South Asian textiles have shaped British fashion and dress for centuries. 'British Asian Style' looks at the ongoing importance of South Asian textiles to British fashion and culture.

In 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act hastened the process of South Asian migration to postcolonial Britain. Half a decade later, now is an opportune moment to revisit the accumulated writing about the diasporas formed through subsequent settlement, and to probe the ways in which the South Asian diaspora can be re-conceptualised. Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas takes a fresh look at such matters and will have multi-disciplinary resonance worldwide. The meaning and importance of local, multi-local and trans-local dynamics is explored through a devolved and regionally-accented comparison of five British Asian cities: Bradford, the East End of London, Manchester, Leicester and Birmingham. Analysing the ‘writing’ of these differently configured cities since the 1960s, its main focus is the significant discrepancies in representation between differently-positioned texts reflecting both dominant institutional discourses and everyday lived experiences of a locality. Part I offers a comprehensive, yet still highly contested, reading of each city’s archives. Part II examines how the arts and humanities fields of History, Religion, Gender and Literary/Cultural Studies have all written British Asian diasporas, and how their perspectives might complement the better-established agendas of the social sciences. Providing an innovative analysis of South Asian communities and their multi-local identities in Britain today, this interdisciplinary book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, Migration, Ethnic and Diaspora Studies, as well as Sociology, Anthropology, and Geography.

Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion is the first comparative study of this highly topical issue and brings together cutting-edge contributions from leading scholars.

South Asia’s diaspora is among the world’s largest and most widespread, and it is growing exponentially. It is estimated that over 25 million persons of Indian descent live abroad; and many more millions have roots in other countries of the subcontinent, in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. There are 3 million South Asians in the UK and approximately the same number resides in North America. South Asians are an extremely significant presence in Southeast Asia and Africa, and increasingly visible in the Middle East. This inter-disciplinary handbook on the South Asian diaspora brings together contributions by leading scholars and rising stars on different aspects of its history, anthropology and geography, as well as its contemporary political and socio-cultural implications. The Handbook is split into five main sections, with chapters looking at mobile South Asians in the early modern world before moving on to discuss diaspora in relation to empire, nation, nation state and the neighbourhood, and globalisation and culture. Contributors highlight how South Asian diaspora has influenced politics, business, labour, marriage, family and culture. This much needed and pioneering venture provides an invaluable reference work for students, scholars and policy makers interested in South Asian Studies.

This book is the first book-length study to explore the sartorial politics of identity in the literature of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. Using fashion and dress as the main focus of analysis, and linking them with a myriad of identity concerns, the book takes the reader on a journey from the eighteenth century to the new millennium, from early travel account by South Asian writers to contemporary British-Asian fictions. Besides sartorial readings of other key authors and texts, the book provides an in-depth exploration of Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man (1972), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003).This work examines what an analysis of dress contributes to the interpretation of the featured texts, their contexts and identity politics, but it also considers what literature has added to past and present discussions on the South Asian dressed body in Br itain. Endowed with an interdisciplinary emphasis, the book is of interest to students and academics in a variety of fields, including literary criticism, socio-cultural studies and fashion theory.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the production of dress shifted dramatically from being predominantly hand-crafted in small quantities to machine-manufactured in bulk. The increasing democratization of appearances made new fashions more widely available, but at the same time made the need to differentiate social rank seem more pressing. In this age of empire, the coding of class, gender and race was frequently negotiated through dress in complex ways, from fashionable dress which restricted or exaggerated the female body to liberating reform dress, from self-defining black dandies to the oppressions and resistances of slave dress. Richly illustrated with over 100 images and drawing on a plethora of visual, textual and object sources, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Age of Empire presents essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, and visual and literary representations to illustrate the diversity and cultural significance of dress and fashion in the period.

This book investigates ways of dressing, style and fashion as gendered and embodied, but equally as “religionized” phenomena, particularly focusing on one significant world religion: Islam. Through their clothing, Muslims negotiate concepts and interpretations of Islam and construct their intersectionally interwoven position in the world. Taking the interlinkages between ‘fashionized religion,’ ‘religionized fashion,’ commercialization and processes of feminization as a starting point, this book reshapes our understanding of gendered forms of religiosity and spirituality through the lens of gender and embodiment. Focusing mainly on the agency and creativity of women as they appropriate ways of performing and interpreting various modalities of Muslim clothing and body practices, the book investigates how these social actors deal with empowering conditions as well as restrictive situations. Foregrounding contemporary scholars’ diverse disciplinary, theoretical and methodological approaches, this book problematizes and complicates the discursive and lived interactions and intersections between gender, fashion, spirituality, religion, class, and ethnicity. It will be relevant to a broad audience of researchers across gender, sociology of religion, Islamic and fashion studies.

A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.

Examines the challenges of fashion from the nineteenth-century to the present day, from decolonisation to sustainability.

Introducing Human Geographies is the leading guide to human geography for undergraduate students, explaining new thinking on essential topics and discussing exciting developments in the field. This new edition has been thoroughly revised and updated and coverage is extended with new sections devoted to biogeographies, cartographies, mobilities, non-representational geographies, population geographies, public geographies and securities. Presented in three parts with 60 contributions written by expert international researchers, this text addresses the central ideas through which human geographers understand and shape their subject. Part I: Foundations engages students with key ideas that define human geography’s subject matter and approaches, through critical analyses of dualisms such as local-global, society-space and human-nonhuman. Part II: Themes explores human geography’s main sub-disciplines, with sections devoted to biogeographies, cartographies, cultural geographies, development geographies, economic geographies, environmental geographies, historical geographies, political geographies, population geographies, social geographies, urban and rural geographies. Finally, Part III: Horizons assesses the latest research in innovative areas, from mobilities and securities to non-representational geographies. This comprehensive, stimulating and cutting edge introduction to the field is richly illustrated throughout with full colour figures, maps and photos. These are available to download on the companion website, located at www.routledge.com/9781444135350.