foucault interviewed by Gerard Raulet).

South Asian mobilisation in two northern cities: a comparison of Manchester and Bradford Asian youth movements

Anti-racist movements develop and maintain their energy through the establishment of local, grass root networks. To date, research on the anti-racist movement in Britain has focussed on the creation of national narratives that highlight the power and influence of the movement. This article compares two of the Asian Youth movements that operated in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explore the importance of investigating localised settings when researching the history and impact of the antiracist movement as a whole. Oral histories and documents produced by the Asian Youth Movements are used to reflect and understand how the organisations operated and developed differently, highlighting the influence of specific urban environments which affected local migratory experiences and therefore the makeup and operations of the movements themselves.

Landscapes of order and Imperial control: The representation of plantation production in late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century tea advertising

Studies of colonial imagery within advertising, such as those by McClintock (1995) and Richards (1991), have so far focused on discussions about general colonial and racist ideologies that permeated the period of Empire. This essay aims to encourage the reading of advertising imagery within its specific political and economic contexts and highlights the particular value of uncovering the ideological interests of manufacturers and the ways in which these impacted on their production of advertising and marketing imagery. It also encourages an understanding of colonialism as ’not a