In the summer of 2001, young British Asians took to the streets of Oldham and Burnley in the North of England to protest against perceived racial inequality in their neighbourhoods. In the popular British press, these events were reported as illustrative of the disconnection of young British Asians from wider British society, driven by outside ‘foreign’ influences. For Ash Amin, however, the protests by young British Muslims mark the emergence of a subcultural force refusing to remain hidden. Importantly, they do not mark distance from Britishness, alienation or confusion, but are, rather, evidence of the very secure sense of citizenship held by this British-born/raised generation. Monica Ali's first novel, Brick Lane, is imbued with this spirit of defiance. Like Nadeem Aslam, Ali seems to straddle worlds of postcolonial fiction and contemporary British Asian literature. Her second novel, Alentejo Blue (2004), can be read as a conscious attempt to refuse to allow simplistic associations between ethnic authors and particular subject matter. For Ali, the possible politics behind such a departure needs to be contextualised within the reception of Brick Lane.

In the wake of the rise of ‘Asian cool’, the desire to meet the image of a confident, self-assured British Asian identity is overwhelming. As the most ‘funny’ British Asian voice, best known for her roles in the BBC comedy series Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at Number 42, Meera Syal might be seen to play into this demand. This chapter, however, suggests the very opposite: Syal's comedy, rather than a mark of newfound confidence, is instead a device used to challenge the prevailing mood of optimism with a stark warning of the continued difficulties of being not only British Asian, but a British Asian woman especially. Marketing of both Syal's first novel, Anita and Me (1996), and its follow-up, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), identifies her with the ‘funny’ public image developed through her television work. Syal's use of comedy is more significant for its engagement with the broader conventions of this genre than for its evocation of humour.

The experience of being Muslim in Scotland is not directly comparable to being a Muslim in England. In comparison with discussions around British or English identity, there is a relative lack of commentary on racism in Scotland. Suhayl Saadi's fiction embodies a ‘Scottishness’ representative of how assumptions of a universal British Asian identity are not just problematic, but radically problematic. His texts are set in Britain, yet they clearly identify not with this broader category of the nation-state, but rather with Britain's constituent nations. Adding Scottish identity to the already problematic relationship between Islam and Britishness, Saadi's fiction exemplifies the diversity within British Asian cultures, and the need to define these in relation to specifics of time and place. That the notion of ‘Asian cool’ is an intensely limited one is taken up in Saadi's novel, Psychoraag. Saadi's nationalism speaks to the importance of geographical affiliation, even as it denies race as a basis for this.

This chapter explores the transition between migrant and British-born/raised positioning through the figures of V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, arguing that the common reading of their liminal positioning can be reconsidered to emphasise the transition from migrant to British Asian consciousness. Are Naipul and Rushdie British authors, needing to be read within the context of an increasingly multicultural British literature? They are not alone in being based for the majority of their lives in Britain but being born elsewhere, and both reflect their status as postcolonial, rather than British Asian, authors, in their principal concern for the trauma of migration. While each authors' characters straddle alienation and confident belonging, the authorial voice in both cases is testament to the latter. In this respect, marginality is only employed strategically: what Graham Huggan refers to as both authors' ‘staged marginality’. Both Rushdie and Naipaul capture a Britishness being changed to accommodate its ethnic citizens.

There have been Asian writers in Britain for almost as long as there have been Asians in Britain: since the seventeenth century. In the wake of mass migration from the 1950s, however, for the first time there exist in large numbers Asians born in Britain or settled since childhood, and now, as a result, British-born or British-raised Asian authors. This book focuses on the works of fiction produced by British Asians. Its central contention is that British Asian authors, who have emerged only in notable numbers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, mark the establishment of a definitive genre of British Asian literature deserving recognition in its own right. Throughout the book, the term ‘British-born/raised’ is employed in preference to the terms ‘second generation’ (for those born in Britain) or ‘1.5 generation’ (for those raised in Britain). The book examines the writings of Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, Ravinder Randhawa, Atima Srivastava, Nadeem Aslam, Meera Syal, Hari Kunzru, Monica Ali and Suhayl Saadi.

Atima Srivastava is the first prominent example of a school of British Asian literature that also includes Preethi Nair, Nisha Minhas and B. K. Mahal: a British Asian romance genre intervention. Her two novels, Looking for Maya (1999) and Transmission (1992), feature young women protagonists working in creative industries. As both the first and the most sophisticated example of the rise of British Asian popular romance, Srivastava's fiction simultaneously challenges two core values of the romance genre: whiteness and heterosexuality. Moreover, the favouring of romance plots over concerns with ethnicity make her novels a further example of the post-ethnic reality to which Hanif Kureishi's work has gestured. The identity crises of earlier British Asians – whether migrants or British born – have been replaced by what Darcus Howe calls an ‘ease of presence’, challenging representations of British Asians as in any sense alienated, disaffected or caught between competing cultures. Through subtle subversion of Western romance, Srivastava's novels interrogate stereotypes of British Asian women, announcing a confident and independent contemporary identity.

Hanif Kureishi is the first author of note born in Britain. How he imagines his world is central to his identity as a British Asian author. Kureishi's vision of London, and of the communities that inhabit it, has become the scaffolding for an ideological perspective which infuses his fiction. For Mark Stein, Kureishi's novels fall into two groups, identified respectively as ‘posed-ethnic’ and ‘post-ethnic’. The early plays The King and Me and Tomorrow Today! (1980) are examples of post-ethnic works. Kureishi's first self-directed feature, London Kills Me (1993), is his first consciously post-ethnic work. In essence, Stein has not identified modes of representation specific to Kureishi, but rather the preoccupations of the majority of British Asian authors. This chapter examines Kureishi's postmodern didacticism, posed-ethnicity and post-ethnicity, liberalism and his vision of British-born Asian identity.

Born in India in 1952 but raised in Warwickshire from the age of seven, Ravinder Randhawa operated under the radar of mainstream literary criticism. Well-known, however, within the Asian writing community, and to feminists, she was essential to the burgeoning British Asian literature. As a founder of the Asian Women Writers' Workshop, Randhawa not only wrote prolifically about the lives of British Asian women, but also fostered the careers of others, including Meera Syal. Her fiction, its focus on themes of generational difference, the domestic and economic exploitation of women, and the often dark comedy of women's lives, has been highly influential on the women authors who have followed. In order to explore the unique way Randhawa engages with British Asian identity, this chapter relies upon the theoretical ideas of gender critic Judith Butler, and also examines the extent to which it is more useful to consider Randhawa's writing in terms of gender rather than ethnicity.

In 2004, the BBC screened a documentary entitled The Power of Nightmares: the Rise of the Politics of Fear. Written and produced by Adam Curtis, the documentary controversially argues that Islamist terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda are self-realising myths, encouraged by the West (particularly U.S. neoconservatives) in order to construct identifiable enemies resonant with the popular imagination. Curtis does not deny the reality of terrorism; what he denies is a well-coordinated and hidden organisation as the source of this threat. Like Curtis, Hari Kunzru sees an explicit connection between terrorism and selfhood. This chapter examines Kunzru's works, Transmission (2004) and My Revolutions (2007), in which he suggests that individuals with justifiable motives find themselves co-opted into less-ethical schemes with a group mentality which strips them of their individual subjectivity, whether such groups are imaginary (in the case of Transmission) or real (as in My Revolutions). Group identity supersedes the complexity of individual selfhood. The chapter also looks at the politics of selfhood and consciousness, as well as identity versus self.