The rise of ‘Asian kool’: youth and ‘transcultural’ identities
The international reach of hip-hop, and the proliferation of its off-shoots, exemplifies the dynamic interplay between global media and young people’s local identities. And, for theorists such as Hall and Gilroy, these processes of interconnection and hybridisation had created spaces where ‘new ethnicities’ took shape and developed (see above). These ideas were taken up by Les Back (1996) in his analysis of the syncretic forms of music and culture that emerged in Britain during the 1990s. Drum ‘n’ bass, for instance, was seen by Back as a preeminent example of a cultural sphere where ‘the aesthetics of the nation [were] recomposed, resulting in more inclusive translocal notions of what it means to reside within UK boundaries’ (1996: 233). In his survey of these processes, Back also underlined the importance of the Asian7 diaspora. For Back, the coming together of Asian and African diasporic cultures in Britain represented an important intersection in the creation of new, syncretic identities. As Back observed, the development of new, ‘translocal’ cultures took on additional nuances:
... when South Asian lexical and cultural elements are introduced into these syncretic processes. The modes of expression that are produced possess a kind of triple consciousness that is simultaneously the child of Africa, Asia and Europe.
(Back, 1996: 185)
While some theorists - for example, George Lipsitz — have used the analogy of the crossroads to represent this conjunction of identities and cultural expressions, Back argued that such a metaphor oversimplifies processes of cultural interaction and development. Instead, he drew upon the idea of the ‘rhizome’ deployed in the work of the critical philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. With its connotations of continuous growth and lateral roots, Back suggested, the notion of the rhizome provided a more useful way of conceiving the various ‘forms of cultural inter-being’ (1996: 185). And, following on from this, he offered the concept of the ‘intermezzo’ to denote spaces where cultural sensibilities merge and new identities are generated.
This kind of ‘multiple consciousness’ has been highlighted in many accounts of young British-Asians’ ‘homegrown’ cultural identities. Indeed, a significant body of work has pointed to the way British-Asian youngsters have negotiated within — and between — not only differences of age, gender and class but also the discourses of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Asianness’. While British-born Asians were once characterised as being caught ‘between two cultures’ (Watson, 1977), during the 1990s increasing attention focused on the way second and third generation British-Asians had actually configured their own ‘transcultural’ identities. The negotiation of generational, gendered, and ethnic identities were, for example, themes com-pellingly explored by filmmaker Gurinder Chadha (in her movies Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002)), and authors such as Hanif Kureishi
(most notably in his screenplay for the film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), and his novels Ute Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995)).
Issues of cross-cultural identity formation were also underscored in academic research. Chris Barker’s (1999) study of British-Asian girls’ everyday discussion of TV soaps, for instance, suggested the young women were well aware of the way their identities were informed by a variety of cultural discourses, and used their engagement with TV soaps as a way of enunciating themselves as Asian, while at the same time reworking the meanings of ‘Asianness’ to encompass their own, syncretic British-Asian culture. Similarly, Marie Gillespie’s (1995; 2000) research on British-Asian youth in south London found the youngsters used an array of international media (British TV soaps, videos of Indian films and so on) as a forum to evaluate and experiment with a variety of different cultural identities. In some respects, Gillespie argued, British-Asian youth’s media consumption prompted discussion around issues common to most young people - fashion, friends and family, growing up, dating — but, along with this, she found the diversity of international media consumed by the youngsters also encouraged distinctly ‘cross-cultural, comparative analyses of media representations’ (Gillespie, 2000: 165).
Popular music is also an arena in which young British-Asians have negotiated their identities. Many authors, for example, have seen bhangra as a genre of music shaped by processes of migration and diaspora. The music takes its name from a form of Punjabi folk music played on traditional drums such as the dholak or dholki, but during the mid-1980s bhangra was reconfigured by young British-Asians who fused traditional bhangra beats with a variety of Western music styles (disco, house and rap) to produce a music that Rupa Huq describes as ‘at least as quintessentially “British” as it is “Asian”’ (Huq, 1996: 62—63). And, blending elements of bhangra with ragga (dubbed ‘bhangramuffin’ by the music press), the Birmingham-born singer Apache Indian took Asian dance music to mainstream success during the early 1990s with a string of hit singles and the critically acclaimed album No Reservations (1992). Equally successful was the producer/perfomier Bally Sagoo, who interwove Bollywood film scores with pulsating Western basslines to sell over 100,000 copies of six albums during the early 1990s, and scoring Britain’s first Indian-language Top-Twenty hit with ‘Dil Cheez’ in 1997.
With a surge of press interest in British-Asian bands, musicians, and club culture during the 1990s, music journalists hailed the rise of ‘Asian Kool’ (Morris, 1993). But, as Rehan Hyder (2004) has observed, the idea of a unified Asian music scene was tenuous. ‘Asian Kool’ actually embraced a multiplicity of bands who incorporated elements of ‘Asian’ music in their performance in very different ways. Asian dance music, Hyder argued, incorporated a diverse range of musical genres (including hip-hop, house, and techno), with artists such as FunADaAMental, Punjabi MG, and Asian Dub Foundation fusing typically Asian sounds and samples with influences drawn from black America, Europe, and contemporary Britain. In contrast, Hyder highlighted the way ‘indie guitar’ bands such as the Voodoo Queens and Comershop merged instruments such as the sitar and dholki into a guitar-oriented mix influenced by 1970s punk and 1980s ‘indie’ bands such as The Smiths and The Jesus and Maty' Chain. ‘Asian К00Г, then, actually covered a wide variety of musical styles and forms of cultural expression, Hyder arguing these represented differently nuanced articulations of a dynamic and multi-faceted British-Asian identity.
The various contributors to Sanjay Shanna et al.’s (1996) anthology, Dis-Orienting Rhythms, took a similar view. Asian dance music of the 1990s, Sharma and his colleagues argued, was ‘a cultural fonn that narrates diasporas, dynamically affirming, transfonning and mutating both imagined and material linkages’ (Sharma et al., 1996: 9). But, they argued, the category ‘British-Asian’ was unable to convey the dynamism and diversity of these various, sliding subjectivities. Instead, processes of social, economic, and cultural globalisation had brought a widening of potential identities and subjectivities for young people — so there existed a plurality of negotiated and dynamic ‘British-Asian’ identities. Many of these syncretic youth cultures still had a strong link with their place of ‘origin’ and its cultural traditions, though they had also become ‘translated’ by their new cultural context - exemplified by the way the band Comershop celebrated the veteran Hindi film songstress Asha Bhosle in their 1998 indie guitar hit, ‘Brimful of Asha’.
In the US, too, researchers have pointed to the way complex interconnections of ethnicity and identity characterise the cultural experiences of ‘desi’ youth (youngsters with a South Asian heritage, ‘desi’ being a term meaning ‘of the land’ - from the Hindu/Urdu word ‘desh’, meaning ‘country’). Sunaina Maira (2002), for example, shows how young, second-generation South Asians living in New York City draw upon both their own ethnic traditions and the city’s vibrant popular culture to negotiate identities that respond to their racially ambiguous position in the dominant black/white paradigm of US race relations. Like many other theorists, Maira highlights the way identities are forged through dimensions of cultural fusion in sites like fashionable Bhangra Remix parties, where rap beats mix with Hindi film music, reggae, and techno. But, rather than being a hybrid or ‘Third’ space of the kind outlined by Bhabha, Maira argues there are pronounced tensions in the way the desi youngsters bridge notions of ‘ethnic’ authenticity and American ‘cool’ — tensions that become especially marked in the realm of gender where, Maira suggests, the performance of an ‘authentic Indianness’ reveals how ‘the surveillance of ethnic purity is inherently about the social control of purportedly transgressive sexualities’ (Maira, 2002: 16).
Nitisha Sharma (2010) also draws attention to the complex character of desi youth’s negotiation of cultural identity. For Sharma, especially significant is the way some young, second-generation South Asians have drawn upon concepts of blackness - ‘the most visible and salient example of a racial identity in the United States’ (3). South Asian rappers, DJs, producers, and journalists, Dharma suggests, have employed hip-hop’s articulation of blackness in their lyrics, lives, and worldview. This, she suggests, has crafted ‘new ways of being desi, or alternative desiness ... that borrow and expand upon blackness by elaborating upon its possibilities as an empowering rather than denigrated identity’ (3). In these terms, by deploying the black-centred themes of hip-hop, desi youth shift away from an insular ethnic identity and instead ‘turn toward communities and expressions that speak to their sense of difference, injustice and artistic expression’ (x). For Shanna, therefore, desi youth’s embrace of hip-hop ‘privileges the cultivation of positive and progressive interracial relationships in an increasingly diverse world’ (36). This may certainly be true of the relationship between desi youngsters and African-American cultural forms. Matters, however, are more conflicted when black cultural forms are drawn upon by white youth.
