The representational burden

The Good Immigrant is an edited collection of short stories, personal reflections and commentaries on identity and identity politics in the United Kingdom, bringing together the voices of black, Asian and minority authors. For these writers of colour, who are migrants or the children of migrants, to reflect on migration means to think about two related types of histories: stories of personal migration, and the longer legacy of past migrations that still reverberates among those born in the UK. The authors use migration as an aesthetic lens through which they express their uneasiness about having to continue to justify their place in society, and as a way into writing about racial encounters that unfold in overt and subtle forms of racism. Through the lens of migration the authors reflect upon the coexistence of multiple forms of belonging, especially for those growing up in racially mixed families; and they testify to the existence of black and ethnic minority spaces that sit uneasily within the national imagination. These creative narratives give voice to what it feels to have been, to be, and to continue to be the Other, in its many variations.

Shukla's collection makes a claim for the inclusion of black, Asian and ethnic minority voices within the national imagination-currently almost exclusively white-but it also challenges the stereotypical assumption that the black, Asian and ethnic minority experience is homogenous. The book is a statement against essentialism and homogeneity. While to be an ethnic minority immigrant can be a shared experience, not all experiences of ethnic otherness are the same. An appealing feature of this edited collection is its diversity, which is visible in the multiplicity of the writers' experiences, the variety of narrative styles, and the wide array of topics covered in the twenty-one essays, which include class, popular culture, micro-aggressions, free movement, masculinity, death and stake in society. Taken together, these aesthetically pleasing essays challenge essentialist stereotypes of the figure of the immigrant and the ethnic other. The authors invite readers into their creative space, thus reversing conventional majority-minorities representations, to experience racial encounters from the positionality of the Other, to feel what it feels to have otherness projected onto oneself, to be described through stereotypes, or to be the subject of racist remarks.

The authors come from the performing and creative arts, and most of them are familiar with the specific politics of representation that exist within their professional worlds. They write about absences, partial presences, incorrect depictions and stereotypical castings. Some also remember seeing the rare appearance of ethnic role models on television while they were growing up, and the impact this had on their identity and aspirations. The book is a call to give black, Asian and ethnic minority characters the same kind of complexity that white characters enjoy, and to portray versions of blackness other than those seen in current dominant representations of a monolithic and uniform blackness. Thus, the collection-which is itself a creative endeavour in the field of cultural representation-re-appropriates the representation of what it means to be an immigrant now, someone for whom race is part of everything that she does.

The aim of the collection is to counter essentialist constructions of the 'good immigrant' of the title (even though it includes some stories about such subjects). It seeks to problematise representations of migrants as 'bad' immigrants-job stealers, benefit scrounges, girlfriend-thieves, refugees-until a crossover in consciousness occurs-through popular culture, winning races or being role models-that can transform them into 'good' immigrants. The book not only draws attention to what it is like to bear the burden of negative representation: it also brings to the fore the burden of representation more generally, in its many forms: the burden of invisibility; the burden of representing the model minority; and the burden of binary thinking, that essentialises the complexity of immigrants' lives. The authors creatively write about, reflect upon and problematise this representational burden.

At this present Brexit conjuncture, we are constantly bombarded with affectively loaded representations of the 'bad' and 'good...