Pnina Werbner

The migration process : capital, gifts, and offerings among British Pakistanis

This study, which breaks new ground in urban research, is a comprehensive and definitive account of one of the many communities of South Asians to emerge throughout the Western industrial world since the Second World War - the British Pakistanis in Manchester. This book examines the cultural dimensions of immigrant entrepreneurship and the formation of an ethnic enclave community, and explores the structure and theory of urban ritual and its place within the immigrant gift economy.

The place which is diaspora: Citizenship, religion and gender in the making of chaordic transnationalism

The paper argues for a need to analyse the organisational and moral, as well as the aesthetic dimensions of diasporas in order to understand their political and mobilising power. Organisationally, diasporas are characterised by a chaordic structure and by a shared sense of moral co-responsibility, embodied in material gestures and extended through and across space. Ultimately, there is no guiding hand, no command structure, organising the politics, the protests, the philanthropic drives, the commemoration ceremonies or the aesthetics of diasporas. Indeed, the locations of diaspora are relatively autonomous of any centre, while paradoxically, new diaspora communities reproduce themselves predictably, and in tandem. The internal complexity of diasporas is shown here through the example of the expansion and spread of international Sufi cults and womens activism. Yet despite the fact that contemporary diasporas are marked by their heterogeneity, diasporic communities located in democratic nation-states do share a commitment to struggle for enhanced citizenship rights for themselves, and for co-diasporics elsewhere, often lobbying Western governments to defend their human rights. This may well be a defining feature of postcolonial diasporas in the West.

Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain

This paper examines the creation of alternative diasporic public spheres in Britain by South Asian settlers: one produced through the entertainment industry—commercial film and other media—that satirises the parochialism and conservatism of the South Asian immigrant generation and highlights cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism, intergenerational conflict, family politics, inter‐ethnic or ‐racial marriages, and excesses of consumption. The other is a conflictual diasporic Muslim public sphere dominated by Muslim male community leaders, which has had to respond to international political crises such as the Rushdie affair, the Gulf War or, more recently, September 11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the confrontation between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Seen from an indigenous British perspective, the messages emanating from these two diasporic discourses, publicised in both Western and South Asian media (cable TV and foreign newspapers in Urdu or local ones in English) are opposed, and create ambivalent stereotyped images of ‘Muslims’ and ‘Asians’. While a Pakistani transnational identity is mostly submerged beneath these other identities, it is in fact critical to understanding the conflicting pressures to which young Pakistanis, and women in particular, are subjected in Britain, and the clash between alienation and popular cultural ‘fun’ marking Muslim Pakistani internal politics. These have led to the pluralisation of the diasporic public sphere.

The translocation of culture: ‘community cohesion’ and the force of multiculturalism in history1

In his work on a Welsh border village, Ronald Frankenberg showed how cultural performances, from football to carnival, conferred agency on local actors and framed local conflicts. The present article extends these themes. It responds to invocations of ‘community cohesion’ by politicians and policy makers, decrying the failure of communal leadership following riots by young South Asians in northern British towns. Against their critique of self-segregating isolationism, the article traces the historical process of Pakistani migration and settlement in Britain, to argue that the dislocations and relocations of transnational migration generate two paradoxes of culture. The first is that in order to sink roots in a new country, transnational migrants in the modern world begin by setting themselves culturally and socially apart. They form encapsulated ‘communities’. Second, that within such communities culture can be conceived of as conflictual, open, hybridising and fluid, while nevertheless having a sentimental and morally compelling force. This stems from the fact, I propose, that culture is embodied in ritual, in social exchange and in performance, conferring agency and empowering different social actors: religious and secular, men, women and youth. Hence, against both defenders and critics of multiculturalism as a political and philosophical theory of social justice, the final part of the article argues for the need to theorise multiculturalism in history. In this view, rather than being fixed by liberal or socialist universal philosophical principles, multicultural citizenship must be grasped as changing and dialogical, inventive and responsive, a negotiated political order. The British Muslim diasporic struggle for recognition in the context of local racism and world international crises exemplifies this process.

What Colour 'Success?' Distorting Value in Studies of Ethnic Entrepreneurship

The study of ethnic entrepreneurship has tended to take as unproblematic what we mean by ‘success’ and ‘failure’. Hence, some groups are defined as success stories. Recently, for example, in Britain, South Asian immigrants were said to be a ‘success’: they had a ‘Jewish future’. The perennial debate both in Europe and in the United States is why Black people have been a ‘failure’ as entrepreneurs. This is even debated by Black people themselves. The present paper sets out to deconstruct notions of success and failure by probing the narrow economistic models of value on which they are based. It argues that only by understanding the organisation of mass cultural production, on the one hand, and relativity of cultural value, on the other, can we arrive at a more subtle understanding of what motivates ethnic entrepreneurs. In the light of this, I argue, even posing the question of success and failure is false. It leads research and writing on ethnic entrepreneurs into blind alleys while creating damaging – and unfounded – invidious stereotypes of different ethnic groups.

Revisiting the UK Muslim diasporic public sphere at a time of terror: from local (benign) invisible spaces to seditious conspiratorial spaces and the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ discourse

Public exposés of hidden spaces where diasporic Muslims allegedly enunciate extreme anti‐Western rhetoric or plot sedition, highlight an ironic shift from a time, analysed in my earlier work, when the Pakistani diasporic public sphere in Britain was invisible and local while nevertheless being regarded as relatively benign: a space of expressive rhetoric, ceremonial celebration and local power struggles. Suicide bombings on the London underground and revelations of aborted conspiracies have led to a national media debate in which Muslim ‘community’ leaders for the first time have come to be active participants. They respond to accusations by politicians and journalists that multicultural tolerance has ‘failed’ in Britain, and that national Muslim organisations are the prime cause of this alleged failure. Addressing this ‘failure of multiculturalism’ discourse, the paper questions, first, whether talk of multiculturalism in the UK is really about ‘culture’ at all? Second, the paper explores why Muslim integration into Britain – the so‐called success or failure of multiculturalism – has come to be ‘tested’ by Muslim national leaders’ willingness to attend Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations. The public dialogue reflecting on these issues in the mainstream and ethnic press, the paper proposes, highlights a signal development in the history of the UK Muslim diasporic public sphere: from being hidden and local to being highly visible and national, responsive to British politicians, investigative journalists and the wider British public.

The predicament of diaspora and millennial Islam. Reflections on september 11, 2001

This article considers the production of an Islamic utopian or millennial discourse by British South Asian Muslims in the diasporic public sphere and its possible impact on the younger generation of Muslims growing up in the UK. Associated with such a discourse, the article considers the vulnerability of diasporas – the process whereby global events can precipitate radical diasporic estrangement, leading to self-estrangement. Such estrangement is fed by moral panics, expressed in the speeches of politicians, in newspaper columns and global news reports. This exposes the fragility of multicultural discourses in the public sphere in the UK.

Everyday multiculturalism: Theorising the difference between ‘intersectionality’ and ‘multiple identities’

This paper contrasts intersectionality, the negative definition of identities, and multiple identities, the situational valorisation of positive identities, to argue for a generational shift in the performance of everyday multiculturalism in Britain. In everyday encounters, actors work to sustain the definition of the situation (Goffman) and with it a surface of civility and mutual respect which are nevertheless morally compelling. Everyday relationships flow smoothly and naturally, in an unreflexive, taken-for-granted way, to constitute shared positive identities (Schutz). Such surface civility may, however, be disrupted by communicative breakdowns whenever participants do not share implicit systems of relevancy. Deconstructive analyses that probe beneath the surface of the everyday can also reveal the existence of negative identities, subject to discrimination and stigmatisation. This paper contrasts the experience of first-generation Commonwealth immigrants to Britain with that of successive generations, who unreflexively displayed a shared British identity during the London 2012 Olympics.

The Moral Economy of the African Diaspora: Citizenship, Networking and Permeable Ethnicity

Scholarship on the African diaspora has documented the legal hurdles African migrants face in acquiring residence and begun to record the religious efflorescence of African Independent churches. Missing, however, is attention to the complex moral assumptions informing African diasporic sociality and claims to citizenship, whether through churches or voluntary associations. The present volume fills this hiatus by theorising the moral economy of citizenship claims and transnational giving. Its contributors explore the underlying ethical assumptions, ideas and practices of African migrants implied by their calls for recognition and the right to work and live in the diaspora, whether or not they possess the required legal documents, and despite being different racially and culturally. We interrogate both the tendency of migrants to encapsulate themselves in religious or home town associations with compatriots or coreligionists, and their expansive horizons and moves towards ‘permeable’ ethnicity, ‘cosmopolitan’ networking and multiculturalism, as they create, imagine and construct the ‘African diaspora’.

The Aesthetics of Diaspora: Ownership and Appropriation

How are transnational aesthetics transformed and appropriated in the diaspora? In theorising the very possibility of a transnational aesthetics, our primary focus goes beyond cognition to aesthetics as ‘sensuous participation’ – the making of beauty, distinction and sensual pleasure as participatory performance, embedded and re-embedded in social worlds of literary art or celebration forged in diaspora. Going beyond current debates in the anthropology of aesthetics, we argue that the transnational appropriation of aesthetic literary and embodied performative traditions, objects, sartorial styles or foods in the diaspora points to the transformational power of mimesis: what appears on the surface to be derivative and imitative, taken from elsewhere, engenders authentically felt cultural competences and a sense of ontological presence. Thus it is that diasporic sociality and aesthetic cultural performance create the grounds for appropriation and ownership in the alien place of non-ownership, that is, in the diaspora, the site of exile.