Announcing, inviting and introducing YOU to the book launch and party x3
for: Dis-Orienting Rhythms: the Politics of the New Asian Dance Music
(Zed books, 1996)

Forthcoming Events,
Launch and Club Nights

Wed 20 November
Compendium Books, 234 Camden High Street, London NW1
6.30-8pm. Book Launch and talk.

Sat 23 and Sun 24 November
Global Partnership, Exhibition Halls, the Barbican.
12 noon - 1pm each day, discussion and music video.

Thurs 28 November
Bar Rumba, 36 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1.
6.30-10pm. Discussion and dance party with DJ Ritu! Free admission.
Co-hosted by Zed Books/New Times Books.

Early February 1997, Frontline Books, Newton St, Manchester. Followed by
Dis-Orienting Rhythms club night with guest DJs and kool soundz. Time
and place to follow …

* Dis-Orienting Rhythms is one of the first books to examine
relationships across Asian dance music, cultural identity and politics
in Britain. It explores a diversity of Asian musical cultural
expression, including Bhangra, Soul, Hip-Hop, Reggae, Jungle, Dub, Indie
and Techno.

* The book includes an interview with Bally Sagoo and DJ Radical Sista,
articles on the political work of bands like Fun^Da^Mental and Asian Dub
Foundation, as well as discussions of Cornershop and the Voodoo Queens,
and of the world significance of acts like Apache Indian. The book links
the music with histories of anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles,
and provides trenchant critiques of "world music" marketing and the
so-called anti-racism of some white Left groups, while arguing for new
political alliances against multi-racist Britain.

* Asian dance music is now a central part of British youth culture. The
music is at the cutting edge of contemporary styles and emergent
cultural forms. It is a global phenomena, which flows across many places
and scenes, not only Britain and South Asia, but across Europe, the
Americas, North Africa, the Gulf, and Southeast Asia. And no other book
has brought together in a collective effort young Asian writers to
debate so wide a range of issues - as such the book shatters the comfort
and myopia of conventional studies.

* Asian dance music is expressive of how new kinds of identities are
placed in a volatile urban milieu, involving an assertion of space and a
hard edged challenge to forms of racism that marginalise and exclude
Asians. South Asian culture is too often seen to be only about either
"arranged marriages," "religion," and "family values" or the curry house
red hot "fuckin vindaloo" clich