ABSTRACT
Home to a predominantly working-class Bangladeshi community, the East End had recently seen its landscape slowly transformed by sleek cafes, warehouse lofts, and renovated nightclubs. The Blue Note, a historic jazz club, had itself received a facelift, and Talvin Singh, a young British Asian musician, had cleverly chosen it as the venue for his new weekly club night, Anokha, which had opened the previous year, in 1996. Over the last decade, Asian Underground music has emerged as one of the main forms of cultural production that British Asians have used to advance a new politics of representation in the context of longstanding racist British nationalism. The marginality of gender to studies of the Asian Underground is surprising given how clearly gender shapes the marketing of the music and club scene, even as the presence of women artists is minimal.
