Shopkeeping

This prose poem aims to capture the social and commercial mood in the Midlands region of the UK during the turbulent 1980s. It relays the experiences of South Asian corner shop owners and how they managed their spiritual and professional lives in a political context where race-rioting and hostility towards immigrants was commonplace. As this creative piece foregrounds the liberatory potential of postcolonial poetic-based autoethnography, it advances Sherry and Schouten’s researcher-poet stance which emphasises how conventional prose cannot fully represent our perception and understanding of, in this case, complex race relations and vexed confrontations between British imperialist ideologies and the postcolonial subjects resisting colonial supremacy and social exclusion. This contribution advances ‘postcolonial poetic-based autoethnography’ as an alternative form of ethnographic research which gives legitimacy to Othered life histories and personal narratives as well as directing attention to historically constituted subjectivities, cultural meanings, ambivalent interactions, and social and racial dynamics.