In a world sewn together by the criss-crossing of ideas, capital, images, and media along with the shifts of migrants, refugees, and other travellers, the movement of people is arguably the central political issue of our day. Unsurprisingly, readers interested in migration and the discursive ‘other’ have plenty of material to choose from. Yet what editor Nikesh Shukla has brought to us in the collection of essays titled The Good Immigrant is as innovative as how he brought the book to a large audience. By crowdfunding the book, Shukla has consciously leapt over the typical process or barriers of publishing and put together an important range of voices and perspectives that articulate the many experiences and ways of being different in Britain.

He brings authors who retell their experience of migration from India or Malaysia together with authors who describe growing up as Asian or black in the United Kingdom. With this clever manoeuvre, Shukla cuts across divisions to pull together vastly different experiences of some very similar encounters. Those Britons who are discursively categorised as the other piece together how they are written out of the frame while they share experiences of breaking out of those tired categories associated with being a “good immigrant”. The authors are from a variety of professional backgrounds; many of them writers, some of them artists or teachers. They represent a society transformed by the vagaries of globalisation, still very much in the process of coming to terms with the changes wrought.

Each of the 21 essays offers readers fresh ideas and perspectives that challenge ascendant anti-immigrant attitudes. The Good Immigrant comes at a time when exactly such perspectives are overpowered by those who are shaping Britain in a very different mould. To paraphrase contributor Musa Okwonga, just when we thought we had moved past a torrent of racism and xenophobia, Britain is facing another storm of hatred unleashed by those who pushed for the divorce of the UK and the European Union. When political discourse is dominated by concerns of a few that see British society through a reductive lens, The Good Immigrant pushes the lens open to a wider scope that recognises that complexity. Each author offers the reader a badly needed window into the perspectives of mostly young men and women who can trace the way their lives are shaped by popular attitudes towards the other.

Immigrants and minorities in the United Kingdom share their experiences of trying to fit into contemporary British society

In short, these personal accounts are a full-throated defence of migrants and in fact anyone who could be thought of as ‘different’ in British society today. Such perspectives fight for political oxygen in a world in which the spectacle of dark-skinned migrants overrunning European countries is used to stoke xenophobic attitudes.

What does it mean to be an immigrant in the UK, given — as Shukla puts it — systematic racism and backward attitudes towards refugees? Contributors indicate how The Good Immigrant not only conveys what it is to be an immigrant, but moves on to describe what it means to be brown, black, yellow — or Muslim, Sikh, or Hindu — in a society that is the archetype of the globalised world in which we live. The authors, united in their difference, offer visceral accounts, deeply personal experiences that describe a society in the throes of change.

The way contributors have gone about this is illustrative of the many kinds of experiences immigrants and their first-generation British children have, from growing up to finding their niches in their careers. Some stories link the personal to the political, like the parallel Riz Ahmed draws between the barriers he faces in crossing borders with the barriers he faces in acting: “In the end, I was always let in, so these airport auditions were technically a success. But they involved the experience of being typecast, and when that happens enough, you internalise the role written for you by others. Now, like an overeager method actor, I was struggling to break character.” Like other contributors, Ahmed describes his discursive categorisation in the shift from being ‘black’ in the eyes of a skinhead to being ‘Muslim’ in facing British intelligence officers at an airport.

“And then along came Kendo Nagasaki ... He was sleek and quick, cunning and sly, made elaborate entrances to the ring where he acrobatically warmed up, revelling in the booing and baying of the crowd whom he arrogantly baited (and did so again after his inevitable victories) in what seemed, to a racially abused schoolboy, the ultimate act of ethnic defiance. In short, Kendo Nagasaki was an out-and-out dirty villainous cheat that the crowd, viewers, commentator and other competitors loathed beyond all seeming limit — except that this fiendish ‘oriental’ won bout after bout with his despicable and blatant dirty tactics, appearing to positively revel in the fact that no matter how much everyone involved seemed to will it, he simply would not be beaten. ... I found myself silently willing on this masked man of the East as the only strong, assertive role model on TV whom I could somehow relate to, albeit tenuously, despite the fact that everyone else in the entire country (the ones who watched wrestling, anyway) appeared to despise Kendo Nagasaki.” — Excerpt from the book

Other essays are raucous, like Daniel York Loh’s which picks apart his childhood fascination with the purportedly ‘Asian’ wrestler Kendo Nagasaki. Describing the 1970s media in which Asians of Chinese origin were referred to as “Orientals”, the fictional Nagasaki stood out from staid Oriental characters who were, in fact, played by whites (like David Carradine in Kung Fu to give an example). He combines an excited description of a wrestler on British television with a cutting critical commentary on the portrayals of British Chinese in the media. Other contributors bring out deeply meaningful stories of youth, such as Varaidzo who describes how she, as the daughter of a mixed-race couple, came to grips with managing her hair, a symbol of her difference and a metaphor for the way she learned to present herself in a society that fails to see the grey between the black and white. Some essays are depressing in recounting experiences of hatred and dealing with Islamophobia, including an account of the way Sabrina Mahfouz stood up for a young black man on a bus before coming face to face with the two racists herself.

Shukla and the contributing authors chip away at the artificial boundaries of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ with hardly a mention of multiculturalism. In fact, these terms are not very useful anymore. The experience of being different, of experimenting with who they are and how they came to be who they are, shows how artificial contemporary ideas are about who belongs, about how we see one another, about ideas of race and ethnicity. The Good Immigrant illustrates how these perceptions keep changing, place to place and time to time.

Contemporary contributions tell us how little has changed from Hanif Kureishi’s descriptions of the 1960s when migrants struggled to deal with a hostile reception from locals in post-war and postcolonial Britain, yet each writer’s professional success, and indeed the publication of this book alone, indicates how much has changed by 2016. Literary fixations on faith, belonging, and split identity give way to the next generation of black and Asian minorities who experience and see the issues in a more sophisticated manner. These authors describe how they come to confront, but also work to change, the discourse; or more accurately, to write themselves into the discourse in new and often exciting ways. This book, though a little uneven and somewhat repetitive, firmly anchors British ethnic and religious minorities; its publication speaks volumes about where Britain is today and in which direction it may be going.

The reviewer is an anthropologist.

The Good Immigrant
(ESSAYS)
Edited by Nikesh Shukla
Unbound, UK
ISBN: 978-1783522958
272pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 27th, 2016