Reading the double diaspora: representing Gujarati East African identity in Britain

August 2012 saw the fortieth anniversary of the South Asian population’s expulsion from Uganda, by Idi Amin. Many members of this community, who were indeed also Gujaratis, migrated to Britain. My research, grounded in literary studies, excavates the cultural impact of these painful deracinations, which were forced in Uganda, and less coerced in Kenya. Given the trauma of departing from multiple homelands and relocating in a sometimes racist host nation, this article explicates how both individuated and collective identity are formed and reformed. Here I also seek to demonstrate a broad overview of the intervention my research eff ects within scholarship on the Gujarati diaspora, their narratives of belonging and, as Parminder Bhachu describes, discourses on the ‘twice migrant’. Within this remit, close reading of selected dance, culinary practices and visual materials will illustrate the trajectory of my research. Because of the paucity in fictional literary representation of the Gujarati East African in Britain, it is to these other forms of social knowledge that I turn. I argue that this lacuna in fictional writings highlights an inadequacy in the written text when articulating the experience of the twice displaced community. I demonstrate that it is the embodied ‘text’ that is favoured by this diasporic community in communicating identity. These embodied ‘texts’, of dance and culinary practices, are also significant in embedding knowledge covertly. The sense of secret or ‘esoteric knowledge’, that manifests itself time again within the double diaspora, is here too examined

Reading the double diaspora: cultural representations of Gujarati East Africans in Britain

This thesis explores representations of culture amongst the prolific twice-displaced Gujarati East African diaspora in Britain. I argue that the paucity of fictional literatures written about, or by, this community demonstrate that the ‘double diaspora’ often favour forms of embodied narrative. Using the literary critical interpretive practices of close reading, I thus analyse a range of cultural ‘texts’. Through this approach of investigating both the written text alongside the nontextual embodied narrative, the thesis broadens the remit of literary studies and subsequently addresses a lacuna in scholarship on cultural representations of the ‘double diaspora’. Whilst the thesis intervenes in contemporary literary postcolonial debate, interdisciplinary connections between diverse disciplines, such as performance, trauma and diaspora studies, are established. Following my introduction, the thesis is divided into three main chapters: each considers a form of embodied cultural representation significant to the migrant who has been displaced from India to Britain, via East Africa. Beginning with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook – one of the few examples of a written representation of twice-migrant culture – I explore culinary practices as a mode of individuated and collective identity articulation. In my third chapter, I develop my argument to read the Gujarati dances of dandiya-raas and garba, played during the Hindu festival of Navratri. Finally, before concluding, the fourth chapter moves to explore visual materials gathered from personal kinship networks. In identifying embodied narratives as significant to the double diaspora, my thesis uncovers the performance of complex and multiple selfhoods and collectivities within this community. Whilst there are instances of a surprising convergence of modern and traditional identities, there is too the emergence of an Indian national identity, which is complicated by regional Gujaratiness. In closing, I propose a Gujarati East African vernacular modernity, which demonstrates how this progressdriven diaspora simultaneously looks in two directions

Towards a spatial practice of the postcolonial city: introducing the cultural producer

This essay offers an introduction to the special issue ‘Reevaluating the Postcolonial City: Production, Reconstruction, Representation’. It institutes the cultural producer as its key reference point for reexamining the spatial imaginary of the postcolonial urban landscape. From internationally acclaimed artists, exhibition curators and marginalized performers to local audiences, tourist consumers, migrant workers, garbage collectors and transsexual pedestrians, the cultural producer is endowed with a diverse range of identity narratives by the contributions to the issue. The authors posit the ‘production of space’ as the principal conceptual axis for reevaluating the postcolonial city as represented, interrogated and reconstructed by the cultural producer. With reference to Lefebvre's spatial theory, Foucault's postulation of heterotopia and Soja's understanding of the Thirdspace, this introduction explores the multiple spatial practices of the cultural producer as she/he engages with the everyday materiality of the postcolonial city along the discursive paradigms of colonial memory, national history, neoliberal hegemonies, racial struggles, gender politics, ethnic peripheries and radical sexualities. The essays in this issue foreground the spatial topography of the postcolonial city as an embodied site of the cultural producer's canonical, subversive and alternative modernities

Reusing Historical Questionnaire Data and Using Newly Commissioned Oral History Interviews as Evidence in the History of Reading

Interviews, whether freestyle or structured, printed or recorded, offer historians of reading valuable insights into the practices and preferences of individual readers. Despite the potential biases that can be generated by the interview format, the reshaping of memory through the process of retelling, and the questions that can go unasked (and therefore, unanswered), the individual interview can be a richly textured source of information for historians of reading. In this article, three researchers involved in both the recently completed Reading Communities: Connecting the Past and the Present project and the ongoing historically focussed UK Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 project (UK-RED) examine the ways in which interviews can capture individual records of reading, both in the past and the present

RA-MAP, molecular immunological landscapes in early rheumatoid arthritis and healthy vaccine recipients

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory disorder with poorly defined aetiology characterised by synovial inflammation with variable disease severity and drug responsiveness. To investigate the peripheral blood immune cell landscape of early, drug naive RA, we performed comprehensive clinical and molecular profiling of 267 RA patients and 52 healthy vaccine recipients for up to 18 months to establish a high quality sample biobank including plasma, serum, peripheral blood cells, urine, genomic DNA, RNA from whole blood, lymphocyte and monocyte subsets. We have performed extensive multi-omic immune phenotyping, including genomic, metabolomic, proteomic, transcriptomic and autoantibody profiling. We anticipate that these detailed clinical and molecular data will serve as a fundamental resource offering insights into immune-mediated disease pathogenesis, progression and therapeutic response, ultimately contributing to the development and application of targeted therapies for RA.</p

ECFS best practice guidelines: the 2018 revision

Developments in managing CF continue to drive dramatic improvements in survival. As newborn screening rolls-out across Europe, CF centres are increasingly caring for cohorts of patients who have minimal lung disease on diagnosis. With the introduction of mutation-specific therapies and the prospect of truly personalised medicine, patients have the potential to enjoy good quality of life in adulthood with ever-increasing life expectancy. The landmark Standards of Care published in 2005 set out what high quality CF care is and how it can be delivered throughout Europe. This underwent a fundamental re-write in 2014, resulting in three documents; center framework, quality management and best practice guidelines. This document is a revision of the latter, updating standards for best practice in key aspects of CF care, in the context of a fast-moving and dynamic field. In continuing to give a broad overview of the standards expected for newborn screening, diagnosis, preventative treatment of lung disease, nutrition, complications, transplant/end of life care and psychological support, this consensus on best practice is expected to prove useful to clinical teams both in countries where CF care is developing and those with established CF centres. The document is an ECFS product and endorsed by the CF Network in ERN LUNG and CF Europe

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Reading Cultural Representations of the Double Diaspora: Britain, East Africa, Gujarat

Reading Cultural Representations of the Double Diaspora: Britain, East Africa, Gujarat is the first detailed study of the cultural life and representations of the prolific twice-displaced Gujarati East African diaspora in contemporary Britain. An exceptional community of people, this diaspora is disproportionally successful and influential in resettlement, both in East Africa and Britain. Often showcased as an example of migrant achievement, their accomplishments are paradoxically underpinned by legacies of trauma and deracination. The diaspora, despite its economic success and considerable upward social mobility in Britain, has until now been overlooked within critical literary and postcolonial studies for a number of reasons. This book attends to that gap. Parmar uniquely investigates what it is to be not just from India, but too Africa—how identity forms within, as the study coins, the “double diaspora”. Parmar focuses on cultural representation post-twice migration, via an interdisciplinary methodology, offering new contributions to debates within diaspora studies. In doing so, the book examines a range of cultures produced amongst, or about, the diaspora, including literary representations, culinary, dance and sartorial practices, as well as visual materials