Manchester
Normative accounts of Manchester write the city in two halves, representing a social, economic and cultural divide. The North, South split is demonstrated in multiple genres of writing: academic, literary and policy. South Manchester is produced through a dominant narrative of vibrancy, in the economic and cultural sphere, with Rusholme and the Curry Mile an iconic space in which the City Council can celebrate multiculturalism. It is this road where the entrepreneurs, that are so central to Pnina Werbner’s (1990; 2002) anthropological account of Manchester, ‘The Migration Process,’ also find their businesses’ homes. A further textual representation is offered through the novel, ‘Curry Mile’ written by Zahid Hussain (2006). ‘Curry Mile,’ was published by a South Manchester based Black and Asian writers publishers called Suitcase Press, in turn funded by the Arts Council. Wilmslow Road is also the site where a visual arts project, managed by the Asian Visual Arts company, Shisha and art a South Asian lesbian and gay group (Sphere) can `mix-it-up'. Indeed, it is the ways in which academic, policy and cultural texts entwine to create a normative account of the sheen and shine of multicultural Asian Britain that creates a blurring, at the level of production as well as creation, of the various genres of writing about Asian Manchester. Similar narrative harmonies are present in the writing of the Northern part of Greater Manchester, but here the story is somewhat different. Rather than the optimism of the multicultural city, with its entrepreneurs and hybrid cultures, there is a story dominated by accounts of urban and social decay, civil unrest and endemic racism. Oldham is only 8 miles from the City of Manchester and a seamless urban sprawl merges their geographies. Nonetheless, Oldham has primarily been written from a policy perspective in terms of local and central government reports on riots and social deprivation. Indeed, the Ritchie report that followed the 2001 civil disturbances and its follow up is replete with stories of decay and decline. Academic work on these areas, such as that by Kalra (2000), also paints a picture of industrial decline and subsequent under-employment. Recent government statements depict these areas as ripe for Islamic extremism, further serving to create narratives of marginalisation. The shine of Rusholme is lost in the grime of the post-industrial landscape of inner-city Oldham with its apparent lack of economic success and irresolvable communal strife. These dominant modes of writing the North and South of Greater Manchester belie the continuities that emerge from a focus on other types of writing, particularly those in vernacular languages. Rochdale, another town of Greater Manchester, is also home to the writer of the first Urdu novel about the journey to England, Hamara Safar, by Hashmi. South Manchester may be home to the only British based Pakistani satellite channel, but its’ staff is drawn from the North. Oldham and Rochdale are part of the Urdu newspaper and literary circuit with each town producing its own media in the form of free newspapers. The Pakistani community centres in Manchester and Oldham both play host to Urdu poetry which also writes the city in vernacular context. Breaking the North, South divide of Manchester is clearly possible in the way in which Rusholme is a regional centre for festivals such as Eid. Local mainstream media regularly reports on Eid, sometimes in celebration, at others in terms of nuisance to residents or police harassment. Perhaps more fundamentally, the diversity and fluidity of Manchester, ossified in textual representations, belies the easy labelling of a British Asian City or of any ethnically marked identity space.
