Oriental Identities in Super-Diverse Britain: Young Vietnamese in London [Hardcover]

Tamsin Barber addresses the experience of the British-born Vietnamese as an overlooked minority population in 'super-diverse' London, exploring the emergence of the pan-ethnic 'Oriental' category as a new form of collective consciousness and identity in Britain.Introduction 1. The British Vietnamese Diaspora 2. Orientalism, Counter-Orientalism and Identity in Multicultural Britain 3. 'Is it because I am Yellow?': Categorization and Difference among the 'Second Generation' in Britain 4. Black-British, White-British, Oriental-British? 5. Counter-Orientalisms and the Politics of Hair, Clubbing and Dating 6. Navigating 'The Vietnamese Community': Local and Transnational Belongings 7. Conclusions

At a time when Britain is increasingly ethnically diverse, and yet still riven by social divisions and modes of 'othering' and prejudice, Tamsin Barber's study of the British Vietnamese is highly timely and engaging. Through an engaging and controversial 'take' on Orientalism, this book makes an important contribution to scholarship on ethnic minority experience in Britain. - Prof. Miri Song, University of Kent, United Kingdom

This book provides a much needed analysis of the experiences, understandings and social position of the British born Vietnamese as well as having a more international focus, filling in an innovative way a glaring gap in the literature. It is also an important and nuanced contribution to the area of migration and ethnic studies. It asks us to be mindful of the importance of gender and class and to the problems of culturalising minority groups, whilst at the same time paying attention to the ways in which the British born Vietnamese articulate and perform their social identities in multiple ways, in the context of diverse forms of exclusion and social participation. This book is essential reading for students, scholars and professionals who are concerned with how migrants and their descendants manage racialisation and disadvantaglÃr