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Professor Parminder Bhachu and student Erica Ciporen are interested in the impact of economic globalization on cultural identity. While Bhachu examines how daughters of Asian immigrants in Britain have transformed the once-denigrated salwaar-kameez into high fashion, Ciporen investigates the deterritorialization of language. |
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Meet the researchers:
On the cutting edge
Interview with Professor Parminder Bhachu
Professor of sociology Parminder Bhachu studies the interaction between the global marketplace and shifts in cultural identities. Gurinder Chadha, film director of Bride and Prejudice and Bend It Like Beckham. Chadha states that "Parminder Bhachu is the most authentic and imaginative intellectual of the diaspora that I have come across...on the cutting edge--a sophisticated analyzer of the multilayered identities and cultural locations that also occupy my films in the global diasporic arena...the first academic to take me and my films seriously in all their complexities."
In a recent interview, summarized below, Bhachu discussed her own migration experiences and what she has learned from studying cultural transformations among peoples that have moved multiple times across international borders.
You describe yourself as a "multiple migrant." What do you mean by that, and how does your personal experience of migration contribute to your research focus?
A multiple migrant is someone who has moved from his or her country of origin to another country, and then moved again to a different country. Of course, the process of migration can continue indefinitely. The multiple migrant model is applicable to many people and is a theme I play out in all my work.
In my own case, my grandfather, an Indian Sikh, moved his family from India to East Africa in the early 1900s. I was born in Tanzania (then Tanganika). When East Africa was decolonized in the 1960s, many Asian residents, including my father, lost their jobs. My family moved to England when I was fourteen and I did the rest of my growing up in a white London suburb. After getting my Ph.D., I worked in British universities for a decade. Since 1990, I have lived in the United States.
What do you find particularly intriguing about multiple migrants?
The interesting thing about multiple migrants like myself is that we do not have a myth of return. We are not oriented toward our country of origin. We are where we are. When people ask me where my home is, I say Worcester, even though I'm a product of East Africa and London.
Most of the literature on migration and settlement characterizes migrants as having a home country with families to whom they send money and to which they eventually plan to return. But for multiple migrants, there's no notion of building an economy in the home country while living spartanly where they are.
My research suggests that multiple migrants have certain advantages. They seem to be savvier in the management of their minority status and they're more skilled at the game of migration.
Your research uses the experiences of multiple migrants to illustrate your larger focus: the interaction between global economic processes and shifting cultural identities.
Yes. Right from the beginning my research has examined the way economic processes are culturally mediated, and how cultural identities are affected by economic relationships.
For example, my first book Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain, examines how notions of marriage and dowry in London's British Asian community were transformed under the influence of an economy different from what they had experienced in East Africa and India. At that time, Asian women in East Africa and India generally did not enter the labor market as waged workers. In contrast, young Asian women in Britain entered the work force, and, as they acquired disposable income, their dowries and weddings became much more elaborate. Often a working bride and her spouse could accumulate enough money to move into their own home, rather than live with the husband's parents. Twice Migrants shows how economic processes had a direct impact on what was going on in the re-imagination, and re-formation of cultural patterns and gendered property rights after migration and settlement into new destination economies.
In my most recent book Dangerous Designs: Asian Women Fashion the Diaspora Economy, I looked at the way a group of British Asian women entrepreneurs and second generation Asian women have transformed the salwaar-kameez--a traditional three-piece garment often disparaged by the white community--into the "suit," an outfit that, by the late 1990s, was considered "globally" chic by Asian, black, and white women.
How did you go about researching Twice Migrants and Dangerous Designs?
Since arriving in London in the late 1960s, I had watched a multiple migrant economy develop before my eyes. Having worn and stitched the suit myself for many years, I had also actively participated in this economy. Then, beginning in the late 1980s, I monitored it systematically using my professional ethnographic skills.
The ethnographic method of research is one that involves participation in and observation of the culture of interest. Conducting ethnographic fieldwork requires a certain amount of energy and patience, as well as the ability to fit into other peoples' schedules. You have to enjoy being with people of all kinds and be able to tolerate frustration. After all, you're imposing on the lives of the people whose culture you're observing, and impinging on their time.
For Twice Migrants I lived for over a year and a half in Southall, an area of London with a concentration of Asian immigrants. I was in my early 20s at that time. I went to lots of weddings, talked to people, observed events and trends, and made extensive field notes. For example, if I was at a wedding I'd be talking to all the relatives, viewing the dowry and the rituals over a period of several days and sometimes weeks. It was an intense process. I used to be up at all hours. But since I was often the same age as the bride, I fit into the scene and was very into what was going on. I loved it!
For Dangerous Designs I systematically monitored trends in this fashion economy for over a decade, and later I interviewed British Asian fashion entrepreneurs, seamstresses, marketers, and many women on the street intensively over the course of about one and one-half years. My visiting, interviewing, and note taking took me to many parts of London.
In your view, multiple migrants have some advantages over migrants who expect to eventually return to their country of origin. In Dangerous Designs you look specifically at how some of these advantages helped British Asian women entrepreneurs transform the salwaar kameez into a garment that could compete in the fashion marketplace. Can you elaborate?
Women who are multiple migrants or come from that background have learned to improvise. Multiple migrants are always on the margin--never part of the existing power structure. They have to improvise all the time, and that makes them innovative.
For example, while Indian women in India relied on tailors to make clothing for them and their families, Indian women in my childhood community in East Africa had no such resource. As a result, they learned to become expert seamstresses and were continually "re-skilling" themselves by sharing resources and expertise. Growing up, it was important that I learn to sew really well. All the women had to.
In Dangerous Designs, I argue that the most cutting edge British Asian fashion entrepreneurs have benefited from and built on this multiple migrant domestic culture, a culture that was defined by a high level of skill which was enhanced through constant re-skilling, improvising, and innovating. These women are very responsive to the current moment and capture it all the time. This is what makes them so cutting edge in the fast changing global economy.
Can you give an example?
Yes. Let me tell you of a breakthrough moment that I had in the London shop of a young fashion designer named Bubby Mahil, one of the women entrepreneurs central to my book. Since interviewing her as part of my fieldwork, she has become very influential as a designer for Cheri Booth, the British Prime Minister's wife, and as the costumer designer for director Gurinder Chadha's recently released film Bride and Prejudice. I am told that Bubby will also be designing some of the costumes for the next Harry Potter film.
Bubby, like me, is ethnically Indian and comes from an East African background. She migrated to Britain at the age of three and was raised in East London, where her shop is. By situating her commerce in the area where she was raised, she can take advantage of her extensive knowledge of the community and her peer group, members of which are in and out of her shop all the time. Her peer group provides a ready-made customer base. This is her real advantage: that she is a strong local agent who operates globally.
When I was in the shop I noticed that Bubby and a customer would talk, and while they talked Bubby would collaboratively draw a basic sketch of a hybrid salwaar kameez that the customer wanted. The sketch, improvised on the spot and combining suggestions from both Bubby and the customer, captured a hybrid aesthetic. The sketch was an example of how the new comes into the world, being, as Basil Bernstein says, "a recovery of something not yet spoken, of new fusion." After the customer left, Bubby created a new, further elaborated sketch and faxed it to her production facility in India. The resulting salwaar kameez "suit" was delivered to London three weeks later for the customer to pick up.
So that moment in Bubby's shop exemplified for you what is going on in today's global market?
Yes. It told me that the market is a conversation. Economies now are about the ways in which products can be made to fit with customers' desires. Bubby and her sister fashion entrepreneurs, by undertaking these conversations with customers, are actually in sync with what is going on in the new global marketplace and thereby gain a competitive advantage. Bubby's suit production process also illustrates savvy use of new global communication and transportation technologies.
Bubby is one of many British Asian women who suffered from racial discrimination. When she was growing up, the salwaar-kameez was negatively coded as "Paki" clothing. Paki was a derogatory, racist term for Asians who might or might not be Pakistani. Bubby decided she would not be defeated by racism. Coming from a multiple migrant background that emphasized sewing and other domestic skills, and having briefly attended a local design school, Bubby went on to develop a style that her white friends really liked, but which was still true to her culture location and racial politics. In the process, she transformed a cultural battle into a commercial space.
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Additional Resources
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Parminder Bhachu
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