Bhangra and Asian Underground : South Asian music and the politics of belonging in Britain / Falu Bakrania.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bakrania, Falu Pravin.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

South Asians--Great Britain--Ethnic identity.

South Asians.

South Asians--Music--Social aspects--Great Britain.

South Asians--Great Britain--Music.

Nightclubs--Great Britain.

Nightclubs.

Music.

Social aspects.

Ethnicity.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

xvi, 245 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2013.

Summary:

Asian Underground music-a fusion of South Asian genres with western break beats created for the dance club scene by DJs and musicians of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi descent-went mainstream in the U.K. in the late 1990s. Its success was unprecedented: British bhangra, a blend of Punjabi folk music with hip-hop musical elements, was enormously popular among South Asian communities but had yet to become mainstream. For many, the widespread attention to Asian Underground music signalled the emergence of a supposedly new, tolerant, and multicultural Britain that could finally accept South Asians. Interweaving ethnography and theory, Falu Bakrania examines the social life of British Asian musical culture to reveal a more complex and contradictory story of South Asian belonging in Britain. Analyzing the production of bhangra and Asian Underground music by male artists and its consumption by female club-goers, Bakrania shows that gender, sexuality, and class intersected in ways that profoundly shaped how young people interpreted "British" and "Asian" identity and negotiated, sometimes violently, contests about ethnic authenticity, sexual morality, individual expression, and political empowerment. Book jacket.

Contents:

Mainstreaming masculinity : Bhangra Boyz and belonging in Britain

From the margins to the mainstream : Asian Underground artists and the politics of not being political

The troubling subject of wayward Asian girls : working-class women and Bhangra club going

Roomful of asha : middle-class women and Asian Underground club going

Conclusion. Bhangra and Asian Underground in the 2000s.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822353010

0822353016

9780822353171

0822353172

OCLC:

825047365