Anokha emerging: The Asian Underground, new ethnicities, and diversity conservatism

Abstract

This article tracks the relationship between Britain’s ‘Asian Underground’ music scene and reconfigurations of Britishness in the mid- to late-1990s, through to the more contemporary tightening of border regimes and draconian policies around immigration in the United Kingdom. It examines the role that a small, British-Asian weekly London club night, Anokha, played in the precipitation of an ‘emergent structure of feeling’ that would ultimately shift national conversations about what Britishness signified at the turn of the last millennium. The article places British-Asian club and music aesthetics in a broader terrain of avant-garde cultural production and representational politics that helped to incorporate Britain’s second generation of South Asians inside the national narrative and polity. The article goes on to speculate on the role this proliferation has played in facilitating forms of political closure with respect to migration, race and bordering that have emerged from a generation of conservative British South Asian (and second-generation immigrant) politicians enabled by these forms of incorporation.