I Am What I Speak: Multicultural Identity in Londonstani

The essay analyses Gautam Malkani's novel Londonstani (2006) to deal with the construction of multicultural identities in contemporary Britain from the joint perspectives of cultural studies and sociolinguistics. The overview of contemporary urban scenes carried out in the novel shows that, within youth subcultures, identity is radically turned into a performance in which language plays a fundamental role. At the same time, one of the basic tenets of the traditional definition of identity – ethnicity – loses its constitutive character. Disembedded from strong identity contexts whatever their cultural origins, what contemporary urban youths seem to share is rather their common status of active, if not greedy consumers of globalised goods.