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To turn to the current volume—this wide-ranging and substantive collection of essays edited by Neil Murphy and Wai-chew Sim—is to come across salutary reminders of how significantly the contours of the subject have altered since the late 1970s, and how, as the subject continues vigorously to expand, so its categories will undergo further changes. Working as academics and critics from Singapore, a useful vantage point, Murphy and Sim have extended the parameters of British Asian to include not just writers from South Asia (as is traditionally the case), but also writers whose parents—or who themselves—have migrated to Britain from other regions of Asia, for example, Japan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. This initiative has made it possible for Murphy and Sim to bring together, first, an interestingly varied group of authors, among them those who came to prominence in the 1980s (Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro), as well as their younger contemporaries (Meera Syal, Romesh Gunesekera, Monica Ali, Hari Kunzru, Ooi Yang-May); and, second, a broad and diverse range of novels that span Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet (1982) and Tariq Ali’s A Sultan in Palermo (2005), the fourth volume in his Islam quintet.
Elaborating on their definition of British Asian, the editors remark, “We do this not because we claim to unearth anything like a knowable community, but because we believe this will help us to learn about extant, differently configured sensibilities, given that non-statist forces working below and above the nation have instituted a proliferation of contact zones, so that in actuality the points of overlap between European and Eastern cultures nowadays take many forms”. Thus, while a central concern in the essays is to foreground the texts under consideration, we find that detailed attention to formal matters is not an end in itself here, but is made integral to critical attempts to negotiate the complex subject positions occupied by the writers, and to engage with political and social issues—those “unresolved antagonisms of reality” (according to John Banville) “that come to define a historical milieu”. Finally, despite a note of wariness from the editors on “developments in critical theory” which have “a way of promoting text-tangential discussions”, the essays show in many cases how, discerningly utilised, theoretical discourse can position, speak to, and problematise the texts in challenging and illuminating ways.