Negotiating Boundaries in the City

Book excerpt: Using in-depth life-story interviews and oral history archives, this book explores the impact of South Asian migration from the 1950s onwards on both the local white, British-born population and the migrants themselves. Taking Leicester as a main case study - identified as a European model of multicultural success - Negotiating Boundaries in the City offers a historically grounded analysis of the human experiences of migration. Joanna Herbert shows how migration created challenges for both existing residents and newcomers - for both male and female migrants - and explores how they perceived and negotiated boundaries within the local contexts of their everyday lives. She explores the personal and collective narratives of individuals who might not otherwise appear in the historical records, highlighting the importance of subjective, everyday experiences. The stories provide valuable insights into the nature of white ethnicity, inter-ethnic relations and the gendered nature of experiences, and offer rich data lacking in existing theoretical accounts. This book provides a radically different story about multicultural Britain and reveals the nuances of modern urban experiences which are lost in prevailing discourses of multiculturalism.