Contesting the ‘model minority’: racialization, youth culture and ‘British Chinese’/‘Oriental’ nights

Abstract

While racialized youth are often central in debates on citizenship, multiculturalism and belonging, those ascribed as ‘British Chinese’ are constructed as model minorities, lacking a hybridized culture but insulated from racism, and thus invisible in these discussions. This article argues, however, that the model minority discourse is itself a specific form of contemporary racialization that revives ‘yellow peril’ discourses on the capacities of particular ‘Oriental’ bodies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how young people challenge these constructions, by drawing on popular culture to organize and participate in what they call ‘British Chinese’ and, more provocatively, ‘Oriental’ nightlife spaces. It analyses how through these spaces participants forge a sense of identity that allows them to reimagine themselves as racialized subjects. It demonstrates how these spaces constitute transient sites of experimental belonging, facilitating new cultural politics and social identifications that at once contest reified conceptions of British Chineseness yet also create new exclusions.

Keywords:

• British Chinese
• Oriental
• model minority
• nightlife and popular music
• belonging
• racialization

Notes

1. Cantopop refers to a category of hybridized rock-inspired popular music sung in Cantonese and produced in Hong Kong since the 1970s.

2. Forms of electronic dance music, originating in Chicago, US and Germany respectively.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diana Yeh

DIANA YEH is associate lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College and in the School of Law and Social Sciences at the University of East London.