A Sartorial Afterword

A SARTORIAL AFTERWORD In May 2016, Britain witnessed Sadiq Khan, born to Pakistani migrants, becoming London’s frst Muslim mayor. Following the investiture cer- emony at Southwark Cathedral, certain right-wing voices used social media to turn the spotlight on Khan’s Muslim faith in a mean-spirited manner, criticising his wife, Saadiya Ahmed, for only putting on the hijab after the election victory. However, as it immediately became apparent in the international media, the woman to whom they were referring— and whose picture was used as evidence—was not Saadiya, but rather the Muslim writer and broadcaster Sarah Joseph, who was also at Southwark Cathedral and who reacted swiftly to this erroneously grounded social media vociferation. In addition to the string of prejudiced implications underlying it, this hijab-centred incident attests to the current obsession with the hijab in Western societies. It is also symptomatic of the scru- tiny to which the Muslim dressed body—and, in particular, the Muslim female dressed body—is currently subjected both in and beyond Britain, with the practice of hijab wearing often being used as a versatile political tool. This ongoing attention, which has intensifed since 9/11 and which our era of mass communication undoubtedly amplifes, bestows a certain historical unprecedentedness on the question of the hijab. However, as the socio-literary analyses in this work have shown, much present- day discussion on the hijab in Britain, for all its singularity, brings to mind other dress-related precedents. These precedents have not simply involved Muslims, but also other South Asian minorities in Britain. Thus debates over the wearing or not wearing of the hijab in contemporary © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 195 N. Pereira-Ares, Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61397-0 196 A SARTORIAL AFTERWORD Britain can be linked to those surrounding the Sikh turban in the 1950s and 1960s and, more tangentially, even to the headgear-related inci- dents recorded in the pre-twentieth-century travelogues examined in this book. What is more, one could even argue that, if viewed in the context of the Asian–British encounter, these controversies over the South Asian dressed body in Britain represent a re-enactment of the multiple sartorial confrontations that historically have affected this encounter, frst in colonial India and later in postcolonial Britain. Of course, these connections are entirely conditional on deploying the broadly inclusive, but none the less largely opaque, category ‘South Asian’; and, of course, the practice of wearing the hijab in Britain also involves individuals other than South Asian Muslims, with the above-mentioned historical links being inappli- cable to them. All these caveats notwithstanding, and recalling Edward Said’s words, drawing connections ‘between the past and the present’ might serve to convey ‘a more urgent sense of the interdependence between things’ (1994: 72). Grounded in a particular interest in literature as a cultural phenom- enon which is embedded, and simultaneously intervenes in, historical, social, cultural, political and sartorial realities, this book has attempted to demonstrate that the dressed body has always mattered to those involved in, and writing about, the South Asian presence in Britain. It has mattered to authors writing in almost all periods, and to male and female writers alike. Each text, as we have seen, plots dress in different ways. Some recreate the writers’ own sartorial memories; while others exploit the literariness of dress within the diegesis. In all of them, references to fashion and dress do not fail to act as quintessential descriptive devices, at times building on a narrative strand or acquiring metaphorical and symbolic resonances. Yet, in most of them, dress allusions transcend the mere descriptive, capturing the process involved in the sartorial per- formativity of identity. More often than not, sartorial allusions in South Asian diaspora narratives are used to express silently a myriad of identity aspects along aesthetic, social, cultural, ethnic, religious, gender, political and ideological lines. Dress in these narratives emerges as a cultural site where identity is visibly inscribed, constructed, monitored, negotiated or creatively reinvented. It renders visible the points of identity attach- ment forged by the characters in the liminal space of the diaspora, invok- ing notions of ethnic identifcation, maintenance, assimilation, hybridity, transculturality or resistance. Dress is a cultural element that allows diasporic characters to relive an imagined South Asia; to revert to a A SARTORIAL AFTERWORD 197 mythical past; to construct a British Asian identity in new and sometimes transgressive ways; to forge an identity rooted in British popular culture, in South Asian local and global mores, in urban and cosmopolitan sensi- bilities, in transnational desi aesthetics or in many of them indistinguish- ably. Dress articulates class as well as gender distinctions and, especially in the work of women writers, it shines a light on traditional discourses that construct the female dressed body as a repository of cultural values. Dress voices the existence of generational divides along the diasporic continuum and refects the various ways in which different generations of characters negotiate their identity in the ‘diaspora space’ (Brah 1996: 209). These identity negotiations often involve a sartorial bargaining vis- à-vis the diasporic community and the majority society, a society that is also inhabited by other minority groups as well as by specifc subcultures that, defning themselves against mainstream culture, establish complex and sometimes antagonistic relations with diasporic communities, sartorially or otherwise. Dress in these narratives guides pronouncements of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and not belonging. It is capa- ble of casting individuals into the categories of ‘superior’/‘inferior’, ‘outsider’/‘insider’, and is powerful enough to alter the body and its perception. Indeed, body and dress operate in close proximity in the featured texts, whether in a symbiotic or a paradoxical manner. The same clothes, as many narratives expose, are construed and viewed differently when worn by ‘white’ or ‘brown’ bodies. The ‘epidermal racial schema’, as theorised by Frantz Fanon (2008: 92), impinges therefore on dress and sartorial perceptions. It imposes a racial schema on what we might call the original sartorial schema. What is more, in a large number of texts, a reverse process also holds true. Dress marks the body of the characters more prominently than any other physiognomic feature, to the point where the ‘body schema’ (Ibid.: 4) is eclipsed by the workings of the sartorial racial schema. Dress is thus revealed to contribute to the racialisation of individuals and/or to adding new layers of racialisation and stigmas to their bodies. In the broad continuum of narratives scrutinised, South Asian dress is portrayed as a palimpsest that has been written and rewritten over the course of the history that frames the Asian–British encounter. It has been (re-)written not simply in Britain, but also in colonial India, and not just by its wearers, but also by others, in paradoxical and often self-serving ways. As a result of this long history of ‘for- eign’ writing, South Asian dress has been coded with meanings beyond 198 A SARTORIAL AFTERWORD the control of its wearers, meanings such as ‘backwardness’, ‘inferiority’, ‘Otherness’, ‘funniness’ and, as certain post-9/11 narratives reveal, ‘suspicion’. It is not, therefore, farfetched to postulate that there exists here a process of ‘sartorialisation’ that works in a similar way to, and/ or operates over, what Fanon defned as ‘epidermalization’ (Ibid.: 4). If, as Fanon wrote, the ‘body schema’ is collapsed by the ‘epidermal racial schema’ (Ibid.: 92), so is the original sartorial schema veiled by the sartorial racial schema. In some texts, we even come across characters that have interiorised and become complicit with the prejudices surrounding South Asian clothes, which parallels what Fanon called the ‘internaliza- tion—or rather the epidermalization [in this case sartorialisation]—of […] inferiority’ (Ibid.: 4). Notwithstanding this, in our journey across sartorial representations in the narratives under consideration, we have also witnessed the over- coming of the above-mentioned ‘sartorial traumas’. Particularly in fction published since the 1990s, we come across hybrid sartorial identities that stress the potential of the diasporic condition to stimulate inventiveness and show ‘how newness enters the world’ (Bhabha 2004: 323). In these narratives, South Asian dress is conspicuously revalorised and creatively reinterpreted by the characters, characters that often partake in the glo- balisation of Asian dress, with all its possibilities as well as pitfalls. For, as certain novels reveal, the consumption of sartorial alterity in the West is often driven by exoticist dynamics and is frequently fraught with multiple paradoxes. There are characters that nevertheless manage to exploit ambiguities for their own beneft, using dress both as a mechanism of self-expression and as a means through which to explore consumer culture and engage with fashion. They reinvent their identity sartorially and, in the process, they also redesign South Asian fashions. They endow South Asian dress with meanings that would be unfamiliar to the characters featuring in much early post-war fction. These early characters would probably not identify the layers of feminism and resistance behind the veils worn by certain post-9/11 female personae. Neither would they have imagined that decades later their literary offspring would be trans- forming ‘tradition’ into ‘fashion’, sartorial mores into fashion statements, simultaneously challenging the Western-centric assumption that fashion is a Western prerogative. South Asian dress is thus revealed to be part of a fashion system in its own right, a system that enters into dialogue with other sartorial paradigms, drawing from and at the same time competing with them.

Load more