Asian British youth lacked an indigenous popular culture that black British youth had

Evidence

Writing of the key difference between the black and Asian British experiences of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Sukhdev Sandhu notes how young Asians “lacked an indigenous youth culture. They forged no musical alliances such as those between rude boy ska and skinhead stomp at the end of the 1960s, or 1976’s reggae–punk axis.” He credits Hanif Kureishi with imaginatively connecting British Asian experience with the main currents of popular culture going on at the time. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 166

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s work on Home Boy — it sharpens what second-generation Asian-British (and by extension American) youth were missing as raw material for identity formation.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this absence of youth-culture alliances explain the different texture of South Asian vs. Black diasporic fiction of protest and identity?