The Good Immigrant - Hardcover

Nikesh Shukla

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 178352295X ISBN 13: 9781783522958

Publisher: Unbound, 2016

Synopsis

How does it feel to be constantly regarded as a potential threat, strip-searched at every airport?

Or be told that, as an actress, the part you’re most fitted to play is ‘wife of a terrorist’? How does it feel to have words from your native language misused, misappropriated and used aggressively towards you? How does it feel to hear a child of colour say in a classroom that stories can only be about white people? How does it feel to go ‘home’ to India when your home is really London? What is it like to feel you always have to be an ambassador for your race? How does it feel to always tick ‘Other’?

Bringing together 21 exciting black, Asian and minority ethnic voices emerging in Britain today, The Good Immigrant explores why immigrants come to the UK, why they stay and what it means to be ‘other’ in a country that doesn’t seem to want you, doesn’t truly accept you – however many generations you’ve been here – but still needs you for its diversity monitoring forms.

Inspired by discussion around why society appears to deem people of colour as bad immigrants – job stealers, benefit scroungers, undeserving refugees – until, by winning Olympic races or baking good cakes, or being conscientious doctors, they cross over and become good immigrants, editor Nikesh Shukla has compiled a collection of essays that are poignant, challenging, angry, humorous, heartbreaking, polemic, weary and – most importantly – real.

About this title

Review

"The Good Immigrant is a lively and vital intervention into the British cultural conversation around race. Instead of statistics and dogma we find real human experience and impassioned argument – and it's funny and moving, too. A must read!" (Zadie Smith)

"The stories are sometimes funny, sometimes brutal, always honest ... if I could, I’d push a copy of this through the letter box of every front door in Britain." (Independent)

"Highly recommended ... It's precisely those who might at first think this book is not about us, who should read it" (Spectator)

"Perceptive, touching and funny" (Observer)

"An important, timely read." (J. K. Rowling)

"Amazing voices ... searingly honest" (Grazia)

"We should recognise both the courage that has been shown in producing these essays and the contradictions that necessarily exist across them ... The Good Immigrant helps to open up a much-needed space of unflinching dialogue about race and racism in the UK" (Guardian)

"To say the publication of The Good Immigrant has come at a good time would be an understatement ... If 2016 has left you feeling helpless, desperately wondering what you can do to repair the damage of anti-immigration rhetoric, then reading it would be a good place to start: it leaves you feeling armed with empathy." (Vice)

"An act of peaceful defiance; as a document of the now, and as an opportunity to educate ourselves about the lives and experiences of others." (Guardian)

"Powerful... The Good Immigrant is a reminder of why Britain is at its best when it lifts the burden of the "bad immigrant" and why it loses so much when it lets it grow" (New Statesman)

Book Description

Award-winning writer Nikesh Shukla gathers twenty British Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic writers and artists to reflect on race, immigration and being ‘other’ in Great Britain.

Edition details

• Publisher: Unbound
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 178352295X
• ISBN 13: 9781783522958
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272