Claire Chambers is a senior lecturer at the University of York, where she teaches contemporary writing in English from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas. She is the author of British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers and co-editor of Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora. She recently published two paired monographs, Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780−1988 and Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels. Together these books narrate a literary history of Muslim writing in Britain from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Claire has also brought out a selection of her essays, Rivers of Ink. Her research has been supported by funding from HEFCE, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). She publishes widely in such journals as Postcolonial Text and Contemporary Women’s Writing, and is Co-editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Email: claire.chambers [at] york.ac.uk
by Claire Chambers Something rather different comes out of fiction by three Bengali women writers based in Britain, as compared to the male authors I examined in Banglaphone Fiction I and II. In this third and final part of the essay, I first examine Monica Ali who, in her novel Brick Lane, mostly evokes life…
by Claire Chambers In this post, I continue my discussion of what I'm calling ‘Banglaphone Fiction', namely short stories and novels written in English and dealing with life in Britain by authors from the two Bengals. I am interested in how both Hindu Indian and Bangladeshi Muslim writers perceive the UK and its migrant population.…
In the 1940s, around the time that the British Raj was disintegrating, Bengalis were coming to Britain in Lascars large numbers. (Smaller numbers had travelled to the country from as long ago as the seventeenth century onwards.) Many of them hailed from Sylhet in what is now northeast Bangladesh. Some of these new residents had previously been lascars, working on the crews of ships or as cooks. Settling in areas such as East London’s Spitalfields, Sylhetis pioneered Britain’s emerging curry restaurant trade, laboured for long hours and with few rights in the garment industry, and worked as mechanics. This article is about their representation in fiction by writers with heritage in both West (majority Hindu) Bengal, and Bangladesh, a predominantly Muslim country.
by Claire Chambers Nine days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, President George W. Bush responded to the World Trade Centre attacks by addressing a joint session of Congress. He lamented that in the space of a 'single day' the country had been changed irrevocably, its people 'awakened to danger and called to defend freedom'.…
Curry houses are also a dominant setting in much writing by authors of South Asian heritage in the UK. Writers working in Urdu, English, and Bengali have evoked both South Asians living in Britain and the restaurant fare they produce. In this essay, Claire Chambers extrapolates a strand from her forthcoming book Britain Through Muslim Eyes, Literary Representations, 1780−1988 (Palgrave: autumn 2015) and discusses the history and cultural representation of curries in Britain.