Sounds of Whose Underground?

Abstract

The piece contrasts the functioning realities of the British Asian diaspora - music, violence, sex, food, life - with the institutionalized production of knowledge about that diaspora, in particular as regards its expressive cultures. It focuses on the emergence of the so-called `Asian Underground' within a contemporary Benjaminian context of `mechanical reproduction' and explores the opportunistic relationship between middle-class elites and their efforts to appropriate a certain radical chic. It goes on to suggest that this is a deliberate process, which not only absolves a voyeuristic whiteness of its hegemonic associations, but also allows the Asian middle class to conjure out of sight class differentials, even as it struggles with its own dependency on the cultural lifeblood of the urban poor or the semiotically disadvantaged.

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