Oriental Identities in Super-Diverse Britain

By: Tamsin Barber

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Synopsis: This timely book addresses the experience of the British-born Vietnamese as an overlooked minority population in 'super-diverse' London. Responding to calls for understanding a greater range of experiences and identifications associated with disparate ethnic minority groups in 'super-diverse' urban settings, this empirical research explores a culturally and politically marginalized minority to develop theorizations of less visible minorities. Contributing to the sociology of identity, 'race', ethnicity and migration, Tamsin Barber asks what it means to be Vietnamese in Britain today and how belonging is understood amongst young British-born Vietnamese. Individual experiences, tensions and opportunities of being both invisible and racially visible are explored through rich, detailed extracts from narrative interviews with the British-born Vietnamese. Oriental Identities in Super-Diverse Britain provides a unique opportunity to theorize the complex ways in which the Vietnamese actively manage identities within the context of coercive Orientalisms and public invisibility in British multiculturalism. Themes of Orientalism, fluidity, agency and resistance are woven together to illustrate how the British-born Vietnamese negotiate a range of shifting and at times contradictory identities in multi-ethnic settings.