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"Falu Bakrania has written a fantastic book that provides an excellent account of the complex and contradictory ways that young men and women in Britain craft British Asian identities through the bhangra and Asian Underground music scenes. It was with pleasure that I 'met' Jess, Sukh, Leena, and the other girls and women. Bakrania's transcriptions of the interviews with men and women were fantastic and well-analyzed, truly conveying a sense of their struggles, joys, and humor. Bhangra and Asian Underground is a fabulous ethnography that will enjoy a wide readership."—Nitasha Tamar Sharma, author of Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness
"Bhangra and Asian Underground is an important book. By focusing on how young British Asian women, particularly working-class women, negotiate questions of race, class, and nation through a gendered relation to popular culture, Falu Bakrania foregrounds the constitutive nature of class in British Asian women's lives."—Gayatri Gopinath, author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures
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Asian Underground music—a fusion of South Asian genres with western breakbeats created for the dance club scene by DJs and musicians of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi descent—went mainstream in the U.K. in the late 1990s. Its success was unprecedented: British bhangra, a blend of Punjabi folk music with hip-hop musical elements, was enormously popular among South Asian communities but had yet to become mainstream. For many, the widespread attention to Asian Underground music signaled the emergence of a supposedly new, tolerant, and multicultural Britain that could finally accept South Asians. Interweaving ethnography and theory, Falu Bakrania examines the social life of British Asian musical culture to reveal a more complex and contradictory story of South Asian belonging in Britain. Analyzing the production of bhangra and Asian Underground music by male artists and its consumption by female club-goers, Bakrania shows that gender, sexuality, and class intersected in ways that profoundly shaped how young people interpreted “British” and “Asian” identity and negotiated, sometimes violently, contests about ethnic authenticity, sexual morality, individual expression, and political empowerment.