Negotiating Boundaries in the City: Migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Britain (review)

When a book has already been singled out for "outstanding use of oral history," by winning the 2009 Oral History Association Book Award, it might seem that a reviewer's job has already been accomplished. Reading for myself, I can say that I am fortunate to have the opportunity to add my praise to the achievement of Negotiating Boundaries in the City. This is a book which makes a significant contribution to oral histories of migration and to oral history as a methodology. I will try to indicate why this is so. Apart from telling the story of migration and settlement in one UK city, the book's three main strengths are its use of oral history evidence, its use of theory, and the ways in which time is foregrounded as an analytical tool.

Joanna Herbert chooses the city of Leicester and the lives of migrants from the Indian subcontinent and from East Africa (Asians in UK English) who settled there in the decades following World War Il as her focus for research. Leicester, an industrial city in England's midlands, is known today as an Asian city with a tourism policy that celebrates the multiplicity of its ethnic diversity (1). All this is a far cry from being labelled in the early 1970s as the UK's most "unwelcoming" city. The then city council had warned South Asian migrants expelled from Idi Amin's Uganda to "stay away" (26), an action which was quickly exploited by national rightwing political organizations. South Asian migrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs had begun arriving in Leicester in greater numbers from the 1960s. They were followed by East African Asians, who came to settle despite the warning.

The book draws on oral history interviews with white and South Asian Leicester people to define and explore boundaries: spatial, ethnic, racial, gendered, and work based. Some interviews were created specifically for this study, while others were already lodged in local and national archives. Oral history evidence leads the argument throughout, though this at times means confronting difficult issues, as for example in exploring the idea of difference in the words of William: "But there's good and bad in all. It's just the fact that they're Asians, we're white and it's not our way of life, but you put up with it, you've got to put up with it, they're here to stay that's the long and short of it" (59). Herbert argues that this othering is used to constitute whiteness as Englishness. However, she counterposes South Asian awareness of the difference between everyday racism and excluding, a materially more damaging and demeaning practice, left unchallenged by whites until contested by South Asians themselves in schools and workplaces. What her presentation reveals is engagement and agency belying perceptions of migrants as victims or as outsiders to the city in which they made their home.

In chapters which focus on transitions, households, neighborhoods, education, and work, gender and ethnic difference among South Asians are used to show how migrants encountered and dealt with spatial, social, and economic boundaries to establish lives, careers, and businesses in the city. Drawing on the theorizing of Pierre Bourdieu, with reference to his ideas of habitus and social capital, she pushes her analysis beyond the simple telling of a story. Thus, we learn how South Asians developed social processes which generated different kinds of social capital that in turn generated knowledge and trust. Bhoot, explaining how women learned to manage urban space, says, "we'd go shopping together. Some of us had a lot of difficulty and didn't know how to come and go into town at first. In a group we'd come and go together" (127). At other points, Herbert takes a critical approach to theorizing that fails to capture complexity, suggesting that feminist arguments which focus on private...