1The grand paradox of multiculturalism is that of multiplicity contained in the unicity of a single word. Ulla Rahbek’s British Multicultural Literature and Superdiversity adopts an innovative approach to investigate multiculturalism as an internally differentiated, dynamic and non-essentialised phenomenon in the British context. Borrowing from the social sciences, she counterpoints the “old diversity” of multiculturalism as theorised by Bhikhu Parekh in the context of immigration linked to imperial history with the “new diversity” of contemporary forms of migration and personal metamorphosis, “what Steven Vertovec calls a general and widespread diversification of diversity” (3). “Old diversity,” as defined by Rahbek, involves promoting cultural identities of ethnic groups but nonetheless essentialising them to varying degrees; “superdiversity” foregrounds diversity within ethnic groups and captures the restless unpredictability of contemporary experience. Rahbek comparatively applies this “turn” to superdiversity in the social sciences to some of the newest literary voices of British multiculturalism across varied genres and British geographical locations.

2One is immediately struck by the Rahbek’s corpus that deliberately drops several doyens of multicultural literature such as Sam Selvon, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Khureshi as well as the millennial novels of Monica Ali and Andrea Levy. Rahbek also seeks to balances the critical over-emphasis on the novel which tends to eclipse other genres. Chapter 1 lays the book’s theoretical groundwork, triangulating Bhikhu Parekh’s “old British multiculturalism,” Vertovec’s “new superdiversity” and Paul Gilroy’s postcolonial conviviality (5). Rahbek is careful to point out that the relationship between the old and the new forms of diversity is dialogic, not dialectic: “multiculturalism and superdiversity do not cancel each other out, but fruitfully supplement each other” (29). Each of the following chapters is devoted to a literary form and demonstrates the “layering” of old multiculturalism and new superdiversity through strategies specific to the genre: tropes of migration and mirroring used by poets like Elaine Feinstein and Daljit Nagra; the relationship between self-recognition and self-retrospection in the memoirs of writers like Sathnam Sanghera and Xiaolu Guo; the utopic and fragmented imaginings of multicultural Britain in the fiction of Natasha Solomons and Caryl Phillips; the compressed spaces of conversation and dialogue in the short stories of Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes and Olumide Popoola. The book concludes with a forceful defence of the ethical role of a “multicultural aesthetic” that “interweaves the word with world and in the process clarifies that world so that readers can better orient themselves” (215).

3In a field that privileges London-centred fiction (evident in the studies of Sukhdev Sandhu, John McLeod and Michael Perfect), a set of now well-established writers and the novel, Rahbek’s work productively expands and updates the multicultural canon. But rather than retaining Rahbek’s book as my sole focus, I will use it more as a starting point for broader reflections on the stakes involved in literary explorations of multiculturalism, which, for the sake of brevity, I will schematically call the following: the historical memory of multiculturalism, multinational capitalism and multilingualism.

4Rahbek carefully unpacks the theoretically fraught terms of multiculturalism and superdiversity. But her use of the term “old diversity” could have been further developed. Problematising the “old” more concertedly would have occasioned a historically deeper understanding of multiculturalism as the premodern norm and not the exception. Hellenic, Persian, Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese and other imperial spaces constantly negotiated the cultural differences of their subjects. Britain has multicultural roots harking back to its place in a transnational and multi-ethnic Roman empire. Scholars like Michael Perfect (Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism, 2014, 2-3) and Stuart Hall (Conclusion to Un/settled Multiculturalisms, 2000, 218) are careful to make the right historical gestures, but perhaps we need to ask for more than cursory waves.

5Historicising multiculturalism could also have allowed Rahbek to approach British literature more comparatively and explore intertextual memories far older than those of British Romanticism and Victorianism. A relevant example pertains to her delicate exploration of the poetic potential of migration, filigree and grafting as emblematic metaphorical layering of modern manifestations of diversity and superdiversity. Her close readings would be well served by reminding us of their conventionalised use across aesthetic traditions (migrating birds as souls in Christian and Islamic traditions, interlace in European medieval texts). In western literature, grafting has a long history as a conceptual metaphor of relationships between man and God (Christian scripture) as well as friendship and love (Seneca, Shakespeare). Uncovering these layers of “old” is perhaps even more important in a book on contemporary cultural production in order to alert readers to the fact that while the writers may be new, their concerns and poetic strategies are older than we may think.

6Rahbek’s sensitivity to diversity also extends to class differences. Her attention to works set not only in London but also in provincial urban and rural environments (Luton, Manchester, Wolverhampton, a Dorset village) is a welcome gesture against the London-centric impulses of multicultural literary studies. (In fact, a map showing these locations would have been helpful to readers less familiar with Britain’s cultural geography.) Her one in-depth foray into capitalism and class is notable. In a moment of lively scholarly debate, Rahbek rejects the Marxist critique of Kavita Bhanot, who calls out the decision of Sanghera’s autobiographical Indian Sikh narrator in Topknot to embrace “middle-class, aspirational, metropolitan” liberalism. Rahbek judiciously tugs our attention back to the memoir’s “self-conscious struggle with form” as the arena of conflicting agendas. She also pointedly asks: “Why is it so galling, if this is the representation of himself that Sanghera feels most comfortable with and that he insists on?” (73). Though Rahbek’s pragmatic candidness is refreshing, an awareness of the historical collusion between capital and race is helpful when examining representations of non-white characters and their integration into global capitalism. As Cedric Robinson famously argues, capital’s self-reproducing logic works when it (re)produces an otherised, even racialised, labour force. An uncritical assimilation of liberal capitalism on the part of Sanghera’s narrator makes us conveniently forget the exploitative and otherising energies through which multinational capital has historically operated.

7A final source of diversity is linguistic. The languages spoken at a maternity ward in Guo’s short story—“Hindi, Arabic, German, Spanish, Polish”—become, in Rahbek’s words, “a testament to the birthing of continued superdiversity” (75). This insight, typical of multicultural literary criticism, is felicitous. But it does mitigate the fact that the multilingual inflections that the authors and critics celebrate come to us in the easily-consumable English of a global bestseller. Genuine moments of inter-linguistic contact such as fleeting references to the issue of translation in Sanghera’s and Nagra’s use of Punjabi could have been probed more deeply to give centre-stage to other languages.

8For bodies of work meant to celebrate multiplicity, much of multicultural literature and criticism come to us in monochrome, focusing mainly on the modern era, on western literary traditions, and on the British and Anglophone worlds. This is no doubt a massively unfair appraisal of a scholarly field sincerely devoted to the exploration of cultural difference. But in the current context of worldwide calls to decentre and diversify the curriculum, we must demand more of ourselves as scholars (and I include myself). This means being braver, even academically reckless, and venturing outside the comfort zones of our hyper-specialised period, area and language to attempt to engage, however awkwardly and perhaps comparatively, with alterity on its own terms.

9Rahbek’s work reflects some of the limits of the field of multicultural studies, but it also invigorates it. It injects multicultural literary criticism with new lifeblood from other disciplines and rejuvenates its literary canon with new, younger, less academically feted authors. In the busy thoroughfare of its pages, German-Jewish, Sikh-Indian, Muslim-Pakistani, Afro-Caribbean, Chinese and Polish characters jostle as they do on Britain’s streets. Academic highpoints in the book include Rahbek’s use of Edward Said’s Orientalist lens to explore the relationship between the subaltern Eastern European migrant, the paternalistic white man and non-white minorities in the texts of Barnes and Phillips. Her deployment of Corinne Fowler’s notion of rural racism in tandem with Solomons’ Mr Rosenblum’s List, her use of Zadie Smith’s idea of “a thimble-sized epic” (180) as a critical concept, and her meticulous exploration of the temporalities of identity (prior to recognition by others, a result of recognition by others, reconstituted through retrospective life-writing) inspired by Lasse Thomassen’s theory of the politics of recognition are equally rich.

10The book recommends itself to scholars and non-specialists. Rahbek’s style is distinguished by its clarity, accessibility and common-sense pragmatism. Perhaps most productive of all is her desire to forge a new language of multiculturalism, that of the “layering” of a Baumtorte cake or of an Asian corner-shop on an English one, the “filigree” of migrating birds, mirroring, and intertwining. Published against the backdrop of the protracted Brexit, Ulla Rahbek’s British Multicultural Literature and Superdiversity is thus a timely intervention on the role of literature in reimagining local, national and diasporic ways of being in a world increasing lacking in multicultural imagination.