Negotiating Boundaries in the City: Migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Britain

This is a finely nuanced study of migration, not as international phenomenon or national crisis, but as the lived experience, over time, of Asian migrants, and white neighbours in an English city. Using oral sources, it holds important insights and salutary lessons on migrant experience and host responses and makes a valuable contribution to the contemporary debates on multiculturalism. Mary Chamberlain, Oxford Brookes University Using life-story interviews and oral history archives, this book provides a radically different story about multicultural Britain. It explores the impact of South Asian migration from the 1950s onwards on the local white population and on the migrants themselves. Offering rich data lacking in existing theoretical accounts, it provides valuable insights into the nature of white ethnicity, inter-ethnic relations and the gendered nature of experiences. Using in-depth life-story interviews and oral history archives, this book explores the impact of South Asian migration from the 1950s onwards on both the local white, British-born population and the migrants themselves. Taking Leicester as a main case study - identified as a European model of multicultural success - Negotiating Boundaries in the City offers a historically grounded analysis of the human experiences of migration. Joanna Herbert shows how migration created challenges for both existing residents and newcomers - for both male and female migrants - and explores how they perceived and negotiated boundaries within the local contexts of their everyday lives. She explores the personal and collective narratives of individuals who might not otherwise appear in the historical records, highlighting the importance of subjective, everyday experiences. The stories provide valuable insights into the nature of white ethnicity, inter-ethnic relations and the gendered nature of experiences, and offer rich data lacking in existing theoretical accounts. This book provides a radically different story about multicultural Britain and reveals the nuances of modern urban experiences which are lost in prevailing discourses of multiculturalism. Contents: Introduction; The background to South Asian settlement; Constructions of whiteness; Transitions; The household; The neighbourhood; Education and the workplace; Conclusion: complexities and connections; Appendix; Bibliography; Index. About the Author: Joanna Herbert is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. She has worked on several research projects on the experiences of minority ethnic groups. Her main areas of interest include the gendered nature of migratory experiences, the role of memory in life histories and constructions of whiteness and racisms.