In her 1999 article ‘The Scent of Memory’, Avtar Brah maps the ways in which gendered, classed and racialised identities and subjectivities are produced in the diaspora space of Britain. ‘The Scent of Memory’ begins, repeatedly returns to and ends with the figure of a mother — Jean, a white English woman in the Southall of the 1970s and 1980s. One way of reading this article is as a series of interruptions, each of which allows us to see Jean differently, (...) to replace her in what Brah has memorably termed the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of staying put. In this article, I stage my own set of speculative interruptions, through which recent feminist theorising of maternal subjectivities confronts the ways in which the maternal and the reproductive are conceptualised, metaphorised and mobilised in contemporary accounts of community cohesion, Britishness and belonging. At stake is our ability to challenge those still-dominant discourses that naturalise repetition and sameness as the necessary ground of belonging, obscuring and ignoring the gendered, racialised and other differences that mark Britishness, and which thereby reproduce the migrant and the minoritised as a problem for the stability of British identities. Following on from and extending Lisa Baraitser's claim that thinking about the relationship with the other ‘might just as well start with the mother’, I ask whether rethinking the reproductive can enable a more complex account of the ways in which ‘the native’ is transformed in diaspora spaces. (shrink)

The introduction to this special issue addresses the production of intimacy in the labour of research. It explores the sensory, emotional and affective relations which form an integral, if often invisible, part of the process through which researchers engage with, produce, understand and translate `research'. The article argues that these processes inform the making of knowledge, shape power relations and enable or constrain the practical negotiation of ethical problems. These issues are not, however, often foregrounded in debates on methods or (...) methodology and are frequently erased from researchers' own accounts of their work. The article explores some of the possible reasons for this, which include institutional and cultural conventions of academic practice, the historical legacies with which disciplines often struggle, and the difficult issues and decisions that individual researchers face as they try to negotiate the relations between scholarly research and personal relationships across time, and between scholarly research and, for example, creativity, fiction, or sensationalism. The article concludes with a review of the main themes in the special issue, focusing in particular on the ways in which the contributors use the concept of intimacy to challenge the boundaries between creativity and analysis; spatial and temporal proximity and distance; freedom and censorship; subjects and objects. (shrink)

This article moves through the tempo of visual and aural inventories that float in and out of the making of a film based project on public spheres within a post-war post-colonial landscape. Seeking a set of conversations which offer clues to the inhabitation and production of public spheres within the zone of cinemas, the article considers the creative process at play in the writing of these iterative histories of the very ways in which cities are imagined, lost and perhaps re-gained (...) through poetic reflection. (shrink)

This article unpacks the notion of ‘carrying’ as an embodied set of influences that bear upon our research practices and journeys. It is widely recognised that we acquire and carry a body of books as intellectual companionship. It is not however readily acknowledged how we as researchers carry sounds, aesthetics, traumas and obsessions, which stay with us and take time to appear before us, as methodological projects within our grasp. Researchers are carriers embarked on exchanges in a double sense. Firstly, (...) we are embodied and affected by our life trajectories. There is a temporality to our research which is entwined with the very knots of our lives. Secondly, we are carriers through the specific ways in which we activate our research materials and relationships. In this article, the two elements of carrying are underlined as being intimately related. (shrink)

This paper looks at the place of items long associated with the bodies of South Asian women in mainstream fashion. First, there will be a profiling of some of the scenes where bindhies, mendhies and related scents and sounds are donned and adored by white bodies. By participating in conversations with South Asian women in Britain in the second part of the article, the author is able to discuss some of the stirrings raised by the recent legitimization of these items (...) by multicultural capitalism, leading towards an exploration of a different sense of aesthetics, memory and desire. The ambivalent attraction of limited recognition offered by the anthropological urge to ‘know’ the ethnic ‘other’ is noted. A consideration of the rage induced by the power of whiteness to play with ‘ethnic’ items which had not so long ago been reviled when they were worn by South Asian women points to the historical amnesia that underlies much multicultural celebration. The allure of images packaged as oriental for South Asian women themselves, although often from a different set of sensibilities and memories, stresses the importance of historical reconstruction. (shrink)

This article excavates a discussion on the mediations that informed the making of the film Aaj Kaal by Asian elders, in a project directed by Avtar Brah and coordinated by Jasbir Panesar with the film trainer Vipin Kumar. It brings this largely unknown and inventive film to the foreground of current developments in participative media research practices. The discussion explores the coming together of the ethnographic imagination and performative pedagogies during the course of an adult education community project centred on (...) South Asian elders making a film. Collaborative dialogic encounters illuminate post-war British front rooms, the seaside and public spheres from what is usually an unlikely vantage point of view in public accounts. (shrink)

This paper looks at the place of items long associated with the bodies of South Asian women in mainstream fashion. First, there will be a profiling of some of the scenes where bindhies, mendhies and related scents and sounds are donned and adored by white bodies. By participating in conversations with South Asian women in Britain in the second part of the article, the author is able to discuss some of the stirrings raised by the recent legitimization of these items (...) by multicultural capitalism, leading towards an exploration of a different sense of aesthetics, memory and desire. The ambivalent attraction of limited recognition offered by the anthropological urge to ‘know’ the ethnic ‘other’ is noted. A consideration of the rage induced by the power of whiteness to play with ‘ethnic’ items which had not so long ago been reviled when they were worn by South Asian women points to the historical amnesia that underlies much multicultural celebration. The allure of images packaged as oriental for South Asian women themselves, although often from a different set of sensibilities and memories, stresses the importance of historical reconstruction. (shrink)