Razia’s westernization is the immigrant model that Britons valorize

Evidence

In fact, the character that most comes to embody entrepreneurial spirit as the valorized national trait for immigrants is not Nazneen but her friend Razia. Initially oppressed by a husband who is more interested in public acts of piety than in looking after his own family, Razia is the first woman to pick up the tailoring piecework with which Nazneen is also soon involved. Such “shameful” behavior is noted by Chanu, who views Razia as a bad influence on his wife. Yet this is only the first of Razia’s transgressions: she rejects the restrictions of the traditional sari, preferring to don a tracksuit and later a (heavily symbolic) Union Jack sweatshirt; takes English-language classes; and gets a drastic haircut. The process of “westernization” for Razia is not depicted as straightforward or easy—at one point she has to rescue her son from drug addiction—but she persists, at the end becoming the leading figure in a dressmaking collective the women set up. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 196

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Returning skilled migrants transmit new cultural values that transform home societies; Skilled migrants carry cultural values and stimulate change in monocultural countries — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3879
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Returning skilled migrants transmit new cultural values that transform home societies; Skilled migrants carry cultural values and stimulate change in monocultural countries — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3879