Revisiting the Muslimness of the Asian gang: locating British Bangladeshis in a changing global geopolitical context

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Asian Gang Revisited (2024) is a sequel to Alexander’s groundbreaking book The Asian Gang (2000) which explored South Asian and Muslim masculinities of a community of British Bangladeshis in South London. The world has vastly changed since then and so have the lives of her participants. It is a remarkable contribution to reflexive ethnography and the scholarship of race/ethnicity, religion, gender, migration and South Asian Studies. As a longitudinal ethnography of the same community spanning over 25 years, it is perhaps the only one of its kind. Here, I situate the book in a global geopolitical context given the spillover effects of her participants’ politicized Muslim identities. I also invite Alexander to connect her rich, nuanced descriptions of the participants’ diverging occupational outcomes and life trajectories to sociological models of immigrant integration. Finally, recognizing the remarkable potential of this book, I invite Alexander to offer some policy implications.