‘Bling-bling economics’ and the cultural politics of masculinity in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani

Abstract

This essay examines the interaction in Gautam Malkani’s 2006 novel Londonstani between neoliberal cultural logic and subject formation in the context of suburban Britain. Malkani frames the novel paradoxically, as both an ironic portrait of the British Asian teens aspiring to ‘rudeboy’ masculinity and an authentic appeal to this otherwise unlikely adolescent readership. I investigate the critical implications of this paradox for hegemonic formations of race and gender. Malkani’s reified depictions of family life play into what I call ‘imagined domesticity’, the dynamic by which individual transgressions by migrants and their children are mobilized to portray an entire community as threatening the nation. Furthermore, in portraying hypermasculinity as entirely explained by desi diasporic domesticity, Londonstani renders this reactionary gender formation the sole responsibility of the desi community itself. At a narrative level, denying the intersectional basis of rudeboy masculinity facilitates Malkani’s climactic revelation of his protagonist’s whiteness (masked by his otherwise-seamless performance of desi identity). By detaching ethnicity from specific and material histories of racial injury, Londonstani emerges as a symptom of what Jodi Melamed terms ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’, where structural antiracist critique recedes and ‘designer desiness’ is the sine qua non of the good life of the new ‘bling-bling economics’.

Keywords:

• desi
• hegemonic masculinities
• multiculturalism
• neoliberalism
• hypermasculinity

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous referees for their comments. I am grateful to Chandrima Chakraborty for her encouragement during publication and her insights into South Asian masculinities, and to David Chariandy and Christine Kim for nurturing my thinking about Londonstani.

Notes

1. Anthias, “Evaluating ‘Diaspora,’” 558; Chakraborty, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism, 8; and Farahani, “Diasporic Masculinities,” 160.

2. Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 843–5.

3. “A Conversation with Gautam Malkani,” Penguin Book Club.

4. Malkani’s field research included interviews with British Asian male teens in Hounslow. See O’Connell, “Gautam Malkani: Interview.”

5. O’Connell, “Gautam Malkani: Interview.”

6. Tribunella, “Institutionalizing The Outsiders,” 89.

7. Malkani, Londonstani, 99–100.

8. The examples of migration narratives Ahmed uses are exclusively about the British context. See Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 121–59.

9. Ibid., 148.

10. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 28.

11. Eckstein et al., “A Divided Kingdom,” 10; Ramamurthy, “Youth Movements,” 58; and Mason and Poynting, “Anti-Muslim Racism.”

12. Brouillette, “The Creative Class,” 4. For a typical example of the post-7/7 climate of reactive paranoia, see Phillips, Londonistan.

13. Brouillette, “The Creative Class,” 3.

14. Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” 269.

15. Ibid., 274.

16. Ibid., 269.

17. Hundal, “Middle Class Mummy’s Boys.”

18. Malkani, Londonstani, 324.

19. Ibid., 340.

20. Malkani, “About Londonstani.”

21. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 43.

22. Gilroy, After Empire, xi.

23. See note 3 above.

24. Malkani, Londonstani, 271.

25. See note 3 above.

26. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 158.

27. Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” 274.

28. Malkani, “About Londonstani.”

29. Ibid.

30. Dean, Democracy, 66.

31. Malkani, Londonstani, 4.

32. Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 4.

33. See note 27 above.

34. Brouillette, “The Creative Class,” 11.

35. Malkani, Londonstani, 228–44.

36. Ibid., 237.

37. See note 34 above.

38. Malkani, Londonstani, 284.

39. Ibid., 238.

40. Ibid., 331.

41. Ibid., 237–9.

42. Ibid., 48–9.

43. Ibid., 61.

44. Ibid., 49.

45. See also Krishnaswamy, “The Economy of Colonial Desire.”

46. Class played a crucial role in this process, as traits such as childishness and deference to authority were valorized through a homology between the two groups, thought to exhibit them; the British working class, who laboured in the imperial army, and “the devoted, obedient martial races of India.” Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 37–8. For more on the persistence of colonial ideologies in postcolonial Britain, see Bains, “Southall Youth.”

47. Malkani, Londonstani, 210.

48. Gunning, Race and Antiracism, 125–6.

49. Malkani, Londonstani, 48.

50. Dean, Democracy, 67.

51. Malkani, Londonstani, 251.

52. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 148.

53. Ibid.

54. I rely here on Hall et al.’s examination of the media’s role in provoking racialized panics in Policing the Crisis, in which they discuss the fomenting of widespread public anxiety around as well as harsher policing of muggings: “‘public opinion’ has been imported back into the judicial discourse as a way of underpinning a juridical statement about crime. Whereas before the media grounded its stories in evidence provided by the courts, now the courts use the public (“everybody thinks”) to ground their statements” (76, emphases original). For their extended analysis of the circuitous co-implication of state and police actors with the media in producing racializing coverage of crime, see especially “The Social Production of News,” 53–76.

55. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 123.

56. Malkani, Londonstani, 7.

57. Ibid., 45–6, 98–103.

58. See also the critique of the cultural work of contemporary discourses of multicultural tolerance with respect to Muslims, in Brown, Regulating Aversion, 148–75.

59. See, for instance, Hardt and Negri, Empire, 43–6.

60. Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 854.

61. My understanding of the ongoing explanatory capacity of neoliberal theory derives from Jamie Peck’s distinction between an initial neoliberal “roll-back,” characterized by aggressive and confrontational state withdrawal from and/or attack on the welfare state, and a subsequent “roll-out,” which facilitates through a more compromising logic known as the “Third Way” the application of market logic in an ever-widening number of policy areas. See Peck, “Zombie Neoliberalism,” 106.

62. Phoenix, “Neoliberalism and Masculinity,” 229.

63. Ibid., 239.

64. Malkani, Londonstani, 6, 132–3; 147.

65. Phoenix, “Neoliberalism and Masculinity,” 240.

66. “The characteristics of hegemonic masculinity (hardness, sporting prowess [particularly at football], and resistance to teachers) were qualities that were particularly attributed to Black boys.” Ibid.

67. These lessons include Hardjit’s theorization of the reclamation of the slur, “Paki,” to his blasting DMX on the car stereo to intimidate a “coconut” in a nearby car. See Malkani, Londonstani, 6–7, 19–21.

68. Phoenix, “Neoliberalism and Masculinity,” 243–4.

69. Malkani, Londonstani, 203.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 307.

72. Ibid., 306.

73. Ibid., 310.

74. Ibid., 167–72.

75. Ibid., 167.

76. Ibid., 171.

77. Malkani, Londonstani, 128.

78. Ibid., 168.

79. Ibid., 131.

80. Ibid.

81. Ibid., 310–2.

82. Ibid., 170–1.

83. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 92–3.

84. Gilroy, After Empire, 155.

85. Malkani, Londonstani, 186.

86. Ibid., 43, 47, 76, 89.

87. Ibid., 209.

88. Malkani, “About Londonstani.”

89. Regarding teachers and public transit users as symbols of the cultural dominant, consider such initiatives as the Tony Blair government’s institution of Education Action Zones, where schools compete in a zero-sum game for scarce public funding, or London Mayor Boris Johnson’s halving of the area of London subject to a congestion charge, widely “hailed by London’s business sector as a ‘commonsense decision.’” See Power and Whitty, “New Labour’s Education Policy,” 545; and Mulholland, “Congestion Charge.”

90. Tribunella, “Institutionalizing The Outsiders,” 100.

91. Bristol Radical History Group, “Intakes,” 11.

92. Ibid., 11, 14.

93. Malkani, Londonstani, 168.