Mobility/stability: British Asian cultures of 'landscape and Englishness'

Abstract

This paper examines the way in which the (British) Asian diaspora creates a territory of belonging and a cultural nationalism within the British landscape. New, British Asian cultures of Englishness are figured through the experience of mobility from ‘other’ landscapes to England. The expression of new hybrids of cultural nationalism based on cultures of Englishness and landscape are presented in the tangible forms of Asian women’s drawings of ‘landscapes of belonging’ and their material cultures at home. The Englishness that is expressed through these cultures is examined as a mobile culture that has shifted in meaning and form through the various migrations of the diaspora from sites of colonial governance. The acknowledgement of mobility reveals how new cultural nationalisms rely on souvenirs and sacred objects, contributing to a new moral aesthetics of home and thus creating an inclusive culture of Englishness. The home incorporates a new space where the Englishness of Victoriana and textures of Indianess or Africaness are sites of memorial to mobility itself. The British Asian diaspora creates spatially transferable, mobile cultures of nationalism, expressed through material registers of English landscape aesthetics. The English landscape itself is examined as refractive of lived landscapes abroad and explored through the diasporic lens. Englishness in this paper is based on a ‘territory of culture’, unfixed from any singular national identity, land, or discrete national culture, but located in the cultures of desire of belonging to England.