Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

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Author: Lars Eckstein | Barbara Korte | Eva Ulrike Pirker

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Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

121

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+ New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts

Edited by

Lars Eckstein, Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker and Christoph Reinfandt

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Cover illustration based on a photograph in Suki Dhandha’s Shopna series. Used with kind permission of the artist. Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-2497-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

Lars Eckstein, Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, Christoph Reinfandt A Divided Kingdom? Reflections on Multi-Ethnic Britain in the New Millennium

9

Writers’ Views Patrick Neate The Little Book of Tommy: Another Tommy Akhtar Investigation

25

Rajeev Balasubramanyam The Rhetoric of Multiculturalism

33

Film I: Beyond the Burden of Representation? Ellen Dengel-Janic and Lars Eckstein Bridehood Revisited: Disarming Concepts of Gender and Culture in Recent Asian British Film

45

Sandra Heinen Multi-Ethnic Britain on Screen: South Asian Diasporic Experience in Recent Feature Films

65

Claudia Sternberg Babylon North: British Muslims after 9/11 in Yasmin (2004)

79

Fiction I: Multi-Ethnic Utopias and Dystopias Lucie Gillet Representations of Multicultural Society in Contemporary British Novels Sabine Nunius ‘Sameness’ in Contemporary British Fiction: (Metaphorical) Families in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005)

99

109

6 Ulrike Zimmermann Out of the Ordinary – and Back? Jackie Kay’s Recent Short Fiction

123

Daniel Schäbler Teenage Transformations in Multi-Ethnic Britain: Rehana Ahmed’s Walking a Tightrope (2004)

139

Nadia Butt Between Orthodoxy and Modernity: Mapping the Transcultural Predicaments of Pakistani Immigrants in Multi-Ethnic Britain in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004)

153

Cordula Lemke Racism in the Disapora: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004)

171

Visual Art and Music: Picturing and Sounding Identity Eva Ulrike Pirker Images of Muslim Britain Go Global: A Reading of the British Council’s Touring Exhibition Common Ground

187

Ingrid von Rosenberg Female Views: Cultural Identity as a Key Issue in the Work of Black and Asian British Women Artists

227

Christoph Härter The Dub Renaissance – Reflections on the Aesthetics of Dub in Contemporary British Music

263

Film II: Borderlines and Contested Spaces Sissy Helff Scapes of Refuge in Multicultural Britain: Representing Refugees in Digital Docudrama and Mockumentary

283

Kathy-Ann Tan ‘If you’re not on paper, you don’t exist’: Depictions of Illegal Immigration and Asylum in Film – on Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002) and Code 46 (2003)

301

Barbara Korte Envisioning a Black Tomorrow? Black Mother Figures and the Issue of Representation in 28 Days Later (2003) and Children of Men (2006)

315

7

Fiction II: Reading and Writing the Metropolis Michael Mitchell Escaping the Matrix: Illusions and Disillusions of Identity in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006)

329

Ellen Dengel-Janic ‘East is East and West is West’: A Reading of Nirpal Dhaliwal’s Tourism (2006)

341

Yvonne Rosenberg ‘Stop Thinking like an Englishman’ or: Writing Against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights (2005)

355

Stephan Laqué ‘A deconstructed shrine’: Locating Absence and Relocating Identity in Rodinsky’s Room (2000)

369

Susanne Cuevas ‘Societies Within’: Council Estates as Cultural Enclaves in Recent Urban Fictions

383

Interviews Angela Kurtz Interview with Rajeev Balasubramanyam

399

Violeta Topalova Interview with Patrick Neate

405

Index

415

Acknowledgements

425

Lars Eckstein, Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, Christoph Reinfandt

A Divided Kingdom? Reflections on Multi-Ethnic Britain in the New Millennium

On 11 October 2000, a Commission sponsored by the Runnymede Trust, an ‘independent and voluntary funded’ think tank founded in 1968 and dedicated to promoting ‘a successful multi-ethnic Britain’, 1 published a report on ‘the future of multi-ethnic Britain’. 2 Some thirty years after the earlier Rose Report on Colour and Citizenship (1969), 3 the Parekh Report provided an up-to-date survey of the ongoing debates in this contested area. However, it must also be seen as a reaction to sobering events and assessments of the 1990s, the most prominent being the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, which brought the phenomenon of institutional racism to widespread attention. 4 Nevertheless, the report’s opening move was to position itself at a turning point in British history which called for a new ‘Vision for Britain’ and a ‘Rethinking [of] the National Story’, and it ended with some fifty pages of suggestions for ‘Strategies of Change’. Though there was, at the time, some hostility from conservative circles, creating a slight media uproar even before the report was officially launched, the reception was mostly equable if not enthusiastic. Writing in response to a Daily Telegraph front-page headline on 10 October (‘[Home Secretary Jack] Straw Wants to Rewrite Our History’), Gary Younge observed in the Guardian:

1

2

3

4

Cf. The Runnymede Trust, ‘About Runnymede’, (accessed 1 February 2008). The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, ed. by Bhikhu Parekh (London: Profile, 2000). Areas mentioned in the Parekh report are ‘Issues and Institutions’ such as ‘Police and Policing’, ‘The Wider Criminal Justice System’, ‘Education’, ‘Arts, Media and Sport’, ‘Health and Welfare’, ‘Employment’, ‘Immigration and Asylum’, ‘Politics and Representation’ and, finally, ‘Religion and Belief’. Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations, ed. by E.J.B. Rose and Associates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death by a gang of white youth in South London in 1993. The perpetrators were never brought to justice due to flawed police investigations. Upon a media campaign initiated by the Lawrence family, Sir William Macpherson of Cluny was commissioned by Home Secretary Jack Straw to carry out a public inquiry into the ‘matters arising from the death of Stephen Lawrence’. Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm42/4262 /4262.htm. The continuing topicality of the Stephen Lawrence case is indicated by the fact that in February 2008, the Stephen Lawrence Centre in Deptford was vandalised.

10


If you really want to take the racial temperature in Britain, you would be better off examining the reactions to the report on multi-ethnic Britain rather than the report itself. Not that the report is not engaging […]. But the reactions […] suggest that we may be no closer to having a mature and open debate about race in this country than we are about cannabis […]. The ‘our’ the Telegraph refers to is essentially white, English and nationalistic. For huge members of Scots, Welsh and Irish, not to mention those of Caribbean, Asian, African and Chinese descent the idea [programmatically introduced in the Parekh report] that ‘the description of British will never do on its own’ is not news […]. The Indian restaurants on ‘our’ high streets, the music on ‘our’ stereos and the Olympians on ‘our’ television screen are all powerful indications that while Britain will always be a majority white country, Britishness and whiteness are no longer synonymous […]. So if people stop using the term ‘Britishness’ it will not be because Bhikhu Parekh tells them so, but because the word has lost its meaning. That is truly what the right is afraid of. It is no accident that the Telegraph refers to the past while the report refers to the future […]. That does not mean there are no problems with the report […]. The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain is a report with valuable signposts about where we have to go to become a country built on equality and mutual respect; the initial reactions provide valuable indications of the kind of barriers that will have to be overcome to get there. 5

Less than a year later, however, in the wake of 9/11, the critical but wellmeaning attitude discernible in the quoted extract had vanished even from the pages of the liberal Guardian. Writing on 6 November 2001, columnist Hugo Young claimed that, while earlier debates were centred around the question of ‘whether, and if so how, non-white migrants would be allowed to become full members of this society’, the new situation called for an altogether different approach: [The Parekh report] does not read well in the light of post-September Islamic outpourings. It made reasonable recommendations for enhancing the old remedies, and needed at the time some defence against the Powellite ranting that greeted it from the hard right. But its ideology can now be seen as a useful bible for any Muslim who insists that its religiocultural priorities, including the defence of jihad against America, overrides his civic duties of loyalty, tolerance, justice and respect for democracy […]. Perhaps the trouble for British Muslims as a community is that not enough of these uncomfortable questions have been asked of them. ‘Multi-culturalism’ gives them shelter from decisions about allegiance that the events of 11/9 [sic] can no longer allow to be postponed. 6

In its extremes (and mostly by chance and unrepresentatively), this sea-change in attitudes towards multiculturalism can also be found in reader responses to 5

6

Gary Younge, ‘Celebrate, Don’t Tolerate Minorities’, Guardian, 11 October 2000 . Hugo Young, ‘A Corrosive National Danger in Our Multicultural Model: British Muslims Must Answer Some Uncomfortable Questions’, Guardian, 6 November 2001 (1 February 2008). Young identifies the following crucial question: ‘[D]o all citizens of migrant stock, particularly Muslims, actually want to be full members of the society in which they live? A shocking and unexpected reversal. September 11 threw up many crises for the world. For Britain, none could be more profound than this one’.


11

the Parekh report on Amazon’s UK website, which move rather provocatively from ‘A must-read for all those who want to improve the future!’ (16 November 2000) and ‘A waste of a great topic to produce a report about’ (4 February 2001) to ‘Politically biased and deeply skewed’ (20 January 2006) and ‘Disgraceful, post-modern, antinational, deconstructive drivel’ (14 April 2006). Somewhere between these extremes the earliest re-negotiations of cultural identities in multi-ethnic Britain after the year 2000 took place against the backdrop of the 9/11 attacks and the renewed shock of the London bombings on 7 July 2005 which alerted the public to a possible threat from ‘within’. Perhaps the most scathing satirical assessment of the new situation can be found in Rupert Thomson’s novel Divided Kingdom (2005). Writing as a (white) British expatriate in Barcelona, Thomson envisages a bleak dystopian landscape germinating in a ‘Britain that looks precisely like a scaremonger’s version of the present day’. 7 Many reviews struck a similar note: In a week when political leaders have been unveiling their parties’ general election manifestos, Rupert Thomson’s new novel […] can make for uncomfortable reading. If the scaremongers are to be believed, we are inundated by immigrants, awash with petty crime and violence, racial abuse is rife, our police are overstretched and underfunded. There are travelling bands of communities disrupting the bucolic life of our country folk and morality is crumbling. It’s a short hop from here to the dystopian nightmare Thomson has created in Divided Kingdom, where the grinning faces of leaders such as Michael Song leer down on the benighted population. 8

In the face of mounting social tension and ever-increasing violence, the administration of Thomson’s fictional version of the United Kingdom hits upon a radical solution which sheds an uneasy light on the multiculturalism debate of recent years. Bypassing matters of race and class altogether, the ‘Rearrangement’ (p.5) 9 of the populace is organised according to psychological disposition as suggested by a resurrected version of the medieval theory of humours. After years of secret monitoring, the formerly United Kingdom is drawn and quartered, as it were, and its inhabitants are violently relocated to the quarter which fits their psychological disposition according to government findings: those who are categorised as sanguine are confined to the Red Quarter. The melancholics must reside in the Green Quarter, the 7

8

9

Alex Clark, ‘Child, Interrupted’, review of Divided Kingdom, Daily Telegraph, 10 April 2005, (1 February 2008). Carl Wilkinson, ‘Good Sense of Humour Essential’, review of Divided Kingdom, The Observer, 17 April 2005 (1 February 2008). Rupert Thomson, Divided Kingdom (London: Bloomsbury, 2006 [2005]). All further references appear parenthetically in the text.

12


phlegmatics in the Blue Quarter, and finally the cholerics in the Yellow Quarter. Their respective capitals cover parts of the former London. 10 The narrator-protagonist Parry, who lives in the Red Quarter and rises through the ranks of its influential civil service, breaks away from his fully controlled life in the wake of a terrorist bomb attack (which in itself indicates that there is opposition to this brave new world). He finds himself on a picaresque od(d)yssey through all quarters, exposing and realising the full absurdity and suffering imposed by the system, which nevertheless can be read as a satirical take on the present: One way of understanding [the novel] is to suggest that all four of its zones represent contemporary Britain as seen through a different satirical scrim: The Yellow Quarter is violent, vulgar America-lite, while the Blue Quarter is a brooding, mystical nation of witches and pagans, and the Red Quarter belongs to sensible, upper-middle class Labour Party voters. (And the Green Quarter is very clearly the bleak and shabby Britain of the postwar years.) 11

Finally, Parry makes his way back to the Red Quarter by adopting the identity of one of the White (!) People, a strange and gypsy-like group of unclassifiables abused in the Yellow Quarter, venerated in the Blue Quarter, and mostly ignored in the remaining ones. Disturbingly, he seems to do so with the connivance of the Red Quarter government, and while it is quite clear that he will persist in subverting the system in his private life with a girl smuggled in from a different quarter, there is a strong sense that the Red Quarter administration appropriates personalities of Thomas Parry’s kind in order to secure its hegemonic status in the Divided Kingdom. The novel comes closest to spelling out this unsettling convergence of fatalism and critique in the words of a clandestine resistance fighter called Fernandez whom Thomas Parry meets in the Yellow Quarter. Just in case the reader misses the implications for the present, they are spelled out explicitly by Fernandez: It’s like racism, really, if you think about it […]. I don’t mean the old racism. That’s dead and gone. I’m not interested in the colour of someone’s skin. It’s their thoughts that bother me. The new racism is psychological. What’s strange is, we seem to need it – to thrive on it. If we don’t have someone to despise, we feel uncomfortable, we feel we haven’t properly defined ourselves. Hate gives us hard edges. And the authorities knew that, of course. In fact, they were banking on it. They force-fed us our own weakness – our intolerance, our bigotry. They rammed it down our throats […]. They took the worst part of us and built a system out of it. And it worked – (pp.195-96)

10

11

A map of the Divided Kingdom as well as information about its basic contours can be found under www.dividedkingdom.co.uk (5 February 2008). Andrew O’Hehir, review of Divided Kingdom on salon.com at (5 February 2008).


13

Again, as in many of the quotes cited earlier in this introduction, the main question is: how inclusive is the ‘we’ that is persistently used in so many contributions to the debate? This question will have to be answered in each and every case: while Fernandez’s ‘we’ refers clearly to humanity at large in its critical intent, it is also quite clear that this realisation of an oppositional minority in the world of the novel is not necessarily (or only in theory) shared by the population of the Divided Kingdom, some (many?) of whom profit from the new scheme of things. This, of course, implies a second fundamental question: who is speaking for whom by employing the seemingly inclusive ‘we’? After all, politicians and governments are doing it all the time, as the slogan ‘Michael Song. Voice of the People’ (p.24) implies. Caught between outright indignation and an acknowledgement that it will never be easy, a novel like Divided Kingdom testifies to the viability of fictional reflections on multi-ethnic Britain after the year 2000. Not everything has tipped to the worse after 9/11 – the refashioning of the national story seems to be unremittingly on its way with ground-breaking and high-profile histories of immigration and literature published in 2004, 12 in the wake of earlier decentring moves. 13 However, the nitty-gritty of everyday life and political processes has certainly become more difficult. The present collection of papers is a selection of contributions (all revised for this volume) to a conference held at Freiburg in February 2007. The aim of the conference was to provide a forum for readings, largely from a non-British perspective, of recent engagements with one of the most challenging multiethnic societies in Europe. Given the topicality of the issues at stake and the products in which they are represented, the readings offer varying and sometimes contradictory perspectives. However, certain leitmotifs transpire through all sections of the collection: a concern with identities and their construction, the question of a ‘burden of representation’, evaluations of the current situation in Britain, as well as the issue of space and belonging. The volume aims at a first survey of the varied reactions to and interventions in this situation as it can be observed in novels, films and other fields of cultural practice in the first years of the new millennium. It is framed by the views of two British writers (one white, one of South Indian descent) whose opening statements (one fictional, one essayistic manifesto) introduce some 12

13

Cf. Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Little, Brown, 2004) and the two final volumes of the Oxford English Literary History, vol. 12 (1960-2000): Randall Stevenson, The Last of England? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and vol. 13 (1948-2000): Bruce King, The Internationalization of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Cf., for example, Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (London: Macmillan, 1999).

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of the most pressing thematic and institutional concerns of cultural production in Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+. They provide insight into their own fictional work in two interviews conducted by Violeta Topalova and Angela Kurtz at the end of this volume. Patrick Neate gave us permission to print his short story ‘The Little Book of Tommy: Another Tommy Akhtar Investigation’, a spin-off from his novel City of Tiny Lights published in late June 2005, and thus very shortly before the 7/7 bombings. In City of Tiny Lights, Neate not only uncannily anticipated the terrorist attacks on the metropolitan subway system through the prism of hardboiled genre fiction centred around private eye Tommy Akhtar, a London-based second generation Ugandan-Indian exmujaheddin cricket lover; he also provides a sharp critique of the post-9/11 climate in Britain which also pervades ‘The Little Book of Tommy’. Rajeev Balasubramanyam, author of the novel In Beautiful Disguises (2000), follows with a critique of ‘The Rhetoric of Multiculturalism’ under New Labour and its reverberations in multi-ethnic Britain in the new millennium. Balasumbramanyam takes a scathingly critical stance on what he perceives as a state-sponsored, corporate ‘multiculturalist propaganda’ which merely covers up a history of continuing racism in an unprecedented national image campaign; what is most problematic for Balasubramanyam, however, is that this propaganda has managed to successfully co-opt the mainstream of especially Asian-British cultural production for its own ends, which he demonstrates in readings of films such as Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham (2002). The opening statements raise a number of issues which merit careful consideration within the larger artistic and academic discourse, and which are tackled in the subsequent articles in this collection. To have set out this project with a brief reading of Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom is in many ways programmatic since after the turn of the millennium, it is no longer sufficient to consider the work of ‘ethnic’ or ‘minority’ artists separately in order to gain a composite and more or less representative picture of the state of the art; the contested field of race, religion and representation has long entered not only black and Asian representational practice, but also the white mainstream – examples discussed in this volume include, for instance, films by white filmmakers such as Ae Fond Kiss (2004), Yasmin (2004), In this World (2003), or Children of Men (2006) and 28 Days Later (2003), as well as novels by writers such as Graham Swift, Ian McEwan and, not least, Patrick Neate. Similarly, black and Asian artists have long ceased to be exclusively occupied with ‘minority’ subjects matters. In this volume, this is exemplified by Zadie Smith’s novels and the work of a range of visual artists like Sutapa Biswas and Ingrid Pollard. The undisputed arrival of diversity in the mainstream of cultural production across ethnic barriers may be hailed as a first step towards the ‘Vision for


15

Britain’ outlined in the final pages of the Parekh report; but Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s essay may equally make us suspicious of such utopian rhetoric in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 when the politics of religious, ethnic and national affiliation have been pitched to the forefront of popular debates again. Are we beyond what Kobena Mercer has famously styled ‘the burden of representation’ 14 in black and Asian British art, or are the ethics of ethnic and religious speaking positions in fact becoming ever more pronounced and contested? Who is speaking for whom, and with what authority, in a kingdom divided or whole? Do filmmakers, novelists, visual artists and musicians tend to perpetuate the ‘Vision’ of the Parekh Report, or do dystopian scenarios along the lines of Rupert Thomson’s novel set the tone? How do artists conceive of the contested borders of the kingdom in an increasingly globalised world of voluntary and forced mass migrations? Is the postmillennial metropolis represented as the site of what Paul Gilroy anticipates as peaceful multi-ethnic ‘conviviality’, or do ‘post-colonial melancholia’ and visions of violence prevail? 15 It is these and similar questions our contributors try to address. The articles to this volume are in this sense generically and thematically organised in five sections: two sections deal with recent film, another two are concerned with fiction and related prose, and one section deals with visual art and music. The first section on recent film goes under the headline Beyond the Burden of Representation? (with a deliberate question mark). While this title would have fitted many contributions, it comprises three essays in which problems of ethnic identification and concomitant artistic overdetermination are exemplarily discussed with regard to Asian British film which, according to a recent overview, had successfully ‘bidd[en] for the mainstream’ over the course of the 1990s and largely moved beyond the ‘burden of representation’ by the turn of the millennium. 16 Ellen Dengel-Janic and Lars Eckstein’s take in ‘Bridehood Revisited: Disarming Concepts of Gender and Culture in Recent Asian British Film’ starts from Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s assessment in ‘The Rhetoric of Multiculturalism’ and questions the liberating potential of such mainstream success by highlighting the nostalgic and inherently reductive views on gender and transcultural exchange in films like Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002), Neil Biswas’s Second Generation (2003), and Pratibha Parmar’s Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006). Sandra Heinen (‘Multi-Ethnic Britain on Screen: South Asian Diasporic Experience in Recent Feature Films’), in contrast, 14 15 16

Kobena Mercer, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text 10 (1990), 61-78. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge 2004). Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film Since the 1990s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004).

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tends to view things more positively in a nuanced comparative reading of Karan Johar’s Bollywood blockbuster Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham… (2002), Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss (2004) and Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham (2002), where at least the latter two are seen to successfully promote ‘intercultural understanding and multiculturalism’. Claudia Sternberg, finally, presents a close reading of Kenny Glenaan’s Yasmin (2004) (‘Babylon North: British Muslims after 9/11 in Yasmin’) in which, ironically, a white Scottish director tackles racist policing and social exclusion in an ethnographic approach more in line ‘with Black British cinema of the 1970s and 1980s than with Asian British films of the 1990s and 2000s’. The second section on film, placed later in the volume, is entitled Borderlines and Contested Spaces; it collects three essays which share an interest in legal and illegal border crossing and territorial contest in relation to questions of ethnicity. The section opens with Sissy Helff’s investigation of ‘Scapes of Refuge in Multicultural Britain: Representing Refugees in Digital Docudrama and Mockumentary’. Helff compares the discursive strategies of Michael Winterbottom’s mockumentary of the odyssey of two Afghan refugees in In This World (2003) with two digital docudramas produced by actual (approved) refugees in a BBC workshop, and problematises them in the context of current debates about the status of multicultural Britain. KathyAnne Tan (‘“If you’re not on paper, you don’t exist”: Depictions of Illegal Immigration and Asylum in Film’) complements this perspective by reading In This World against Winterbottom’s next movie Code 46 (2003), also revolving around refuge and ‘illegality’, albeit in the context of a ‘sciencefiction futuristic love story’. Analysing the widely different modes of representation, Tan concludes that both films really operate as companion pieces which mutually compensate some of their respective ideological shortcomings. Barbara Korte’s ‘Envisioning a Black Tomorrow? Black Mother Figures and the Issue of Representation in 28 Days Later and Children of Men’ continues Tan’s interest in the dystopian vision of Code 46 by looking at the latest post-millennial apocalyptic scenarios painted by two further white filmmakers, Danny Boyle (2003) and Alfonso Cuarón (2006). Both films place their characters in larger negotiations of Englishness against an iconography of territorial conflict, migration and refuge in their envisioning of a British future, which ties in with the focus of this section. Thematically, films like Children of Men and Code 46 would also fit the rubric Multi-Ethnic Utopias and Dystopias, which headlines the first section on prose fiction in this volume. Utopia and dystopia are not meant to be understood in the strict generic sense here, but refer to representational ideologies of contemporary multi-ethnic affairs more generally, ranging from relative optimism to bleak pessimism in a post-9/11 climate. Lucy Gillet’s readings in


17

‘Representations of Multicultural Society in Contemporary British Novels’ make a beginning in this vein by juxtaposing the ‘cosy’ multiculturalism of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) with the much more sombre vision of Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003); yet Gillet also intriguingly highlights how white writers like Ian McEwan and Graham Swift work against notions of a monolithic Englishness alongside the likes of Smith and Phillips. Sabine Nunius then investigates ‘“Sameness” in Contemporary British Fiction: (Metaphorical) Families in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty’. Nunius explores how Smith works against ideas of postmodern fragmentation and difference by (re)emphasising alternative ‘family’ relationships (among which ‘ethnic families’ seem to be the least stable) all of which are ‘constructed’, yet nevertheless provide pragmatic cohesion. Nunius’s focus on communities subsequently gives way to a focus on individual isolation in Ulrike Zimmermann’s ‘Out of the Ordinary – and Back? Jackie Kay’s Recent Short Fiction’, in which Zimmermann explores the problematic identity construction of black female outsiders in stories from Jackie Kay’s most recent volumes of short fiction, Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002) and Wish I Was Here (2006). Daniel Schäbler (‘Teenage Transformations in Multi-Ethnic Britain: Rehana Ahmed’s Walking a Tightrope’) continues the focus on short fiction and individual identity construction, this time looking at two exemplary stories from the collection Walking a Tightrope: New Writing from Asian Britain (2004). Schäbler shows how the collection politically subscribes to the utopia of a ‘postethnic future’, even while emphasising the continuity of racism on all sides and the force of ethnic determination in processes of (teenage) identity formation. The section closes with two very different essays on one of the bleakest fictional takes on multi-ethnic relations in Britain published in the new millennium so far. Nadia Butt (‘Between Orthodoxy and Modernity: Mapping the Transcultural Predicaments of Pakistani Immigrants in MultiEthnic Britain in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers’) reads Aslam’s 2004 novel as a faithful and sincere rendition of Pakistani communities in Britain which refute ‘modernity’ in favour of ‘orthodox Islam’, practising ‘inhuman and irrational social practices such as “honour killing” and “forced marriages”’, and passionately calls for the translation of ‘traditional concepts of Islam into the global landscape of modernity’. Cordula Lemke provides a contrastive view to such a reading in ‘Racism in the Disapora: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers’ by investigating the discourses on racial and cultural purity in the novel more closely; doing so, she extracts a racist and ‘deeply misogynist undercurrent’ not only on the level of narrated content, but also in the narrator and narrative discourse itself which undercuts the seemingly dominant assimilationist moral of ‘get rid of everything Pakistani’.

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The second section dealing with prose continues the discussion of many of the ‘utopian’ or ‘dystopian’ concerns of the first section; yet all essays collected here do so with a specific focus on the metropolitan setting of London; the section is accordingly titled Reading and Writing the Metropolis. The beginning of five essays discussing urban formations of multi-ethnic division or conviviality is made by Michael Mitchell’s ‘Escaping the Matrix: Illusions and Disillusions of Identity in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani’. Through the lens of this novel, published in 2006, Mitchell explores the social dynamics of (transcultural) impersonation and imposture in urban multiethnic ‘bling’ youth culture and beyond, and associates this with a larger transversal cultural dynamics which increasingly eludes the explanatory power of older ‘ethnic and geopolitical concepts of identity’. Ellen Dengel-Janic (‘“East is East and West is West”: A Reading of Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism’) then takes stock of the ‘rather uncompromising and bleak account of contemporary London and its diverse communities’ in Dhaliwal’s first novel, only to argue that his very clichéd take on race and gender is part of a biting satirical attack on the fashionable multiculturalism of the liberal bourgeoisie which only covers up de facto ‘racial segregation in the media and literary world’. Yvonne Rosenberg’s reading of City of Tiny Lights (2005) in ‘“Stop Thinking like an Englishman” or: Writing Against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights’ then presents a different critique of the media which for Rosenberg repressively ‘fix’ the contested meaning of terms such as ‘alterity’ or ‘terrorism’; by attending to the ‘linguistic games’ in City of Tiny Lights, Rosenberg shows how Neate’s novel undermines imposing taxonomies of otherness. The section closes, finally, with two perspectives on urban architecture and fiction in multi-ethnic contexts. The first essay by Stephan Laqué, ‘“A Deconstructed Shrine”: Locating Absence and Relocating Identity in Rodinsky’s Room’, again presents a Derridean reading, this time investigating London’s Museum of Immigration and Diversity at 19 Princelet Street in Spitalfields, consisting of a single attic room from which its inhabitant David Rodinski, an orthodox Jew, disappeared without a trace sometime in the 1960s. Laqué discusses the relevance of the room which was only unlocked in the 1980s and has since been preserved in its original state through ‘the post-Freudian concept of the crypt as a spatial frame for the construction of hybrid identities’. He argues how Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein do or do not do justice to this concept in their prose exploration Rodinski’s Room (2000). Susanne Cuevas closes with an investigation of ‘“Societies Within”: Council Estates as Cultural Enclaves in Recent Urban Fiction’ by particularly focussing on Courttia Newland’s The Scholar (1998), which she compares to Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003). Cuevas not only explores the different ideological


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outlooks of both novels – the one more in the pessimistic tradition of Zola’s naturalism, the other more optimistic about the emancipating powers of human agency – but she also addresses how Newland and Ali saw themselves confronted with voices questioning the ‘authenticity’ of their speaking positions. The last section of essays, placed in the very middle of this volume, is entitled Picturing and Sounding Identity and devoted to visual art and music. Eva Ulrike Pirker’s essay ‘Images of Muslim Britain Go Global: A Reading of the British Council’s Touring Exhibition Common Ground’ retraces the genesis of the exhibition (2001-2003) and its ambivalent reception in different parts of the world. It also inquires into the medial and generic predispositions of such a project before offering interpretations of selected photographs (reprinted in this volume with the generous permission of the British Council). Ingrid von Rosenberg (‘Female Views: Cultural Identity as a Key Issue in the Work of Black and Asian Women Artists’) offers a diachronic perspective, tracing the evolution of the work of black and Asian British women artists from the 1980s and 1990s into the ‘tenser political and social climate after 9/11’. Exemplarily focussing on exhibits by Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Joy Gregory, Ingrid Pollard, Chila Burman and others (many of which are reprinted in this volume with permission), von Rosenberg assesses a development ‘from militant feminist beginnings in the 1980s to a sometimes serious, sometimes playful exploration of female identity construction in the 1990s to a growing occupation with more general and more public issues in the 2000s’. Christoph Härter’s ‘The Dub Renaissance – Reflections on the Aesthetics of Dub in Contemporary British Music’ finally presents an informed investigation of the metropolitan dubstep scene, not least in its ambivalent positioning against post-9/11 angst, by analysing the performative modes and historical trajectories of dub, its formal aspects and narrative strategies. A cultural area which this volume largely leaves aside is television – a medium of significant impact not only in black and Asian Britons’ struggle for representation, but also for presenting blacks and Asians as an integral part of Britain. Since the turn of the new century, television has reflected all the trends otherwise discussed in the following pages: from celebrating a multi-ethnic Britain, e.g. in the four-part miniseries adapted from Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth (Channel 4, 2002), to ongoing racism and the new Islamophobia. As satirically envisaged in Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom, some of the most recent programmes on British primetime television in late 2007 suggest that ‘division’ is on the rise again in mainstream programming. On the one hand, the BBC and Channel 4 joined the celebratory spirit around the Abolition Bicentenary and black history in general. On the other, the 2007

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Autumn season also featured, among others, the controversially received Channel 4 television drama Britz, in which an Asian British man working for MI5 has to trace down his own sister who plans a suicide bomb attack. Other programmes such as BBC Two’s White Season (Winter/Spring 2008) helped to re-establish ‘whiteness’ in current political discourse: a whiteness reaffirmed against a multi-ethnic Britain in which the white underclass feels marginalised. 17 Less than a decade after the Parekh report’s ‘Vision for Britain’, the debates on multi-ethnic Britain are more heated than ever.

Works Cited BBC Press Office, ‘BBC Two Winter/Spring 2008’ [accessed on 15 February 2008]. Clark, Alex, ‘Child, Interrupted’, review of Divided Kingdom, Daily Telegraph, 10 April 2005 [accessed on 1 February 2008]. Davies, Norman, The Isles: A History (London: Macmillan, 1999). Gilroy, Paul, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge 2004). King, Bruce, The Internationalization of English Literature, Oxford English Literary History, vol. 12 (1948-2000) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Korte, Barbara and Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film Since the 1990s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004). Macpherson of Cluny, Sir William, The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry [accessed on 15 February 2008].

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The BBC’s ‘White Season’ ‘features a series of films that shine the spotlight on the white working-class in Britain today. It examines why some feel increasingly marginalised, and explores possible reasons behind the rise in popularity of far-right politics in some sections of this community. As “white trash” and “chav” become commonplace insults, the films explore the complex mix of feelings that lead some people to feel under siege and that their very sense of self is being brought into question. And, as newly arrived immigrant populations move in, the season examines the conflict between the communities and explores the economic and psychological tensions’. BBC Press Office, ‘BBC Two Winter/Spring 2008’ (15 February 2008).


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Mercer, Kobena, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text 10 (1990), 61-78. O’Hehir, Andrew, review of Divided Kingdom, salon.com, [accessed on 5 February 2008]. Parekh, Bhikhu, ed., The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (London: Profile, 2000). Rose, E.J.B. and Associates, eds, Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). Stevenson, Randall, The Last of England? Oxford English Literary History, vol. 12 (1960-2000) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The Runnymede Trust, ‘About Runnymede’ [accessed on 1 February 2008]. Thomson, Rupert, Divided Kingdom (London: Bloomsbury, 2006 [2005]). Wilkinson, Carl, ‘Good Sense of Humour Essential’, review of Divided Kingdom, The Observer, 17 April 2005 [accessed on 1 February 2008]. Winder, Robert, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Little, Brown, 2004). Young, Hugo, ‘A Corrosive National Danger in Our Multicultural Model: British Muslims Must Answer Some Uncomfortable Questions’, Guardian, 6 November 2001 [accessed on 1 February 2008]. Younge, Gary, ‘Celebrate, Don’t Tolerate Minorities’, Guardian, 11 October 2000 [accessed on 1 February 2008].

Writers’ Views

Patrick Neate

The Little Book Of Tommy: Another Tommy Akhtar Investigation

Little Book of Tommy#1: you can learn everything you need to know about life from the game of cricket. I’ll come clean. This is actually one of the old man’s sayings but that makes me its rightful heir and it’s a good place to start. Seeing as Farzad’s a morose alcoholic with the postcolonial confusion of your average London immigrant, it’s always tempting to take his choicest with a pinch of the proverbial. Nonetheless, as a onetime cricketer myself (Brentford Under 15s, an average of 44.2 no less), I recognise the wisdom. Let me give you an example. The successful batter, Farzad claims, relies on quick feet, steady eyes and a calm temperament. The successful bowler, Farzad claims, relies on line and length, prevailing conditions and the batsman’s foibles. He says, ‘In these days of covered pitches, son, every Tom, Dick and Harold will tell you it’s a batsman’s game but that’s not true! For the bowler always wins in the end! The batsman, however good, is never more than cannon fodder!’ At this point, the old man will usually chuckle before dropping his punchline. ‘Has anything been more accurately reflective of the relationship between colonisers and colonised?’ The geezer’s clearly no fool. If you don’t get the metaphor, then most likely you’re no cricket fan. Either that or you shy away from the truths of blunt cultural analysis. Or perhaps you’re simply not a Ugandan-Indian-Englishman (or, frequently, ‘Paki’ for short) who’s had 30 years to appreciate the ongoing ironies implicit in the phrase ‘mother country’. Whatever. As introductions to cartoon stories go, this might be verging oblique. However, if you’re going to understand what follows, you need to understand the philosophical framework of yours truly, the piss-artist also known as ‘Tommy Akhtar: Private Investigator’. You’ll find me in the Yellow Pages. Serious. I can’t tell you the exact date but it must have been late April ’99 because minority London was traumatised after it had twice been inexpertly blown up by persons unspecified. Combat 18 were claiming responsibility. So were The White Wolves. Her Majesty’s Blindest were clueless but it’s a fair bet they weren’t nosing around The Fabian Society, say, or Rock Against Racism.

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I’d moved back to stay with the old man a couple of days after the bomb in Bangladeshi Brick Lane, a little more than a week, therefore, after the blast in black Brixton. Farzad’s yard is just off Acre Lane, shrapnel distance from Brixton market. As an outsider, I can say that the neighbourhood was stressed but coping well. Then again, as an outsider, I’d suggest that ‘stressed but coping well’ is probably this neighbourhood’s natural state. But as for yours truly? I was utterly unengaged. After a fruitful couple of years, the offices of TA Services (located, should you need them, just off the deli end of Chiswick High Road) were being rewarded with a lick of eggshell and, seeing as said offices doubled as my flat, I’d chosen to vacate. And I’d opted for Farzad’s gaff and a fortnight’s R and R in the company of my soul brothers Benny and Turk. If I’d known it would be a busman’s holiday, I’d have packed a notebook. As far as I recall, it was a fairly standard weekday afternoon. I was drinking away a hangover, Turk was half-clapped and each Benny was only halfcomforting. Farzad was lodged in the living room with Trinidad Pete and a four pack of Genius. They were watching a tape of Brian Lara’s St John’s epic in ’94; Trinidad for reasons Trinidadian, Farzad reasons political. The doorbell rang. I answered it. I was shocked to find myself face to face with Mr Elegance. I was a little shocked because Mr Elegance, though a familiar face in the area, rarely called on the old man. I was a lot shocked because, for surely the first and only time, blokey failed to live up to his nomenclature. I don’t know his real name but Mr Elegance has been a Brixton fixture since time. He is, as Jamaican geezers often are, of indeterminate age – anywhere between 50 and 70 – and he’s always immaculately turned out in one of a selection of natty three piece suits, watch chain hanging from waistcoat, handkerchief folded in breast pocket, Oxfords mirror-polished. He walks with a spring in his step, swinging a cane of apparently African origin which is topped by a carved lion’s head. On this occasion, however, Mr E was Mr DStraught and he was dabbing at his eyes with the hankie and leaning on that stick like he’d otherwise collapse. Farzad shouted: ‘Who is it Tommy boy?’ Blokey gave me no chance to reply. At the sound of dad’s voice, he walked straight past calling, ‘Mr Akhtar! I need to speak to you Mr Akhtar!’ The three of them – Mr Elegance, Trinidad and the Old Man – made for a strange-looking summit. Mr E was on the sofa and as described, Trinidad slouched next to him in a string vest and loose slacks unbuttoned at the waist for easy access, Farzad stalking the room in his usual bizarre get up.


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It’s hard to believe but Farzad is regarded with respect around the way and often approached to advise, broker or mediate. The respect is remarkable considering he’s a drunk; more remarkable still considering his habitual outfit consists of an outsized Bob Marley T-shirt and Union Jack boxers that hang off his seven stone frame like bin liners from a coat hanger. But he’s renowned for his intellect and fair mind and, when Mr E had a crisis, it was the old man he turned to. Number One Son was proud, for real. The gist of said crisis was as follows: hadn’t we heard? Late last night, Daniel Dexter, Mr Elegance’s 19 year-old grandson, had been attacked on the way to his mum’s. He was found slumped unconscious in a gutter with a six inch knife wound under his ribcage. He was found by James and Keisha, two teen lovebirds on a moonlit stroll. The blade had punctured a lung and he’d lost a lot of blood. There was currently cop tape around the crime scene. Daniel was currently comatose in St George’s ICU, prognosis pending. Mr Elegance said the Old Bill were worse than useless. He said he suspected motivations racial because who could tell what London was coming to these days? He said that Daniel had told him he had a girlfriend but he’d never brought her home. Why was that? Maybe she’d got Daniel involved in, and I quote, ‘some kind of unpleasantness’. He said – and for some reason this compressed the hole where my heart used to be – that he’d been to the hospital and Daniel’s mother had said he wasn’t helping and sent him home but he had to do something, didn’t he? Trinidad played it Outraged Of Acre Lane, Farzad Consternated Of Kampala, yours truly Nonplussed Of No Fixed abode. Farzad nodded and said he’d have Number One Son investigate. Mr Elegance looked dubious doubled. I gave it the mysterious Asian eyebrows. Trinidad tapped Mr E on the thigh and said, ‘Boy’s a proper detective, boss.’ Mr E wiped a careful hand across his trouser leg. He remained traumatised and unconvinced. Farzad cracked a Genius. Trinidad followed suit. I sparked a Benny, sloshed Turk into a plastic beaker and raised it to Mr E. ‘Anything I can do to help,’ I said. And I meant it. I asked around. It wasn’t hard. Everybody knew Mr Elegance’s grandson. Daniel expressed the hopes and fears of a community, for real. He was studying Law at City. He was living in student housing near the university and only came home once a month for laundry and such. Let me put it like this: talk in the neighbourhood was contradictory. Talk in the neighbourhood was that Daniel was a shining example for the local thug-lites. Talk in the neighbourhood was also that Daniel was seeing a white girl which wasn’t so surprising but he’d developed airs and graces to match. Let me put it like this: behind his back, Daniel was hailed as the great black

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hope. Behind his back, Daniel was also dissed and dismissed as the worst kind of coconut. I didn’t know Daniel myself so I didn’t know what was true and I didn’t know what was said to his face. Daniel had two kid sisters called Dionne and Donna. Dionne was training as a chef at some Clapham bistro. Donna had recently been knocked up by a small-time lowlife who called himself Styles. I wondered if Daniel was both blessed and hamstrung by his middle-class, white name. I know what the expectations of immigrant parents feel like and I suspect that the only thing worse than failing to meet them is succeeding. Did I tell you I write these pearls down? I’ll most likely finish at 100. This one’s Little Book of Tommy #11. Next morning I headed to City University. The students made me dizzy. All the confidence distressed me. All the uncertainty likewise. I was stopped on the door by a burly security guard in a black bomber. He demanded my identity card. I told him my name was Mohammad Akram and I was a chemical engineering postgrad who’d left his card at home. I thickened my accent. He couldn’t find my name on the system but he didn’t dare turn me away. I went to a lecture in jurisprudence. I didn’t understand a word. I sat next to an upmarket blonde who threw her hair like she was advertising shampoo. We bonded mutual exotica. I told her I was a mature exchange student from Delhi. She told me she was from Guildford. I forget her name. I sometimes forget my own. Afterwards I followed her to the cafeteria like a puppy. Shampoo bird chose a cosmopolitan corner. The assault on Daniel had made the papers, albeit beneath the Brick Lane bombing, so it was cappuccinochat cubed. There was a starter dreadlock who did most of the talking; a Nigerian kid called Dele. He was clearly Daniel’s sidekick and he shared his take with Mr Elegance. Dele said racism was endemic in British society and until you accepted that your opinion wasn’t worth jack. He skinned a rollie. I sparked a Benny. Various others fired various others, mostly Silky Smooths. Dele said ‘It’s f___ing institutional, you get me?’ and his ethnic colleagues looked grievous and his white colleagues looked at the floor. Eventually, shampoo bird said, ‘Anyone seen Arabella?’ There were shaking heads and tutting. Shampoo bird said, ‘Where’s Arabella?’ Nobody said squat. I was getting somewhere. I bided my time. Then I played it indisputable. I told them my name was Tommy Akhtar. I told them I was a private investigator. I told them I’d been


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hired by Daniel’s family. I told them that if Arabella was Daniel’s girlfriend then they needed to hook me up, serious. Their suspicion was amateurish. It took less than 30 seconds for Dele to furnish addresses, both student and home. I was pleased with myself. It’s always a bad sign. Next thing I knew the whole table was shtum and I looked up to find myself flanked by two geezers with spam complexions and no dress sense. It must have been all that cigarette smoke that had masked the smell of Old Bill. Plod#1 put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘And who the f___ are you?’ I detected something in his accent. A touch of the Micks. I played it back where it came from, buying time: ‘I might ask exactly likewise.’ ‘DC Donnelly. Brixton CID.’ He flashed me his badge. ‘Tommy Akhtar, Chiswick Rotary.’ I flashed him my teeth. ‘Could we have a word Mr Akhtar?’ I stubbed my Benny and waved goodbye to shampoo bird and Dele the dread. The plod were kind enough to help me to my feet and escort me into the corridor. Donnelly stood too close to me. I had three inches on him. He had angry spots at his hairline and his breath smelled sour. Either that or mine was reflected in his pate. He said, ‘And who the f___ do you think you are?’ Little Book of Tommy #66: tell the truth whenever possible. The truth is always simpler. This might sound obvious but it gets tough when you lie for a living. It’s why I have a peculiar affection for honesty. I may not like yours truly but I know him just fine. I told Donnelly the truth. I told Donnelly I was a private investigator and I was looking into what currently stood at attempted murder. I told Donnelly I was working for Daniel Dexter’s granddad who figured plod were worse than useless. I told Donnelly I was going to talk to Arabella, the girlfriend, because that seemed like the best place to start. My directness left the geezer few options. I was disconcerted that he chose amusement. ‘Knock yourself out Mr Akhtar,’ he said and his mouth twitched a smirk. ‘Go detect.’ Arabella Sneddon was not at the halls of residence. But I’d found out her surname. I headed to the family home in a quiet Dulwich side street – mostly pruned hedges and Victorian semi-detached – but she wasn’t there either. The Sneddon household was the scruffy exception. There was a clappedout Volvo in the driveway and the foliage needed attention. I rang the bell. It buzzed feebly, like a wasp come November. I was running equations. The woman who opened the door was a mess of the kind the middle-aged, middle-classes do best. She had chaotic gray hair in roughly the same state as

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her hedge. She wore a shapeless denim dress and grubby deck shoes. She smacked ’60s hangover. I suddenly understood Donnelly’s smirk. This was the wrong tree and I was barking. But there was nothing else for it. A dog howls at the moon because it’s a dog. Little Book of Tommy #67: lie whenever necessary. I told her I was DS Akhtar from the Brixton factory. She said she’d already spoken to my colleague. I played it charming and nonchalant. I said, ‘DC Donnelly?’ She nodded. I asked if Arabella was in. She frowned. She said, ‘Don’t you people talk to each other? I told the other chap I sent her to stay with her father.’ ‘Didn’t she want to see Daniel?’ ‘I told her there was nothing she could do right now.’ She thinned her lips at me. Mrs Sneddon had an unkind mouth. It was small and tight like a cat’s anus. She let me in nonetheless, no questions asked. I checked Arabella’s bedroom. It was student standard. I checked her CD collection: a lot of R ’n B and reggae, a couple of Clash albums. Her sound system was spanking new, computer likewise. There was a pinboard loaded with photos: pasty brunette in situation tropical, pasty brunette surrounded by giggling black kids, pasty brunette kissing black baby. I was just killing time. I knew I wasn’t going to learn anything about the attack on Daniel here. I was, however, about to learn exactly the ‘kind of unpleasantness’ that Arabella had Daniel involved in. And it wasn’t the sort Mr Elegance had been expecting but an altogether more subtle kind. Daniel was up to his neck in smug liberalism, the most subtle kind of unpleasantness of all. Mrs Sneddon talked at me non-stop. She said that Arabella had worked in an orphanage in Guyana on her year off. She said that her daughter was a caring girl. She said she’d brought her up that way. She said she knew Daniel quite well. It seemed he was a regular visitor. She said that she liked him and she was impressed that he’d managed to escape such difficult circumstances to get as far as university. She said Daniel had told her that his mother didn’t have a single book in the house. Could I imagine such a thing? She asked my background. I ignored the potential charade and answered ‘Uganda’. She shook her head and muttered something about Amin. She got quite upset then. She said she knew black boys had it tough but when a tragedy like this happened you had to wonder when they’d learn. I didn’t know what that meant. She was almost tearful. She said that if Daniel recovered he’d be more than welcome to convalesce chez Sneddon at their place in Cahors, a little town outside Toulouse, a farmhouse that she’d bought with her ex-husband, Arabella’s father, who’d left her … I cut her off. I didn’t need to know.


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At the door, Mrs Sneddon said, ‘I hope they catch him, officer. Whoever did it. I suppose it was just one of those random acts of violence.’ I stayed shtum and walked away but I thought of Little Book of Tommy #25: even fools are right sometimes. The London bombings of ’99 weren’t the work of some highly-organised right wing terrorist group but a sad individual called David Copeland who built explosives out of fireworks in his small-town Hampshire home. The following weekend he blew up the Admiral Duncan pub in gay Soho and there were three fatalities. He was arrested that evening and his bedroom was a homage to hate. The assault on Daniel Dexter wasn’t racially motivated but carried out by a local giant by the name of Julius Soper. A diagnosed schizophrenic, Julius had a history of violence and had spent most of his life in institutions various. Only the previous month, he’d been released to the custody of his grandmother, Maureen, under new Care In The Community guidelines. One of the conditions of Julius’s release was that he shouldn’t be left alone but, on the night of the attack, Maureen had felt compelled to visit her best friend Doris Fatunle who had been traumatised (though physically unhurt) by the Brixton bombing ten days before. It seemed that left to his own devices Julius had become increasingly agitated and decided to go looking for granny. Scared of the outside world, he’d taken a kitchen knife for self-protection. His path had crossed Daniel’s and for some reason he’d regarded the young student as a threat. After the attack, Julius headed straight home, stripped naked, hid his clothes and the knife at the bottom of the laundry basket and climbed into bed. When Maureen came to do the weekly wash she was horrified and went straight to the police. Daniel eventually recovered and finished his law degree. Apparently he’s now at a big city firm and sharing a flat in Pimlico with a secretary from his office. I couldn’t tell you her race. I don’t know if it’s of interest. He hasn’t been seen round Brixton since time. All reports are received through his proud grandfather, Mr Elegance, and, as Trinidad puts it, ‘if you listened to Elegance you’d think the boy was running the f___ing country’. At his trial, the London nail bomber, David Copeland, pleaded diminished responsibility but the government needed a prosecution and the jury didn’t buy it. Geezer got three life sentences. I don’t know jack about Julius Soper’s trial beyond the fact he was remanded without prospect of release. I still see his grandmother in the neighbourhood. She is small, sad and ancient. She looks like a raisin.

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Three observations from three different sources: 1. A black geezer’s up to seven times more likely to be remanded in a secure mental health unit than a white geezer (MIND). 2. Crazy black geezers don’t blow up London for reasons deranged (yours truly). 3. ‘The bowler always wins in the end’ (the old man). None of these, however, make it into the Little Book of Tommy. After much consideration and with the benefit of hindsight, the last three entries read as follows: #98: by its nature, tragedy is unsurprising. #99: social assumptions are as dangerous as they are useful. #100 (and this doesn’t disprove #25 only its earlier application): there’s no such thing as a random act, violent or otherwise.

Rajeev Balasubramanyam

The Rhetoric of Multiculturalism

I. 1) A corporation is a body or society authorised by law to act as one individual unit. By this definition, Great Britain is as much a corporation as Shell, or ICI, or Microsoft. All corporations use logos, symbols, and slogans to attempt to define and communicate this individual identity to others. When a private corporation does it, this is usually called advertising, or PR, but when a nationstate does it, it is usually called propaganda. The word multiculturalism describes a form of propaganda used to define the corporate identity of Great Britain. This propaganda benefits both private corporations and the state, and is disseminated by both via the advertising and entertainment industries, the newsmedia, and the mass-produced, or at least mass-advertised, works of art. Propaganda is usually referred to as a negative thing, but it doesn’t have to be. The dictionary definition is, the organised spreading of doctrine, true or false information, opinions etc. especially to bring about change or form. So, the questions to ask are, what sort of propaganda is multiculturalism? Does it communicate a doctrine, or does it spread information, and if so, is this information true or false, is the doctrine worthy or unworthy? 2) Let us consider, first, multiculturalism as the spreading of information. Multiculturalist propagandas appear to be telling us that Britain is a society in which many cultures co-exist. But this has always been the case in Britain; history tells us there have been Angles, Saxons, Romans, Normans, Celts, Africans, South Asians, and many more. The English language is the product of huge ethnic intermingling. So why do we need an entire propaganda industry to tell us this now, in the 21st century? If we consider in what context the word is used, we soon see that multiculturalism is rarely used to describe, for example, Scottish, Welsh and Spanish people living together; or punks, Goths, hippies, and Elvis impersonators, all of which are different cultures. The word is almost exclusively used to describe cultures differentiated by their skin colour. So what do we learn from this: that black and brown people produce cultural products that contribute to the aggregate culture of Britain? Surely this is obvious. All people produce culture, and if they are British, then whatever they produce will automatically become a part of the aggregate culture. So the word must mean more than this.

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3) Let us consider it as ideology, or doctrine. Perhaps the word implies a commitment on the part of its users to accept, or tolerate, the cultural expression of black and brown people, perhaps to consume, learn from, or incorporate aspects of these cultures into their own. But again, there is no reason why this shouldn’t be the case. This has always been the way of societies, except where the establishment (today meaning a compound of the state and corporations) has actively prevented such a thing from happening, an ideology usually described as racism. It would seem, then, that the word multiculturalism refers to a country in which the establishment is not racist, does not try to actively suppress the cultural expression of black and brown people, and does not try to inhibit their cultural products from being consumed by white members of society. 4) So, a multicultural society refers to a society with black or brown people in it, and multiculturalism refers to propaganda that tells us that Britain, a multicultural society, is not racist, or rather, that the state and corporations are not-racist and so the society is moving in this direction. The problem with this is that it isn’t true. The state and corporations do practice racism. And yet, they spend millions on spreading this false propaganda of multiculturalism, millions which could be spent combating racism. The next question, then, is why? 5) Multiculturalism is fashionable. Racism, despite being endemic in the world today, is unfashionable, and fashion is a tool of the capitalist world used to sell products based on their image rather than their substance. To rebrand Britain as Multicultural Britain, is to re-brand it as modern, fun, sexy, and Cool, as in ‘Cool Britannia’. Why? Because cool sells, hence Britain sells; British films, Britpop, Britlit, the Young British Artists, clothing labels, airlines, cars etc. On the flip side, multiculturalism also brings money into Britain by attracting foreign investment of all kinds; heavy industry, light industry, art expos, film production, and sporting events like London’s bid for the Olympics or the marketing of Aamir Khan as a multiculturalist icon. It attracts intellectual and human capital, including academics, scientists, skilled and unskilled workers, tourists, and celebrities, now including Madonna. 6) Multiculturalist propaganda is also used, whether or not this is explicitly stated, to justify British foreign policy, the logic of which is as follows. If Britain is not a racist society with a racist establishment, why would this establishment, under the multiculturalist Prime Minister Blair, involve Britain in a racist war? Conclusion: the Iraq war is not a racist war but is entirely necessary for peace and global security etc. etc.


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7) Within Britain, multiculturalist propaganda is used for social control, that is, the masking of social injustice and the dilution of social protest. Britain is a caste-based society, caste status determined primarily by skin colour, class, gender, and, especially in the case of Islam, religion. If we imagine this hierarchy in the shape of a pyramid, we have, at the top, the white males, the rulers. Lower down we have the upper-middle and middle castes, consisting of white males, fewer white females, even fewer black or brown males, and, even fewer still, black or brown females. At the base, we have the white working classes, the black and brown lower middle-classes, and then the black and brown working classes, with black and Muslim working class females at the very bottom. Multiculturalist propagandas enable the highest castes to distort the perception the middle castes have of the lowest castes, substituting fantasy for reality. This fantasy is conducive to feelings of well-being, which mean the middle-castes consume more, and political apathy, which helps to maintain the caste system: when the lower castes protest at the injustice of their circumstances, the middle castes are less likely to believe them. This substitute reality is aggressively marketed, backed by huge financial resources, such that voices of social dissent from below reach them as feeble echoes, filtered and diluted as they travel upwards. It is no coincidence that the output of multiculturalist propagandas rocketed in the months immediately after the inquiry into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. This was a clear case of the upper castes responding to political articulation from the very bottom of the pyramid by flexing their own, very powerful, propagandist muscles. 8) A less likely scenario, though one that does exist to a limited extent, is the ‘American Dream effect’ of deterring the lowest castes from political protest by substituting a belief that hard work and adherence to the rules will ensure social advancement. This is far harder to achieve, because the lowest castes, living inside the reality of injustice, can see it, whereas the middle-castes need to be told or shown.

II. 1) Having identified the nature and uses of multiculturalism, let us consider how this affects British artists, particularly black and brown artists. As stated, there are caste disparities between black and brown people in Britain. Some, by virtue of wealth, education, and status, occupy a higher caste position than others; some, though very few, are even quite close to the top of the pyramid, though not at the top. These, obviously, have a vested interest in multiculturalist propagandas, and are most trusted by the establish-

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ment to do so ‘responsibly’. It is also possible for black and brown artists from the bottom of the pyramid to successfully produce multiculturalist artworks and then ascend, rewarded by the upper-castes for their co-operation. 2) What, then, is a multiculturalist artwork; what must an artist do to conform to the multiculturalist orthodoxy? In the following analysis I shall refer to specific films and novels, identifying elements of multiculturalist propaganda in these works, whilst recognising that few works of art can be reduced to this and only to this. Note also that as all meaning is subjective, works of art, indeed reality itself, is interpreted, if not re-created, by our belief systems. As I shall explain later, it is possible for the authorial intent to be innocent, but for a work to take on a multiculturalist meaning in the mind of the receiver. This is particularly true when, in the mainstream arts arena, only multiculturalist works are available within particular media and genres. The power of a work is increased when it functions as an ambassador for an entire social group. 3) I shall now detail four broad techniques that are used in multiculturalist propaganda. There may be many more, but these are the ones that seem, to me, to be the most important. a) The Dark Ages versus The Golden Age Multiculturalist propagandas rarely refer to contemporary injustices in Britain, but frequently refer to social injustice abroad, or to past social injustices in Britain where the implication is that that society has changed, that we are now in the Golden Age. Such works take on a triumphalist meaning: ‘Look, we have arrived. The nightmare is over.’ For example, in the film Bend It Like Beckham, Jasminder’s father talks about how the ‘bloody English’ wouldn’t let him into their cricket team, and Jasminder reminds him that times have changed that Nasser Hussein is now captain presenting an image of progress, an end of history and politics, an end to oppression. b) Cultural Satire: Ridicule In multiculturalist propagandas, the cultural habits of black and brown people are frequently satirised, using caricature and stereotype in a light, amusing way. This suggests that because we have reached the Golden Age, we can sit back and laugh because social and cultural difference is merely trivial, an amusing comedy of manners rather than a site of injustice and oppression. Such works appear to testify to social progress, in that the images of black and brown people are no longer as explicitly derogatory as they were in the seventies and eighties. However, there is still the problem that for a genuinely


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non-racist society, cultural difference should not be enough to provoke laughter. Cultural difference should be accepted as normal rather than titillating, embarrassing, or ridiculous, all of which imply irrationality and inferiority. The laughter arises because Asian or Black culture is presented as being inherently risible, and this is the same technique used in the explicitly racist comedies of the seventies and eighties, except that today, the actors or writers are themselves black and brown. The very title of Goodness Gracious Me a pioneering work of multiculturalist caricature testifies to this, a signal that the viewer can relax; it is in the old mode. Goodness Gracious Me refers to a song from the comedy The Party, in which Peter Sellers is ‘browned up’ to play an Indian film star who causes chaos at a society event. Today, ‘browning up’ might be considered objectionable, but if the old techniques are recycled and presented by black and brown actors it can appear at first glance to be progressive, if not revolutionary. It appears that, instead of being laughed at, we are now laughing at ourselves; yet the question remains, Why should the portrayal of Asian culture in itself be enough to provoke laughter? The answer: because in contemporary British society, making fun of Asian people simply for being Asian, still sells. c) Assimilation The flipside to caricaturing cultural difference is to eliminate it, suggesting that skin colour is irrelevant to culture. Whereas the former shows black and brown cultures in a negative light, this technique suggests that there is no such thing as black and brown culture, because colour is not a determinant of culture, because colour doesn’t matter, the implication, of course, being that racism does not exist. Examples include works by black or brown authors in which the central characters are always, and only, white, or in which the author describes the character as of ‘indeterminate race’, i.e. refusing to specify the character’s skin colour because this is considered unimportant for our understanding of the character. Similarly, we have works in which colour appears to be an obstacle for people, particularly to love, but is, effortlessly, it seems, surmounted. In Bride and Prejudice, for example, the lower middle-class Indian woman ultimately marries a white American billionaire, despite her initial disgust at his perceptions of Indian culture, and the opposition of his mother. He even cancels a project worth tens of millions of dollars because she has persuaded him it has racist implications. In the vernacular of multiculturalism, inter-racial love only ever means white – non-white. It is significant that whereas in Bhaji on the Beach, we see

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a relationship between an Afro-Caribbean male and Asian female, in the far more successful Bend It Like Beckham, the male love interest is white. Bend It Like Beckham is the story of Jasminder, a young Asian girl, who wants to play football but whose parents try to prevent her from doing so. Her mother forbids her from playing and insists she learn to cook instead; there are scenes showing Jasminder practicing her football skills on tomatoes when she is supposed to be chopping them. So, Jasminder plays football in secret, supported by her friend, Jules, who introduces her to a women’s team. Jules is white, and her father is very supportive of her playing football, though her mother is less so, associating it with lesbianism. However, Jules is not a lesbian; she is in love with their coach, Joe, a man Jasminder ends up kissing. Their relationship appears prohibited on three counts: firstly, that her friend Jules is also in love with him; secondly that Joe is white, and not Sikh, so her parents will be against it; and third that he’s her coach. Later, however, a fourth obstacle appears, that of cultural difference.. During a match, an opposition player calls Jasminder a Paki and later, crying, she rails at Joe, asking him, ‘Can you understand that?’ His reply is: ‘Of course I can. I’m Irish.’ By the end of the film, Jasminder is due to go to America to play football and three of the four barriers to her relationship with Joe have been eliminated. First, she and Jules are friends again and Jules has accepted it. Second, Joe is no longer going to coach the women’s team. Parental opposetion remains as a barrier, but not cultural difference, as Joe’s Irishness appears to have cleared up the problem of their having different coloured skins and hence having experiences which may not be mutually intelligible. In the final scene, Jasminder is about to catch her flight when Joe appears at the airport and kisses her, virtually in front of her parents, but there are no repercussions. Instead, at the end of the film we see Joe playing cricket with Jasminder’s father whilst Jasminder is in America. The political philosophy Bend It Like Beckham espouses is assimilation. Jasminder is presented with a choice between backwardness and progressiveness (multicultural Britain). This backwardness is represented by her parents who, born in India, have not sufficiently assimilated into British ways in terms of their religion and culture. This culture is grossly caricatured throughout the film, whereas the opposing, white English culture, is not. The second choice, progressiveness, is represented by football and by white people. That Joe is Irish but considers himself qualified to understand colour racism, is a nod towards the view that ‘colour doesn’t matter’, that there is no significant difference between the social experience of visible and non-visible minorities (it is significant, also, that Joe hates his father, his link to another nation). Furthermore, Jasminder does not want to play cricket, a game far


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more popular among South Asians than football, and her hero is white and English, not Indian, or Brazilian, or black British. For Jasminder to assimilate, i.e. to be with Joe, she has to agree that colour doesn’t matter. She has to believe that Joe can understand her social experience even though he is white. Joe’s attitude towards Jasminder’s parents is one of respect, tolerance, and understanding . He argues that times have changed and that she should be allowed to play football. Joe is always reasonable and fair, giving in when he feels he cannot win. Jasminder is not; her desire to assimilate is too great, persuading us that this desire arises not from outside pressure but from inner desire. It is also significant also that, though the captain of the team is black, she remains only a minor character. In fact, there are no major black characters in the movie. But this would also seem to have been a option, given that football is equally popular among black Britons as white Britons. But this would have distorted the meaning of the film. It is white culture to which Jasminder aspires, and no other. The film’s feel-good ending relies on Jasminder overcoming all obstacles to her desire to assimilate, and the audience is left with a sense of well-being after being peddled the following fantasy: brown people want to assimilate, and can, because colour doesn’t matter. As such, there are no significant obstacles to the dream of multiculturalism. Jasminder’s apparent incompatibility with mainstream white culture turns out only to be façade designed to please her parents. The suggestion is, then that, by the time her parents’ generation dies off, the next generation will be fully assimilated. We can see, then, that the propagandas of multiculturalism do not, in fact, espouse multiculturalism at all, in the literal sense. Instead they promote a trend towards monoculturalism, , universalism, a point we shall return to. d) Demonisation In Bend It Like Beckham white characters are praised for their tolerance, while (old world) Asian characters are ridiculed for their lack of it. However, this can be pushed further, particularly when the black or brown characters represent more politically significant values. In such cases, multiculturalist propagandas can demonise these dissenting voices. In the film East is East, an adaptation of the stage play of the same title, we see a white English woman married to a Pakistani Muslim man who also has a wife in Pakistan, but has five children with the English woman. The children differ in their attitudes towards assimilation. One is a quiet, Godfearing Muslim, relatively compliant to his father’s wishes. Another is gay, and has moved out and been ostracised. A third is eager to assimilate,

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possessing a white girlfriend and visiting to nightclubs where he masquerades as white. The fourth, a girl, and the fifth, a boy, are too young to have clearly defined attitudes, though the boy does have the habit of referring to other Asian people as ‘Pakis’. While blatant racism appears throughout the film, the film is set in the seventies and not today, and there is the suggestion that the Golden Age is approaching when a young white boy, whose father supports Enoch Powell, regularly greets Om Puri’s character, by saying ‘Assalamaulaikum’. Furthermore, the only racism we see is perpetrated by white working-class people, never by middle-class people. In East is East the white woman is idealised: she is extremely tolerant, participating in all her husband’s customs, including the way her children are raised. She does not oppose him even when her homosexual child is rejected, her only act of subversion being to lead the children to a phone box so that they can speak to him. The Muslim male, however, is demonised. He cannot bear the fact that his (old) world is disintegrating, and becomes progressively more violent and intolerant, first towards his children and then, in the denouement, towards his wife whom he beats up very badly. The uses of multiculturalist propagandas in justifying foreign policy decisions are apparent here, with British Muslims having rapidly dropped to the bottom of the caste pyramid since 9/11. There are virtually no depictions in mainstream cinema of peaceful, tolerant, and above all rational Muslims, the implication being that anyone who self-identifies as Muslim is automatically a fanatic. In East is East, however, as in Bend It Like Beckham, it is the old generation who are portrayed negatively, not the new, who seek to assimilate but are held back by the old. The purpose of demonisation in terms of obtaining a society based on political consensus, i.e. monoculturalism, is to show the inadequacies of politically dissenting groups and cultures, and to show that these voices are either ignorant, dangerous, or else simply delusional and ridiculous. The importance of empahsising their irrationality lies in attempting to reveal their inadequacy when it comes to democratic discourse. The effect is to push them out of the political arena. The logic is clear: if dissenting groups cannot be assimilated, they must be excluded. Forms of culture that have been demonised, and hence excluded from democratic discourse, include arranged marriages, Islam, and black street culture via, amongst others, the hugely successful Ali G, who has acted as middle-man between lower and middle-caste culture. This is the phenomenon of the minstrel, an important aspect of multiculturalism. Note that the disclaimer from the accusation of racism towards Ali G is that he in fact


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parodies a white wannabe who apes Afro-Caribbean street slang and culture, but this is entirely compatible with the history of minstrelsy. By changing the race of the actors periodically, the tradition was sustained, and opposition contained. Black actors would end up parodying white actors parodying black actors parodying white actors ad infinitum, but the end result is the same: stereotyping, dehumanisation, and the appropriation of lower caste voices, the disclaimer irrelevant to the effect. There is, however, a further purpose to demonisation, and this is the maintenance of fear. Fear is essential to peddling fantasy to the middle castes, heaven only being meaningful in the presence of hell. Secondly, middle-caste fear gives a mandate to the state to extend its control in the interests of protection, hence the new anti-terrorist legislation, most of which is used to further strip the lower caste of their civil liberties. It is an interesting irony that the two highest grossing Hollywood trilogies in recent years were The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix. Put simply, it could be said that The Lord of the Rings is the worldview that upper caste rulers would like us to share, while The Matrix reveals the reality. 4) Note that the above techniques listed work together as a whole, and can only work in this way. For example, demonisation without a feel-good fantasy to run to, would simply leave the middle-castes too afraid even to consume. Or, if the past was shown in its true colours without the present being painted in gold, middle-caste audience members might arrive at the conclusion that the present is not so different. Or, if black and brown people are continually shown as desiring to assimilate without the alternative being demonised or ridiculed, the question could arise, why? Why assimilate into another culture if the original is perfectly acceptable?

III. 1) As black and brown people in Britain strive to attain greater visibility, the upper castes respond by beating them to the punch. Hence, the more political and cultural agitation we see from below, the greater is the output from above. There would have been little need for multiculturalism at all had it been feasible to maintain the invisibility of black and brown people in Britain. However, explosions such as the Brixton and Southall riots, the riots in the North-West, and, perhaps most importantly, the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, resulted in great pressure on establishment institutions to comply to demands for political representation. Almost overnight it became unacceptable to have a police force without black or brown members; it was no longer acceptable to have television

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programmes depicting communities known to be in racially mixed areas, yet employing no brown or black actors; and it was no longer acceptable to have cultural and arts industries with so few black and brown artists. The danger was that when these faces did arrive, they would be politically unacceptable to the establishment, and hence the establishment needed to fill these gaps itself, i.e. with black or brown people acceptable to an establishment agenda. The response was the galvanisation of the multiculturalist propaganda machine, ranging across cinema, literature, visual art, television, advertising etc. and also news media, a critical weapon in the battle for middle-caste perception. While it may not be possible to silence or drown out all dissenting voices via counter-propagandas, it is still possible to alter the reception of these voices in middle-caste minds. This is the role of the news media. Of course, the media can tell us how to view the war in Iraq, or the US election, or the Lawrence inquiry or North-West riots, but it can also tell us how to read a text, interpret a film, view an artwork, and can also tell us which books to read, films to watch, and exhibitions to see. This is the role of the reviewer or critic, working in tandem with the advertising industry who together can transform an ‘innocent’ work into multiculturalist propaganda by altering its meaning. The media, too, determine which works are perceived as fashionable or glamorous; they, together with the advertainment industry constructed the fiction of ‘Cool Britannia’, the New Labour administration hiring a corporate branding firm in order to re-brand the corporation of Great Britain. 2) Multiculturalism does not refer to the ideology of liberalism or cultural acceptance, and it is not a simple description of British society. It is, instead, a technology of social control, racism, and the maintenance of the caste hierarchy, an instrument of delusion, oppression, and censorship in contemporary British society. It is also a huge and growing industry, generating wealth that, mostly, is returned to the upper castes, wealth garnered mostly from middle-caste consumption,. Whilst multiculturalism masquerades as a celebration of the defeat of racism, it is in fact its opposite – a vehicle to suppress cultural diversity in contemporary Britain.

Film I: Beyond the Burden of Representation?

Ellen Dengel-Janic and Lars Eckstein

Bridehood Revisited: Disarming Concepts of Gender and Culture in Recent Asian British Film This paper explores the politics of gender and culture in recent Asian British film. In our reading, the new millennium has witnessed an ambivalent success story: on the one hand, film makers like Gurinder Chadha have almost single-handedly catapulted Asian British film into the international mainstream; while British ‘minority’ filmmakers of the 1980s and 90s still succumbed to the ‘burden of representation’, the 2000s have brought cross-over success in multiplex cinemas across Britain, India, and indeed the globe. On the other hand, this success is compromised, we believe, by a regressive politics, as the desire for global rather than local marketability tends to manifest itself in a catering to nostalgia, an avoidance of serious transgressions of gender, and in the sublimation of transcultural conflict in all sorts of exoticist fantasies. We hope to demonstrate as much, first, in a reading of Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004) in the context of British gender nostalgia and ‘Austenmania’, and second, of three further films by Neil Biswas (Second Generation, 2003), Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham, 2002) and Pratibha Parmar (Nina’s Heavenly Delights, 2006).

Who wants to cook Aloo Gobi when you can bend a ball like Beckham? Jess in Bend It Like Beckham (2002) Housekeeping is a much overlooked skill, for which, I think, I blame feminism. Tanya Turner in How to Be a Footballer’s Wife (2003) 1

1. Introduction Interviewed after the German premiere of her box office sensation Bend It Like Beckham in autumn 2002, director Gurinder Chadha happily claimed that she had ‘a letter from Tony Blair saying how much he loved the film. He enjoyed it especially because it represented his Britain, a very diverse, multicultural Britain. He also sent a House of Commons claret’.2 Those who wonder why exactly Tony Blair should have been such an enthusiastic fan of 1

2

Jodi Reynolds, How to Be a Footballer’s Wife (Basingstoke and Oxford: Shed Productions, 2003), p. 86. Claudia Sternberg, ‘Gurinder Chadha in Interview’, in Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian Film Since the 1990s, ed. by Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp.245-252 (p.246).

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Chadha’s feature film will find ample food for thought in Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s essay on ‘The Rhetoric of Multiculturalism’ in this volume; Balasubramanyam interprets Britain’s multiculturalism as a corporate propaganda, as the carefully calculated marketing of a brand in a New Labour image campaign which only superficially propagates cultural diversity, while in reality functioning as an instrument of social control and ‘white’ cultural hegemony. His reading of Bend It Like Beckham accordingly accuses Chadha of deliberate complicity with this official multi-culturalist ‘Cool Britannia’ ideology, by creating a fantasy-structure which celebrates Indo-British assimilation to white British standards in a deceptive feel-good comedy. While we do not wish to entirely disagree with Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s assessment of the ideological scope of recent Asian British mainstream cinema, we wish to complicate some of the arguments by taking a detour via questions of gender. Our starting point is that Chadha’s ‘bidding for the mainstream’ in the larger context of Black and Asian Film 3 is inextricably entwined with a bid on the cultural capital associated with Jane Austen. This, of course, is quite hard to miss regarding her 2004 feature film Bride and Prejudice, which presents us with a Bollywood-style adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic romantic novel. However, it also pertains to other Asian British films after 2000. 4 What specifically interests us in this context are the concomitant gender politics in Asian British film: if films of the 1980s and 1990s such as Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) (based on screenplays by Hanif Kureishi), David Attwood’s Wild West (1992), Udayan Prasad’s Brothers in Trouble (1996) or Chadha’s own Baji on the Beach (1996) share an interest in transgressing norms of gender and culture – be they ‘Western’ or ‘Eastern’ –, the advent of international mainstream success in the wake of Damien O’Donnell’s East is East (1999, based on a screenplay by Ayub Khan-Din) seems to come hand

3

4

See Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg’s Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian Film Since the 1990s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004) for a comprehensive overview of trends and developments until 2002. Her bid certainly is a timely one, as the global popularity and marketability of Jane Austen’s work seems at an unprecedented high in the new millennium. In 2007, Anne Hathaway (The Devil Wears Prada) starred as Jane Austen herself in a cinematic biographical take titled Becoming Jane, while Austen’s characters – and Lizzy Bennet in particular – are played by the popular sex symbols of our time; Aishwarya Rai (voted ‘most beautiful miss world of all times’ in 2000) was followed suit by Keira Knightley (voted ‘sexiest woman in the world’ by FHM UK in 2006) in Joe Wright’s production of Pride and Prejudice in 2005. On the ‘Austen Cult and Cultures,’ see Claudia L. Johnson in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.211-226.

Disarming Concepts of Gender and Culture in Recent Asian British Film

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in hand with a retraction into the moral universe of Jane Austen’s Romantic petite bourgeoisie. In the following, we will argue that this retraction is not exclusively explicable as catering to nostalgic fantasy-structures of mainstream Britain, or to what Paul Gilroy has termed ‘postcolonial melancholia’, 5 covered up in the rhetoric of multiculturalism. By contexualising Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, we will illustrate instead that Jane Austen’s outlook on gender is rather compatible with the ideologies and fantasy-structures which have been created by mainstream Bollywood films for India and its diaspora during the 1980s and 1990s. The current fashionability of Jane Austen’s moral universe, we will argue, is thus not only a specifically British phenomenon, but rather presents us with a transcultural ‘common moral denominator’ providing the material for filmic plots which promise cross-over success. The apparent alignment with a global rather than dominantly British or European market, as we wish to illustrate by reading a representative selection of other post-2000 Asian British films, indeed comes with a conscious sanctioning of transgressions of norms of gender and culture and is indicative of a larger trend in Asian British film making.

2. Gender Nostalgia Meets Bollywood: Bride and Prejudice We are currently experiencing an unmistakeable hype around Jane Austen on cinema and TV screens in Britain and, indeed, across the globe. An ever growing (paying) public is obviously attracted to Austen’s heroines – or more specifically, their mediatised film versions. Their amorous quests and moral dilemmas, their engagement with family values, class restrictions and economic problems, and the overarching concept of gender informing these concerns as embedded in the ubiquitous marriage plots, it seems, matter to women today. Germaine Greer rather unexpectedly explicates the appeal of Austen’s heroines for 21st-century female audiences thus: Austen herself was, like most women of any age, no dazzling beauty. Her heroines too are middle class, ordinary, with no special advantages of looks or education or wealth, and yet they are heroines. The battles they fight are the battles of every day. They struggle for selfcontrol in agonising circumstances. They turn aside so that other people can’t see the hot tears that start into their eyes […] Though 190 years have passed since Austen’s death, women’s emotional lives still present the same challenges. 6

This, of course, sounds like a far cry from Greer’s revolutionary feminist rhetoric of the 1970s. Surely, Jane Austen has been claimed by many as a feminist – Margaret Kirkham, for instance, positions her firmly within a 5 6

Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004). Germaine Greer, ‘In Praise of Jane’, The Guardian, 12 March 2007.

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feminist tradition, showing the strong resemblance between Wollstonecraft and Austen and positing that Austen has to be understood as partaking in ‘the first claim of Enlightenment feminism: that women share the same moral nature as men, ought to share the same moral status, and exercise the same responsibility for their own conduct’. 7 Particularly, Austen’s famous techniques of free indirect discourse and irony crucially challenge patriarchal stereotyping of women as non-rational beings. Yet if Jane Austen’s art or ideology can thus indeed be considered emancipated in historical perspective, this does not automatically make for a feminist appeal today, even if many critics, including Greer, seem to posit the opposite – or in other words: it is important to distinguish between Austen’s literary oeuvre in its own context, and Jane Austen as a brand name in the Austen craze since the 1990s. 8 We would insist that a few ‘challenges’ and ‘circumstances’ have indeed changed in the last 190 years which render part of the ideological framework of Austen’s gendered universe rather incompatible with more recent feminist ideas. The most pressing and obvious point here is that even if Austen’s heroines are rational, introspective and confident, the framework of their fictional biographies is firmly based on social norms of conduct and marriage. Even though Gilbert and Gubar argue that ‘[m]arriage is crucial because it is the only accessible form of self-definition for girls in her society’, 9 and Moers points out that Austen’s subject is not courtship but ‘marriageship’, 10 sociocultural norms typically remain unchallenged. Upward social mobility, and, by extension, happiness, is possible for women only through marriage (the undisputed focal point of Austen’s plots which are basically modelled on the generic conventions of the comedy), and any transgression against the everpresent norms of class, gender, and particularly, the bourgeois family, tend to be severely sanctioned. 7 8

9

10

Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1983), p.84. Sutherland, Kathryn, ‘Muddying the Hem: How to Make the Great Jane Austen Movie – From Makeover to Minimalism’, TLS, 13 April 2007, pp.20-21, (p.20). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p.127. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City and New York: Doubleday, 1976), p.71. Moers goes on to examine how ‘marriageship’ has to be conceived: ‘the cautious investigation of a field of eligible males, the delicate manoeuvring to meet them, the refined outpacing of rivals, the subtle circumventing of parental power (his and hers), and the careful management, at the end of the story, which turns idle flirtation into a form offer of marriage with a good settlement for life. All this must be carried on in a way that the heroine maintains her self-respect, her moral dignity, her character as daughter, sister, friend, and neighbour, and her youth; it must be done quickly, in a year or two, before her bloom fades. […]. Marriageship is one of those subjects that must be read imaginatively from the woman’s point of view, which here differs from that of the man’ (p.71).


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The current wave of Austen adaptations on British screens really ties in, therefore, with a recent vogue of anti-feminist ideology, 11 by mediatising what we would like to call ‘gender nostalgia’.12 It forms part of a larger bestselling wave of British artists who, in Paul Gilroy’s words, ‘affirm post Feminist responses to the country’s changing structures of class, gender, and family [and] share a basic hope that the destructive process that corroded family life from within can be reversed by,’ among other things, ‘reconstitution of the bourgeois household’. 13 Gilroy’s perspective is particularly important in this context since it shows how the resurgence of conservative gender ideology is part of a larger cultural conservatism which goes hand in hand with the discrediting and demise of a number of transnational political agendas among which feminism is only one (next to, for instance, Marxist, post-colonial or anti-racism movements). The phenomenon of gender nostalgia, Gilroy argues, is part of a larger political climate in which ‘cultural nationalism, cheap patriotism, and absolute ethnicity supply the potent default settings for political identity,’ 14 and in which the 19th century tends to be increasingly perceived

11

12

13 14

Pulitzer prize winner Susan Faludi speaks of a ‘backlash’ against feminism in an American context since the 1980s. Cf. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women (New York: Doubleday, 1991); Susan Bolotin coined the term ‘post-feminism’ as early as 1982 in ‘Voices from the Post-Feminist Generation’, New York Times Magazine, 17 October 1982. While Faludi and Bolotin are mainly concerned with intellectual retraction from feminist ideas, in the early years of the new millennium a new, popular as well as intellectual anti-feminism has been attested. The German magazine Der Spiegel recently suggested that ‘[a] new wave of anti-feminism is taking hold of Germany. Former career women-turned-housewives are spreading the word about a “new femininity” which encourages women to stay at home and embrace motherhood’. Khuê Pham, ‘Germany’s New-Housewives Spark Debate on Gender Roles’, Spiegel Online, 15 March 2007, our transl. We should indicate here that we have a slightly different reading of filmic nostalgia than Slavoj Žižek, for instance, proposes. Žižek holds that nostalgia in film works on the grounds that ‘we are fascinated by the gaze of the mythic “naïve” spectator, the one who was “still able to take it seriously,” in other words, the one who “believes in it” for us, in place of us’. He concludes that ‘[f]or that reason, our relation to [such films] is always divided, split between fascination and ironic distance: ironic distance toward its diegetic reality, fascination with the gaze’ (112). What is at stake regarding the success of heritage film and gender nostalgia in Britain, it seems, is probably the exact opposite of what Žižek suggests: There is indeed, as Greer puts forth, a continuing fascination and identification with the diegetic ‘realities’ of gender in Austen’s moral universe, while fresh, playful and ironic approaches to sex up 19th-century discourse and modes of perception are permissible and invited. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Pornography, Nostalgia, Montage: A Triad of the Gaze’, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), pp.107-22. Paul Gilroy, After Empire, p.130. Ibid., p.28

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‘as an economically, culturally and morally intact era’. 15 Gilroy speaks of ‘postcolonial melancholia’ in this context, of a desire to return to a purportedly intact cultural identity in a process that is wilfully forgetful, not only of the more dire realities of Victorian gender politics, but especially of the imperial atrocities of the Victorian reign. As Gilroy assesses: Once the history of Empire became a source of discomfort, shame, and perplexity, its complexities and ambiguities were readily set aside. Rather than working trough those feelings, that unsettling history was diminished, denied, and then, if possible, actively forgotten. The resulting silence feeds an additional catastrophe: the error of imagining that postcolonial people are only unwanted alien intruders without any substantive historical, political, or cultural connections to the collective life of their fellow subjects. 16

If one attends to the nuances of Gilroy’s argument, therefore, the realities of racism and cultural exclusion, particularly after 9/11 and the 2005 London bombings, and the current Austenmania on British screens, seem less unrelated than they appear at first sight. If a member of the Indian Diaspora in Britain partakes in the Austen craze by taking up a popular classic like Pride and Prejudice and bending it into the generic context of Bollywood cinema, this should by the nature of Gilroy’s argument provide ample space for writing back in familiar Green Book fashion. Quite obviously, though, viewers who hope to find postcolonial subversion or serious (gender)political aspirations in Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice will be rather disappointed. The reason, we would propose, why a film which is, in Homi Bhabha’s sense, paradigmatically hybrid, nevertheless fails to live up to postcolonial ideals of subversion is that Bride and Prejudice deliberately evades the postcolonial logic of cultural confrontation (as expressed in centre versus periphery, coloniser versus colonised). Instead, it seeks out global alignment and common ground between cultural norms and conventions, thereby conforming to the dominant logic of globalism, i.e. that of the market. Or in other words: Bride and Prejudice no longer desperately bids for the British mainstream, but for the British (and Euro-American), and the Diaspora, and the Indian mainstream, self-confidently catering to a number of very different veritable markets at the same time. The recipe allowing cross-over rather than local mainstream success could vaguely be described thus: 1) choose a plot structure which appeals to the popular taste of all cultural contexts; 2) avoid serious transgressions of heteronormative notions of gender and culture with regard to all contexts; 3) sublimate potential fractions between culture-specific norms in exoticist fantasies and clichés.

15

16

Eva Ulrike Pirker, ‘Britain’, in English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion, ed. by Lars Eckstein (Stuttgart: UTB, 2006), pp.33-60, (p.34). Paul Gilroy, After Empire, p.98.


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In view of these demands, it turns out that the nostalgic revival of Austen’s work and the world of Bollywood cinema are hardly as incompatible as a first glance would suggest, but rather that they are in several respects an ingenious match. In terms of plots and their underlying gender ideologies, there are a number of similarities between Austen’s tales and prototypical Bollywood films. 17 Even though one of the dominant tropes in Bollywood is love at first sight, followed by opposition from authoritarian fathers (and mothers), the films usually re-establish the values of the middle-class family as love interests are integrated into the cultural norm. 18 Take for example Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (dir. Sooraj Barjatya, 1994), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (dir. Aditya Chopra 1995) or Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (dir. Karan Johar, 2003), the three most popular films of the past 20 years: in all three films, family values are ultimately more influential than the romance plot, very similar to Austen’s moral universe in which individual love and desire have to be subordinated to moral values and rules of conduct. Certainly, in Bollywood – just as in Austen’s novels – transgressive moments occur, such as Kajol’s rebellion against her father in Dilwale; the protagonist falls in love with a stranger despite the fact that she has agreed to an arranged marriage. 19 Yet the initial transgression of the socio-familial ideology on 17

18

19

We should make clear that Bollywood is not to be equated with Indian cinema, even if it is its most prominent segment. According to Rajadhyaksha, until around 1990, Bollywood roughly denoted ‘popular Hindi film’ and has only more recently opened to non-Indian audiences (from the beginning, however, there was a trend towards globalisation in Bollywood’s catering to Diaspora audiences around the globe). ‘The term [Bollywood] today refers to a reasonably specific narrative and a mode of presentation […]. Amit Khanna [says] that “Indian movies are feel-good, all-happy-in-the-end, tender love stories with lots of song and dances […]. That’s what attracts non-Indian audiences across the world” and to this we could add “family values” and their palpable, if not entirely self-evident, investment in “our culture.”’ Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian cinema: Cultural Nationalism in the Global Arena’, in City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, ed. by Preben Kaarsholm (Calcutta and New Delhi: Seagull Books, 2004), pp.113-139 (p.119). Of course, it is impossible to reduce Bollywood to traditionalism or nostalgia; as Prasad argues, Bollywood simultaneously caters to tradition and a ‘desire for modernity’: ‘While often anchored in familiar narratives that reinforce traditional moral codes, the popular film text also offers itself as an object of the desire for modernity’. Madhava M. Prasad, ‘Cinema and the Desire for Modernity’, Journal of Arts and Ideas 25/26 (December 1993), 71-86 (p.85). Despite the fact that critic Gayatri Gopinath offers an alternative reading of classical Bollywood drama, namely, a queer reading of the joint family in films like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun…! (dir. Sooraj Barjatya 1994), the space for new gender roles and norms is rather limited when it comes to popular Hindi films. Cf. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). As the film progresses, the perspective shifts from the female to the male protagonist, played by famous Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan, whose endeavour to convince Simran’s (Kajol) family of his suitability as a future son-in-law, becomes the dominant focus.

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marriage is later overpowered by a willingness of the couple to conform and to subject themselves to the ‘law of the father’. Hence they seek the family’s permission to get married, a permission which can only be given by the patriarch himself (Amrish Puri cast in a very typical role). In Pride and Prejudice disobedience against parental advice – as in Lydia’s eloping with Wickham – similarly leads to despair, and can only be (partly) redeemed by Darcy’s newly gained patriarchal influence which forces Wickham into the normative confines of marriage. 20 The Lucky (Lydia)-Wickham subplot, incidentally, is the only feature in Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice which significantly differs from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in an otherwise rather faithful adaptation revolving around the Amritsar-based Mr. and Mrs. Bakshi and their four beautiful and eligible daughters. Lucky indeed runs off with Wickham in a rush of teenage folly, yet it is only a few days before she and Wickham are tracked down by Darcy and Lalita (Lizzy); Darcy gives Wickham a good beating, Lalita and Lucky give him a good slap, and the matter is resolved as Lucky returns to the secure bosom of her own family. On the one hand, one might argue that this de-escalation of the affair is merely conceived to make for a happier happy ending which is required by Bollywood convention. On the other hand, of course, it avoids alienating Diaspora and Indian audiences in terms of culture and gender. After all, Johnny Wickham not only represents the bad boy of the tale, but he is also white, English, comparatively poor and lower class (being the son of Darcy’s nanny and living on a house boat in London). While interracial romance in itself seriously challenges the conventions of Bollywood, interracial marriage without the redemption of economic and social improvement seems to have been too much to ask of Bride and Prejudice’s Asian audience segments. Consequently, Lalita Bashki’s romance with and eventual marriage to Darcy, a white American, is the movie’s only consistent transgression of norms of gender and culture.

20

Focalisation indeed perhaps proposes the most obvious difference between the gendered narratives of Jane Austen and Bollywood – while the latter is dominantly preoccupied with male perspectives, the first foregrounds the emotional and moral development of her female characters. Deepa Nair holds that ‘Pride and Prejudice has always been a favourite with the Indians. For Austen’s world is not much different from the middle class Indian homes. Like the 18thcentury England of Austen’s novel, the world in Chadha’s film is primarily concerned with the question of matrimony. Marriage for Bakshi sisters and their friends offer the sole mode of escape from the small town they were born in. The craze of getting NRI grooms for daughters is also something quite real in India’. ‘Bride and Prejudice – A Review’, South Asian Women’s Forum (15 May 2007).


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Bride and Prejudice effectively disarms this transgression, however, through a number of redeeming elements: first, Darcy is a less problematic choice than Wickham; after all, he is a desirable millionaire and part of a respectable family in the hotel business; and he is an American living in the glamorous world of L.A. rather than an ambiguous 21 British tramp based in the former imperial centre of London. Second and just as importantly, Indian audiences are made to feel good about Darcy as he is thoroughly ‘reformed’ by Lalita and eventually acknowledges the equality, if not superiority, of Indian culture. Starting out with a great portion of, as Lalita puts it, ‘arrogance, pride and vanity’ and expecting to find ‘simple, traditional and subservient’ women, he encounters a woman who teaches him better. The main battle ground between Darcy and Lalita is, not surprisingly, family values. Lalita angrily responds to Darcy’s qualms about arranged marriages that ‘Americans think they have the answer for everything, including marriage – pretty arrogant considering they have the highest divorce rate in the world’, and goes on to explain that ‘it is more like a global dating service’. Darcy is hardly convinced at first, but over the course of the film comes to value Lalita’s points; in a subchapter tellingly titled ‘The Importance of Family’, he begins to truly win Lalita’s affections by acknowledging his own disrupted family background (‘I don’t remember the last time my family got together like this’). Bride and Prejudice thus at once caters to British gender nostalgia (paired with exoticist fantasy), counters Western notions of backwardness by reinterpreting arranged marriages in a context of ‘global dating,’ and confirms reservations against the corruptions of Western liberalism. Yet Darcy is not only turned into an acceptable groom by becoming a true family man; more crucially, perhaps, he also comes to accept the national(ist) metaphorical overtones of the trope of the family by learning not to interfere with the body politic of ‘Mother India’. Having come to India to invest in a five star hotel complex in Goa, Lalita, as it turns out in the end, manages to talk him out of the investment by accusing him of neo-colonial interests, ‘[y]ou want people to come to India without having to deal with Indians,’ she admonishes, and concludes: ‘I don’t want you to turn India into a theme park. I thought we got rid of imperialists like you’. Read as a meta-commentary, these statements perhaps form the most stunning moments of irony in the entire film – because, of course, we are hardly presented with a ‘realistic’ image of either India or the US in Bride and Prejudice itself; rather, what we get is indeed a collage of ‘theme park’ imagery in best Bollywood fashion. If there is any sense of social realism at all, it is – as in Jane Austen’s novels – firmly reserved for the middle classes, 21

In Bollywood films, ambiguity in characterisation is mostly evaded (there are a few exceptions, such as Devdas, dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali 2002, a remake of Devdas, dir. P.C. Barua 1935); instead, characters are clearly divided into good and evil, hero and villain.

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even if Mrs. Bakshi’s moaning about her old house and unpaid bills strikes the viewer as slightly spoiled in view of the ‘palace’ which the family inhabits. Apart from a clownish toothless servant in the opulent family home, people of lower castes and classes are only shown and given a voice during dance sequences in the streets of Amritsar, where they happily sing in heavily accented English and wear colourful costumes. The film goes through a total of four Indian weddings, and the dominant image of India for Western viewers is indeed, as the DVD-cover hails, one of ‘vibrant colours, fantastic musical numbers, and stunning dance routines’. Americans, of course, do not fare much better in this context. The most memorable moment of exoticist fantasy primarily created for the Indian market, presumably, is a musical sequence on an L.A. beach where Darcy and Lalita’s blossoming romance is framed by the appearance, first, of a full-blown gospel choir, then of a number of surfers who begin to wave their boards, and finally of a Baywatch couple running to the rescue in tight red speedo gear. Quite obviously, this deliberate accumulation of clichés owes much to a playful homage to the larger generic conventions of Bollywood and its selfconsciously anti-realist aesthetics. In view of her global market, Chadha makes effective use of a persistent strategy of double address; passages which cater to the exoticist and escapist fantasies of certain audience segments will simultaneously appeal to other viewers as hilarious persiflages or revealing caricatures, and vice versa. Significantly, though, the recourse to constant cliché and hyperbole alleviates viewers in either case of really having to engage with cultural otherness in any serious way; instead, cultural difference can always be readily relegated to the realm of exotic fantasy or comic laughter, and never gets in the way of the bourgeois feel-good comedy. Potential ideological conflict regarding different cultural norms – particularly with regard to gender ideology – are thus defused from the very beginning, and transcultural negotiation is really only a sexy surface phenomenon which is always carefully interrogated for veritable marketability (as encapsulated, perhaps, in the special appearance of black American singer Ashanti, who performs a bhangra-inflected pop number at a Goa beach party). Beneath this glitzy glam transcultural surface, Bride and Prejudice tends to affirm conservative nostalgia on all sides, and retracts into cultural and national(ist) stereotypes.

3. Ways out of Transgression: Second Generation, Bend It Like Beckham and Nina’s Heavenly Delights Gurinder Chandha’s aiming at global mainstream success and its concomitant, only thinly veiled conservatism is rather blatantly obvious in a film like Bride and Prejudice; this conservatism, as we have shown, is only partly


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explicable as an orientation of the British mainstream and the cultural capital of Jane Austen in the context of a larger, widely mediatised gender nostalgia in Britain. Rather, Chadha’s film ingeniously negotiates British mainstream conservatism with the moral universe of Bollywood and not only fits the tastes of the booming Indian market segments, but also appeals to the exoticism of Western viewers. However, in order to decide whether we are indeed dealing with a larger cultural trend here, it is necessary to examine whether Chadha’s formula for global success is also applicable to other recent Asian British film productions and directors less obviously indebted to Bollywood, yet similarly concerned with intercultural negotiations of gender. We suggest a brief look at three further recent productions, therefore: first, the two-part Channel 4 feature film Second Generation (dir. Neil Biswas 2003), which particularly fits this discussion as it adapts another all-English classic; second, Gurinder Chadha’s earlier Bend It Like Beckham (2002), and Pratibha Parmar’s Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006). While an adaptation of King Lear set in cosmopolitan multi-ethnic London might raise expectations regarding a (postcolonial) subversion of the canonical text, Second Generation, taken as a whole, is a surprisingly conservative rendering of the Lear tale (albeit closer to Nahum Tate’s adaptation than to the Shakespearean original). 22 One significant alteration, though, provides a valid point of entry into a discussion of Second Generation, namely the centrality of the female protagonist’s predicament. Heere (Parminder K. Nagra, playing the Cordelia figure) falls out with her family as her patriarchal (first generation immigrant) father (Om Puri) cannot accept the fact that she has adapted to a British ‘lifestyle’. Her transgression, from her family’s point of view, lies in her relationship with a white British journalist (Danny Dyer). As in all films under discussion here, the problem of being caught between two conflicting worlds – the more ‘traditional’ world of the family and the ‘modern’ world of Western society, and the difference between Indian and Western culture – is thus negotiated through the central female protagonist. Yet more so than in the other movies, Heere is reduced to a symbol in Second Generation, a symbol of difference which is basically emptied of individuality and depth of character. Through her, the movie basically stages incompatible gender concepts, pertaining to Western notions and Indian family norms respectively, both centering on female sexuality. Female sexuality, indeed, is seen as inherently conflictual. As long as an inter-racial relationship is maintained, a re-union with her family seems im22

Cf. Ellen Dengel-Janic and Johanna Roering, ‘Re-Imaging Shakespeare in Second Generation (2003) – A British-Asian Perspective on Shakespeare’s King Lear’, in Drama and Cultural Change: Turning Around Shakespeare, ed. by Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker (Trier: WVT, 2008 forthcoming).

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possible. But as soon as Heere enters a sexual relationship with her childhood friend and owner of an underground record label, Sam Khan (Christopher Simpson), she begins to rediscover her ‘Indianness’, presented in the film as a rather unproblematic, organic category which eventually redeems Heere of the contingencies and fragmentations of ‘Western’ life. The ultimate reaffirmation of her (Indian) cultural identity takes place when she is identified and defined according to her gendered role in the family: thus Heere not only decides to take care of her old, mad father, but she also chooses Sam, whose attitudes to family and especially Heere’s father are presented as more sympathetic than Jack’s (Heere’s boyfriend), who advises her to ultimately transgress family values. Thus the family, like in the moral universe of Bollywood or Jane Austen, eventually wins over transgression and individualism. This is highlighted particularly in the film’s ending, when Heere, her father and Sam return to ‘Mother India’ to escape the corruptions of British life and diaspora kinship (Heere’s two sisters as greedy Goneril and Regan figures). What is striking here is a significant change in Heere’s character: we are left with Heere bargaining at a local Indian market, followed by a domestic scene in which she is serving food to her father and husband-to-be. Sublimating all earlier conflicts and ambiguities, this transformation from independent, even rebellious, young woman, having a pre-marital relationship with a British man, to a dutiful wife-to-be and daughter is presented as utterly unproblematic and convincing. In contrast to pre-2000 films such as, for example, Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach, which takes an openly feminist stance against various forms of patriarchal oppression (domestic violence being one of the film’s most dominant themes), Second Generation reverts to conservatism. Gender as well as cultural identity are in the end reduced to blatant stereotypes, and the narrative closure sublimates all complexity, let alone transgression, in favour of an astonishingly simplistic and idealised resolution. 23 Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It like Beckham, released a year before Second Generation, promises a different take on gendered identity: after all, Chadha herself labelled it a ‘girl power movie’. 24 Yet a glimpse beneath the surface soon reveals that Bend It Like Beckham basically shows a similar unwillingness to openly transgress norms of gender and culture. The gender roles in Bend It Like Beckham adhere to a strictly heteronormative matrix despite the fact that the movie’s core idea is a story of transgression – that of a young Asian-British girl who wants to become a footballer. Bend It Like Beckham

23

24

At least on the level of story. In terms of its filmic discourse and its visual and auditory focus on the British dub and bhangra house scene (Nitin Sawhney providing the movie’s soundtrack), the message is less clear cut (cf. Dengel-Janic and Roering, ‘Re-Imaging Shakespeare’). Sternberg, ‘Gurinder Chadha in Interview’, p.246.


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receives more detailed attention elsewhere in this volume, 25 and we therefore wish to only very briefly indicate how the transgressive potential of the plot is defused by strategic appeals to gender nostalgia and cultural conservatism. This concerns, firstly, Chadha’s take on family values and agency in gendered contexts. Here, Jess’s (again, Parminder K. Nagra) passion for football rather than cooking indeed presents a serious transgression against norms of gender and culture (football being a paradigmatically ‘English’ sport, while Jess’s father is a cricketer – which is of course no less English, but has been fully appropriated by Indians) – yet it is important to note that Jess is willing and determined to heroically sacrifice her passion to please her family; eventually, it is her father who permits her to play the all-important league final despite the fact that it is her sister’s wedding day. In other words, Jess’s transgression is only legitimised, in the end, by the redeeming effect of patriarchal consent. Secondly, Chadha obviously shied away from a more provocative presentation of the core triangular relationship between Jess, her white team mate Jules (Keira Knightly) and her coach Jo (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Both girls are in love with their coach, while Jules in the end steps back for Jess. As in Bride and Prejudice, the main transgression here is the interracial relationship between Jess and Jo, and again, cultural friction and conflict are defused in rather simplistic strategies of evasion – Jo is Irish rather then English, and purports to know everything about racism and being an outsider in Britain (which supposedly eliminates potential cultural friction between him and Jess). Any notion of an (interracial) sexual attraction between the two girls, by way of contrast, is negated in the filmic plot – rather, lesbian overtones are merely used for one of the main comic twists, as Jules’s mother mistakes the two girls’ friendship for an affair. 26 It is highly interesting to note in this context that Chadha apparently wanted a lesbian romance in Bend It Like Beckham in the beginning, but then decided to stay within heteronormative bounds. Chadha’s friend Nisha Ganatra claims that Chadha planned to have a lesbian main plot, ‘but “chickened out” at the last minute for fear of offending and upsetting Indian audiences’. 27 What has originally been conceived as a queer story, quite obviously, has been very consciously domesticated to become a fairly tame romantic comedy in view of the film’s global marketability. All remaining transgressions – Jess’s love of football, and of her white (Irish) coach – are toned down and eventually ratified by parental law, and even though the main marriage plot is ‘incomplete’, if you 25 26 27

Cf. the essays by Rajeev Balasubramanyam and Sandra Heinen. The film’s only gay character is Jess’s cousin, who remains largely undeveloped. Cited in Sarah Warn, ‘Dropping Lesbian Romance from Beckham the Right Decision’, AfterEllen, November 2003 (15 May 2007).

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like, Bend It Like Beckham is hardly far beyond the normative moral universe of Jane Austen’s romantic comedies. To complement a larger picture of the post-2000 Asian British film scene, let us close then with a feature film which is, at first glance, all about transgression in a Diaspora context. Pratibha Parma’s Nina’s Heavenly Delights centres around Nina Shah (Shelley Conn) who returns to her Glaswegian family after three years in London ‘exile’ to attend her father’s funeral. It gradually turns out that she escaped from an arranged marriage on her wedding day in pursuit of ‘true’ love, and the power of ‘true love’ vs. family obligation also forms the core concern of the film. Upon her return, she finds that her father, a renowned Indian chef and two-time winner of ‘The Best of the West Curry Competition’ hosted by the local ‘Karma TV’ station, gambled away half his restaurant, now owned by the attractive young Scotswoman Lisa (Laura Fraser). Rather than selling the restaurant off to her father’s former rival (her mother’s secret ‘true’ love) and his son (Nina’s formerly intended husband Sanjay), Nina and Lisa hook up to posthumously fulfil the late chef’s dream of winning a ‘Best of the West’ hattrick. Circling around this basic plot, the film celebrates transgression – Nina’s teenage sister is a Scottish Highland Dance champion; her brother is secretly married to a white Scotswoman and comes out just before the crucial culinary competition; Nina’s childhood friend Bobbie is a wannabe drag queen who rehearses with his friends to get a role in an ominous ‘Scollywood’ feature titled ‘Love in a Wet Climate’; Lisa and Nina, finally, fall deeply in love and eventually come out, after Nina’s mother’s encouragement to elevate love over mistaken family obligations, during the ‘Best in the West’ TV battle (which the girls of course win against the purely technical, but non-sensuous brilliance of Sanjay). There is no doubt that Pratibha Parma violates rule two of our tentative recipe for global success (avoid serious transgressions of heteronormative boundaries) which Chadha and Biswas have rather faithfully followed in Bend It Like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice, and Second Generation. 28 Yet, she of course compensates for this violation by deliberately wallowing in rule three (sublimate potential fractions between culture-specific norms into fantasies and clichés). If the closure of Second Generation evades the complexities of transcultural dynamics by a nostalgic return to holistic stereotypes of gender and culture, Nina’s Heavenly Delights proposes a diametrically opposed, yet no less simplistic solution – namely the effortless transcendence of all social obstacles through the power of love. In cooking as in life, the 28

As Philip French notes in a Guardian review, ‘Not since the last major amnesty in Ulster have so many people come out at the same time’. Philip French, ‘Review of Nina’s Heavenly Delights’, The Guardian, 1 October 2006.


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chef’s core message goes, ‘no matter what the recipe says, petit, always follow your heart’. This evasion of social realism is, of course, a deliberate and in a way legitimate artistic choice, highlighted by metafictional commentary (as in magical realist sequences in which the benevolent ghost of the dead chef appears, or in the film’s closing sequence, which presents us with a dance routine as part of the shooting of ‘Love in Wet Climate’, featuring not only Billie and his drag friends, but all other characters of Nina’s Heavenly Delights, too). Parma thus constantly indicates that what is at stake is the fictional creation of an ‘urban fairytale albeit in a world full of real people,’ 29 and the DVD cover proudly quotes reviews styling the film as ‘unapologetically upbeat’ and, quite tellingly, ‘breezy and escapist’. Even though rooted in a local, Indo-Glaswegian context and based upon autobiographical experience, 30 Nina’s Heavenly Delights evades the particularities of social problems; instead, it seeks the company of other major ‘exotic foodies’ (first and foremost, probably, Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman and Alfonso Arau’s Like Water for Chocolate) and counters the provocative thrust of its gender politics in a fantasy world of sensuous universalism.

4. Conclusion: One Step Backward or One Step Beyond? What are the tentative conclusions to be drawn from the analysis of the four films we have looked into in our discussion? We believe that it is not too farfetched to argue that overall, the progress of Asian British film in the new millennium is marked by an unmistakeable evasion of the complexities of transcultural exchange and the ways in which notions of gender are implicated in such dynamics. We should perhaps make quite clear that this is not to claim that the films fail to live up to a purportedly universal set of Western feminist ideas; as Chandra Talpade Mohanty explicated in her seminal essay ‘Under Western Eyes,’ to globally impose Western feminism as a universal doctrine comes with a number of severe problems, not least since it tends to lump together a range of highly diverse cultural contexts to construct the singular category of invariably oppressed ‘Third World Women’. 31 Rather, our argument is that Asian British filmmakers have tended to give in to rather facile resolutions and often nostalgic fantasies of gender and culture which transcend the conflictual realities of socio-historical challenges (generally staged by focussing on central female characters).

29

30 31

Parma’s ‘Director’s Statement’ as part of the ‘Production Notes’ (31 May 2007). Ibid. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, Feminist Review, 30 (Autumn 1988), 61-88.

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There are two ways of assessing this phenomenon. The first is to see it as a sign of progress and, ultimately, emancipation from what Kobena Mercer called the ‘burden of representation’. 32 If up until around 2000 ‘the relatively small number of black art works which are available to a potential audience,’ as Karen Ross summarises Mercer’s argument, meant ‘that each one must necessarily bear the burden of having to authenticate and typify heterogeneous black communities’ 33 in a multi-ethnic British context, recent Asian British filmmakers have clearly freed themselves from this ‘burden’. Social realism and differentiated takes on culture and gender are no longer top of the agenda, as our readings have tried to illustrate. Once confidently part of the mainstream, the next frontier is the global market, the potentialities of which have only been fully opened up for Asian British cinema by the unexpected blockbusting success of Bend It Like Beckham. As Korte and Sternberg indicate, the particular privilege of Asian British film (as opposed to black British film) in this context is that it may draw both on the British film tradition and marketing mechanisms, but also on the booming South Indian film industry, which increasingly develops an ‘interest in supporting British Asian films’. 34 Chadha’s affirmation that she would ‘rather make films for the multiplex crowd than for academics’, and that Bend It Like Beckham was indeed her attempt ‘to make the most commercial, mainstream, wide-appealing, multiplex movie [she] possibly could – with an Indian girl in the lead’, 35 may thus indeed be interpreted as a sign of an ultimate and successful ‘centring of the margin’. Asian British filmmakers, such a reading would suggest, singlehandedly moved Asian British film from a politically overdetermined minority art to a relatively autonomous global player. Chadha’s anticipation of academic discontent shall not prevent us, though, from interrogating some of the downsides of this process. Of course, one may find the reductive perspectives on gender and culture which we have attempted to highlight in our discussion regrettable as such, and a fairly high price to pay for commercial success; though it should also be mentioned that such moralistic calls for artistic integrity tend to underestimate some of the institutional difficulties of political filmmaking. It is interesting to note in this context that after a (gender)politically daring film like Bhaji on the Beach (1993), co-funded by Channel 4 and ‘the first mainstream feature written, directed and produced by a non-white British Woman’ (italics in the 32

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Kobena Mercer, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text, 10 (1990), 6178. Karen Ross, Black and White Media: Black Images in Popular Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Politiy Press), p.51. Korte and Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream? p.37. Sternberg, ‘Gurinder Chadha in Interview’, p.250.


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original), 36 Gurinder Chadha did not initially find funding for a second feature film in Britain, and instead produced her second feature What’s Cooking (2000) in L.A., before returning to Britain with Bend It Like Beckham. 37 What is more problematic, however, is perhaps that while Asian British filmmakers tend to busily alleviate themselves of the ‘burden of representation’, established white British filmmakers have – very successfully in commercial terms – moved into the vacuum and discovered the ‘authentification’ and ‘typifying’ of Asian British communities, and by extension of gender roles within these communities, as a topical subject. Thus, it is avatars of committed British social realism like Ken Loach (Ae Fond Kiss, 2004) or Kenneth Glenaan (Yasmin, 2004) who take most of the credit for critically engaging with the new Asian-British realities after the turbulences of 9/11, while their (disputatious) ideological positioning is hardly challenged by Asian mainstream directors. 38 One of the most expensive prices to pay for having moved beyond the ‘burden of representation’, it seems to us, is to leave the job to the others – and to relapse again into the ‘burden of being represented’.

Works Cited Biswas, Neil, dir., Second Generation (UK 2003). Bolotin, Susan, ‘Voices from the Post-Feminist Generation’, New York Times Magazine, 18 October 1982. Chadha, Gurinder, dir., Bend It Like Beckham (UK 2002). ——. Bride and Prejudice (UK 2004). Chopra, Aditya, dir., Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (India 1995). Dengel-Janic, Ellen and Johanna Roering, ‘Re-Imaging Shakespeare in Second Generation (2003) – A British-Asian Perspective on Shakespeare’s King Lear’, in Drama and Cultural Change: Turning Around Shakespeare, ed. by Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker (Trier: WVT, 2008 forthcoming).

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Korte und Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream? p.163. Cf. Sternberg, ‘Interview’, pp.248-49. Which role the recent policy of the UK Film Council, itself funded by the National Lottery, plays in the larger picture, and whether, as Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s assessment of Bend It Like Beckham suggests, New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’ ideology comes into play here, remains a matter of speculation – suffice it to say that Tony Blair and New Labour have taken a decided interest in the more recent commercial success of Asian British film which coincides with increasing government funds. One exception being Neil Biswas’s second drama commissioned for Channel 4 after Second Generation, Bedford Riots (2006), which is hardly interested in (female) gender roles.

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Faludi, Susan, Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women (New York: Doubleday, 1991). French, Philip, ‘Review of Nina’s Heavenly Delights’, The Guardian, 1 October 2006. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Gilroy, Paul, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge 2004). Gopinath, Gayatri, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). Greer, Germaine, ‘In Praise of Jane’, The Guardian, 12 March 2007. Johnson, Claudia L., ‘Austen Cult and Cultures’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.211-226. Kirkham, Margaret, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1983). Korte, Barbara and Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian Film Since the 1990s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004). Mercer, Kobena, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text 10 (1990), 61-78. Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (Garden City and New York: Doubleday, 1976). Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, Feminist Review 30 (Autumn 1988), 61-88. Nair, Deepa, ‘Bride and Prejudice – A Review’, South Asian Women’s Forum [accessed on 15 May 2007]. Parmar, Prathiba, ‘Director’s Statement’, in ‘Production Notes’ [accessed on 31 May 2007]. Parmar, Prathiba, dir., Nina’s Heavenly Delights (UK 2006). Pham, Khuê, ‘Germany’s New-Housewives Spark Debate on Gender Roles, Spiegel Online, 15 March 2007 [accessed on 31 May 2007]. Pirker, Eva Ulrike, ‘Britain’, in English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion, ed. by Lars Eckstein (Stuttgart: UTB, 2006), pp.33-60. Prasad, Madhava M. ‘Cinema and the Desire for Modernity’, Journal of Arts and Ideas 25/26 (December 1993), 71-86.


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Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian cinema: Cultural Nationalism in the Global Arena’, in City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, ed. by Preben Kaarsholm (Calcutta and New Delhi: Seagull Books, 2004), pp.113-139. Reynolds, Jodi, How to Be a Footballer’s Wife (Basingstoke and Oxford: Shed Productions, 2003). Ross, Karen, Black and White Media: Black Images in Popular Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Politiy Press). Sternberg, Claudia, ‘Gurinder Chadha in Interview’, in Bidding for the Mainstream: Black and Asian Film Since the 1990s, ed. by Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp.24552. Sutherland, Kathryn, ‘Muddying the Hem: How to Make the Great Jane Austen Movie – from Makeover to Minimalism’, TLS, 13 April 2007, pp.20-21. Warn, Sarah, ‘Dropping Lesbian Romance from Beckham the Right Decision’, AfterEllen, November 2003 [accessed on 15 May 2007]. Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Pornography, Nostalgia, Montage: A Triad of the Gaze’, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), pp.107-22.

Sandra Heinen

Multi-Ethnic Britain on Screen: South Asian Diasporic Experience in Recent Feature Films Several recent feature films depict the life of South Asians in contemporary Britain. However, although they all deal with diasporic experience, they interpret this experience in radically different ways. This paper identifies three forms of representing multi-ethnic Britain on screen and illustrates the differences between these forms by looking at three representative mainstream films. While the Indian film Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham… by Karan Johar uses the diasporic theme mainly to build up a meaningful contrast between Western material wealth and Indian moral values, British director Ken Loach’s love story Ae Fond Kiss tries to analyse the prejudices affecting intercultural encounters, and Bend It like Beckham by Asian British director Gurinder Chadha focuses on similarities, rather than differences, between British and Indian culture. Each of these depictions of diasporic life in Britain is shown to be connected not only with the filmmakers’ cultural backgrounds, but also with the cinematic traditions the films embrace and with the audiences they address.

1. Introduction Since the 1990s, the South Asian diaspora in Britain has been a frequent subject of mainstream fictional narratives in British TV and cinema. Like other multicultural topics, the depiction of British South Asians is ‘no longer confined to service programmes for ethnic minorities’ 1 but has become part of mainstream popular culture. 2 The aesthetic representation of Asians in the audio-visual media can serve different functions, ranging from a nominal inclusion of ethnic minorities to an exclusive focus on multicultural issues. Whereas some films try to capture the reality of multicultural life in Britain, in many cases the filmic depictions are anything but realistic (nor do they aim to be); instead, a symbolic reading of the characters as representatives of a social

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2

I would like to thank Ryan Dorr for his valuable stylistic emendations. Andra Leurdijk, ‘In Search of Common Ground: Strategies of Multicultural Television Producers in Europe’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (2006), 25-46 (p.25). Cf. Sarita Malik, Representing Black Britain: A History of Black and Asian Images on British Television (London: Sage, 2002), Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film Since the 1990s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004) and Michael D. Giardina, ‘Bending It Like Beckham in the Global Popular: Stylish Hybridity, Performativity, and the Politics of Representation’, in Visual Economies of/in Motion: Sport and Film, ed. by C. Richard King and David J. Leonard (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), pp.33-55 (pp.38-40).

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group defined by its ethnicity is encouraged.3 The feature films considered here, then, are not discussed as possible mirrors of a social reality, but rather as agents in the process of diasporic identity formation. Following the assumption that not only the utterances of the ethnic minorities concerned participate in this process, this essay will examine both images of diaspora in purely Indian and British productions as well as representations of the South Asian diaspora by British Indian filmmakers. One film from each of the three groups has been chosen to be analysed as a representative of its kind, although each cultural background naturally allows for more than one perspective on Asian life in Britain. The textual analyses of the films will neither be exhaustive, nor seek to provide conclusive interpretations. Instead, the analyses will focus on the films’ contributions to the social discourse on multi-ethnic Britain. Although the three films under consideration share a mainstream appeal and address the British Asians they depict, their main target audiences are not identical. Whereas the Indian film – Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., directed in 2001 by Karan Johar – reaches out for Indians at home and all over the world, the two British films – Ae Fond Kiss, directed in 2003 by Ken Loach, and Bend It Like Beckham, directed in 2001 by Gurinder Chadha – are primarily aimed at non-Indian viewers. This difference in regard to intended audience, along with the fact that each film draws upon a different cinematic tradition, accounts for their different concerns and representational aesthetics. With regard to genre categories, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham… can be classified as a typical Bollywood blockbuster, Ae Fond Kiss as a British realist social drama and Bend It Like Beckham as an intercultural comedy, incorporating elements of both Indian and British cinema. 4

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In accordance with most audio-visual representations, which tend to lump Indians together as a homogeneous group, a distinction between the different groups commonly subsumed under the terms ‘Asian’ or ‘South Asian’ will only be made when relevant to the interpretation of the feature films under consideration – although, as Tariq Modood and Fauzia Ahmed note, ‘the term “Asian” has ceased to have much content as a political category’, Tariq Modood and Fauzia Ahmed, ‘British Muslim Perspectives on Multiculturalism’, Theory, Culture & Society 24 (2007), 187-213, (p.187). On the history, advantages and drawbacks of the term ‘South Asia’, cf. also Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp.5-9. On the mainstream appeal of Bend It Like Beckham cf. Korte and Sternberg, pp.169-177, and their interview with Gurinder Chadha, pp.245-252. James Mottram likewise stresses the wide appeal of Ae Fond Kiss, cf. Mottram, ‘In the Mood for Love’, Sight and Sound 14 (2004), 22-23 (p.22). In general, the choice of universal themes (love, death, having children, generational conflict, coming of age, friendship), a strong emotional appeal and a focus on individuals who can be identified make a wide reception possible, cf. Leurdijk. To name just one other film of each category: Ramji Londonwaley (2005) by Sanjay Dayma is comparable

South Asian Diasporic Experience in Recent Feature Films

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Popular Indian Hindi movies, also known as Bollywood films, have in the last few years become a fashionable phenomenon among Western audiences in Germany, Britain and elsewhere in Europe. But whereas the recent success of these films with non-Indian viewers is mainly due to their exoticism (most strikingly conveyed in the notorious song-and-dance sequences, lavish costuming, and vivid colours on display), their appeal to the South Asian communities in Europe is fundamentally different. In fact, Bollywood’s popularity is often attributed to the notion that it serves as the ‘most important binding element’ 5 of the South Asian diaspora and as a ‘lively expression of their yearning for roots’ which enables them ‘to reconstruct an imagined homeland culture in an alien surrounding’. 6 Thus, Bollywood cinema is considered an essential means for the diasporic viewer’s construction of cultural identity, because it helps ‘to create a discursive realm of consensus regarding notions of “Indianness”’ 7 which not only links the diasporic viewers to their mother country, but also forms a strong tie between the different South Asian diasporas in the world. Therefore, ‘South Asian diasporic identificatory processes are’, as Jigna Desai puts it, ‘centrally configured and contested through the cinematic apparatus’. 8 The Indian film industry has become conscious of its ideological influence on the South Asian diaspora – and of the economic gains to be made from the diaspora markets: ‘[F]or the past two or three decades […] South Asian diasporas [have been] one of the largest sites of consumption of Bollywood films and

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6 7

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to Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., Love + Hate (2004) by Dominic Savage to Ae Fond Kiss and Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006) by Pratibha Parmar to Bend It Like Beckham. Ruben Gowricharn, ‘Bollywood in Diaspora’, Tijdschrift voor sociaal-ruimtelijke vraagstukken 19 (2003) , p.8. On the same topic cf. also Nandini Bhattacharya, ‘A “Basement” Cinephilia. Indian Diaspora Women Watch Bollywood’, South Asian Popular Culture 2 (2004), 161-183, Aswin Punathambekar, ‘Bollywood in the Indian-American Diaspora’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (2005), 151-173 and Manas Ray, ‘Nation, Nostalgia and Bollywood: In the Tracks of a Twice-Displaced Community’, in The Media of Diaspora, ed. by Karim H. Karim (London: Routledge, 2003), pp.21-35. Ray, p.26. Punathambekar, p.152. Due to the cultural dominance of the Indian commercial film in the (British) diaspora, J. Geetha even speaks of a ‘Bollywoodisation of Indian culture in the UK’ (‘Bollywood Ending’, Sight and Sound 13 (2003), 31-32, ). Desai, p.35. In this context the term ‘cinema’ is not restricted to public screenings but rather applies to the cinematic product, the feature film. Since the 1980s VCRs, DVD-players and cable TV have played a pivotal role in the distribution of Bollywood films, which in striking contrast to the consumption rituals in India tend to be watched in private by diasporic viewers, cf. Bhattacharya.

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are considered a distribution territory by the Indian film industry’. 9 As a result, Bollywood has, since the mid 1990s, produced a large number of films which cater specifically to diasporic taste by featuring Indian protagonists living in Britain or the US. 10

2. The British Asian Diaspora in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... is one such recent film dealing with the situation of Indians living in Britain. Most of the second part of the film – nearly 90 minutes of the movie, in fact – is set in London, where the Indian protagonist Rahul has settled with his family after they were repudiated by his parents. Apart from introductory scenic shots depicting distinctive sights of London and a few jokes about the British people and their accent, the setting is highly unspecified and could refer to any Western society. Scenes depicting interaction with white Londoners are kept to a minimum, seemingly only included to show that the immigrants are fully integrated. Otherwise white people only occur as walk-ons or as part of the décor, functioning much like shots of Big Ben do: they are markers of the ‘exotic’ and reminders of the unIndian setting. Despite the reduced presence of British characters in the film, Western ideology in a more general sense is visually and acoustically omnipresent, most notably in the emphasis put on economic success: tokens of Western consumer society, such as Starbucks and Burger King, are visually highlighted, while the first attempt at reconciliation between the Indian parents and their London-based offspring takes place in a shopping mall, in which Rahul’s father buys an iPod. Although consumerism is depicted as a Western condition,11 there are no negative connotations attached to it, nor are the Indians in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... excluded from it. Rahul’s family certainly does not suffer from low social status or financial pressure, but rather inhabits (as all

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Desai, p.40. Cf. also Heather Tyrrell, ‘Bollywood in Britain’, Sight and Sound 8 (1998), 2022 and Manjunath Pendakur and Radha Subramanyan, ‘Indian Cinema Beyond National Borders’, in New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision, ed. by John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka and Stuart Cunningham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.67-82 (p.78), who stress the bearing of the British market: ‘By 1994 the UK had an estimated 1 million households of Indian diasporic families and constituted over 50 per cent of the global market for Indian films’. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) is one of the first of these new filmic attempts ‘to recognize and represent the expatriate Indian community’, Punathambekar, p.152. That consumerism and business is originally a Western invention is stressed by the fact that all male members of Rahul’s family have for generations gone to London to study at a business school.


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Londoners in the film seem to do) a sphere of natural and also self-evident wealth. 12 According to Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... the main difference between India and Britain is not a question of economic development but of moral values. Indian and Western norms are linked to the concepts of tradition and modernity, respectively, and the contrast between these two ideas pervades the narrative: both Rahul and his wife Anjali, born and raised in India, feel uprooted in Britain. Anjali compensates for this by adhering to ‘traditional Indian’ customs, which she never did while still in India: she sings devotional songs, refuses to speak English with her British neighbours (although she is in full command of the language), and mocks English politeness, which – as she sees it – does not come from the heart. Anjali is a perfect example of the stereotypical diasporic subject longing for an imaginary, idealised India. Her son Krishna and her younger sister Pooja, on the other hand, are both representatives of second-generation immigrants who show obvious signs of acculturation in their behaviour, their outer appearance, their British accents and their abbreviated (in this case, to Krish and Poo), and thus anglicised (or rather de-Indianised), names. Poo is represented as a fashion queen mainly concerned with her looks. In the sequence introducing Poo, her vanity is portrayed as a logical consequence of the influence exerted by Western ideals of womanhood: the camera pans across a row of lifestyle magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Elle and Harper's Bazaar, all featuring photographs of trendy women on the cover, only to come to a halt on Poo’s face at the end of the row, decorated with a cosmetic face pack. In the same sequence, the style of Poo’s clothing, her body movements, the close-ups on selected body parts (swinging hips, coloured lips, heavily made-up eyes) and the lyrics of the soundtrack (‘It’s Raining Men!’ by the Weather Girls) all stress the character’s aggressive sexuality.

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An explanation of the ‘uneasy union’ of tradition and capitalist modernity in Indian commercial cinema since the 1990s is provided by Wimal Dissanayake in ‘Globalization and Cultural Narcissism: Note on Bollywood Cinema’, Asian Cinema 15 (2004), 143-150 (p.149): For Dissanayake the central social function of these films is ‘to ease the transition of audiences into a postmodern consumer society’. Therefore, the films stress the positive aspects of consumer society while at the same time underlining the importance of traditional values and rites. The Indian diaspora is a favoured subject of Bollywood films, because it embodies this tension between tradition and modernity in a condensed form. The depiction of diasporic characters who are very modern and very traditional at the same time is, according to Ray, p.32, the basis for their special appeal to diasporic viewers: ‘This enmeshing of identities has enabled Bollywood to address the moral and cultural alienation that diasporic youth feel with Hindi films made to ‘standard formula’, while it also offers them the difference they want vis-à-vis Hollywood’. On the popularity of Bollywood among British Asians cf. also Geetha.

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As in most Bollywood films, Western culture in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... is equated with moral corruption. Living in London can therefore threaten Indian integrity and Indian identity, which is defined in opposition to the (lack of) Western values. Since the film excludes questions of racism or material concern from its presentation of the Indian diaspora in Britain, it can focus its attention entirely on the more symbolic aspects of diasporic life: Indian people living in Britain are shown to be in involuntary exile. To return to India would be the only way to regain emotional and cultural stability. If a return is not possible in the literal sense – as is the case for most Indians living in Britain – it can at least be achieved ritually by preserving cultural traditions, and imaginatively by watching Bollywood films. 13 In addition to a culturally conservative and idealistic image of India, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... offers ‘potentially subversive narratives of defiant subjects talking back to British nationalism’. 14 Apart from the aforementioned mockery of British mannerisms, another scene illustrates this resistance in a condensed form: after overhearing Anjali complain that her son only learns English songs at school and doesn’t know any of the Indian ones she grew up with, her brother-in-law intervenes. Although Krish and his class are supposed to sing ‘Do-Re-Mi’ at the annual school function, to everybody’s surprise they instead perform the Indian national anthem ‘Jana Gana Mana’, with Krish’s leading voice supported by the rest of the choir, consisting mostly of white British children. 15 This public display of Indian nationalism not only moves Anjali to tears, but captures the whole audience: one by one, the British parents stand up in reverence. A man is seen lifting his hand to his heart, and the white woman who mainly has functioned in the story thus far as the epitome of British hypocrisy is deeply affected and initiates an enthusiastic round of applause. Thus, public space tagged by the setting and characters as distinctly British is seized for a proud affirmation of Indian identity, which inevitably commands the respect and admiration of the British audience, who has for once been compelled to listen. Thus the sequence implies that the British claim to cultural hegemony is dependent on the silencing of alternative voices.

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Cf. Ray, p.27, who investigates the Fiji-Indians’ attitude to Bollywood films. Their community ‘harboured no illusion of return but, for reasons of identity and cultural make-up, yearned for a romanticised version of India that Bollywood amply provided’. Anne Ciecko, ‘Into the Sc(re)enery: Bollywood Locations and Docu-Diaspora’, Asian Cinema 15 (2004), 5-20, (p.10). The replacement of an English song by an Indian one mirrors the history of the anthem: it was written and first performed around the time of George V’s visit to India in 1911. Whereas it can be (and was then widely) understood as a paean in praise of the new Emperor of India, it was in a different reading adopted as the Indian national anthem in 1950.


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3. The Representation of Multi-Ethnic Britain in Ae Fond Kiss It is not surprising that films by British filmmakers differ radically in their representations of the South Asian diaspora in Britain from this ‘Indian-eye view on the British Asian experience’. 16 The filmmakers have an intimate knowledge of British society, which therefore cannot so easily be reduced to the cultural Other it represents in Indian films. In addition, the British films are produced with a British (if not international) audience in mind. This audience can be expected to be familiar with life in Britain (or Western society in general), while knowing little about the history and culture of South Asia. Compared to Bollywood, the familiar and the ‘exotic’ here have exchanged positions: Asian behaviour and customs have to be explained and contextualised, whereas most references to British culture (such as the name of a British football player or a quotation from a famous British poem in the film titles) 17 are presented as if they are self-explanatory, thus establishing a connection to the assumed viewer’s cultural background. Finally, the difference in the depiction of South Asians can be related to the cinematic conventions shaping the films: the most prominent British films dealing with British Asians made by non-Asian filmmakers in the last few years have drawn on British social realism, a cinematic tradition oppositional to Bollywood. Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss, Dominic Savage’s Love+Hate and Kenneth Glenaan’s Yasmin all employ an aesthetic which is naturalistic rather than symbolic. Colours and lighting throughout the films conform to conventions of filmic realism, as does the camera angle, the camera movements and the distance between camera and object, which all suggest an accidental, unobtrusive observer rather than an omniscient and artful narrator. The story, therefore, has priority over the narrative discourse in each of these cases. The films try to voice social criticism without providing an explicit moral. By turning viewers into observers of ‘given’ social realities which seem to be portrayed objectively, they are asked to assess the events for themselves. These filmmakers’ intention to provide an insight into the life of ethnic minorities in contemporary Britain is reflected in their choice of characters and storyline: the characters occupy a considerably lower social position than those in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., one which is more representative of the actual position of many British Asians: the Pakistani family of Ae Fond Kiss, for example, own one of the typical corner shops selling newspapers

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Tyrrell, p.22. That the two films discussed here, Bend It Like Beckham and Ae Fond Kiss, intend this automatic decoding is stressed by the fact that both films were marketed outside Britain under modified titles, which can be understood without a specifically British cultural background: the German audience, for example, saw them as Kick it Like Beckham and Just a Kiss, respectively.

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and groceries. The political concern of Ae Fond Kiss, as that of the other two films, can be linked directly to the events, or rather consequences, of 9/11. It is no coincidence that all three films are set in the North of England and focus on the Muslim community (as opposed to the Hindi families living in cosmopolitan London who are the standard choice for Indian films). The British films obviously opt for a setting with a high potential for intercultural conflict. Although Loach’s film does not actually show the growing racism towards Muslims in Britain in the wake of 9/11 as Glenaan’s Yasmin does, his film can nevertheless be regarded as opposing racism and the stigmatisation of a religious group. The film’s opening sequence makes this explicit: a group of pupils in class are listening to a speech given by Tahara, one of the film’s protagonists. An inscription on the board indicates that the speech is part of a simulated parliamentary debate on the ‘West’s campaign against international terrorism’. Tahara’s final sentences introduce not only the film’s main theme of cultural identity and prejudice, but also draw a parallel to the current political situation and Islamophobia: ‘I reject the West’s claim of moral high ground after two of its main Jesus-lovers tore up the UN charter. But above all I reject the West’s simplification of a Muslim’. Tahara uses herself as an illustration of the complexity of cultural identity: ‘I am a Glaswegian, Pakistani, teenager, woman – woman of Muslim descent, who supports Glasgow Rangers in a Catholic School. […] I’m a dazzling mixture and I’m proud of it’. As Tahara’s self-characterisation as a ‘dazzling mixture’ anticipates, Western and Pakistani culture in Ae Fond Kiss are, despite all differences, not two separate spheres always to be kept neatly apart. The friendly cooperation of Tahara’s father with a group of distinctly British builders throughout the film is a visual reminder of the peaceful everyday interaction between the Pakistani family and the white British population. The degree of acculturation, though, is not the same in the two generations of the family, as indicated by conventional means of representation: whereas the parents look markedly unEnglish, speak with an Indian accent and frequently fall into Punjabi, their three children speak with a Glaswegian accent, wear Western clothes and at least two of them have as many white friends as Asian ones. Not surprisingly, this leads to the chief confrontations of Ae Fond Kiss, as in a scene in which Tahara has an argument with her father because he refuses to let her move out in order to go to the university of her choice. She defends her plans on the grounds of her cultural identity – which she defines as Western. Nevertheless, the film tries to avoid depicting a simple opposition between the parents as first-generation immigrants on the one hand and their assimilated children on the other. The family members show deep love for each other and the children are extremely loyal to their parents. To maintain


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this loyalty and still be able to lead a life of their own, Tahara and her brother Casim lead a kind of double life: Casim, for example, works as a DJ at night and helps his father in his shop during the day. He is content that his parents have arranged a marriage to a Pakistani girl for him, but nevertheless is quite versatile at chatting up his sister’s white teacher Roisin. 18 He can easily keep the two worlds apart as long as Roisin ducks down in the car each time they go past one of his cousins’ takeaways – until he falls in love with Roisin and is forced to realise that his two lives are no longer compatible. The interracial love story at the centre of Loach’s film becomes the test case for a multi-ethnic society, in which different cultures seem at first glance to coexist happily. Both worlds – the white one, with white curtains and grand pianos, and the Asian one, with Saris and closely-knit family structures – reject the relationship and try to put an end to it. Although hinting at the opposition Roisin has to face in her world, Loach decides to focus mainly on the conflicts arising within Casim’s family and within the relationship itself. In doing so the film exposes the fragility of the cultural balance achieved by second-generation immigrants. Casim can neither act according to his parents’ expectations nor can he dismiss their norms and adopt Roisin’s notion of a self-determined life. He repeatedly counters Roisin’s demand that he should make his own choices with utterances like ‘You’re white. You don’t understand’. The Western habit, well-intended as it might be, to take concepts of autonomy and independence for universal values and to therefore impose them upon other cultures is here and elsewhere in the film questioned by Casim. In the end, though, Western ideology is victorious: Casim leaves his family after they try to trick him by manipulating Roisin and himself. Significantly, the interethnic relationship can only be realised according to the conditions of Roisin’s world. Still, Casim’s accusation ‘You’re white. You don’t understand’ is not only directed at Roisin, but also at the film’s real audience. And as Casim tries to explain his culture to Roisin, the film tells its viewers about Muslim life, too: Roisin and the viewer learn about the partition of India and Pakistan and its formative impact on those affected by it, they are told about izzat, the Muslim concept of family honour, and about the racist attacks Casim’s father had to endure. Whereas the film stresses the specifity of Muslim cultural identity in these sequences, at other moments it elaborates on common cultural ground. In a conversation about Islam and Catholicism, for example, Roisin and Casim come across far more similarities than differences between their respective 18

As the name indicates, Roisin is Irish and thus herself part of a cultural minority in Britain. A relationship between an Asian character and an Irish one is a recurring plot element in films about the South Asian diaspora in Britain. In Bend It Like Beckham the Irish character explicitly puts the racism towards British Asians on a level with his own treatment.

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beliefs. Through both narrative strategies – the attempt to explain Muslim cultural identity to the Western audience on the one hand and the focus on similarities between Western and Muslim culture on the other – Ae Fond Kiss tries to advance intercultural understanding. Whereas Bollywood films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... intend to construct a distinctly Indian cultural identity for non-residential Indians, Loach’s film questions the assumption of two separate spheres and with it dominant all-white definitions of Britishness.

4. The Representation of Multi-Ethnic Britain in Bend It Like Beckham While Loach wants to inform his viewers about the situation of immigrants in Britain, the primary intention of Bend It Like Beckham by the British Indian filmmaker Gurinder Chadha is to entertain them. Consequently, disputed topics like religion or racially-motivated violence are mentioned only very marginally and the interaction between British and South Asian cultures has above all a comic function. The Asian community and its British surroundings are depicted as two different universes, each with stereotypical attributes. Food, clothes, music, the choice of TV channels and accents are used to establish this cultural contrast. In addition, Chadha employs shots of the Indian protagonists’ house to visualise the relationship between white and Asian Britons quite strikingly: one shot shows the terraced house as one in a row of very similar houses; as it becomes dark, however, the Indian house suddenly sticks out because it is illuminated for the older daughter’s wedding. In another shot, the camera records a wedding ritual in the backyard from above, moving on to the neighbours’ gardens: whereas on one side of the hedge, the garden is filled with more than forty chatting and cheering people in colourful clothing, on the other side a silent elderly couple take no notice at all. Coexistence between Britons and Asians is thus shown to be peaceful, although social intercourse is non-existent. This changes when Jessminder, the younger daughter of the Indian family, who dreams of becoming a professional football player, is asked by the white Jules to join the local women’s team. The football pitch provides, as Roy suggests, a ‘third space’, existing between the two cultures. 19 A truly multicultural group of girls, including black and East Asian players as well as white and Indian players, meet on this neutral ground, on which their skill and common goal to play good football, rather than their ethnicity, matters. 20 19

20

Anjali Gera Roy, ‘Translating Difference in “Bend It Like Beckham”’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 4 (2006), 55-66 (p.64). Cf. Gerold Sedlmayr, ‘Negotiating Diasporic Spaces in Contemporary Multi-Ethnic Britain: Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It like Beckham’, in Medialised Britain: Essays on Media, Culture and Society, ed. by Jürgen Kamm (Passau: Stutz, 2006), pp.173-184 (p.179): ‘the pitch is a metaphor of the younger


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Outside the football pitch, though, prejudices prevail: Jules’s mother automatically assumes that Jess’s parents will arrange a marriage for her and that Jess can teach Jules devotion and feminine behaviour, while Jessminder’s father believes that the British will never accept Indians as equals. However, this suggested contrast between the ethnic groups is gradually undermined as the film increasingly stresses the similarities between Jess and Jules. They both come from a middle class background, both reject their traditional mothers’ ideas of appropriate female behaviour; both are forced to go shopping although they don’t want to and instead try to practice football whenever they can despite being scolded for doing so. By claiming that Jess and Jules have to face the same problems, the film changes the argument gradually but fundamentally: what at first sight seems to be a question of ethnic cultural identity slowly turns into a question of gender expectations characteristic of both cultures. 21 The differences between the Indian and the white British culture, visually and acoustically so striking, are turned into a kind of wrapping containing identical objects. The claim that similarities by far outweigh differences makes for a truly happy ending, which fits the comedy genre: Jules and Jess win a football scholarship in California and their parents eventually agree to let them go. At the airport, the parents of the girls are drawn together by their shared fate: in a symbolic gesture, hands are shaken and handkerchiefs exchanged. In the end, therefore, not only gender roles but also cultural prejudices concerning other ethnicities are overcome. If Johar mainly addresses Indian viewers, and Loach primarily white European viewers, Chadha’s target audience can be described as multi-national. Her films’ cross-over appeal is largely due to the fact that she is ‘providing each viewer with something that is familiar and something that is not’. 22 The spectator can discover something new – while at the same time being offered something familiar. For the Western viewers the outer appearance of the Indians, their rituals and the inclusion of untranslated Punjabi speech are exotic and only to a certain degree comprehensible. Yet alienation is avoided by drawing on popular Western film genres like the sports film or the coming-of-age story. Western viewers might also feel ‘familiar and comfortable’ with the moderate feminist challenges to gender norms and patriarchal power. 23 In

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generation’s utopian vision of Britain as a truly multi-ethnic space, one where different discursive formations are brought into close contact and negotiated in the spirit of a fait contest’. As Korte and Sternberg, p.174, point out, the ‘subordina[tion] of ethnic problems to gender issues’ in Bend It Like Beckham is an indication of its mainstream appeal. Cheryl A. Wilson (with regard to Chadha’s 2004 feature film Bride and Prejudice, which in many ways functions like Bend It Like Beckham), ‘Bride and Prejudice: A Bollywood Comedy of Manners’, Literature / Film Quarterly 34 (2006), 323-331 (p.324). Cf. also Roy, p.55. Desai, p.214, cf. on the ‘liberal but never too radical’ treatment of gender issues in Bend It Like Beckham also Korte and Sternberg, p.174.

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such a contained form, ethnic minorities are fashionable and marketable. On the other hand, the film’s affinity to the Bollywood cinema tradition, apparent in its use of music, the stereotypical characterisation of the Indian family and the inclusion of scenes typical of a Bollywood narrative (such as the engagement and the wedding party), provide familiar elements for Indian viewers.

5. Conclusion: Politics of Representation and Resistant Readings Ultimately, all three films opt against a realistic depiction of South Asians in order to address a wider audience. 24 Thus, the films do not so much reflect the recent developments and anxieties in Britain, but rather the logic of the media market, with its stress on success with the audience. Depending on the respective target audience, the representation of multi-ethnic Britain varies, as can most strikingly be observed in the contrast between Bollywood’s version of British Asians and both the British Asian and the white British view. As Bollywood films ‘construct difference at the level of the nation’ 25 and are primarily concerned with defining Indian-ness in contrast to its other, the West, ‘the deterritorialized Indian [is] imagined as internal and integral to the Indian nation state’ 26 rather than as a part of British society. Bollywood’s ideology does not allow for a positive vision of multicultural Britain, which would undermine its argument. In contrast, Loach and Chadha – although employing opposite means – both promote not only intercultural understanding and multiculturalism, but also claim that much of what is commonly perceived as cultural difference is in fact the result of a distorted perception of the other. Whether this is to be praised or criticised is highly controversial. While the still-increasing number of teacher’s guides about Bend It Like Beckham is an indicator of the high educational value the film is assigned (mostly because of its multicultural politics), the same politics are fiercely attacked by others: ‘[W]hile purporting to be positive, progressive artefacts subverting the status quo, the majority of these popular iterations wash over and efface harsh realities witnessed in the everyday interactions between and among diverse segments of a population’. 27 That popular films declaring Britain a ‘happy multicultural land’ are in fact in line with the country’s official politics is candidly revealed by Chadha herself, 24

25

26 27

According to Leurdijk, p.40, the ‘recent “cross-cultural trend” in multicultural programming’ has had a similar effect on multicultural TV productions. Cf. Tejaswini Ganti, ‘“And Yet My Heart is Still Indian”: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood’, in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. by Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002), pp.281-300 (p.297). Desai, p.41. Giardina, p.35. Cf. also Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s contribution in this book.


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when she proudly declares ‘I […] have a letter from Tony Blair saying how much he loved the film. He enjoyed it especially because it represented his Britain, a very diverse, multi-cultural Britain’. 28 Yet the viewers’ capacity to counter (nationalist or multiculturalist) ideological simplifications of complex realities with resistant readings should not be underestimated. The audience of Bend It Like Beckham and Ae Fond Kiss is, in my opinion, as unlikely as the diasporic spectator of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... to mistake fiction for fact. 29 If the films are problematic, then it is not because of the conciliatory happy endings and the blind eye turned to existing social tensions, but because of the privilege which in all three films is granted to one culture over the other, most obviously so in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., but also in Bend It Like Beckham and Ae Fond Kiss – films in which Western values are in the end the only common ground upon which the two cultures can meet.

Works Cited Bhattacharya, Nandini, ‘A “Basement” Cinephilia: Indian Diaspora Women Watch Bollywood’, South Asian Popular Culture 2 (2004), 161-183. Chadha, Gurinder, dir., Bend It Like Beckham (UK 2001). Ciecko, Anne, ‘Into the Sc(re)enery: Bollywood Locations and Docu-Diaspora’, Asian Cinema 15 (2004), 5-20. Desai, Jigna, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2004). Dissanayake, Wimal, ‘Globalization and Cultural Narcissism: Note on Bollywood Cinema’, Asian Cinema 15 (2004), 143-150. Ganti, Tejaswini, ‘“And Yet My Heart is Still Indian”: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood’, in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. by Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002), pp.281-300. Geetha, J., ‘Bollywood Ending’, Sight and Sound 13 (2003), 31-32. Giardina, Michael D., ‘Bending It Like Beckham in the Global Popular: Stylish Hybridity, Performativity, and the Politics of Representation’, in Visual Economies of/in Motion: Sport and Film, ed. by C. Richard King and David J. Leonard (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), pp.33-55. Gowricharn, Ruben, ‘Bollywood in Diaspora’, Tijdschrift voor sociaalruimtelijke vraagstukken 19 (2003) [accessed on 6 May 2007]. 28 29

Chadha in Korte and Sternberg, p.246. Both Hu and Bhattacharya stress the ambiguity of diaspora viewers towards Bollywood films.

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Hu, Brian, ‘Bollywood Dreaming: “Kal Ho Naa Ho” and the Diasporic Spectator’, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 25 (2006), 93-104. Johar, Karan, dir., Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... (India 2002). Korte, Barbara and Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film Since the 1990’s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004). Leurdijk, Andra, ‘In Search of Common Ground: Strategies of Multicultural Television Producers in Europe’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (2006), 25-46. Loach, Ken, dir., Ae Fond Kiss (UK 2003). Malik, Sarita, Representing Black Britain: A History of Black and Asian Images on British Television (London: Sage, 2002). Mishra, Vijay, ‘The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora’, Textual Practice 10 (1996), 421-447. Modood, Tariq and Fauzia Ahmad, ‘British Muslim Perspectives on Multiculturalism’, Theory, Culture & Society 24 (2007), 187-213. Mottram, James, ‘In the Mood for Love’, Sight and Sound 14 (2004), 22-23. Pendakur, Manjunath and Radha Subramanyan, ‘Indian Cinema Beyond National Borders’, in New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision, ed. by John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka and Stuart Cunningham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.67-82. Punathambekar, Aswin, ‘Bollywood in the Indian-American Diaspora’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (2005), pp.151-173. Ray, Manas, ‘Nation, Nostalgia and Bollywood: In the Tracks of a TwiceDisplaced Community’, in The Media of Diaspora, ed. by Karim H. Karim (London: Routledge, 2003), pp.21-35. Roy, Anjali Gera, ‘Translating Difference in “Bend It Like Beckham”’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 4 (2006), 55-66. Sedlmayr, Gerold, ‘Negotiating Diasporic Spaces in Contemporary MultiEthnic Britain: Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It like Beckham’, in Medialised Britain: Essays on Media, Culture and Society, ed. by Jürgen Kamm (Passau: Stutz, 2006), pp.173-184. Tyrrell, Heather, ‘Bollywood in Britain’, Sight and Sound 8 (1998), 20-22. Wilson, Cheryl A., ‘“Bride and Prejudice”: A Bollywood Comedy of Manners’, Literature / Film Quarterly 34 (2006), 323-331.

Claudia Sternberg

Babylon North: British Muslims after 9/11 in Yasmin (2004) This contribution offers a reading of the film Yasmin which tells the story of the impact the events of 9/11 and their aftermath have on a young British Pakistani woman, her family and community in northern England. The paper analyses the narrative’s juxtaposition of the main characters’ translocal existence with the global discourses of terrorism and Islamism as well as the title character’s struggle to re-evaluate and re-assert her identity as a Muslim woman in the wake of increasing Islamophobia. Furthermore, it discusses the filmmakers’ ethnographic approach to their subject-matter and the significance of an unstaged scene highlighted by mainstream reviewers. Finally, it is argued that Yasmin – despite its temporal and geographical specificity – continues and recodes a previously established narrative tradition of social exclusion and racist policing which is more closely connected with black British cinema of the 1970s and 1980s than with Asian British films of the 1990s and 2000s.

1. Background and Production Context In the 1990s and 2000s, a number of Asian-themed feature films were made by white and/or Asian British writers and directors; most of them – including the popular East is East (1999, dir. Damien O’Donnell) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002, dir. Gurinder Chadha), but also the lesser known debut features Bollywood Queen (2002, dir. Jeremy Wooding), Halal Harry (2006, dir. Russell Razzaque) and Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006, dir. Pratibha Parmar) – can be classed as dramatic comedies. Within this genre, secular lifestyles and indulgence in popular culture – Western or Eastern – are presented as positive and liberating and conflict is resolved through humour and compromise. Central to the films’ narratives are interethnic relationships of the second generation, which symbolise a permissive and multiculturalist Britain. They are also found in the social realist dramas Ae Fond Kiss (2004, dir. Ken Loach) and Love + Hate (2006, dir. Dominic Savage), which draw, however, a less reconciliatory picture of contemporary race relations. In an earlier production, My Son the Fanatic (1997, dir. Udayan Prasad), interethnic romance occurs between a first generation migrant and a younger white woman, but breaks down between the migrant’s son and his fiancée. In the film discussed here, Kenny Glenaan’s Yasmin (2004), successful relationships between white and Asian Britons are either absent or doomed to fail. Set in northern England in 2001, the story of a young British Pakistani woman shows the negative impact which 9/11 has on herself, her family and community. Two

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other British productions, The Hamburg Cell (2004, dir. Antonia Bird) and Infinite Justice (2006, dir. Jamil Dehlavi), specifically address 9/11. While these focus on events outside the UK and characters investigating or operating from within terrorist networks, Yasmin tackles the situation of ordinary Muslims resident in Britain since the terrorist attacks. Perhaps in tandem with A Way of Life (2004), Amma Asante’s film about white poverty and violent racism in Wales, Yasmin must be regarded as one of the most pessimistic filmic representations of multi-ethnic Britain in the post-9/11 era. Yasmin was funded by Scottish Screen, Channel 4, Screen Yorkshire and the German co-producer EuroArts. The film was directed by Kenny Glenaan, a white Scotsman who had previously made Gas Attack (2001) about violence against the Kurdish community in Glasgow, and written by Yorkshireman Simon Beaufoy, the screenwriter of The Full Monty (1997, dir. Peter Cattaneo), which addressed the plight of unemployed steelworkers in Sheffield. Yasmin was shot in 2003 on cost-effective digital video and blown up to 35mm for theatrical screenings. In 2004, the film was received favourably at the festivals in Edinburgh and Venice, won the audience award at Dinard as well as the prize of the ecumenical jury at Locarno. It was shown in the cinema in a number of European countries and its success on the festival circuit opened up the market for distribution in the UK. On account of the film’s topicality, rather than waiting for a distributor to secure an opening for theatrical release, the production team opted to have it broadcast on Channel 4 as a one-off television drama in January 2005 (with a repeat in August of the same year) and to make it available on DVD. Both Glenaan and Beaufoy see themselves as working in the tradition of the British filmmaker Ken Loach and, in Yasmin, they collaborated with Sally Hibbin who had also produced several of Loach’s films in the 1990s. Loach’s work is echoed in the film’s emphasis on ordinary people experiencing extraordinary pressure, its regional and social specificity and the use of original locations, professional and lay actors and improvisation. To heighten the film’s realism further, Yasmin’s narrative was constructed from information gathered in consultations with British Pakistani communities in northern England. A number of workshops ran over the period of one year and were set up with the aid of Katy Jones, a producer of the former current affairs TV programme World in Action. Glenaan’s original plan was to follow up on the disturbances in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley of July 2001 which had brought young Asian and white men to the streets and led to serious clashes with the police. Yasmin’s production notes state: What emerged at first was a story about the riots that happened in Oldham and Bradford just before September 11th and the continuing mistakes made by the council and local/national

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governments in terms of facing up to what was already going on. This seemed to be a microcosm of what was happening internationally in terms of terrorism and racism. [...] As history unravelled itself after September 11th (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc), the significance of the riots seemed to diminish in size and the story naturally seemed to shift to post September 11th. 1

Glenaan was aware that a ‘lot of the Asian [Muslim] communities […] already had a microscope pointed at them’ 2 even before 9/11, which had to do with the ‘politicisation of Islam in Britain’ 3 since the late 1980s: Until the publication of The Satanic Verses Muslims in Britain were a silent, apparently compliant and quiescent law-abiding minority. […] Since the Rushdie affair, a series of other crises has disrupted any processes of integration into Britain and induced a sense of widening alienation. The Gulf War, Bosnia, Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, September 11, the nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have all mobilised Pakistanis and other Muslims on the streets of Britain […]. 4

A ‘visibilisation process’ 5 took place as previous geographical or linguistic categories relating to Asian Britons were replaced by those of religion; Muslims became conceptually and discursively ‘available’ as a monolithic group identified by faith. Among the consequences of these developments was a considerable increase in political, media, popular and academic attention, which resulted in more and better information as well as ‘new opportunities for dialogue’, 6 but often led to the production and reinforcement of generalisations and negative stereotypes. Islamophobia therefore was not created, but rather aggravated by the terrorist attacks of 2001, 7 and Yasmin charts the demonisation of Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11 from the perspective of the affected communities. While the riots which prompted the project are absent from the film’s narrative, the local focus has been maintained and the highly localised existence of the main characters is purposely contrasted with international discourses and events.

1 2

3

4 5 6

7

Yasmin Website, ‘Interviews’ (8 February 2007). Geoffrey MacNab, ‘Focus: UK Political Film-Making – Under the Microscope’, Screen International, 8 October 2004, p.24. Pnina Werbner, ‘Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (2004), 895-911 (p.907). Ibid., p.905. Ibid. Dilwar Hussein, ‘The Impact of 9/11 on British Muslim Identity’, in Islam & the West Post 9/11, ed. by Ron Geaves, Theodore Gabriel, Yvonne Haddad and Jane Idleman Smith (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp.115-129 (p.126). For a pre-9/11 discussion see the report of the Runnymede Trust, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All (London: Runnymede Trust, 1997).

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2. A Translocal Community and ‘Global’ Wars Yasmin tells the story of a British Pakistani family, consisting of a widowed father (Renu Setna), his British-born daughter Yasmin (Archie Panjabi) and son Nasir (Syed Ahmed) as well as Yasmin’s husband Faysal (Shahid Ahmed), who has recently arrived from Pakistan. No place names are given in the film, but the rows of terraced stone houses and glimpses of hills and dales help to identify the setting as the postindustrial North of England. A document used in the film refers to the fictional location of ‘Oldley’, which constitutes a blend between Oldham in Lancashire, where a number of workshops took place, and Keighley in West Yorkshire, where the film was shot. Towns like Oldham and Keighley have played a significant role in Asian migration to Britain: The history of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities is intimately tied to the histories of the Lancashire and Yorkshire towns on both sides of the Pennines as mill towns. After the second world war [sic] they provided the cheap labour that allowed the mills to face the growing international competition in the textile industry. This worked for a while, but after the mid-1960s, the labour force […] shrank unremittingly as a result of job-displacement by new technologies and the closure of mills unable to compete with cheaper textiles from the developing countries. […] For over a quarter of a century large sections of the population in these towns have faced severe economic hardship and uncertainty, with more than one generation living with permanent unemployment […]. 8

In relation to other British minority ethnic groups, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities have experienced ‘significantly greater disadvantage […] in many institutional areas’ 9 and tend to live more closely together. 10 Many firstgeneration Asian Muslims in the Lancashire/Yorkshire region are migrants from the Mirpur district in Azad Kashmir, the part of Kashmir under Pakistani control, and often come from families with a rural background and low socioeconomical status. They frequently maintain ties to their villages of origin which often ‘consist […] of the members of one or two extended families who are also part of a biradari (literally “brotherhood”)’. 11

8

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10 11

Ash Amin, ‘Unruly Strangers? The 2001 Urban Riots in Britain’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27.2 (2003), 460-63 (p.461). Andrew Pilkington, Racial Disadvantage and Ethnic Diversity in Britain (Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p.114. Ibid., p.106. Amrit Wilson, Dreams, Questions, Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006), p.51.


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Yasmin presents just such a closely knit diasporic Mirpuri community, 12 whose families live in a few narrow streets of back to back houses, with local shops and a small mosque nearby. Community members are connected to Pakistan via transnational technologies such as mail, telephone and satellite television. Most of these connections are, however, to equally specific locales and individuals: Yasmin’s father shows his children photographs of a house owned by the family; Faysal speaks to his relatives on the telephone. Britishborn Nasir and Yasmin are connected to locally specific places outside their homes and street: the unemployed Nasir frequents an old factory building where he hangs out with other Asian youths; Yasmin, who has her own car and a job as a mobility support worker, shares the mobility van, office and pub with her white colleagues. The latter spaces are beyond the social control of their father and community so they offer a certain freedom. Nasir sells drugs and has casual sex; Yasmin, on her way to work, transforms from a modestly dressed Muslim to a fashionable South Asian by changing her clothes behind a stone wall. It is with the latter visual identity that she has befriended her co-worker John (Steve Jackson) and maintains a superficial, but functional relationship with her female colleagues. The main characters in the film illustrate that diasporic individuals are not ‘unbounded social actors’ 13 and the specific context in which transnational actions take place is not just local, but also ‘translocal’ (i.e., local to local). […] Translocal relations are constituted within historically and geographically specific points of origin and migration established by transmigrants. Such relations are dynamic, mutable, and dialectical. They form a triadic connection that links transmigrants, the localities to which they migrate, and their locality of origin. 14

A prime example of translocal relations is the marriage between Yasmin and Faysal, which was arranged by her father out of obligation to the biradari and against his daughter’s wishes. Faysal crosses over between the two local contexts, but appears out of place as if he has been mistakenly transposed from one locality to another. Used to a rural lifestyle, he cooks outdoors on an open fire and even steals a goat to ‘replace’ his wife whose language he does not speak and who refuses to have anything to do with him. Out of ignorance, defiance or desperation he tragicomically re-enacts routines from his previous life in Pakistan in the backyard of a terraced house in England. 12

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The Mirpur connection is confirmed, albeit obliquely, when the father says that the improvements of his property in Pakistan will be carried out by professionals from Karachi, not the local Mirpur craftsmen. Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Michael Peter Smith, ‘The Locations of Transnationalism’, in Transnationalism from Below, ed. by Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction, 2002 [1998]), pp.3-34 (p.12). Guarnizo and Smith, pp.12f.

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Whatever the constraints of their individual (trans)localities, the main characters exercise some agency over their lives and the spaces they inhabit. This changes dramatically when the attacks of 9/11 occur, which are brought, as the film emphasises, to everybody’s attention through the same media images. Yasmin takes little notice of the events at first and does not follow the ensuing debates. When she finds a note saying ‘Yas loves Osama’ sticking to her locker at work, she needs John to tell her who ‘Osama’ is. Initially, she is hardly disturbed by this anonymous ‘humour’, but her sensitivity is sharpened when she is confronted with further casual racism and changes in behaviour towards her which indicate that a connection has been drawn between her, the 9/11 terrorists and the regime in Afghanistan. It is not only Yasmin’s workplace that has become a place of unease and harassment; this is extended to her community’s enclave. In the hyped-up atmosphere of national security and the ‘Global War on Terror’, a heavily armed police unit crashes into Yasmin’s and her father’s houses, and the family – as well as the visiting John – are forced into police cars at gunpoint. The police are searching for the absent Faysal, whose (translocal) telephone calls to relatives both in Karachi and an orphanage financed by the Kashmir Liberation Front have caused him to become a terrorist suspect. Upon his return, Faysal finds the houses broken into and assumes that there has been a (local) burglary. He turns to the ever-present police in the street who duly arrest him and keep him detained without charge. After the police raid and Faysal’s detention, Yasmin realises that her family and community have been placed under general suspicion. The full implication of this becomes clear to her when she is interrogated by a police officer. He constructs a case without evidence, informs her that Faysal can be held ‘as long as [they] like’ and threatens to charge her with withholding information under the 2001 Terrorist Act. 15 Yasmin is also detained, and only formulaic legal advice and a copy of the Koran in her cell function as reminders of Britain’s democratic system and multiculturalist agenda. In Yasmin, overseas telephone calls and translocal allegiances have been reinterpreted as conspiratorial, and diasporic individuals are seen as transnationally operating agents. The recoding of translocal relations as transnational networking has been imposed from the outside and has led to differential

15

Britain had already passed the Terrorism Act of 2000, but 9/11 prompted further legislative action. The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001 ‘followed the example of the USA’s emergency anti-terrorism legislation, especially provisions allowing the detention without trial of suspected terrorists. This was achieved through the derogation (opting out) of Article 5 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which outlaws arbitrary detention and imprisonment’. Derek McGhee, Intolerant Britain? Hate, Citizenship and Difference (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005), p.98.


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treatment on both individual and institutional level. The same strategy, however, is also used from within, as is shown with regard to Yasmin’s brother Nasir. Unlike his sister, Nasir is immediately taken by the dimensions of the terrorist attacks, praising their ‘style’ in front of his father, who is outraged by his son’s enchantment with what he sees as a shameful and murderous act. Nasir feels a sense of empowerment by the suggested association between Islamist terrorists and young Muslims like himself and he quickly appropriates the respective discourse. He calls himself a ‘freedom fighter’ to impress the white girls who had ignored him when he still was, in their eyes, a mere ‘Paki’. Organised militant Islamists take the recoding further: the young agitator Kamal sees an opportunity to undermine the rule of the local elders by engaging and recruiting the community’s young men. Kamal takes up the rhetoric of war – now in the guise of a ‘Global War on Islam’ – and propagates a collective responsibility and need for armed struggle in the Middle East and elsewhere. Nasir is attracted to this mixture of religious righteousness and militarism and decides to leave his family in order to fight for a ‘cause’ of which he has little knowledge. By opting for Islam as a transnational resistance movement, Nasir hopes to escape his local predicament – the ethnic ghetto and gerontocracy of his father on the one hand and unemployment and drug culture in working class Britain on the other. Yasmin strongly disapproves of her brother’s choice, but she too renews her relationship with her faith and revaluates her position as a Muslim woman.

3. Hijab and Talaq: Asserting Ethnic and Gender Identity after 9/11 Yasmin’s foremost concern is to show institutional and individual discrimination on the grounds of religion in the wake of 9/11 and the impact it has on already economically and socially marginalised Muslim communities. The filmmakers also took up a request that arose from the workshops, namely to ‘notice the women in this culture’; 16 they centre on a female character who leads a double life as was related to them by one community member. By combining these two focal points, gender concerns feature prominently throughout the story. The title character Yasmin belongs to the minority of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women in Britain who work outside the home; 17 nevertheless she

16 17

David Butcher, ‘Culture Clash’, Radio Times, 8 January 2005, 18-19 (p.19). Heidi Safia Mirza, ‘“All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men – But Some of Us Are Brave”: Mapping the Consequences of Invisibility for Black and Minority Ethnic Women

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submits to the dominant patriarchal system within her community by cooking and cleaning for her father, brother and husband. While Faysal and Nasir are idle, Yasmin spends time assisting neighbours with paperwork or giving women lifts to go shopping. In return for her efficiency and commitment, Yasmin decides for herself which cultural codes to follow. She dresses modestly in her community, but goes to work in tight-fitting Western clothes. She chooses not to go to the mosque, but also only pretends to participate in social drinking, thus rejecting an important element of white leisure culture. When her identity as an ironically self-identified ‘Paki’ disintegrates after she has been labelled a ‘Muslim’ in her white-dominated work environment, she initially withdraws to her home and neighbourhood. This withdrawal, however, is unsuccessful: Faysal claims rights as her husband and lashes out at her. Yasmin throws him out of the house, but her father does not accept her decision and threatens to disown his daughter. Like her brother, Yasmin feels that traditional structures – the regime of the elders as well as that of multiculturalist Britain – have failed her. After a time of disorientation and desperation, she manages to draw on her earlier self-reliance and develops coping mechanisms which reconcile gender and ethnic identity. Her strategies include wearing more traditional clothes even outside her home and street. Observing the hijab in the changed climate of the West is about self-assertion above all else. In the wake of the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11, the hijab was worn more than ever before. […] In Europe and the US, in the context of anti-Muslim racism, the hijab clearly has a political meaning that is very different from its meaning in Muslim majority countries. 18

At least at first, Yasmin’s ‘return’ to an Islamic dress codes is less an indicator of a religious turn than a statement about her failed project of assimilation and an outward sign of solidarity with her community whose presence she had taken for granted and whom she had served patiently, but with emotional detachment. The latter is further underlined in Yasmin’s relationship with Faysal. She never gives up her plan to end this marriage of (in)convenience, but after her own encounters with the police she feels sympathy for and even prays with Faysal, who has been driven to tears by his experience of arrest and detention. In the end Yasmin still separates from him, but instead of submitting the divorce papers to the British courts, she initiates an instant separation – a triple

18

in Britain’, Explaining Ethnic Differences: Changing Patterns of Disadvantage in Britain, ed. by David Mason (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2003), pp.121-138 (p.126). Wilson, p.24.


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talaq 19 – by asking Faysal to say three times that he divorces her. In Islam, talaq describes the ‘unilateral repudiation by the husband’. 20 Here the scene undermines the clichéd scenario of the arranged marriage and submissive Muslim woman because even though Faysal says the words which seal the divorce, it is in effect Yasmin who executes it. Her awakened sense of cultural identity is doubly significant: not only does she emancipate herself as a Muslim woman with regard to the choice of her partner, but she also circumvents the court proceedings in order to subvert what the police officer suggested, namely that he could ‘help’ her get rid of her husband by enforcing immigration legislation. By effecting (only) a religious divorce, Yasmin does not render Faysal liable to be deported under the Two-Year Immigration Rule. 21 The marriage and divorce plotline in Yasmin reflects external structural factors such as the father’s boundedness to the kinship network, the submission of the daughter to the will of the father and the foreign migrant’s subjection to immigration law. It also, however, shows how the main character reinstates agency by choosing to equalise and humanise her relationship with Faysal and turning the divorce from a public (secular/state-regulated) procedure with immigration implications to a private (religious/cultural) affair which still enables her to separate. The separation is also that of legal systems. Yasmin and her family experience the law of Britain as biased. It controls immigration and curtails civil liberties, but does not protect from harassment and abuse. As a consequence, Yasmin withdraws from what Yilmaz calls the centralist and uniformist legal modernity of the nation-state, which would include the civil divorce, and turns to ‘alternative normative orderings in society’, 22 that is Sharia law. It is available to her and acceptable to her family and community, but resistant to official law in Britain, last but not least because it has no bearing on Faysal’s immigration status.

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Divorce is permitted in Islam, but talaq should be given in a phased manner at three different stages over three months. A husband can, however, ‘effect a definite and triple talaq by repeating the formula thrice in one session […]. Although these rules do not conform to the Koranic prescriptions, they have gained currency in practice’. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2nd ed. 2000), p.37. Ihsan Yilmaz, ‘The Challenge of Post-Modern Legality and Muslim Legal Pluralism in England’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 28.2 (2002), 343-354 (p.350). The UK Home Office’s Immigration Rule 287 (a) (i) (a) regulates granting indefinite leave to remain for spouses. It states as a requirement that ‘the applicant was admitted to the United Kingdom […] for a period of 2 years […] and has completed a period of 2 years as the spouse […] of a person present and settled in the United Kingdom […]’. (5 May 2007). Yilmaz, p.344.

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Finally, the divorce motif features on a societal level, where the deteriorating relationship between John and Yasmin mirrors that of Muslim and non-Muslim Britons. The separation of spheres is suggested when her boss tells her to ‘take some time off’ to ‘let things cool down a bit’, which in effect seems to terminate her employment, and is finalised when John, in the film’s penultimate scene, meets her on the street. Surprised by her more traditional outfit, he still offers to have a drink together, but sees no chance for any future contact when Yasmin declines and assertively proposes that he could come along with her to the mosque. On the surface, the scene seems to emphasise the ‘Muslimisation’ of Yasmin, but at the same time it confirms that John’s lack of interest and investment in Yasmin as a member of a minority ethnic community puts an end to any pre-existing relationship. Despite Yasmin’s decision to honour her religion independently of her father and to show solidarity with the British Pakistani community, her choices remain limited and her changes have been externally motivated. She felt pressured to withdraw from her life as a multicultural urbanite and is left with the care of her aging father who, at the end of the film, admits to being out of touch with the world around him. He is devastated by the double loss of Nasir as a son as well as a good Muslim and seeks the comfort of his daughter. While Yasmin’s reconciliation with her father keeps the remaining family unit intact, she has little to call her own and will continue to fulfil her role as housekeeper and community helper. Yasmin has lost access to a more emancipated lifestyle and, as the ending suggests, has no further ties with the white community. The latter constitutes the majority of the production’s audience, and it is therefore of interest to investigate some of the critical responses to the film when it was first presented.

4. Ethnographic Realism and the Representation of Whiteness Yasmin belongs to the established British tradition of social realist (television) drama whose socially committed filmmakers draw attention to inequality and injustice in contemporary society and frequently focus on disenfranchised and underrepresented social groups. As these dramas tend to target mainly ‘mainstream’ or ‘majority’ audiences, they often combine a socio-critical interest with a degree of ‘ethnographicness’, 23 offering insights into lesser known or inaccessible communities and/or subcultures. In the case of Yasmin, the choice of subject matter, the long-term and direct engagement with the 23

Marcus Banks, ‘Which Films are Ethnographic Films?’, in Film as Ethnography, ed. by Peter Ian Crawford and David Turton (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press in association with the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, 1992) pp.116-129 (p.126).


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subjects of representation, setting up the production base in the community, using local people as performers (e.g. Syed Ahmed as Nasir) and bringing professional actors in contact with the people they represent 24 reflect this ethnographic approach, as do the various ethnographically charged terms and phrases used by the writer-director team: Glenaan speaks about his intention ‘to deliberately blur the line between fiction and documentary’, 25 which aligns him with Loach and stresses the observational nature of the film; Beaufoy suggests an anthropological dimension when he claims that Yasmin is ‘a film about a tribe in the same way that The Full Monty was a film about a tribe […]. […] It just happens to be the British Asian community […] as opposed to steelworkers’. 26 Yasmin is built on ‘ethnographic intention’ which ‘is most clearly seen when the desire is to encode “reality” directly upon the film strip’. 27 Dialogic fieldwork and improvisation are presented as the guarantors of accuracy and authenticity: a film of this nature could not truly be accurately portrayed without intrinsic involvement from the community […]. From there, it was simply a matter of listening to what they had to say, stories they had to tell and things that needed to be heard. Simon Beaufoy came on board shortly afterwards to help structure these thoughts, views and opinions into a story and script – keeping in mind that ultimately the project was to be semi-improvised. (my italics) 28

The accuracy/authenticity claim based on input of community members is also used to legitimate the white filmmaker(-ethnographer)’s involvement. Simon Beaufoy is quoted as saying: Everything in [Yasmin] is true […]. […] we have stitched it together in a fictional way, but we were very careful that we were dealing with facts all the time. This was not a made-up fiction by a bunch of outsiders. We took stories from the inside and worked on them. 29

The ‘autonomy’ of the subjects is further underlined by Beaufoy, who states that dialogue spoken in Urdu or Punjabi was purposely not subtitled and that actors were improvising and adding their own touches. Shahid Ahmed’s performance as Faysal, for example, caused laughter in Asian audiences because of what he says about Yasmin to his relatives on the phone. 30

24

25 26 27 28 29 30

Cf. Archie Panjabi’s statements about meeting local women and discussing their lives and experiences as well as Muslim practices; Yasmin Website, ‘Interviews’. Glenaan, ibid. Butcher, p.18. Banks, p.119. Yasmin Website, ‘Synopsis’. Butcher, p.19. Ibid.

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The community-centred approach is highlighted and usually seen as positive in reviews of Yasmin in mainstream publications. 31 The use of workshops is critiqued, however, in James Walton’s polemic in the Daily Telegraph. He questions whether it is ‘really the dramatist’s job to portray people as they want to be portrayed’ and quips that the violent police arrests ‘hadn’t been workshopped with Britain’s policing community’. 32 Walton takes issue with what he perceives as a stifling virtuousness of Yasmin (saying ‘all the right things about Muslims in Britain’ 33 ); indirectly he draws attention to some of the problems concerning ethnographic data and claims of accuracy and truth. Community members’ interests may indeed privilege certain kinds of information and gatekeepers can dominate and guide discussions. The filmmakers’ own focus and position also influence the selection of material and ways of representing it. While much care was taken to research British Pakistani communities, the film’s promotional material betrays a more ‘sensationalist’ approach when it comes to police methods: while Beaufoy addresses the problematic issue of how to expect ‘loyalty’ from ethnic minorities ‘when a police Armed Response Unit is holding a gun to the head of your ten year old son’, Glenaan even speaks of ‘loaded guns being forced into the mouths of ten year old children’. 34 As a consequence, all police officers in the film are shown as manipulative, prejudiced or violent and thus essentially undemocratic. For the mainstream reviewer (and arguably the mainstream viewer), it is one of the film’s circumstantial scenes, however, which has been of particular interest with regard to Yasmin’s ethnographic appeal and the representation of British majority culture. Half an hour into the film, Yasmin has taken her neighbour to a busy shopping precinct. Suddenly, four boys on bicycles appear, shout abuse and throw milk at the woman who, like Yasmin, wears a black coat and headscarf. While the entire film aims to show changes in attitude and behaviour towards British Muslims after 9/11, this scene especially illustrates the increase of verbal and physical attacks at the street level on members of the Asian communities. 35 It reveals that in public spaces

31

32 33 34 35

Cf. Butcher; Audrey Gillan, ‘Full Monty Author Strips Bare Islamophobia’, Guardian, 18 August 2004, p.13; Allan Hunter, ‘Yasmin’, Screen International, 20 August 2004, p.27; Alkarim Jivani, ‘Yasmin’, Time Out, 12-19 January 2005, p. 151; Stuart Jeffries, ‘Coming to a Small Screen Near You’, Guardian, 13 January 2005, section P2, p.16. James Walton, ‘The Trouble with Virtue’, Daily Telegraph, 14 January 2005, p.33. Walton, p.33. Yasmin Website, ‘Interviews’. For a European perspective on this issue see Chris Allen and Jorgen Nielsen, Summary Report on Islamophobia in the EU after 11 September 2001 (Vienna: European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, 2002); for a psychological assessment see Lorraine P.


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the visual identity as a Muslim has been the ‘single most predominant factor in determining who was to be a victim of an attack or infringement’ and that women observing the hijab were ‘more likely to be targeted than were men’. 36 Reviewers do not, however, comment on the attack itself, but rather on the intervention of an elderly woman, who witnessed the incident. 37 She approaches Yasmin and her neighbour and asks whether the women are all right. She holds onto their arms briefly and says: ‘I apologise for them. It’s awful. Terrible!’ The woman’s reaction is repeatedly highlighted because the boys’ attack was scripted and staged whereas her appearance was not. She had been a passer-by who was unaware that a feature film was being shot. Taking the incident for real, she literally ‘entered’ the scene and apologised to the two actresses. Her spontaneous action, which had been caught on camera, was included in the final film, and it is this accidental footage which constitutes ‘one of the most moving moments in the film’ for Radio Times reviewer David Butcher and the ‘most moving scene’ and ‘most powerful moment’ for Guardian critics Stuart Jeffries and Sam Wollaston respectively. 38 Wollaston offers the following reason why this filmic moment proved so memorable: ‘It just goes to show that however well written and acted something is, a bit of reality will stand out, especially when the subject matter is something we’ve seen on news documentaries and perhaps in real life too’. 39 The reviewer seems to suggest that the unstaged moment is more ‘real’ than the ethnographically informed narrative with its realist aesthetics. I would argue, however, that the scene is no more ‘authentic’ than those which are acted and directed, but that it constitutes a coincidental – and therefore ‘truthful’ – proof of the rejection and condemnation of Islamophobia and racism in white secular/Judeo-Christian Britain. In the elderly woman’s contribution, mainstream reviewers see a confirmation of their own views and attitudes which they share with the filmmakers, but which are notably underdeveloped

36

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38 39

Sheridan, ‘Islamophobia Pre- and Post-September 11th, 2001’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 21.3 (2006), 317-336; for a response from the Muslim Council of Britain see their compilation Quest for Sanity: Reflections on September 11 and the Aftermath (London: MCB, 2002). Allen and Nielsen’s findings, summarised in Sheridan, p.319. Cf. also Wilson, p.24: ‘According to Arzu Merali, Director of Research at the British-based Islamic Human Rights Commission, who has collated reports of these attacks […] there were about 300 attacks on Muslims in Britain in the first month after the bombing of the Twin Towers, most of them on women’. Paul Hoggart, ‘Culture Shock Beyond the Veil’, The Times, 14 January 2005, section T2, p.23; Jeffries; Sam Wollaston, ‘Yasmin’, Guardian, 14 January 2005, section P 2, p.18. Butcher, p.19; Jeffries, p.16; Wollaston, p.18. Wollaston, p.18.

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in the narrative. Almost forty years after Enoch Powell related the plight of an unidentified widow in Wolverhampton who feared to be driven out of her neighbourhood by black families in his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968, 40 a ‘little old lady’ from Keighley acts as the only corrective to the negative burden of representation placed on the film’s white characters. 41 Playing off against other sequences and characters which were scripted, the elderly woman is aligned with Yasmin’s father who, irrespective of his culturally separatist lifestyle, follows the Koran’s principle of a ‘fraternal relationship between the Muslim and his community, regardless of their belief’. 42 He stoically removes National Front graffiti from the shutters of his repair shop, interprets the police raid as a ‘mistake’ and even admits doubts about Faysal’s integrity after the incident. Both the elderly woman and Yasmin’s father represent a ‘traditional’ (pre-9/11) tolerant Britain, and just as the woman wishes to protect Muslim citizens from being harmed by white youth, the father sends the young Islamists away who distribute anti-Western leaflets. While he serves his translocal brotherhood, he does not tolerate a distorted view of Islam, telling the ringleader Kamal that he is not his ‘brother’. The elderly woman’s scene also resonates with the film’s pub sequence in which John says to Yasmin that Muslims should have come forward and express their regret for 9/11. 43 The remark sends the already destabilised and uncharacteristically drunk Yasmin over the edge; she walks over to her female colleagues, who had ignored her earlier, and shouts: ‘I’m sorry! Is that what you lot wanted to hear, yeah? I mean I didn’t do it, right. […] But I am fucking sorry! Is that better now, is it?’ Both scenes include an apology for somebody else’s actions, but Yasmin’s outburst reflects her disappointment, anger and feeling of powerlessness because she, a young woman living a precariously balanced life based on the cultural demands of others, is treated as guilty by association. The elderly woman, on the other hand, has been a

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42 43

Powell used the woman’s voice rather than his own to paint an apocalyptic picture of the alleged threats and consequences of continuing immigration. Questions about Powell’s source for the story, the woman’s actual existence and identity, and the rhetorical effectiveness of the ‘little old lady’ element in the speech have occupied journalists, Powell biographers and cultural analysts for several decades. As Jeffries points out, on a very local level the woman stands for the majority of Britons who would not support the much publicised candidature of Nick Griffin, the head of the British National Party, who had run in the constituency of Oldham West & Royton in 2001, the year of the film’s narrative, and stood in the 2005 General Election in Keighley when the film was televised. Hussein, pp.115-129 (p.123). The expectation that (all) Muslims need to explicitly distance themselves from and publicly condemn the acts of terrorism was also prominently expressed in 2001 by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, cf. McGhee, p.101.


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witness to the years of settlement and the decades of struggle of some of Britain’s diasporic groups. Because of the generational difference, her apology carries some extra weight and perhaps appeals to viewers with an awareness that blaming minority groups for events and conditions beyond their control and exploiting a climate of fear for unsanctioned aggression have been recurring features in the histories of racism and social exclusion. Despite the singularity of the circumstances of 9/11 and the film’s use of them as a cinematic plot point and caesura in race relations, Yasmin does not present its viewers with an entirely new story – neither historically nor with regard to the history of representation. Within the wider context of migrant and diasporic film in Britain, the production continues and recodes a previously established narrative tradition. Notably, Yasmin has less in common with some of the Asian-themed films referred to at the beginning than with productions of the 1970s and 80s which focused on Black British life in metropolitan London. 44 Yasmin shares with Pressure (1975, Horace Ové), Babylon (1980, Franco Rosso) and Burning an Illusion (1981, Menelik Shabazz) scenes of surveillance, stop and search practices, arrests on suspicion and hostile police interrogations. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988, Stephen Frears), which brings together Asian, black and white characters, opens with the shooting of a black woman in her home when the police burst in to arrest her son. The discrepancy between the experiences and attitudes of a lowprofile, isolated parent generation and those of their children who are exposed to individual and institutional racism on the street, in the labour market and during leisure activities, is central to the narrative of Pressure. Burning an Illusion has a female character in the lead and narrates how the young black woman questions her assimilated lifestyle when her boyfriend is jailed and she is injured in a racially motivated drive-by shooting. She begins to look into her African heritage and becomes an active community member. Cultural re-orientation is presented as a consequence and necessity in light of a prejudiced or at best indifferent majority culture. As the recent visibilisation process has singled out Muslims from the British Asian population at large and young Muslim males have replaced ‘young black men as the objects of white fears’, 45 some attention has shifted from Black London to northern parts of England. ‘Babylon brutality’, 46 understood

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Alternatively, Yasmin could be discussed in the context of films about Muslim women in Europe, e.g. Majdhar (UK 1984, Ahmed Jamal), 40 qm Deutschland (Germany 1986, Tevfik Baser), Yasemin (Germany 1988, Hark Bohm) and, more recently, Samia (France 2001, Philippe Faucon) and Head On (Germany 2004, Fatih Akin). David Mason, ‘Introduction’, in Explaining Ethnic Differences: Changing Patterns of Disadvantage in Britain, ed. by David Mason (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2003), pp.1-8 (p.2). Phrase used in the end credits of Rossso’s film Babylon.

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both as violence perpetrated against and coming from members of minority groups, can be found outside the metropolis and a visually and atmospherically distinct ‘Babylon North’ has been mapped onto postcolonial Britain. Despite significant historical and cultural differences, a certain narrative continuity in representations from the perspective of minority ethnic communities does reflect a continuity of social concerns and grievances in multi-ethnic Britain.

Works Cited Allen, Chris and Jorgen Nielsen, Summary Report on Islamophobia in the EU after 11 September 2001 (Vienna: European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, 2002). Amin, Ash, ‘Unruly Strangers? The 2001 Urban Riots in Britain’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27.2 (2003), 460-63. Butcher, David, ‘Culture Clash’, Radio Times, 8 January 2005, 18-19. Gillan, Audrey, ‘Full Monty Author Strips Bare Islamophobia’, Guardian, 18 August 2004, p.13. Glenaan, Kenny, dir., Yasmin (UK/Germany 2004. First transmitted on Channel 4, January 2005). Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo and Michael Peter Smith, ‘The Locations of Transnationalism’, in Transnationalism from Below, ed. by Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction, 2002 [1998]), pp.3-34. Hoggart, Paul, ‘Culture Shock Beyond the Veil’, The Times, 14 January 2005, section T2, p.23. Hunter, Allan, ‘Yasmin’, Screen International, 20 August 2004, p.27. Hussein, Dilwar, ‘The Impact of 9/11 on British Muslim Identity’, in Islam & the West Post 9/11, ed. by Ron Geaves, Theodore Gabriel, Yvonne Haddad and Jane Idleman Smith (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp.115-129. Jeffries, Stuart, ‘Coming to a Small Screen Near You’, Guardian, 13 January 2005, section 2, p.16. Jivani, Alkarim, ‘Yasmin’, Time Out, 12-19 January 2005, p.151. McGhee, Derek, Intolerant Britain? Hate, Citizenship and Difference (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005). MacNab, Geoffrey, ‘Focus: UK Political Film-Making – Under the Microscope’, Screen International, 8 October 2004, p.24. Mason, David, ed., Explaining Ethnic Differences: Changing Patterns of Disadvantage in Britain (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2003).


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Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000). Mirza, Heidi Safia, ‘“All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men – But Some of Us Are Brave”: Mapping the Consequences of Invisibility for Black and Minority Ethnic Women in Britain’, in Explaining Ethnic Differences: Changing Patterns of Disadvantage in Britain, ed. by David Mason (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2003), pp.121-138. Muslim Council of Britain, Quest for Sanity: Reflections on September 11 and the Aftermath (London: MCB, 2002). Pilkington, Andrew, Racial Disadvantage and Ethnic Diversity in Britain (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Runnymede Trust, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All (London: Runnymede Trust, 1997). Sheridan, Lorraine P., ‘Islamophobia Pre- and Post-September 11th, 2001’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 21.3 (2006), 317-336. Walton, James, ‘The Trouble with Virtue’, Daily Telegraph, 14 January 2005, p.33. Werbner, Pnina, ‘Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (2004), 895-911. Wilson, Amrit, Dreams, Questions, Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006). Wollaston, Sam, ‘Yasmin’, Guardian, 14 January 2005, section P2, p.18. Yilmaz, Ihsan, ‘The Challenge of Post-Modern Legality and Muslim Legal Pluralism in England’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 28.2 (2002), 343-354. Yasmin website: [accessed 15 November 2007]. UK Home Office Immigration Rules: [accessed 15 November 2007].

Fiction I: Multi-Ethnic Utopias and Dystopias

Lucie Gillet

Representations of Multicultural Society in Contemporary British Novels This article looks at some representations of English multiculturalism in contemporary literature, and tries to see whether white British writers depict multiculturalism as completely and as accurately as black British writers. This question will be examined through the analysis of two novels by black British authors – White Teeth by Zadie Smith and A Distant Shore by Caryl Phillips – and two novels by white British writers – The Light of Day by Graham Swift and Saturday by Ian McEwan. While blackness is directly addressed in White Teeth and A Distant Shore, it does not seem to appear in Swift and McEwan’s novels. But despite this fundamental difference, the two white British writers include other types of outsideness in their novels, which implies that they also reject a traditional and imperial conception of Englishness that would include whiteness only. Although in a different way, the white British writers examined here are also concerned with the changes in their society.

In the discussion about the literary representation of British multicultural society, white British writers are often either ignored or criticised because they fail to include rounded racial ‘others’ in their works. In his essay ‘Kingdom of the Blind’, Caryl Phillips observes that [t]he ‘colour problem’ was debated in parliament, on television, in newspapers, magazines, on the radio. It was the big story of the 50s. Yet where is it represented in the literature? [...] As the 50s gave way to the swinging 60s, and then to the 70s and 80s, things did not improve. White British writers have continued to write about Britain without seeing any black faces, and the responsibility to represent a multiracial Britain has continued to fall on the shoulders of non-white writers. 1

I intend to examine this phenomenon through the analysis of two novels by black British authors – White Teeth by Zadie Smith and A Distant Shore by Caryl Phillips – and two novels by white British writers – The Light of Day by Graham Swift and Saturday by Ian McEwan. 2 I thereby hope to counter-

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2

Caryl Phillips, ‘Kingdom of the Blind’, The Guardian, 17 July 2004 (2 November 2005). I am aware that the labels black and white are extremely problematic in the sense that they allude only to the concept of ‘race’. I do not mean here to classify the writers on the basis of their ‘race’ or skin colour; rather, I want to emphasise their respective cultural heritage, but I am obliged to use the terms black and white because there are no real alternatives to them. In this article, the reader should keep in mind that the word black refers to the writers who originate from countries of the former British Empire (with the exception of Australia and Canada), while the word white is used to describe the artists whose origins are exclusively British.

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balance Caryl Phillips’s statement by showing that, though no racial ‘other’ really appears in Swift and McEwan’s novels, these writers’ treatment of other types of outsideness testifies to their sensitivity to British multicultural society.

1. A Multicultural or ‘Cosy’ Version of England? White Teeth and A Distant Shore are novels that directly address multiculturalism in Britain. White Teeth tells the story of three families: the Joneses who are half-English, half-Jamaican; the Iqbals, a Bangladeshi family, and the Chalfens, a white English household of Jewish descent. The novel is set in North West London and spans the lives of three generations, with most of the characters being given personality, voice, and thoughts. A Distant Shore introduces two protagonists – Dorothy, a white Englishwoman, and Solomon, an African political refugee – who meet and become friends in a village in the North of England before Solomon is killed and Dorothy becomes mad. Phillips’s characters also have very developed personalities, and the story is told from their points of view. Of course, Zadie Smith and Caryl Phillips represent different types of multiculturalism. White Teeth presents the reader with a celebration of multiculturalism while A Distant Shore gives us, with Solomon’s murder and Dorothy’s madness, a more pessimistic view of the future of Britain as a multicultural society. But in spite of this difference, the confrontation between the various cultures and points of view making up Britain and/or their adaptation to each other is central to both novels. However, this representation of racial ‘others’ does not seem to appear in The Light of Day or Saturday. Those two novels in particular caught my attention because Graham Swift and Ian McEwan, along with Julian Barnes and Martin Amis, are the authors one immediately associates with ‘the “establishment” in contemporary British writing’. 3 As a consequence, many critics have been tempted to see them as writers who can only present, in Kate Flint’s words, ‘a cosy version of England’. 4 The Light of Day takes place on 20 November 1997, exactly two years after Sarah Nash murdered her husband Bob after he had just driven his mistress to the airport. The story is narrated by George Webb, the private investigator

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Merle Tönnies, ‘A New Self-Conscious Turn at the Turn of the Century? Postmodernist Metafiction in Recent Works by “Established” British Writers’, in Twenty-First Century Fiction, ed. by Christoph Ribbat (Heidelberg: Winter, 2005), pp.57-82 (p.57). Kate Flint, ‘Looking Backward? The Relevance of Britishness’, in Unity in Diversity Revisited: British Literature and Culture in the 1990s, ed. by Barbara Korte and Klaus Peter Müller (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), pp.35-50 (p.42).

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Sarah Nash had hired to track her husband, and who has now become her lover. The whole novel revolves around Webb’s activities and thoughts on that day. Saturday is also a circadian novel that focuses on the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne on Saturday 15 March 2003. The novel starts with Perowne watching a burning plane heading for Heathrow, a harbinger of the sense of menace that pervades his life on that day. Like White Teeth and A Distant Shore, these two novels also present ‘others’, but their focus is almost exclusively on the white male English protagonists. In The Light of Day, the Croatian political refugee Kristina Lazic, whom Sarah and Bob Nash welcome, plays an important role in the story: she becomes Bob’s mistress and by this very fact triggers the drama that is to follow. But despite her crucial position in the story, Kristina is not given any voice or personality. She is reduced to an element of the plot, more precisely to THE perturbing element in the English couple’s happy life. There are also several ‘others’ in Saturday, but most of them are Perowne’s patients or colleagues, and they all seem to be only part of his everyday background. Rodney Browne, for instance, comes from Guyana and is one of Perowne’s registrars. But the relationship between the neurosurgeon and the Guyanese is strictly professional and, though the reader is sometimes given some information about him, he seems to be only an extra in the story. Andrea Chapman is another black character, of Nigerian origin. She is one of Perowne’s patients, a teenager with a brain tumour. She is given some personality traits and appears several times in the story but she seems to stand for one of Perowne’s feats as a surgeon rather than for an outsider in Britain. Indeed, Andrea is ‘a problem patient’, 5 who only Perowne manages to treat and cure for good. As for Perowne, he is a small-minded man, prejudiced against people who are different, as testified by the way he deals with Baxter and his friends. Baxter is the man whom Perowne bumps into on University Street and who intrudes into the neurosurgeon’s house in the evening. He and his friends obviously originate from a different, much less privileged, social background than Perowne. As a result, the neurosurgeon does not manage ‘to take the trio seriously’ (S, p.90) and humiliates Baxter by talking about his disease in front of the other two men. Perowne is a man who thinks he does not need to read because ‘he’s seen enough death, fear, courage and suffering to supply half a dozen literatures’ (S, p.4), a man who is ‘nostalgic for a verdant, horse-drawn, affectionate England’ (S, p.5). All these elements favour Stephen Metcalf’s interpretation of the novel as ‘a deeply English novel […] presided […] by a longing for the old village virtues of peace and

5

Ian McEwan, Saturday (New York: Doubleday, 2005), p.8. All further references appear parenthetically in the text.

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continuity’. 6 They certainly do not call for a reading of Saturday as a book open to other cultures and different people.

2. Tolerance to the ‘Other’ and the Challenge of Englishness Despite these problems, I would like to argue, as Emma Parker does in her analysis of Graham Swift’s Last Orders, that The Light of Day and Saturday are novels that ‘poin[t] to the inadequacy of imperial conceptions of Englishness’, 7 for they undoubtedly also question a static notion of English identity. These novels therefore convey a message that is not so radically different from that of the black British writers, who generally deal with otherness in their works. As David Bennett remarks, ‘multiculturalism [...] clearly signals a crisis in the definition of “nation”’, 8 which suggests that the authors who represent multiculturalism also tend to ‘transgre[ss] the circumscribed concept of Englishness’. 9 In White Teeth, Englishness is a concept that is continually criticised and deconstructed, as indicated by Alsana’s words: ‘Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy tale!’(WT, p.236).10 If Irie stands in front of the ‘gigantic mirror’ of England ‘without reflection’ (WT, p.266), it is because the concept of Englishness does not correspond to reality. Even Archie feels alienated in England, in spite of the fact that he is a white Englishman with the typical English surname ‘Jones’. Remarkably enough, ‘Jones’ is also Dorothy’s family name in A Distant Shore. At first sight, Dorothy might seem to be the quintessential Englishwoman: she drinks tea whenever she needs comfort and is obsessed with good manners. However, the only well-behaved man that she meets is Solomon and she describes him as ‘a proper gentleman. In fact, one of the first gentlemen that [she]’d ever met’ (ADS, p.64). 11 Dorothy’s ideal

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Stephen Metcalf, ‘A Day in the Life: How Critics Got Saturday Wrong’, Slate Magazine, 30 March 2005 (3 October 2006). Emma Parker, ‘No Man’s Land: Masculinity and Englishness in Graham Swift’s Last Orders’, in Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-War and Contemporary British Literature, ed. by Daniel Lea and Berthold Schoene (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), pp.89-104 (p.90). David Bennet, Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998), p.2. Susanne Pichler, ‘Alien-Nation and Belonging: Ethnic Identities in Selected Black British Novels’, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 29.1 (2004), pp.43-63 (p.48). Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Penguin, 2000), p.236. All further references appear parenthetically in the text. Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (London: Vintage, 2004), p.64. All further references appear parenthetically in the text.


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gentleman turns out to be an African refugee instead of the white British man we would normally associate with politeness. At the end of the story, Dorothy realises ‘that there’s no way that [she] can live among these people’ (ADS, p.59) and she rejects reactionary England by taking refuge in madness. Dorothy and Solomon’s sad endings are obviously a way of disapproving of the fossilised conception of Englishness that paralyses the people in Weston, and by extension in England as a whole. In a different way, The Light of Day and Saturday also support a progressive definition of Englishness. It would be simplistic to read Graham Swift’s novel as an example of what Kate Flint calls his ‘narrow-minded parochialism’. 12 First of all, the narrator chosen by Graham Swift is not a typical white male British character. George Webb is an ex-cop turned private detective. As Hermione Lee has observed, the choice of such a job for the narrator of his novel testifies to Swift’s desire to put the ‘unliterary, workaday professions’ 13 in the forefront and thus to give a voice to a representative of a less privileged group in British society. Webb does not really correspond to the typical image of masculinity either: he has lived alone for years, is a good cook, and works nearly exclusively with women, whom he deeply respects. Through George’s personality then, Swift challenges the class hierarchy and the patriarchal ideology that usually go hand in hand with a traditional conception of Englishness. The character of Kristina also offers a symbolic resistance to an obsolete vision of Englishness. Indeed, if Kristina seems to be the source of all the problems between Bob and Sarah Nash, she is also the element that brings Sarah and George together in a complex but happy relationship. This might allude to the intricate situation of British society nowadays: Kristina’s intrusion into their lives might stand for the confusion and difficulties, but also for the riches that multiculturalism represents for all its actors. In Sarah and Kristina’s mutual teaching of each other’s language, Sarah is, in George’s words, ‘the teacher being the student, starting from scratch’(LD, p.145). 14 This not only suggests a reversal of the imperial thought that confers knowledge and civilisation only on the British; it also provides a model for the process of adapting to each other and of accepting what the ‘other’ has to offer.

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Flint, p.43. Hermione Lee, ‘Someone to Watch Over You’, The Guardian, 8 March 2003, (9 February 2007). Graham Swift, The Light of Day (London: Penguin, 2003), p.145. All further references appear parenthetically in the text.

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The image of the exile in the novel also contributes to illustrating the fact that everybody in Britain is concerned by the change in their country. If Kristina is literally an exile in a foreign country, many of the other characters in the novel are symbolic exiles. After murdering Bob, Sarah loses her son, house and freedom, and is ‘deported’ to prison for several years. As for George, who is constantly travelling between the prison and his house, he gradually realises that he ‘[does]n’t have a real home anymore’ (LD, p.138). Additionally, as a backdrop to the couple’s experience of homelessness, Napoleon and the Empress Eugénie, the ‘rich refugees’ (LD, p.101) in exile in Chislehurst in the 19th century, are omnipresent in the novel. Finally, Bob is also ‘in the last hours of his life, in exile from himself’. 15 Sarah’s description of him as ‘the bloody refugee. The one who doesn’t know where his home is’ (LD, p.228) associates his predicament with Kristina’s, which places British people on the same level as the refugees. This implies that we are all equal in this new world order where, as Caryl Phillips puts it in one of his essays, ‘nobody will feel fully at home’. 16 In Saturday, the challenge of a conservative vision of Englishness is symbolised by Henry Perowne’s gradual change as the day unfolds. Perowne’s transformation starts with the burning plane he sees at dawn and reaches its climax with Baxter’s violent intrusion into his house and family in the evening. This last incident ends happily – the family are safe and sound, and Baxter is sent to hospital after falling down the stairs – but the fact that the novel goes on for about fifty pages after this fortunate outcome confirms that Perowne’s reaction is worth looking at. Baxter’s attack has left a deep mark on Perowne’s life and attitude, and has altered his world for ever. The man’s invasion of the peaceful circle of the neurosurgeon’s family might be read as a reminder of present-day immigration in Britain, but also of the ‘terrorism’ that threatens most countries at present, two realities that Perowne had until then managed to keep at a distance. However, with Baxter’s onslaught, Perowne realises that he cannot ignore the outside world anymore. In the end, his certainties about the war in Iraq and the marchers in London ‘have dissolved into debating points’ (S, p.287), and he now feels ‘timid, vulnerable’ (S, p.287). Significantly, Baxter is what Perowne’s son calls a ‘street guy’ (S, p.154), which suggests that the lower classes might also have something to teach to the upper classes. When Baxter asks Daisy to read one of her poems, he is incredibly moved by the beauty of her words. Set against Perowne’s insensitivity to art and even to his own daughter’s performance, Baxter’s emotion

15 16

Hermione Lee, ‘Someone to Watch Over You’. Caryl Phillips, A New World Order (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), p.5.


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at that moment proves ‘that [he] has an equal value as a human being, and an equal claim to the dignity society confers on Henry’. 17 Even Perowne understands this at the end: he feels guilty that ‘he has done nothing, given nothing to Baxter who has so little that is not wrecked by his defective gene’ (S, p.236) and even decides to give up the charges against him. As suggested by Perowne’s new open-mindedness to people like Baxter and to the outside world, Saturday advocates tolerance to the ‘others’ populating Britain.

3. Otherness vs. Blackness In light of all this, it cannot be denied that by including ‘others’ into their novels, Swift and McEwan reflect upon the changes in British society. This suggests that they are as much aware as Caryl Phillips that ‘[i]f one believed that “England” – or Scotland or Wales – was white then right before your very eyes England was becoming half-English’. 18 It would even be tempting to argue that, given Pichler’s definition of the nation as a ‘concept that many make use of in order to exclude “Others”’, 19 the deconstruction of Englishness suggested in The Light of Day and Saturday accordingly evokes the inclusion of all the ‘others’ in Swift and McEwan’s visions of present-day Britain. This being said, one cannot simply ignore the fundamental difference that exists between on the one hand Swift and McEwan’s novels and on the other White Teeth and A Distant Shore. As shown in this essay, the white British writers’ redefinition of Englishness remains mostly symbolic and allegorical. Multiculturalism and the tolerance of ‘others’ in Britain are suggested in The Light of Day and Saturday, but are by no means represented, since, as pointed out above, the characters standing for otherness in these two novels are only present for the sake of the plot. Furthermore, the different types of otherness presented in Swift and McEwan’s novels do not reflect the reality of multicultural England since they do not include blackness. Because the outsiders in the two novels confront the protagonists with new cultures or different ways of living, it might be tempting to read them as symbols of all the ‘others’ and of the impressive mixing of cultures that can be observed in England today. However, none of these marginalised people are black – with the exception of Rodney and Andrea, but, as we have seen, they are not important as full characters in Saturday – and this restricts the novels’ faithful representation of multiculturalism. In The Light of Day, Kristina introduces another culture into the 17

18 19

Lee Siegel, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, The Nation, 11 April 2005, p.6, (26 October 2006). Caryl Phillips, ‘Kingdom of the Blind’, p.3. Pichler, p.45.

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lives of Bob and Sarah Nash, and by extension into England as a whole, but her outsideness remains undetected until she speaks. Because she is white, she could be mistaken for a British person, unlike any black or Asian refugee or citizen. This primordial difference reveals that a person’s skin colour makes for their ineluctable labelling as ‘other’ and thus renders their acceptance within a mainly white society even more difficult. In Saturday, Baxter also fulfills the role of an ‘other’ to which Perowne and England have to adapt. But such a character does not directly relate to British multiculturalism since only his social background distances him from Perowne. Baxter’s character merely stigmatises the age-long oppression of the working-class in Britain. There is, however, a character who is more important to Perowne and who is actually a cultural ‘other’: Jay Strauss, Perowne’s colleague and friend, who is American. As testified by Perowne’s observation about Jay: ‘It took Jay Strauss, an American with the warmth and directness that no one else in this English hospital could muster, to bring her into line’ (S, p.9, italics mine). The United States and Britain have different cultures and it is logical that the English should see an ‘other’ in an American expatriate. But here again, the cultural ‘other’ is a white person, which means that his difference is less easily perceived. Even less so when he speaks the same language as the British and his culture is much closer to Perowne’s than Kristina’s Croatian customs are. Blackness then appears to be the ultimate otherness and, for all their openness, it is still difficult to claim that Swift and McEwan represent multiculturalism as faithfully as Zadie Smith and Caryl Phillips.

4. Conclusion: Artistic Freedom and Visibility Perhaps more important than the question of whether white writers depict multiculturalism in their works is whether they have to do so. Salman Rushdie is not of this opinion, for he believes that writers should be judged for what they write, independently of their gender, class or ethnicity. As for Zadie Smith, she fulminates against the fact that black writers are expected to represent their community and are therefore denied the freedom white writers enjoy. Indeed, is it legitimate to impose a subject matter on writers, black or white, because they live in a multicultural society? Finally, criticism of white British writers for not representing multiculturalism accurately enough might not be the solution to black people’s invisibility in British literature. A more effective position on the part of literary critics and institutions would be to systematically include black British writers within British literature. For, if some novels like White Teeth have met with international acclaim as British novels, there are still many black British authors who escape notice from a large audience. What would


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grant them more visibility is a ‘bidding for the mainstream’, which according to Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg does not imply submitting to existing structures of cultural hegemony or simply adapting to a British majority culture whose participants are still largely white. Rather, it means to actively participate in and change a predominant cultural stream whose structures – including market structures – already are in the process of redefinition and which has already set in motion its own decentralisation. 20

In this case, a blurring of the margin-centre distinction in literature, and more generally in culture, could lead to an equality between black and white writers in British literature. As Kwame Dawes remarks: ‘Is it not now time for us to do away with the term “Black British Literature”, and simply demand that our writing, that is writing by blacks in Britain, be called, simply, “British literature”?’ 21 The four novels I have examined above actually support this point of view. They all question imperial conceptions of Englishness, they all assert that Britain is no longer what it used to be, i.e. only white. Nor is British literature, which should become the unique term for all the different literary traditions existing in Britain today. For, if White Teeth, A Distant Shore, The Light of Day and Saturday are all set in contemporary Britain and reflect on the current state of England, they do so in very different ways. These different literary responses reveal that the complexity of British society cannot possibly be encompassed by only one novel, voice, or literary style. It is only by keeping the different voices that respond to the same society and by putting them side by side that we will obtain deeper and maybe more complete insight into the nature and complexity of multicultural societies. 22

Works Cited Bennet, David, Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998). Flint, Kate, ‘Looking Backward? The Relevance of Britishness’, in Unity in Diversity Revisited: British Literature and Culture in the 1990s, ed. by Barbara Korte and Klaus Peter Müller (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), pp.35-50.

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Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film Since the 1990s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), p.8-9. Kwame Dawes, ‘Negotiating the Ship on the Head: Black British Fiction’, Wasafari 29 (1999), 18-24 (p.24). Lucie Gillet is ‘aspirant du F.N.R.S.’

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Korte, Barbara and Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film Since the 1990s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004). Dawes, Kwame, ‘Negotiating the Ship on the Head: Black British Fiction’, Wasafari 29 (1999), 18-24. Lee, Hermione, ‘Someone to Watch Over You’, The Guardian, 8 March 2003, [accessed on 9 February 2007]. McEwan, Ian, Saturday (New York: Doubleday, 2005). Metcalf, Stephen, ‘A Day in the Life: How Critics Got Saturday Wrong’, Slate Magazine, 30 March 2005 [accessed on 3 October 2006]. Parker, Emma, ‘No Man’s Land: Masculinity and Englishness in Graham Swift’s Last Orders’, in Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-War and Contemporary British Literature, ed. by Daniel Lea and Berthold Schoene (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), pp.89-104. Phillips, Caryl, A Distant Shore (London: Vintage, 2004). ——. ‘Kingdom of the Blind’, The Guardian, 17 July 2004 [accessed on 2 November 2005]. ——. A New World Order (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001) Pichler, Susanne, ‘Alien-Nation and Belonging: Ethnic Identities in Selected Black British Novels’, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 29.1 (2004), pp.43-63. Siegel, Lee, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, The Nation, 11 April 2005, p.6, [accessed on 26 October 2006]. Smith, Zadie, White Teeth (London: Penguin, 2000). Swift, Graham, The Light of Day (London: Penguin, 2003). Tönnies, Merle, ‘A New Self-Conscious Turn at the Turn of the Century? Postmodernist Metafiction in Recent Works by “Established” British Writers’, in Twenty-First Century Fiction, ed. by Christoph Ribbat (Heidelberg: Winter, 2005), pp.57-82.

Sabine Nunius

‘Sameness’ in Contemporary British Fiction: (Metaphorical) Families in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) In contemporary British fiction, we may presently observe the emergence of a new strategy in the dealing with difference. For the purpose of this essay, this phenomenon will be referred to as ‘sameness’. Despite certain parallels to established concepts such as transculturality or transdifference, ‘sameness’ cannot be subsumed under one of these established labels. In contrast to those approaches, ‘sameness’ does not aim at the mixture or blending of two oppositional elements but may rather be understood as a hierarchisation of differences. In the process, one differential category temporarily takes priority so that all other categories are suppressed for the time being. Due to its concentration on potentially unifying aspects, ‘sameness’ may be seen as a turn away from ‘postmodern’ strategies which focus on the fragmentarising and destabilising effects of difference. An illustrative example of ‘sameness’ may be found in Smith’s novel On Beauty, which employs the image of (metaphorical) families as a basis for unity and belonging.

1. ‘Sameness’ and (Metaphorical) Families At present, we are witnessing the emergence of a growing body of literary works which deal with the topic of difference, in particular with respect to the role played by difference in the construction of personal and collective identities. These texts indicate the need for a re-orientation with regard to the points of reference for the formation of (cultural) identities since former ‘cornerstones’ have lost their viability under the impact of processes such as globalisation and internationalisation. Moreover, we are observing a move away from the concentration on divisive elements of difference in favour of a focus on potentially unifying aspects. For a considerable period of time, difference has been – and still is – one of the main objects of investigation in a variety of disciplines such as gender studies, postcolonial criticism and the vaster field of cultural studies. Therefore, at least as far as Western academia is concerned, difference may be seen to constitute one of the prime categories of analysis, in particular with respect to the study of identity. In the majority of cases, studies concentrate on specific differential categories, first and foremost the ‘holy trinity’ of ‘gender, race, class […] plus sexual orientation, nationality and – in recent years – age’. 1 Although the last decades have seen several attempts to move away from simplistic binary oppositions and to establish modes of analysis which tran1

Doris Feldmann, ‘Beyond Difference? Recent Developments in Postcolonial and Gender Studies’, in English Studies Today, ed. by Ansgar Nünning and Jürgen Schlaeger (Trier: WVT, 2007), pp.113-137 (p.118).

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scend apparently clear-cut dualisms, it seems that the current development in contemporary fiction sketched out above cannot be adequately described by established concepts such as hybridity, transculturality, multiculturalism and transdifference. Rather than orchestrating characteristically ‘postmodern’ topics, for instance the death of the subject, the fragmentarisation and instability of identities and the loss of former points of reference such as the nation state, an increasing number of recently published works concentrate on the topics of community, belonging and new points of reference to supplement those which have been rendered meaningless due to the processes of globalisation and internationalisation. 2 This new strand in contemporary fiction calls for a theoretical approach which takes into account a focus on potentially uniting and binding elements, which I will refer to as ‘sameness’. By contrast to the majority of hitherto existing concepts dealing with difference, ‘sameness’ does not denotate a permanent quality or state but rather designates the temporary suppression of all divisive elements in favour of one differential category or, respectively, a specific value to which the power of bridging fundamental differences is attributed. This ‘privileged’ category or highlighted (ideological) value serves as the basis for the construction of a (subjectively perceived) homogeneity and coherence within a certain group of people, an experience that I will capture under the label of the experience of ‘sameness’. 3 This state, however, is not durative and requires permanent efforts by the characters involved in order to maintain its functionality and to keep suppressed differential categories at bay. For this reason, ‘sameness’ fulfils a double function: on the one hand, it satisfies the desire for security and belonging expressed by the protagonists in individual texts; on the other hand, on the level of narrative transmission, it re-attributes the power to generate meaning to the process of narration. Here, in contrast to ‘postmodern’ literature, modes of literary presentation are no longer employed to demonstrate a general void or lack of meaning in contemporary society but they rather serve to create a feeling of coherency and communality. 4 An illustr2

3

4

To some extent, this is in tune with the perceived need to change the focus of analysis in cultural/sociological studies. In this context, Gilroy’s statement may be seen as exemplary; he stresses that ‘[w]e need to consider whether the scale upon which sameness and difference are calculated might be altered productively so that the strangeness of strangers goes out of focus and other dimensions of a basic sameness can be acknowledged and made significant’. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004), p.3. ‘Sameness’ may thus either be described as the temporary creation of a hierarchical structure of differential categories or as the subordination of all differential categories to one specific concept or ideal. Ina Schabert, Englische Literaturgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine neue Darstellung aus Sicht der Geschlechterforschung (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2006), p.436.

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ative example of this strategy may be found in Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty. Here, the (metaphorical) image of the family is used as a basis for the construction of ‘sameness’. In On Beauty, we encounter several communities, which either represent families in the traditional sense (that is, a group of people related by blood), or are perceived as family-like structures by their members. The following analysis will focus on three types of ‘families’: a) the ‘real’ family of the Belseys, b) the ‘black family’ promoted by Levi and Kiki, and c) the ‘family’ of workplace-colleagues. Apparently, membership in these groups is not exclusive, which leads to several cases of multiple affiliations. With respect to the representation of ‘sameness’, the following questions prove to be of major interest: how do individual members perceive their ‘family’ and how do they relate to other members? How are ‘outsiders’ or ‘traitors’ dealt with? And, most importantly, which differential categories are temporarily privileged in order to render all other differences irrelevant for the moment? Against the background of these questions, special attention will likewise be paid to the interplay between personal and collective identity. A further aspect to be considered in this context are the specific stylistic and narratological strategies employed in the depiction of these metaphorical families and their instrumentalisation for the construction of ‘sameness’. As will be demonstrated over the course of this essay, one of the main functions of each (metaphorical) family consists in providing the characters with the necessary framework to construct firm, seemingly continuous and stable identities. This obviously runs counter to the widely held ‘postmodern’ assumption that identities are always in flux and cannot ultimately be traced back to a lasting, unchanging core. A growing body of recent (literary) publications undermine this position by depicting characters who long for precisely this stability of their identities and, to some extent, also succeed in achieving it. This phenomenon may be considered an indication that at least the belief in the possibility of an unalterable ‘core identity’ exists irrespective of all theorising to the contrary. 5 5

Here, one may also speculate whether this search for stable identities – which in turn provide some level of security and assurance – arises at least partly due to changes brought about by recent transformations of the social landscape in the wake of globalisation and an increasing internationalisation which render former points of reference such as the nation empty of meaning. For this reason, the question of what makes a person and which points of reference to turn to when defining one’s own identity gain crucial importance. One might claim that the turn to smaller, individual units such as the family or ‘brotherhoods’ mirrors the current re-focalisation on lower scale units in the political realm which parallels globalisation. Cf. Bernd Wagner, ‘Kulturelle Globalisierung: Weltkultur, Glokalität und Hybridisierung’, in Kulturelle Globalisierung – Zwischen Weltkultur und kultureller Fragmentierung, ed. by Bernd Wagner (Essen: Klartext, 2001), pp.9-38.

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2. The Belsey Family The first family the reader encounters in the novel is Howard Belsey along with his wife Kiki and their three children. Right at the beginning of the novel, however, the Belsey family finds itself in a state of disintegration. Having to deal with their father’s recently disclosed affair, each of the adult Belseys sticks to the idea of family life as an important source of support; the children in contrast, feel forced to turn to substitute families now that their family network has temporarily broken down. Jerome ‘[falls] in love with’(p.44) 6 the Kipps family, in particular with their daughter Victoria, while Zora focuses on her university career and her position in academia, i.e. her ‘intellectual’ family. Levi, on the other hand, adopts a ‘gangsta’ image both in terms of speech and dress, a move that he hopes to secure his position in the ‘black family’ with. Nevertheless, despite the current crisis, the Belsey family has not lost its binding powers entirely and continues to unite members from different (cultural) backgrounds and roots. 7 These internal differences are most noticeable with respect to the spouses, Howard and Kiki. At first sight, they seem to belong to two completely different worlds, him being a white, highly educated male university lecturer and her, a black woman, working as a nurse. While these differences in terms of race, class and education are entirely overcome in specific situations – sex or ‘the Hawaiian’ (p.395) being the ultimate image of both corporeal and ‘spiritual’ union – they regain prominence in other contexts. Especially in the company of Howard’s friends and colleagues, Kiki feels acutely aware of her inability to participate in ‘intellectual’ discussions and suffers from her alleged inferiority: Meredith – if one were to remember two facts about each of one’s guests in order to introduce them to other guests – was interested in Foucault and costume-wear. At various parties Kiki had listened carefully and yet not understood what Meredith was saying while Meredith was dressed as an English punk, a fin de siècle dame in a drop-waisted Edwardian gown, a French movie star and, most memorably a forties war bride, her hair set and curled like Bacall’s, complete with stockings and stays and that compelling black line curving up the back of both her mighty calves. (p.100)

Despite the ironic tone of this description of Meredith’s self-orchestration, there can be no doubt about Kiki’s being intimidated by the considerably younger woman. This feeling of alienation and liminality is increased by Kiki’s colour: ‘Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other 6

7

Zadie Smith, On Beauty (London: Penguin, 2005), p.44. All further references parenthetically in the text. Here, it is worthy of note that the family – a traditionally bourgeois concept or value – is unreflectedly presented as a value per se and that the need to re-stabilise the family life is hardly questioned.


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people. This one was unpleasant: a black woman in a headwrap approaching with a bottle in one hand and a plate of food in the other, like a maid in an old movie’ (p.98). In general, skin colour constitutes a subtle but nevertheless persistent topic in the Belseys’ family life. Especially in moments of great tension, clichés and essentialist notions are raised, for instance when Howard discusses his marital problems with his father (p.301). Even though suppressed at most times, the differences in terms of colour create barriers within the family as they set off white-skinned Howard against his children and render them a likeness of their mother rather than of their father. In fact, Levi’s blackness provokes situations and experiences he cannot share with his father, such as the alienation when walking the streets of their bourgeois, allwhite neighbourhood. In spite of the fundamental differences with respect to education and colour as well as the concomitant problems, all members of the Belsey family ultimately believe in the importance of their mutual ties and try to prevent their family from completely falling apart. Thus, the family is obviously perceived as a potential source of security and support, a bulwark against the outside world, a fact suggested by several passages presented from the perspective of a focalising figure: Only Kiki supported [Jerome’s insistence on a family outing]. She believed she understood Jerome’s motivation. […] Jerome must behave as if nothing had happened. They must all do that. They must be united and strong. (p.61, second emphasis mine)

For Kiki and Howard, the family even assumes existential qualities. After the disclosure of Howard’s second affair and the subsequent split-up, Howard realises Kiki’s significance for his life: ‘You’re for me – you are me”(p.389, original emphasis). What is more, despite Kiki’s somewhat stereotypical intellectual ‘inferiority’ (conspicuously, it is once again the woman who is less educated than her husband and falters on the academic level), she is attributed a ‘moral’ or ‘emotional’ authority. Throughout the novel, attention is drawn to the tension between academic or scientific discourse and the language of emotion and love, which only Kiki seems to master: ‘[w]here Kiki had felt her way instinctively through her problem, Jerome had written his out, words and words and words. Not for the first time, Kiki felt grateful she was not an intellectual’ (p.43). This association of women with emotions and irrational feelings (explicitly discussed by Carlene Kipps and Kiki at one point in the novel) clearly reflects the cliché of women being determined by their body or ‘nature’. Nevertheless, at the same time, a turn away from a purely intellectual approach to life is promoted as the only possible way to happiness, with emotions not simply being dismissed as female whims. At least this is what seems to be implied by the ending of the novel, when Howard fails to deliver his academic paper but may have succeeded in taking the first step towards a

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reconciliation with his wife. This emphasis on love and its uniting power is in tune with Schabert’s observation that: despite all theory-encumbered scepticism, all intellectual refinement and all critical intelligence, literary texts likewise rediscover an ethical impulse, an altruistic form of love as counter force to the dominant socially destructive forces and praise it as an ideal. Such frequently lofty statements finally abandon the postmodern non-commital stance. 8

As can be derived from the reaction of the Belsey children to the disintegration of the family and the possibility of a reunion between the spouses alluded to in the end, love, coupled with the concept of the nuclear family, is clearly presented as the constructive force which enables individuals to overcome the divisive nature of difference. In this case, ‘sameness’ is therefore constructed on the basis of a (bourgeois) ideal and closely connected to love which permits the temporary bridging of differences such as sex/gender, race/colour and educational background. The related shifts between moments of intimacy and alienation illustrate, however, that divisive elements tend to return and have to be actively suppressed.

3. The ‘Black Family’ A further ‘family’ in the novel consists of the black ‘brother- or sisterhood’. Still, before turning to actual representations of this group, I would like to draw attention to the different ways in which individual characters in the novel deal with their cultural heritage. Apparently, a fundamental difference exists between ‘white’ and ‘black’ approaches. The narrative provides ample information on individual family backgrounds, essentially the cultural ‘roots’ of both spouses, to which each responds in a different way. While Kiki derives self-confidence from the knowledge of being part of a continuous line of ‘strong’ black women and is proud of the achievements of her ancestors, Howard proves unable to cope with and to truly accept his working-class background: It was an ancestry he referred to proudly at Marxist conferences and in print; it was a communion he occasionally felt on the streets of New York and the urban outskirts of Paris. For the most part, however, Howard liked to keep his ‘working class roots’ where they flourished best: in his imagination. (p.292)

Not only does Kiki value her personal lineage, she also believes in a bond between all black people arising from their shared cultural roots which constitutes the basis of her idea of an all-encompassing black community or ‘family’. In this context, it is interesting to note which cultural references are drawn upon by the members of the black brother- or sisterhood and which 8

Schabert, p.439, my transl.


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expressions are used to call up ideas of family and belonging. Strikingly, clichéd, originally ‘white’ notions are adopted and, on the one hand, internalised, on the other hand consciously exploited. This holds particularly true for Kiki, whose self-image is to a high degree determined by her body: The size [of her bosom] was sexual and at the same time more than sexual: sex was only one small element of its symbolic range. If she were white, maybe it would refer only to sex, but she was not. And so her chest gave off a mass of signals beyond her direct control: sassy, sisterly, predatory, motherly, threatening, comforting – it was a mirror-world she had stepped into in her forties, a strange fabulation of the person she believed she was. […] Her body had directed her to a new personality. (p.47)

Apparently, Kiki unquestioningly accepts stereotypes such as the association of blackness with a ferocious sexuality and clichéd notions of (black) femininity – the majority of which originated in 19th-century imperialism – and she incorporates them into her self-image. By contrast to this unconscious adoption of certain ‘ethnic’ features, Kiki, in other situations, is highly aware of the constructed nature of these stereotypes: ‘[b]ut then, thought Kiki, they were brought up that way, these white American boys: I’m the Aunt Jemima on the cookie boxes of their childhoods, the pair of thick ankles Tom and Jerry played around’ (p.51). In some contexts, Kiki even deliberately meets (white) expectations by behaving in precisely the way she knows to conform to ‘white’ clichés. It is against the background of this complex perception of blackness that the idea of the ‘black family’ evoked by Kiki in her conversation with a street vendor must be analysed. ‘You’re from Africa?’ she asked sweetly, and picked up a charm bracelet with tiny replicas of international totems hanging from it: the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Statue of Liberty. […] ‘Where do you think I am from? You are African – no?’ ‘No, noooo, I’m from here – but of course…’ said Kiki. She wiped some sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, waiting for him to finish the sentence as she knew it would be finished. ‘We are all from Africa’, said the man obligingly. He made a double outward fan of his hands over the jewellery. ‘All of this, from Africa’. (pp.48-49)

Ironically, neither Kiki nor the street vendor have ever been to their (spiritual) home country, the so-called ‘black continent’. They are therefore referring to shared ethnic or cultural origins derived from an imaginary construct rather than from a real genealogy. The statement becomes slightly absurd with respect to the vendor’s merchandise allegedly likewise stemming from ‘Africa’: the items on display by no means represent any symbols of Africa but rather constitute ‘landmarks’ of Western culture. At this moment, though, they are employed as signifiers of culture per se – stripped of their former connotations, they come to serve as symbols of cultural authenticity. This leaves us with the question of whether such icons continue to carry any significance at all or whether they, in the wake of globalisation and its

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homogenising impact, have been rendered empty signs, which may be freely used as symbols for culture as such. Yet, despite the lack of ‘real’ referents, the construction of an imaginary shared heritage does work on the level of the characters and triggers a feeling of belonging among them. 9 As the conversation shows, boundaries of class and sex are overcome as blackness – i.e. race – takes priority over other potentially dividing elements. This moment of bonding is interrupted by the arrival of Kiki’s (white) friends Claire and Warren which re-establishes class boundaries. For Kiki, the importance of the black community arises primarily from the possibilities it offers for socialising; her membership in the black family therefore forms only part of her self-image. To her son Levi, by contrast, the idea of a black brotherhood assumes a vital significance. He approaches the project of creating an ‘authentic’ black identity in a radical way and attempts to stylise himself into a ‘gangsta’ or ‘street’ persona. Seeing that he comes from an affluent, upper-middle-class background, his efforts to sound and look ‘street’ have a comic effect on the reader and are repeatedly mocked, sometimes even criticised, by the other characters: ‘Street, street’, bellowed Zora. ‘It’s like, “being street”, knowing the street – in Levi’s sad little world if you’re a Negro you have some kind of mysterious holy communion with sidewalks and corners.’ (p.63)

Ridiculous as Levi’s sudden involvement in the Haitian cause and his zeal in the struggle for disadvantaged black ‘brothers’ may seem, several passages in which he acts as a focaliser imply that he feels an earnest desire to belong to a community in which he is not distinguished by his skin colour (which, as he is painfully aware, sets him off from the vast majority of residents in Wellington’s residential area). Levi obviously hopes to find a substitute family in order to compensate for the lack of security and stability in his ‘real’ family. His ideal of a group of people inseparably connected to each other is symbolised by his very own vision of the ‘black brotherhood’. In 9

Apparently, we are not merely dealing with a literary construct or invention here. Baumann observes a similar phenomenon among the Afro-Caribbean community of Southall intent on re-defining their cultural identity: ‘Across these approaches, however, one could discern one crucial historical revalidation. It consisted in a new emphasis on the historical unity of all people of African descent. […] Both Rastafarians and secular pan-Africanists saw themselves as “Africans, whatever the country you come from” and Africa was apostrophised, in the words of many informants, as “our spiritual home”, “our common cultural identity”, and “the country where our true culture lies”. This new African identity constructs not only a global history, but also a new and global cultural identity.’ Cf. Gerd Baumann, ‘Collective Identity as a Dual Discursive Construction: Dominant v. Demotic Discourses of Culture and the Negotiation of Historical Memory’, in Identities: Time, Difference, and Boundaries, ed. by Heidrun Friese (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books), pp.189-200 (p.193).


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order to find his ‘authentic’ black identity, Levi resorts to an exaggerated imitation of the ‘bro’s’ on the street in the desperate hope to thereby become one of them. The notion of the ‘black family’ and the ways Kiki and Levi react to it hint at the interplay of personal and collective identities. The novel leaves us in no doubt about the fact that a universal ‘black’ identity does not exist – at least not in the clear-cut form sought by Levi – and that it must remain an (illusionary) construct. However, despite its constructed nature, the idea of a bond linking all black people provides an important point of reference for the creation of the characters’ self-images and thus constitutes a crucial part of their personal identities. This seemingly stable core is shaken as soon as alleged members of the group start to behave in a way contradictory or even detrimental to the idea of the black family. This is in particular the case with Monty Kipps, an outspoken black university lecturer, who pronouncedly turns against the idea of a bond between all black people. His son Michael even denies the existence of a black identity at all, ‘[arguing] that being black was not an identity but an accidental matter of pigment’ (p.44). The controversy assumes a political hue when Kipps publicly speaks out against affirmative action. His stance proves highly troublesome for the liberal supporters of affirmative action when Monty Kipps begins to use their ‘own’ values, first and foremost the right to free speech, against them. Here Kiki, following her gut feeling, is the only one able to incorporate controversial ideas into her system of beliefs and to thereby uphold the notion of a functional black family. ‘Intellectual’ Howard, in contrast, continues to slander Monty as a conservative fascist. Once again, emotions are promoted as the only possible strategy of coping with internal tensions and keeping potentially divisive differences at bay. As in the first example, the unions or communities constructed on the basis of ‘sameness’ prove fragile and are constantly threatened by the renewed importance attributed to differential categories such as class, or the ‘counter-productive’ behaviour of individual members.

4. Workplace Family As a last example, I would like to discuss the metaphorical family of coworkers or colleagues. The novel deals with several types of this kind of ‘family’, for instance the group of employees at the music store where Levi works a part-time job, followed by his gang of fellow hustlers. When Levi first starts the Saturday job, he feels proud to belong to the big corporate ‘family’ hailed by his employer: Our companies are part of a family rather than a hierarchy. They are empowered to run their own affairs, yet other companies help one another, and solutions to problems come from all

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kinds of sources. In a sense we are a community, with shared ideas, values, interests and goals. (p.180)

While the reader will most probably realise immediately that this statement only forms part of the company’s marketing spiel, the company’s rhetoric nevertheless strikes a tune with Levi as it caters directly to his desire to belong to a group that shares the same ideals and goals. In terms of narrative perspective, we witness a discrepancy between the character’s perception of the situation and its assessment via the narrator’s ironic comments, which disclose the rationale behind the company’s self-marketing strategies. Therefore, the final realisation that his work-place family has only been an illusion hits Levi quite hard: trying to organise a motion against the company’s orders to work on Christmas Day, he finds his ‘allies’ quick to desert and to conform to the manager’s expectations. At this point, class barriers resurge since Levi is in a position to risk losing his part-time job whereas his colleagues depend on their regular income. Moreover, Levi secretly has to admit that he is actually ignorant of his fellow workers’ way of life: There was an alternative universe that Levi occasionally entered in his imagination, one in which he accepted LaShonda’s invitations, and then later they made love standing up in the basement of the store. […] But the truth was he wouldn’t know what to do with a woman like LaShonda. […] Levi’s girls were typically the giggly Hispanic teenagers from the Catholic school next door to his prep, and those girls had simple tastes: happy with a movie and some heavy petting in one of Wellington’s public parks. (p.184)

Nevertheless, the failure of this first workplace family does not spoil Levi’s belief in the bonds within the ‘family’ of co-workers. For this reason, he turns away from the realm of ‘official’ corporate business and replaces his job at the music store with a new ‘job’ as a hustler. Due to this entrance into an all-black male group, an overlap arises with Levi’s ideal of the black brotherhood, a notion which he tries to impose on the group of young men selling fake designer goods on the street. Comparable to his music store experience, Levi’s desperate attempts to belong are doomed to failure. However, Levi himself does not realise this failure and is thrilled at his being accepted into the group, an experience which provokes a strong feeling of empowerment and pride in him: He was in. Being in was a weird feeling. These past few days, coming to meet the guys after school, hanging with them, had been an eye-opener for Levi. Try walking down the street with fifteen Haitians if you want to see people get uncomfortable. He felt a little like Jesus taking a stroll with the lepers. (p.243, emphases in the original)

Levi’s over-enthusiasm leads to various comic incidents, especially when he starts to act as the ultimate authority on ‘street’ and black ‘bro’s’, going as far as re-naming one of his fellow hustlers to make his name sound more


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authentic. The narrator’s comments leave the reader in no doubt that the other young men, who have to make a living out of their ‘job’, only play along but do not really believe in Levi’s idea of ‘[t]he Street, the global Street, lined with hustling brothers working corners from Roxbury to Casablanca, from South Central to Cape Town’ (pp.245-246). Although the passages on Levi’s ‘street’ life are narrated in a highly ironic tone, they neither aim at ridiculing Levi’s search for a ‘family’ in which he is no longer an outsider, nor do they undermine the concept of the ‘workplace family’ as such (here more or less identical with the black brotherhood). If only temporarily, Levi does gain some satisfaction from his bonding with the newfound ‘bro’s’, and thus makes an experience which is vital for his coming to terms with his black identity. The academic community at Wellington University represents a further group which can be considered as a ‘workplace family’. Zora is the character most attracted to this circle. She is described as being constantly busy planning her academic career and, to this end, pestering members of staff. Strikingly, Zora, who ridicules her brother Levi for his deluded notions of a black brotherhood, herself falls prey to the lure of an imaginary community or ‘family’. As in Levi’s case, an overlap with the black community may be detected as Zora is intent on supporting disadvantaged black fellows and enabling them to enter the closed-off realm of academia. Her enthusiasm in this project is not dissimilar from Levi’s zeal and she likewise misinterprets other people’s real ambitions and hopes, expecting them to share her own goals. Claire exploits Zora’s ambitious stance by asking her to argue the case of several black students participating in her poetry class without the required formal qualifications: ‘“Depressing as it is, the truth is these people won’t respond to an appeal to their consciences in any language other than Wellington language. And you know Wellington language, Zora. You of all people”’ (p.263, emphasis in the original). At this point, the university is presented as a walled-off community, which can only be entered by the privileged few. This impression is shared by Elisha, who has been given a job at Wellington but who doubts that she will ever truly belong to this academic ‘family’: ‘“But people like you and me,” continued Elisha severely, “we’re not really a part of this community, are we?”’ (p.374) While Zora, with her upper-middle class background, manages to overcome ethnic and gender differences, class differences prove resilient for Carl; accordingly, he, in the end, does not become a member of Wellington’s exclusive circle and even actively sets himself apart from it. Ironically, this scene follows immediately after Zora’s realisation that, despite her established position within the academic community, she is ignorant of some of the events most important to her personally. In the ensuing argument when Carl

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accuses Zora of a lack of ‘authentic’ blackness, class differences constitute a seemingly insurmountable barrier: ‘But that’s a joke around here, man. People like me are just toys to people like you… I’m just some experiment for you to play with. You people aren’t even black any more, man – I don’t know what you are. You think you’re too good for your own people. You got your college degrees, but you don’t even live right. You people are all the same’, said Carl, looking down, addressing his words to his own shoes, ‘I need to be with my people, man – I can’t do this no more’. (pp.418-419, emphases in the original)

Although wounded pride certainly plays a role in this heated exchange, the frequency with which comparable discussions occur suggests that there is a tension between the concepts of the ‘academic’ family and the ‘black brotherhood’ and that the two are not entirely compatible despite certain overlaps. It is at this point that the dynamic quality of ‘sameness’ shows most clearly: while ‘sameness’ allows for the privileging of a specific differential category, relegating all other, potentially divisive differences to second place, this privileging can only be upheld within a specific context and for a limited period of time. As soon as the constellation changes, formerly suppressed differences return and may now likewise adopt the position of the ‘top criterion’. For this reason, ‘sameness’ requires permanent effort and adaptation to new contexts. We are, therefore, not dealing with any fixed structures but rather confronted with fragile constructs.

5. Conclusion As the foregoing analysis of the three different types of ‘family’ in On Beauty demonstrates, the specific use of this metaphor constitutes one strategy of conveying the idea of ‘sameness’. In this case, ‘sameness’ results from a feeling of community, stability and belonging. In On Beauty, the concept is employed to provide a basis for the creation of (seemingly) coherent identities. Even though each ‘family’ in the novel is afflicted with flaws and weaknesses and can only be maintained by constant efforts to suppress incongruent elements, these families are still perceived as important sources of stability and support by the protagonists, who derive the necessary strength for the construction of their personal identities from the collective identity which they feel to correspond most clearly to their self-images. In particular with respect to the two purely metaphorical families, it proves fruitful to draw upon Baumann’s theory on cultural identities as dual discursive constructs. Baumann reports that, during his studies in Southall, he found that [t]he more one listened, the more voices one heard that identified different cultures within the same quasi-ethnic community, while recognising the same culture across different communities as well. The equation between ethnic identity and culture, dominant as it is in much public discourse about ethnic minorities, disintegrated the more I got to know local


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people. […] The data thus showed two different discourses of identity being engaged by Southallians themselves. 10

This definition of collective identity as a dual discursive construct comprising a reificatory and a demotic discourse provides a possible solution to the problem that ‘sameness’ never exists in an absolute, enduring form but is always implicitly interspersed with differences, which have to be actively suppressed in order to uphold the illusion of homogeneity. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the ‘adoption’ of one collective identity does not automatically rule out membership in other communities, which allows for multiple affiliations and context-depending overlaps. With respect to the perceived viability of these constructed communities, we have to distinguish between two levels. Here, a tension arises from the juxtaposition of the perspective of individual characters (employed as focalisers) and the assessment of the situation by the narrator. In several cases, the narrator’s ironic comments suggest that the characters believe in idealised constructs rather than ties or communities based on factual similarities. Nevertheless, those constructs are not presented as valueless or futile. In this context, irony, in contrast to its ‘postmodern’ usage, does not serve to dismantle or ‘deconstruct’ the sheer possibility of continuous identities and lasting affiliations; rather, it underlines the constructed character of each metaphorical family (or its narrative in case of the real-life family) without denying its legitimacy and importance as a crucial point of reference. This strategy illustrates that although we are dealing with idealised constructs, they are to some extent ‘real’ for the characters and fulfil an important function in their search for satisfactory, ‘authentic’ identities. Another striking aspect is the fact that the construction of each metaphorical family heavily depends on narrative means; narratives are thus drawn upon for the generation of meaning. Although Schabert refers primarily to the novels themselves in her statement that ‘even when depicting a society which is split into personal interests and morally depraved, the act of narration finally makes sense’, 11 I would nevertheless like to argue that this observation also applies to the intratextual level, in particular to the characters’ ‘auto-narratives’. The attempt to generate meaning by narrative means can be seen as part of a general tendency which moves away from ‘postmodern’ representations of the fragmentarisation and instability of characters’ identities; in contrast, a number of texts now suggest that stable, satisfying identities may be achieved after all. This development, however, must not be interpreted as a clean break from postmodernism; rather, this

10 11

Baumann, p.190. Schabert, p.436, my transl.

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growing body of works may be seen as the starting point of a new line in the history of the contemporary British novel and coexists with the characteristically ‘postmodern’ texts which are still being produced. An aspect worthy of further investigation is the question of whether this tendency is linked to current social and societal transformations triggered by globalisation and internationalisation; the return to narratives generating sense and alluding to the possibility of stable identities might be seen as being provoked by a general insecurity and the increasing loss of meaning of former points of reference in identity formation.

Works Cited Baumann, Gerd, ‘Collective Identity as a Dual Discursive Construction: Dominant v. Demotic Discourses of Culture and the Negotiation of Historical Memory’, in Identities: Time, Difference, and Boundaries, ed. by Heidrun Friese (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), pp.189-200. Feldmann, Doris, ‘Beyond Difference? Recent Developments in Postcolonial and Gender Studies’, in English Studies Today, ed. by Ansgar Nünning and Jürgen Schlaeger (Trier: WVT, 2007), pp.113-137. Gilroy, Paul, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004). Schabert, Ina, Englische Literaturgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine neue Darstellung aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2006). Smith, Zadie, On Beauty (London: Penguin, 2005). Wagner, Bernd, ‘Kulturelle Globalisierung: Weltkultur, Glokalität und Hybridisierung’, in Kulturelle Globalisierung – Zwischen Weltkultur und kultureller Fragmentierung, ed. by Bernd Wagner (Essen: Klartext, 2001), pp.9-38.

Ulrike Zimmermann

Out of the Ordinary – and Back? Jackie Kay’s Recent Short Fiction Since the year 2002, Jackie Kay has published two collections of short stories. Many of them concern themselves with the issue of identity. This paper offers an analysis of Kay’s ‘Why Don’t You Stop Talking’, ‘Out of Hand’, and ‘Trout Friday’. All three texts have female protagonists, who are beset with questions about themselves, their qualities as individuals and their position in contemporary British society. Loneliness, loss, and the feeling of being an outsider belong to the burden Kay’s characters carry. They have to face discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity and gender, and they struggle against the persistent tendency of being put in firm and often pointless social categories. Their exploration routes are rendered by Kay with empathy and depth. Kay’s short stories may be seen as construction sites of identity. How genealogical and individual ideas of identity are investigated in the stories will be the focus of this paper, while Kay’s literary language will also be examined.

1. Introduction Jackie Kay, who belongs to a younger generation of Scottish writers, is maybe best known for her widely acclaimed novel Trumpet 1 and for the polyphonic poetry sequence The Adoption Papers. 2 Her two collections of short stories, Why Don’t You Stop Talking and Wish I Was Here, were published in 2002 and 2006 respectively. 3 The short stories address a variety of subjects, amongst which issues of identity, love relationships, and the experience of loss, death, and dying seem to figure prominently. Indeed, Kay’s ability to portray what is frequently seen as ‘contemporary’ relationships, with apparently arbitrary separations and the protagonists’ unending search for romantic love, and the inclusion of homosexual love, has led writers of reviews to rather overstate the importance of the theme in her short fiction. This is especially true of her second collection. 4 Kay, the daughter of a white Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, was given up for adoption as a baby and grew up in Glasgow with her white adoptive parents. ‘Kay’s concern with identity is hardly surprising [...]; she is 1 2 3

4

Jackie Kay, Trumpet (New York: Vintage, 2000 [1998]). Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991). Jackie Kay, Why Don’t You Stop Talking (London: Picador 2003 [2002]), and Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here (London: Picador, 2006). The online review ‘A Book for the Broken-Hearted’ is a case in point. Anne Enright, ‘A Book for the Broken-Hearted’, The Guardian Online, 17 June 2006 (15 August 2007).

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uniquely placed to comment on the interface between personal and cultural identity’. 5 As a lesbian and single mother, she could easily be labelled an ‘identity politics poster child’. 6 Her own experiences as a black woman with a distinctive Scottish accent can be reckoned as a factor for her interest in identity questions. Since the beginning of her career as a writer, she has constantly been asked in interviews how she feels about herself, her origins, her position in (Scottish as well as British) society. Her usual answer is that she sees herself as a Black Scottish woman writer. She acknowledges difficulty with being called British, but will accept the label if it is used as a kind of umbrella term. 7 She certainly will not accept the label ‘black’ if this is connected to fixed ideas of how to behave and what to produce in terms of her art. When asked for a contribution to the 200th anniversary of abolition, she notes that she was hesitant at first, ‘[...] I replied that I thought enough had been written about slavery, and that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a black writer. Black writers are often expected to write about slavery and race’. 8 However, Kay did contribute in the end, her argument being that she herself learned a lot about forgotten and repressed parts of Scottish history in the process and wanted to share this experience. She does not lay claim to any particular right to speak from a more authentic position than others. The problems connected with the denominator ‘black’ in terminological constructs like ‘Black British Literature’ have been addressed by Mark Stein and Helge Nowak among others. 9 Nowak draws attention to the cultural and political implications of ‘black’, which does not only convey certain assumptions about writers, but has come to include for instance Caribbean and Asian writers as well. In this sense, ‘black’ refers to a political stance, but must be suspected to veil the heterogeneity of the writers and the cultural production concerned. 10 This is Kay’s point in the above-quoted remark. In 5

6

7

8

9

10

Alison Lumsden, ‘Jackie Kay’s Poetry and Prose: Constructing Identity’, in Contemporary Scottish Women Writers, ed. by Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp.79-91 (p.79). David Ian Paddy, ‘Jackie Kay’, The Literary Encylopedia, (The Literary Dictionary Company, 2002) (15 August 2007). Laura Severin, ‘Interview with Jackie Kay’, Free Verse, 2001/2002 (15 August 2007). Jackie Kay, ‘Missing Faces’, The Guardian Online, 24 March 2007 (15 August 2007). Helge Nowak, ‘Black British Literature – Unity or Diversity?’, in Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s, ed. by Barbara Korte and Klaus-Peter Müller (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), pp.71-87, and Mark Stein, ‘The Black British Bildungsroman and the Transformation of Britain’, in Korte and Müller, pp.89-105. See Nowak, pp.74ff. Mark Stein, however, argues that the term ‘black’ per se consciously includes the idea of heterogeneity and diversity and is therefore applicable and helpful, cf.

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general, an awareness of the fact that ‘black’ ‘is [...] frequently [...] used as an umbrella term for all non-white minorities [...]’ 11 is a prerequisite for making use of the term. Although seen by many critics as somewhat more useful, resorting to ‘multi-ethnic’ also retains the black/white dichotomy. 12 Generally, Kay has a high awareness of these issues and keeps addressing them, but refuses to be bound to them in her role as a writer. Although autobiographical elements are frequent in Kay’s writings, her texts offer far more for interpretation than just autobiography. She rather uses her own biography as ‘a starting ground from which to explore the broader conditions of multicultural Britain and identity in general’. 13 In the major part of her writings, she concerns herself with identities which are not self-evident and do not belong to the mainstream (however mainstream might be defined in a given situation). In the following, three short stories will by studied in detail. The issues they deal with are paradigmatic and recur in much of Kay’s writing. All of them have women protagonists who have to struggle in a – at best uncomprehending and at worst hostile – society, which tends to put pressure on those who do not fit easily into categories. Hence, the selection of stories is intended to illustrate Kay’s narrative choices of subject matter, characters, and motifs.

2. Silence and Trauma: ‘Why Don’t You Stop Talking?’ The title story 14 of Kay’s first collection Why Don’t You Stop Talking has a first-person narrator-protagonist. Thelma is a typical Kayan character in the sense that she does not seem to inhabit her own life self-evidently or easily. The reader soon learns that she is beset with problems: she is lonely, feels habitually watched by people who are in fact mostly unconcerned, and cannot stop talking once she has started. The vital importance of language and the absolute necessity to acquire mastery over it as well as to control the deeprooted need for utterance and self-expression is stressed from the very outset of the narrative. ‘It’s harder to take words back than it is to get a refund’ (W, p.40), as Thelma notes with bleak wisdom at the beginning of the story.

11

12 13 14

Stein, pp.90-91. For this debate, see also Barbara Korte, ‘Generationsbewußtsein als Element “schwarzer” britischer Identitätsfiktion’, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 40 (1999), 331-350 (pp.331-336). Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg, eds., Many Voices – Many Cultures. Multicultural British Short Stories (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997), p.11, my transl. See Korte and Sternberg, pp.12-13. Paddy. Jackie Kay, ‘Why Don’t You Stop Talking,’ in Why Don’t You Stop Talking, pp.37-50. All further references appear parenthetically in the text.

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Behind her lies a traumatic childhood with verbal, emotional, and presumably also physical abuse. Thelma recounts of her parents, ‘I don’t see them anymore and they don’t see each other. One Christmas we all said things we shouldn’t and once they were said we couldn’t get over them. I reckon families should be banned’ (W, p.44). Here language turns lethal, with the potential to sever familial bonds forever. Thelma frequently feels inferior; she does not seem to have a job, and she is totally on her own, cut off from all profitable social contact. She suffers greatly from being overweight, not merely because she deviates from the beauty ideal, but for the very practical reason that she can hardly manage the stairs to her flat anymore (W, p.48). The story sets out in a supermarket, where Thelma loads her trolley with sweets and is promptly enraged by the impression that a slim and pretty woman (here the I-narration implies that Thelma is neither one nor the other) is looking at her shopping. When she tries to chat to the woman about this, the conversation turns into an exchange of terse and heated remarks and ends with the woman asking the question, ‘Why don’t you stop talking?’ and, as her parting shot, saying ‘Get yourself a shrink’ (W, pp.42-43). Thelma, shaken and at the same time feeling that she, too, should watch her weight and eat more healthily, faces her next ordeal when she wants to withdraw cash and a man jumps the queue at the cash dispenser. Despite the fact that he is tall and massive, Thelma protests and gets – again – a heated reaction. ‘You’re lucky I have got manners [...]. If I didn’t I’d belt you one on that fat black mouth of yours!’ (W, p.45). After this encounter, Thelma bolts for her flat, only to be held up by the sight of a woman beating her small child in the street. When she tries to intervene, she is attacked and beaten in the face by the child’s mother. It is to be noted that Thelma’s position within the course of the story’s events changes. The first incident leaves it open whether the narrator is being paranoid in the circumstances, or whether the slender woman indeed stares at her and her load of sweets. An assessment of the narrator’s reliability is precluded. The queue jumper, however, behaves in an anti-social way from the start and injures Thelma – first he ignores her right to get to the cashpoint, then he insults her. The third confrontation would not include the narrator at all if she did not choose to intervene. Significantly, she does not do this for herself, but to protect someone who is totally unknown to her. The narrative is moving from an incident which might have its origin in Thelma’s consciousness alone because she feels implicitly criticised towards direct threats which would be hard to interpret as figments of Thelma’s imagination in the text. Furthermore, the story seems to be designed as an illustration of the


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saying that ‘misfortune always comes in threes’. The chronology persistently builds up tension. Thelma’s problems are not depicted as monocausal. There is no easy solution to lighten the story’s rather bitter aftertaste. Again somewhat typically for Kay, the protagonist is at least doubly marginalised. Thelma is once verbally abused because of her ethnicity. However, the overall impresssion is that not exclusively racial, but also socio-cultural and gender discrimination all contribute to the complications in her life. Thelma is black, female, described as not pretty, and presumably jobless. It is implied that the queue jumper, for instance, would not have dared to ignore and then intimidate a man, or, for that matter, a woman prettier than Thelma. Society, represented by the hostile characters appearing in the text, seems bent on keeping a woman down who is on her own, has low self-esteem and presumably talks too much; even more so if this woman attempts to stand up for herself or for someone weaker than herself, as in the case of the child in the street. The sense of apprehension created in the text finds its culmination in the final tableau of Thelma, standing in front of the mirror and cutting into her tongue with her razor. ‘I’m constantly living on my tongue’s edge. I can’t afford to take no more risks. Every time my tongue gets me into trouble, it will be punished. [...] It is actually painful, but the pain feels good. The pain feels deserved. The blood is generous and red and it pours down my face’ (W, p.50). The aggression Thelma has developed and experienced during her day is coming back to her. Lacking meaningful coping strategies (except eating more biscuits), she directs this aggression finally against herself. Her resorting to self-harm can be seen as a climax of an increasingly unstable mental state. At the same time, the episode makes a metonymical move and points to the equivalence in some languages of ‘language’ and ‘tongue’, which in English lives on in figurative phrases like ‘hold your tongue’, something that Thelma has been trying to do during her narrated day. The punishment of that part of Thelma’s body which in her opinion causes all her troubles seems to echo lex talionis, mediaeval forms of punishment which were supposed to actually mirror the crime. There are further references in this scene. The bloodshed in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus comes to mind, where cutting out Lavinia’s tongue and hacking off her hands is part of the all-encompassing violence that besets the characters and is an integral part of the plot. There are explicit references to Philomela from Ovid’s

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Metamorphoses in the play, for instance when Lavinia tries to explain what has happened to her and gets out the book. 15 To go back to the earlier text which echoes in Thelma’s cutting of her tongue: in the sixth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela sets out on a journey to visit her sister Procne under the protection of Tereus, her sister’s husband, and is then abducted and raped by him. 16 After his crime, the rapist cuts out Philomela’s tongue to silence her once and for all. Ovid’s account of this atrocious scene is worth quoting, since his description provides the tongue with a life of its own, which also is the underlying idea of Kay’s short story. [...] Philomela was offering him her throat and, when she saw his sword, had conceived a hope of death; as her tongue protested, calling all the time on the name of her father, and struggling to speak, he [Tereus] caught it in pincers and took it out with his cruel sword. The end of its roots flickered while the tongue itself lay trembling and muttering on the black earth, and as the tail of a mutilated snake will jump, it quivered, and, as it died, was looking for its mistress’s tracks. 17

The traumatised girl cannot stop screaming and expects after her rape to be murdered, but in the imagery of these verses, Philomela’s tongue itself simply refuses to stop calling for help and even goes on moving and ‘muttering’ when it has already been severed from its roots. Thelma, one could argue, is a modern-day Philomela who has internalised her victimisation. She is in her opinion not as innocent as Philomela (in a sexual sense) would have been; Thelma’s ‘crime’ is talking uncontrollably, the result of too much loneliness which makes her crave for human contact and communication. The antagonistic reactions she receives finally pave the

15

William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. by Jonathan Bate (London: Routledge, 1995), Act IV,1, lines 30-58. 16 The story of Philomela is to be found in the verses 412 to 674 of Book Six of the Metamorphoses. See for instance Ovid. Metamorphoses V-VIII, ed. by Donald E. Hill (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1992). William Anderson points out in his commentary on Book Six that the myth has older, Greek sources. See Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Books 6-10, ed. by William S. Anderson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p.206. 17 [...] Iugulum Philomela parabat spemque sua mortis uiso conceperat ense; ille indignantem et nomen patris usque uocantem luctantemque loqui comprensam forcipe linguam abstulit ense fero. Radix micat ultima linguae, ipsa iacet terraeque tremens immurmurat atrae, utque salire solet mutilatae cauda colubrae, palpitat et moriens dominae uestigia quaerit. (Latin text and English translation of lines 552-560 quoted from Hill).


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way for the idea that somehow everything disagreeable happening to her is her own fault and deserves punishment. It is noteworthy that despite being mute, the mythical Philomela still manages to make her story known by weaving its images into a tapestry, thus triggering her sister’s revenge plot. Victims cannot be silenced as easily as the perpetrators of crimes tend to think. In Ovid, the sisters as well as the rapist king are transformed into various birds in the end. There is no conciliatory conclusion to ‘Why Don’t You Stop Talking’. However, Thelma can tell her story as a first-person narrator. Within the frame of the short story, the need to express oneself is conceived of as indelible: art, be it words or images, keeps the possibility of utterance open, even if there is only silence and pain left to be expressed. The story’s language is highly visual, 18 rich in terms describing colours and textures and culminating in the description of a self-reflective tableau: a woman watching herself in the mirror while blood runs down her face. The visuality of Kay’s language can also be noted in the next two short stories to be discussed.

3. ‘Out of Hand’: Paradigms of Immigration In contrast to ‘Why Don’t You Stop Talking’, ‘Out of Hand’ 19 – from the same collection – has a psychologically stable protagonist. Seventy-six year old Rose McGuire Roberts remembers her life and tries to come to terms with ageing, a process that is represented in the story by the image of her hands, which used to be beautiful when Rose stepped off the Empire Windrush in the summer of 1948. ‘Twenty-six years old, they arrived, elegant, black, skilled, beautiful hands’ (O, p.159). Rose has come to England literally to lend a hand and is full of expectations of good things to come. She is impressed with the enthusiastic welcome by the waiting crowd, manages to maintain her cheerfulness even in her drab lodgings and celebrates her arrival in England by going to the cinema. To her surprise, she sees herself in the news, stepping off the Windrush (O, p.163). Her appearance on the black-and-white screen finally makes her new life real to her. She is extremely pleased and very proud of the fact that only she knows the colour of the clothes she was wearing when she arrived. Once again, colours take on a highly important role: here Rose retains a sense of privacy although she has, in a way, turned public on screen.

18 19

I am indebted to Barbara Korte for this observation. ‘Out of Hand’, in Why Don’t You Stop Talking, pp.157-169. All further references appear parenthetically in the text.

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However, after the film, nobody seems to have recognised her, nobody speaks to her, and the critical glances she receives foreshadow her experiences in her first years in England. As a qualified nurse, she ends up making tea and emptying bed-pans; racist incidents occur frequently – patients accuse her of spreading diseases and tell her to ‘go back to the jungle’, while her colleagues don’t intervene (O, p.167). With her Jamaican husband, who is now ‘[d]ead and buried in the wrong country’ (O, p.160), she has often contemplated to go back, only to come to the conclusion that both of them do not know any longer if ‘they were just imagining their own country’ (O, p.160). As has been noted by Mike and Trevor Phillips, ‘the region from which we had travelled became transformed in our minds into idylls, lost paradises [...]’. 20 The heritage becomes increasingly mythical, especially for the second and third generations. But the England Rose expected to come to is a myth as well: The question of the nation they [postcolonial peoples] come from and the nation they have come to as sites of enunciating subjectivity and citizenship remains a key signifier to the typologies of hybridity experienced [...]. What and who is a Jamaican in Jamaica and England? 21

There is no conclusive answer to this, except for the awareness of the position out of which Rose can speak. She consciously avoids telling her children and grandchildren about her negative experiences, but has sworn to herself she will never forget them. The achievement of having begun a new life in England, even if she cannot be sure what exactly the country she came to represents, either, fills her with a kind of stubborn satisfaction. ‘She has got to remember. She can see herself on the big screen. Red hat. Navy dress. Coming down off the Windrush. She could almost applaud’ (O, p.169). While the Windrush has ‘become a symbol of post-war immigration’, 22 Rose’s hands acquire a symbolic value as well. They identify her as a person who has lived a hard-working life (it is emphasised that her hands look older than the rest of her body) and who has given a lot; first to the new and unfriendly country, later to her growing family. Rose has achieved a certain proud security in her old age, along with resignation and disillusionment, which she refuses to pass on to the next generations.

20

21

22

Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (London: Harper Collins, 1998), p.1. Awam Amkpa, ‘Floating Signification: Carnivals and the Transgressive Performance of Hybridity’, in Performing Hybridity, ed. by May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp.96-105 (p.100). Phillips and Phillips, p.2. See also Susanne Reichl, Culture in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: WVT, 2002), pp.18-19.


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It is remarkable that Kay has decided to employ the arrival of the Windrush as a topic. While creating a fictional character and providing it with a voice amongst so many nameless immigrants who will never tell their history, the story certainly connects to the enormous discursive importance the Windrush has gained. Nevertheless, Kay remains critical of these historical landmarks. ‘We’re perhaps over-fond of dates [...]. Anniversaries afford us a big noisy opportunity to try and remember what we should not have forgotten’. 23

4. ‘Trout Friday’: Naming Identity ‘Trout Friday’ 24 concerns itself with genealogical as well as individual identity. Once more, the story has a female protagonist living a lonely life. At 23, Melanie is faced with isolation: her father left the family long ago, she lost her mother, recently she has had a miscarriage and has been left by the child’s father (T, p.67). Nevertheless the narrative keeps up a somewhat bitterly humorous tone: the purchase of a new toothbrush is commented as follows, ‘She had lost too much already [...] and she didn’t want to lose her teeth into the bargain’ (T, p.67). Melanie has established a set of strict rules in her everyday life to keep everything under control and to banish the encroaching sense of loneliness. Taking care of her body is one option to maintain her mental as well as physical balance. Hence, she also tries to nourish herself with healthy food, a tendency which becomes obsessive and from which the title of the story derives. ‘[...] she read fish was good for the brain. So now she has salmon Monday, prawn Tuesday, cod Wednesday, haddock Thursday and trout Friday. Weekends she has fish-free because she only really needs her brain during the week’ (T, p.67). Similarly, she allows herself to think of her father, whom she barely remembers, exactly once a month. Melanie’s body is imagined as the site of genetic as well as cultural heritage when she searches for traces of her dead mother and lost father in front of the mirror. There was her face, her own face in the mirror at night and in the morning. Her mother was from Ireland [...], and her father was from Trinidad and when she looked in the mirror, the pair of them were behind her, mixing themselves up in her face. [...] Her father’s teeth were in her mouth. [...] They definitely weren’t her mother’s – thank God, because her mother had the most terrible teeth. [...] There were her eyes, her father’s. A deep dark brown. [...] And her nose, which was probably a cross between the two [...]. There was her mouth, almost comically her mother’s. [...] And her colour which was a mixture of the two. It still

23

24

Jackie Kay, ‘Missing Faces’, The Guardian Online, 24 March 2007 (15 August 2007). ‘Trout Friday’, in Why Don’t You Stop Talking, pp.65-81. All further references appear parenthetically in the text.

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struck her as interesting that colour could be blended like that, as if people were paint. (T, pp.6869)

As in ‘Why Don’t You Stop Talking’, the scene, with an almost painting-like quality, is a woman studying herself in a mirror. However, the topic here is not violence against her own needs, but the search for a solution of philosophical questions which have occupied Melanie for most of her life. In a way, this passage is a realisation of hybridity in a very concrete sense. Melanie is highly aware of her heritage. It is to be assumed that she would be able to live more effortlessly with it if she were not surrounded by people trying to put her firmly into categories. Various possibilities she has heard in the course of her life are played out in Melanie’s mind: ‘She’d read somewhere that people with her colour of skin were now being called beige. Somehow she didn’t like beige; it made her think of fashion and clothes. It made her ask questions like: does beige go with khaki? Beige Britain’ (T, p.69). Although she is not keen on the colour term used by The Guardian in 1997, it at least acknowledges the influence immigration has on the country and puts the focus on problems of interminable categorisation in the first place. The front page of G2 stated under the headline ‘Beige Britain’: ‘A new race is growing up. It’s not black, it’s not white and it’s not yet officially recognised. Welcome to the mixed-raced future’. 25 This was followed by an article titled ‘A Rich Mix’, citing among many others a young man whose mother is ‘white and British’ and his father South-African Indian. He reports struggling with questionnaires asking about his ethnicity, ‘Once I just scrawled “human” over the whole lot.’ 26 One can imagine Melanie doing the same, especially since other attempts at terminology turn out to be even worse: [...] she didn’t like it when one of the girls at work called her half-caste because it sounded insulting and she didn’t like mixed-race because it made her feel muddled. Certainly not mulatto, it made her think of mules. Definitely not people who said to her, ‘You’re neither one thing nor the other.’ because that made her feel left out, belonging to nobody. (T, p.69)

Melanie certainly feels herself to be a casualty of pointless over-categorisation, which she as a narrator manages to convey in clear and often amusing terms. Naming and labelling always takes place on a thin line between a well-meant effort to acknowledge difference in modern society and a tendency towards essentialism. ‘Most upsetting of all, she didn’t like it when other black people described her as being red or high yellow because that made her feel like a primary colour’ (T, p.70). Again, colours play a fundamental role. It is rather amusing that later in the text, while cooking her Friday trout, Melanie listens to ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay, a not overly sophisticated love song in which every25 26

The Guardian, 22 May 1997, G2, front page. Gary Younge, ‘A Rich Mix’, The Guardian, 22 May 1997, G2, 2.


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thing turns out to be yellow, starting with the stars, including everything the addressee does, and in which the addressee’s ‘skin and bones’ turn into ‘something beautiful’. 27 Interestingly, the protagonist seems to be living contentedly with herself; it is her friends, colleagues, people in the street, the media, who are constantly preoccupied with words, with naming her in an adequate way. Melanie’s selfdefinition – although she does feel insecure about her looks, her intelligence, and her social position at times and would like to know more about her family (T, p.80) – is much less debated in the text than any definition of her provided by others. As Jennifer Fink concludes her remarks on hybridity and writing, ‘[...] a yearning remains for the lost languages, colors, fabrics, textures of our individual and collective ancestors’, 28 a yearning that can be discerned in Melanie as well. However, any exoticism connected with her family heritage is firmly refuted by the narrative when she finally receives a letter from her long-absent father. ‘All this time she’d thought he was living in Trinidad or Tobago, all this time she’d looked at pictures of the beautiful beaches of Tobago on the Internet [...], he was actually living up the road in Tottenham’ (T, p.80). The alliterative play in which Trinidad, Tobago, and Tottenham figure as equally important and equally out of reach marks the extent of her disillusionment. Accordingly, there is no idyllic reunion between father and daughter, with the latter’s resolute refusal to get in touch with her father at the end of the narrative. ‘He did sign off: Love Dad. Calling himself, Dad, struck a false note; although he was her father, he hadn’t earned the name’ (T, p.81). Here Melanie herself embarks upon a thinking process concerned with categorising. The result is that ‘[she] didn’t want to know what was her and what was him’ (T, p.81). She decides to accept what she is without the need to know everything she is made out of. This also includes acts of rejection. The short story concludes with her purposefully dispelling the image of herself and her father sitting down to dinner. Instead, she begins to enjoy her solitary meal on Trout Friday. She has started to acknowledge, as Stuart Hall put it, ‘not the so-called return to roots but a coming-to-terms-with our “routes”’. 29 Libby Brooks has quite correctly labelled ‘Trout Friday’ as an

27 28

29

Coldplay, ‘Yellow’ (15 August 2007). Jennifer Natalya Fink, ‘Pushing Through the Surface: Notes on Hybridity and Writing’, in Performing Hybridity, ed. by May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp.247-252 (p.248). Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs Identity?’, in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), pp.1-17 (p.4).

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‘anti-quest’ 30 which presents the reader with the question whether ‘rejection of the past [can] be as empowering as acceptance of it’. 31 For Melanie, this seems to be the case.

5. Jackie Kay’s Literary Language Before returning to the topic of identity, some observations about Kay’s language seem to be appropriate. Together with her interest in issues of social and political relevance, Kay should be noted for her language, which is characterised by its high degree of visuality. There is a lot of watching and observing going on, descriptions of colours abound, be it skin colour or the colour of clothes a character decides to wear. Sight is the predominant sense in the stories, with protagonists who tend to observe themselves and their surroundings very closely. Interestingly, Kay once described her approach to short stories, a form which she appreciates highly, in terms of painting. ‘It’s like a wee picture that reveals a big picture’. 32 Frequently colourful tableaux are drawn by her words. The reader is called upon to see Thelma drawing bright red blood from her tongue in front of her mirror, Melanie studying herself closely and doubtfully again in a mirror, Rose’s carefully chosen dress and her aged, worn, lined hands. Furthermore, there is a tendency to include metaphor and, in the stories analysed here, particularly metonymy in the narration. Barreca has claimed that this technique predominates in female authors: The basis of this strategy relies on literalizing what has become merely symbolic. Rather than creating a word/object/action that accrues meaning through repeated appearance in the text, metaphor-into-narrative illustrates the stripping away of symbolic or over-determined meaning in order that the ‘original’ significance of the word should dominate. It involves a linguistic strategy that takes a metaphor, simile, perhaps a cliché, and plays it out into the plot of the text. 33

Cases in point are Thelma, who re-literalises the phrases about watching and holding one’s tongue and goes too far with it, as well as Rose, in whose story the act of “lending a hand” is played out in its literal significance. Lending a hand can lead to lending one’s life. I would argue, however, that the reliteralising technique does not preclude the acquisition or re-acquisition of 30

31 32 33

Libby Brooks, ‘“Don’t tell me who I am”. Conversation with Jackie Kay’, The Guardian Online, 12 January 2002 (15 August 2007). Ibid. Ibid. Regina Barreca, ‘Metaphor-Into-Narrative: Being Very Careful with Words’, in Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, ed. by Regina Barreca (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988), pp.243-256 (p.243).


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symbolic meaning. But it surely heightens the readers’ awareness of the language employed in the text and resists an easy consumption by giving back a figurative and poetic quality to everyday phrases. Melanie’s fish diary could also be included here, turning the naming of days (as in Bank Holiday, St. George’s Day, Good Friday) into something new, creative, and even humorous.

6. Conclusion Kay’s protagonists show various degrees of personal stability. They either inhabit their own lives rather uneasily or have at least a history of unease behind them. More often than not they wonder whether they are not strangers to their own lives. With a variety of coping strategies they deal with isolation, discrimination, and mental imbalance. The fact that a character is black, Jamaican, a woman, or not conforming to a beauty ideal will obviously not trigger a crisis, but the pressures of society, which either reacts with withdrawal or with relentless questioning and prodding to anyone daring to speak, indeed to exist, off the mainstream. ‘In a sense, Kay normalises the different while questioning the sureties of the norm’. 34 Kay’s protagonists leave the ordinary and straightforward, some of them because they are cruelly forced to and get mentally and physically damaged in the process. Others are aware of the fact that identity does not have an essence or core and decide to embrace it nonetheless. ‘[...] Kay explores both genetically inherited, teleologically inscribed, essentialist models of self, and those which posit the subject as a social and familial construct, interrogating the tensions which sit between these apparent binary oppositions’. 35 There is no going back to the ordinary, to serene platitudes, to blissful ignorance. In her texts Kay implies Hall’s tenet that ‘[i]dentities are constituted within, not outside representation’. 36 Representation here is speaking out and writing, acting against a gaze that is interested in surface only. ‘I still have Scottish people asking me where I’m from. They won’t actually hear my voice, because they’re too busy seeing my face’, Kay remarked in an interview. 37 The exploration process of identity may be interrupted, but is never represented as terminated with the conclusion of a short story. The debate of identity can only have ‘arbitrary closures’ in Hall’s sense. 38 Kay’s stories are construction sites where the formation of identities is made visible in an illuminating and empathy-evoking way. 34 35 36 37 38

Paddy. Lumsden, p.79. Hall, ‘Who Needs Identity?’, p.4. Brooks. Stuart Hall, ‘Minimal Selves’, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker et al. (Chicaco: Chicago University Press, 1996), pp.114-119 (p.117).

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Works Cited Ampka, Awam, ‘Floating Signification: Carnivals and the Transgressive Performance of Hybridity’, in Performing Hybridity, ed. by May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp.96-105. Anderson, William S., ed., Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972). Barreca, Regina, ‘Metaphor-Into-Narrative: Being Very Careful with Words’, in Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, ed. by Regina Barreca (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988), pp.243-256. ‘Beige Britain’, The Guardian, 22 May 1997 (G2, front page). Brooks, Libby, ‘“Don’t tell me who I am.” Conversation with Jackie Kay’, The Guardian Online, 12 January 2002 [accessed on 15 August 2007]. Coldplay, ‘Yellow’ [accessed on 15 August 2007]. Enright, Anne, ‘A Book for the Broken-Hearted’, The Guardian Online, June 17 2006 [accessed on 15 August 2007]. Fink, Jennifer Natalya, ‘Pushing Through the Surface: Notes on Hybridity and Writing’, in Performing Hybridity, ed. by May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp.247-252. Hall, Stuart, ‘Introduction: Who Needs Identity?’, in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), pp.1-17. ——. ‘Minimal Selves’, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker and others (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), pp.114-119. Hill, Donald. E., ed., Ovid. Metamorphoses V-VIII (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1992). Kay, Jackie, ‘Missing Faces’, The Guardian Online, March 24 2007 [accessed on 15 August 2007]. ——. The Adoption Papers (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991). ——. Trumpet (New York: Vintage, 2000 [1998]). ——. Why Don’t You Stop Talking (London: Picador, 2003 [2002]). ——. Wish I Was Here (London: Picador, 2006).


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Korte, Barbara, ‘Generationsbewußtsein als Element “schwarzer” britischer Identitätsfiktion’, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 40 (1999), 331-350. Korte, Barbara and Claudia Sternberg, eds., Many Voices – Many Cultures: Multicultural British Short Stories (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997). Lumsden, Alison, ‘Jackie Kay’s Poetry and Prose: Constructing Identity’, in Contemporary Scottish Women Writers, ed. by Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp.79-91. Nowak, Helge, ‘Black British Literature – Unity or Diversity?’, in Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s, ed. by Barbara Korte and Klaus-Peter Müller (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), pp.71-87. Paddy, David Ian, ‘Jackie Kay’, The Literary Encyclopedia (The Literary Dictionary Company, 2002) [accessed on 15 August 2007]. Phillips, Mike and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of MultiRacial Britain (London: Harper Collins, 1999). Reichl, Susanne, Culture in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: WVT, 2002). Severin, Laura, ‘Interview with Jackie Kay’, Free Verse 2001/2002 [accessed on 15 August 2007]. Shakespeare, William, Titus Andronicus, ed. by Jonathan Bate (London: Routledge, 1995). Stein, Mark, ‘The Black British Bildungsroman and the Transformation of Britain’, in Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s, ed. by Barbara Korte and Klaus-Peter Müller (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), pp.89-105. Younge, Gary, ‘A Rich Mix’, The Guardian, 22 May 1997 (G2, 2).

Daniel Schäbler

Teenage Transformations in Multi-Ethnic Britain: Rehana Ahmed’s Walking a Tightrope (2004) In this essay I will focus on two short-stories set in contemporary Britain: ‘Jubilee Dreams’ by Preethi Nair and ‘Stab the Cherry’ by Jamila Gavin, both published in Walking a Tightrope: New Writing from Asian Britain, a collection of short stories for younger readers edited by Rehana Ahmed. They both deal with Asian teenagers caught in a tension-field of generational, cultural, and ethnic conflicts. Both protagonists try to negotiate an identity and a future for themselves. Using Mark Stein’s concept of ‘novels of transformation’, which deals with ‘radical generational conflict’, as a starting point for my analysis of ‘Jubilee Dreams’, my first aim is to focus on how the stories render inter-generational and inter-cultural conflicts and what solutions they offer. Apart from these real-world issues, both ‘Jubilee Dreams’ and ‘Stab the Cherry’ contain fantastic elements. My second aim therefore is to ascertain the function of the supernatural for the stories. I will start by looking at both texts individually, after which I will contextualise them with the other stories in the volume and situate the anthology within the current debate over postethnicity.

1. Patchwork Families Mark Stein’s recent study on ‘black British literature’ critically reflects on both the role of the media and critics’ single-mindedness: ‘[...] the narrow focus and the disproportionate attention on a few young celebrities [...] in fact belie the breadth and heterogeneity of black British cultural production [...]”. 1 Among others, the short-story anthology Walking a Tightrope: New Writing from Asian Britain, 2 edited by Rehana Ahmed, counters this development. By juxtaposing stories by well established young writers with texts written by less well-known ones, ‘[t]he result is a collection that resists any fixed idea of what it is to be Asian in Britain and challenges stereotypes about what “Asian writing” might be’ (p.1). All ten stories deal with decisive stages in their protagonists’ coming of age, and this provides a common ground with the teenage audience the edition is mainly targeted at. While the other contributions to the anthology are well worth examining, only the two stories I will look at here truly fit the thematic range of this volume, as the other stories are either set in Asia or in pre-1990’s Britain. 1

2

Mark Stein, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2004), p.183. In accordance with Stein and other critics I will use the term ‘black’ synonymous with ‘Asian’ in the following. This is for pragmatic reasons and does not aim at obliterating differences in cultural background. Rehana Ahmed, ed., Walking a Tightrope: New Writing from Asian Britain (Basingstoke and Oxford: Young Picador, 2004). All further references appear parenthetically in the text.

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Both Preethi Nair’s and Jamila Gavin’s short-stories show that life in postmillennial multi-ethnic Britain is not just a conflict between people of different cultural backgrounds. The tensions run within families, and growing up in a heterogenous society necessitates coming to terms with traditional expectations, while at the same time adapting to society at large. Furthermore, the stories destabilise the notion of a genuinely ‘British’ culture, rather insisting that it is a patchwork formed by many cultures, deeply divided in itself. For the rest of this paper this heterogeneity must be kept in mind. 3

2. Leaping the Gap The protagonist of Preethi Nair’s ‘Jubilee Dreams’, Asha, is thirteen and wants to become a journalist. She adores popstar Will Young and has to keep this obsession secret from her strict father by covering all the Will-posters in her room with even larger posters of horses. At school she is the most unpopular girl in her class and longs to be part of Sarah Walker’s elite circle of cool, rebellious girls. Her main opponents within her family are her older sister Anita and her father, who’s chief aim in life is to become a living British stereotype. Asha renders him ridiculous throughout the story: he is so obsessed with the Queen and the celebrations for her birthday, that an upcoming war between India and Pakistan only concerns him insofar as it might disrupt the birthday ceremony (p.9). He hates all Pakistanis and thinks they are to blame for everything. Asha’s mother is caught up in the constant conflicts between Asha, Anita and their father and is portrayed by Asha as well-meaning but weak. From this initial setup on the first few pages, one can already gauge the story’s double-strategy: the overall tone is humorous, even light-hearted. However, underlying this is a darker note of tension and cultural conflict. Asha is stricken with a faint moustache (p.11) due to puberty, of which she is very much ashamed. Her body, while undergoing changes, is thus inscribed with her otherness: ‘[m]y big sister says it’s gross and wants me to wax it off, but then the kids at school will know that I’ve waxed it off. [...] I couldn’t take that kind of embarrassment’ (p.11). She is caught between restrictions imposed by her father, who wants her to marry soon and not to adapt current fashion-trends, and the expectations of ‘British culture’, namely her schoolclass, who want her to adopt these fashion trends in order to be accepted. In 3

For a critical rendering of the discussions and disputes evolving around these ideologically charged terms, see Laura Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), and the introduction in Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Routledge, 2004).

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addition, the fault lines between the cultures run within the family: Asha’s sister Anita caters to a liberal Western lifestyle and refuses to comply with her father’s traditional Indian concept of marriage. He constantly upbraids her for her disobedience. Anita dates a Pakistani Asha calls ‘Chip Shop Azhar’, a relationship which her father would not allow if he knew about it. Asha’s father is proud of Britain and very much ‘into the Queen’. He displays an enormous gratitude toward the Commonwealth: he’ll go on about the days when he would walk ten kilometres to school, with no shoes, begging for food. Then he’ll go on about how fortunate we are to live in England. That’s why he’s so into the Queen – because he says she gave him a second opportunity by letting him come to England. So you’d think he would be in favour of asylum seekers, but he says most of them are ‘bloody scroungers’ who are living off his hard-earned money. (p.8)

Asha finely notes the inconsistency between his life-story and his attitude towards foreigners. Moreover, his memories of poverty are boring repeats for her. Her father is a comical figure and in a sense equally tragic. Caught in a ‘dialectic between difference and sameness’, 4 he feels he has to adapt totally to British culture. A total conversion proves impossible for him, which in Asha’s eyes makes him bad tempered and bossy. His constant nagging at his children is the result of the pressure he feels: the pressure to adapt and the pressure to keep up traditional norms. The dilemma of Asha’s father also manifests itself linguistically: he picks up phrases at work – he is a cab driver – and uses them ruthlessly at home: ‘[s]ometimes his phrases make no sense; other times it’s like playing Countdown and you have to try and unscramble the meaning behind his words within thirty seconds or you lose the gist of the conversation’ (p.9). His pronunciation is poor, as in the way he says ‘poor head’ when he means ‘parade’, or in the phrase ‘keeping up with the Jonasis [sic]’ (p.9). Asha thinks he doesn’t fully understand the phrase, because he insists that they ‘had great cars and houses and holidays, and we had to keep up with them’ (p.9-10). Asha’s remarks about her father are clearly malicious due to their ongoing conflict, but at the same time they show how his determined attempts at self-assimilation fall far short, thereby exacerbating his status as outsider. The family’s living room serves as an objective correlative for the immigrant family’s search for identity: ‘[i]t’s an Indian living room, though you wouldn’t really know it as we have laminate wood flooring throughout. I think the only things that really give it away are the heavy electric-green curtains and the photographs and statues of incarnated gods everywhere’

4

Graham Huggan, ‘Virtual Multiculturalism: The Case of Contemporary Britain’, European Studies 16 (2001), 67-86 (p.74).

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(p.9). Just like Asha’s family, the room is a patchwork made up of two cultures, trying to adapt to Western lifestyle but at the same time reluctant to give up its Indian heritage. After the exposition about her family, Asha recounts a dream that transforms reality for her and ‘changed the course of events in my life’ (p.15): in the dream, Popstar Will Young tells her to believe in herself. In a TV-show travesty, Asha presents a news-feature and her work is harshly judged by her friends and family. Will suddenly appears and defends her. As a token against Asha’s disbelief he tells her to make a song request on the radio. When she wakes up, Asha does so and although the woman on the phone denies her request, a little later her radio-alarm comes alive and the song is played for her as a special request from Will (p.18). This supernatural event gives her new courage. In its blurring of the ontological boundary between the real and the imaginary it is clearly ironic, as indicated by the cheap game-show atmosphere. However, at the same time it points to the greatest wish of many teenagers: to get to know their idols and to experience their own ‘five minutes of fame’ and thus be socially accepted and admired. The media is a chance for Asha to really ‘exist’. Asha’s other conflict zone is her school. Triggered by her radio-experience with Will she decides to be more self-confident and climb the ranks of social hierarchy: ‘[i]t was time to go for the big time: for Sarah Walker and her gang’ (p.19). Asha makes herself popular by making compliments to Sarah while scorning her competitors, especially Elena Kyocera, who was previously ranked above Asha as second most unpopular girl. Asha even publicly renounces her passion for Will Young and declares she likes the rapper Eminem instead. The complex power-relations in Asha’s class are not relevant here, but it is obviously composed of pupils with different ethnic backgrounds. While not portrayed as a problem within the school class itself, the mixed ethnic backgrounds are relevant, as we shall see presently. Sarah, with her fashionable Estuary English and her habit of smoking ostentatiously, sets the standards for the rest to follow. Like Eminem she has adopted the rebellious minority sub-culture and uses it to establish her leading position. The white rapper Eminem, who nimbly shifts between ‘white’ and ‘black’ cultural spheres, serves as a guiding metaphor for the conflict of cultures depicted in the text. James Keller applies Kristeva’s concept of the abject to Eminem’s self-perception and subsequent self-fashioning. 5 Especially his homophobic and misogynist lyrics have helped to create this image: ‘[h]e imagines himself to be the poster child for that which middle class America 5

Cf. James Keller, ‘“Shady Agonistes”: Eminem, Abjection, and Masculine Protest’, Studies in Popular Culture 25 (2003), 13-24.


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does not want its children to become’. 6 The politics of the poster literally apply to Asha’s room, as she immediately dismantles her horse and Will posters and hangs up ones featuring Eminem. Eminem’s abusive ‘GangstaRap’ is the counter image of Will Young, who is markedly politically correct. Both Will Young and Eminem, two very different examples of pop-idols, do not fit into the traditional concepts of Asha’s father, who refers to Eminem as ‘the robber’. After Asha has won Sarah’s confidence and is allowed into her gang, she invites them to her home. The permanent initiation into the gang which she had hoped for ends in utter failure. While she and the gang are in her room, her sister Anita and Chip Shop Azhar arrive and start making love in the next room. Asha’s father comes home surprisingly and finds her and her bellybuttoned friends dancing to rap music and sees all the Eminem-posters. He then discovers his other daughter in bed with a Pakistani, ‘goes ballistic’ (p.26) and throws all the visitors out. What appears as an absurdly comical climax to the reader leaves Asha devastated: That’s where I’m up to, Eminem. That’s what you get from following a stupid Will Young dream, giving off a different vibe. I’m in the depths of despair and there’s no one there for me, least of all you, Eminem, cos I was never into you in the first place. My sister has left home. My dad won’t speak to me, my mum’s not supposed to speak to me and Sarah and her gang will never speak to me again. (p.26)

However, things gradually brighten up: a year later she has managed to find a good friend in Elena, the other outsider, and to persuade her father of Will Young’s royal ancestry and that it is important to have role models (p.27). Although the story has a happy ending, it openly confronts liberal Western values with the traditional strict patriarchal laws of an immigrant culture and thus raises the issue as to how it is possible for teenagers to escape their cultural heritage sufficiently enough to be embedded in British society without succumbing to ‘Western superficiality’. Sarah and her gang are no more a viable option for Asha than are her father’s plans for her early marriage. The text posits a division between Asha’s own generation and the generation of her parents. While the parent-generation is struggling to integrate, but cannot, the younger generation is finding ways of bypassing cultural differences. Asha succeeds finally after taking the wrong turn: giving up all her individuality so as to become a gang-member fails due to her father’s resistance. After giving up her aspirations to climb the ranks within her peergroup, she settles down happily into her friendship with Elena. ‘Jubilee Dreams’ dresses these complex intergenerational and intercultural problems 6

Keller, p.22.

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in a humoristic guise while simultaneously avoiding endearment. Thus, in depicting the heroines balancing-act between cultures and by achieving a bright outlook, the text can be seen as a depiction of hybrid indentity formation. 7

3. The Power of the Tree Jamila Gavin’s Stab the Cherry paints a much darker picture of growing up in a multi-ethnic society. Told from a male perspective, it deals with the problems of a young Asian teenager faced with trying to resist brutal pressure to become a member of an aggressive youth-gang. Dilip, a promising young drummer, must confront the expectations of his brother to give up his fascination with music and his friendship with an elderly drum-teacher and an English boy. Already in his mother’s womb, Dilip is fascinated by all rhythmic sounds, ‘[a]nd when he made it out into the big wide world, all he heard was the beat: the rhythm of life’ (p.203). As a small boy, he meets old Mr. Robinson, who was once a famous drummer. He lets Dilip practice on his drum-kit until he is given one by his father. Dilip plays in the band of his friend Russell Bateman, but this friendship comes increasingly under fire by his older brother Mukham: ‘[y]ou’ve got to learn who your real friends are, and believe me – it’s not that white trash down at Troutwater’ (p.207). His older brothers Arjun, who is in prison, and Mukham are members of the ‘Thuggies’, ‘[...] and had been ever since they went to secondary school, creating mayhem round the neighbourhood and terrorizing anyone that stood in their way’ (p.206). The Asian ‘Thuggies’ maintain a constant war with the white ‘Trouts’. As he grows older, Dilip is increasingly put under pressure to join the gang. The threatening attitude Dilip’s brother displays towards him turns into dismay when Mukham realises his younger brother will not give in to the gang’s demands: ‘[w]hat do you think you’re playing at? Don’t you realize what they can do to you?’ (p.215). Despite his display of ruthlessness Mukham suddenly appears vulnerable and shows real concern for his brother. However, Mukham’s concern quickly turns to violence and he vents his helplessness by throwing Dilip’s drum kit out of the window (p.216). In contrast to ‘Jubilee Dreams’, in which the conflicts are mainly cultural, the protagonists in ‘Stab the Cherry’ clearly organise their world according to ethnic categories. The ‘Thuggies’ abound in hatred against the neighbouring white gang and enforce a strict policy of racial segregation. Dilip’s transgression is only tolerated by his brother and the gang as long as he has not come of age, i.e. is not old enough for ‘recruitment’. His parents are powerless: ‘[m]um 7

For a critical discussion of the concepts of identity and hybridity see Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), p.123 and pp.173-83.


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would have whined about that too, but she knew it was no use, Mukham was already a law unto himself. Their father worked all hours and was just too exhausted to be bothered’ (p.210). Bearing in mind the significant differences between a literary text and a sociological study, a brief look at Claire Alexander’s The Art of Being Black will nevertheless help to understand what goes on between the ‘Thuggies’ and Dilip. 8 Alexander spent a year living with a gang in London and some of her insights bear strong resemblance to the textual world of ‘Stab the Cherry’, while her findings significantly differ in other aspects. Alexander defines the peer group as ‘[a] collection of individuals joined internally by a set of assumed shared values and welded in opposition to external forces’. It aims at ‘control over the public sphere’. 9 This ties in well with the behaviour of the ‘Thuggies’, but while Alexander paints an altogether sympathetic picture of ‘her’ gang, intent on proving that contrary to common opinion they are quite peaceful, Gavin’s text is not so optimistic, both in the symbolism it uses and its depiction of the gang’s extreme violence. In line with Alexander’s findings, the ‘Thuggies’ entertain an ‘internal mythology’ 10 : Mukham is proud of the injury he received in a battle with a white gang. He and the gang see this as evidence of bravery and masculinity. Another of the group-myths entertained especially by Mukham as a means of putting pressure on Dilip is the release of their brother Arjun from prison: ‘“Arjun would knock your head off for this [Dilip’s disobedience]. You know that, don’t you? You’d damn well better be in with us by the time he comes out of prison’” (p.210). On one occasion, the gang are outside Dilip’s house, once again commanding him to come out and join them. They hang around a cherry tree outside his window and kick and stab it. Dilip feels there is a connection between himself and the tree: For the first time, Dilip noticed the tree. It had been outside his window ever since they moved there. [...] As far as Dilip was concerned, a tree was just a tree. But today, as he watched the lads attack its slender trunk, it felt like they were attacking him. He felt every stab and kick and stubbing out of cigarettes. He wondered how long the little tree could bear the abuse. It looked vulnerable, all wintry and bare. It would surely die like all the other trees that the council had planted and the gang had vandalized. (pp.208-209)

A link is thus established between the fate of the tree and what lies in wait for Dilip, should he resist the gang. However, the text makes very clear that joining the gang would result in injury of a different kind. This duality is evoked by 8 9 10

Claire Alexander, The Art of Being Black: The Creation of Black British Youth Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Ibid., p.149. Ibid., p.148.

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the link between the physical abuse the tree is subjected to and the mental anguish Dilip feels, which is disguised as physical pain. The tree symbolises Dilip’s dilemma – whatever he chooses, he will have to overcome the tight social rules surrounding him or succumb to the brutal ‘Thuggies’. Things worsen when the gang catches Dilip and his white friend Russell outside Dilip’s house after Russell has just invited him to be the band’s drummer for a local concert. Ravi, the leader of the gang, Dilip’s somewhat more hesitant brother Mukham and the other gang members beat up the two boys, chase Russell away and force Dilip up against the tree. ‘Dilip felt the hard trunk of the cherry tree up against his spine. It seemed to whisper to him through his vertebrae’ (p.212). Ravi announces ‘[y]ou’re one of us, you know’ and sets him the task of stealing money from his old friend Mr. Robinson. Dilip has hereby been forcefully subjected to an initiatory ritual by the gang. As he sees no other option, Dilip visits Mr. Robinson with the intention of stealing the money. However, he remembers his connection with the tree: ‘Dilip stood rock-still, his eyes still glued to the money, but in his mind’s eye he saw himself standing under the cherry tree – waiting like the tree for the gang to come and kick and bully him’ (p.214). The tree as objective correlative for the state he is in suddenly clarifies his situation: ‘[b]ut he wasn’t a tree, rooted to the ground, unable to fight back. Was he going to give in? He felt a rush of courage’ (p.214). Dilip’s mythical bonding with the cherry tree saves him. The immobility and subsequent vulnerability of the tree serve as the eye-opener Dilip’s human peers cannot offer. The image of the tree and his love of music serve as guides in a bleak environment that offers little orientation beyond the ‘traditional’ criminal career. After Mukham has destroyed the drum kit his father gave him, Dilip sees no way he could play on the upcoming concert and subsequently lapses into depression. At this point the power of the tree comes into play for the second time: The cherry-tree had blossomed – just like that. It was a miracle. He couldn’t think of the right words: it was like snow; like a fluffy white cloud had dropped into the branches; like a bride all veiled in white ... like a warrior angel. Yes, that was it – that’s what he was thinking: it was a warrior in shining armour. The bravery of the little tree – after all that kicking and slashing, to go and flower like that in the face of such ugliness. It was magnificent; it was a triumph. Now he knew: if that little tree had the courage to go and do its own thing, well, so could he. (p.217)

Dilip arrives at his insight via a chain of similes – each comparison triggering the next one. His free association, starting from peaceful images (snow, cloud, bride) and arriving at more belligerent ones (warrior angel, knight), lends him the resolve to pursue his goal of playing with the band. With the


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help of the tree, Dilip has finally arrived at a successful chain of signification, which helps him overcome his state of indecision. The climax of the story is a rather clichéd Western-style showdown: after borrowing Mr. Robinson’s drum kit, Dilip is finally able to play, and the concert is going very well. The band is interrupted by the masked ‘Thuggies’, armed with baseball bats. People start to leave in fear. Dilip recognises his brother Mukham, for whom obligations towards the gang prove stronger than family ties. Mukham challenges Dilip one last time to leave the stage and join them. Dilip thinks of the brave tree, and explodes into a violent drum riff (p.219). He thus resorts to the extralinguistic medium of rhythm to counter the pressure and the threat of violence. The attempt, however, proves unsuccessful: Ravi is about to smash Mr. Robinson’s kit, which forces Dilip to give in and agree to go with them. This is prevented by Dilip’s eldest brother Arjun, who has just been released from prison. Like a deus ex machina he demotes Ravi from the position of gang leader by throwing him on his back, after Ravi, enraged at being challenged, charges at him with his baseball bat. Arjun declares: ‘Don’t you ever let me catch you bullying my brother again. And get this straight: he’s not joining your gang. He’s not joining any gang. He’s not landing up in prison like me. Now get out of here, and take that lot with you’, he said, looking at the other gang members, who suddenly looked like nothing but a bunch of sheepish boys. (p.220)

Things are further set aright when Mukham is persuaded to stand by his brothers. The penal system is shown to actually have changed Arjun from a violent gang leader into a caring brother. Arjun’s tender gesture, touching Mukham’s arm and thus persuading him to join him, underscores this change (p.220).

4. Towards a Postethnic Future? Both stories can be seen as instances of teenage identity construction within the socio-cultural formation of multi-ethnic Britain. Claire Alexander’s conclusion to her fieldwork marks a point of convergence between her sociological findings and the kind of literature under scrutiny here: Black British Youth identity is, then, necessarily incomplete, in a state of constant flux and reinvention, engaged in a continual process of ‘becoming’. Black British youth identity is thus something of an ‘art’. It is an ‘imagined’ construction, which is constantly reinvented and challenges traditional notions of essentialized cultural and racial entities. 11

By confronting British culture with that of the immigrant, these texts at the same time show that whatever lies behind the concept of ‘British culture’ is 11

Alexander, p.199.

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in itself highly heterogenous: Asha, Dilip and their families move between the cultures, but at the same time are part of British culture and thus add to its hybridity. Both teenagers have taken important steps towards a successful identity formation, but as the texts show, this is a constant process. However, ‘Stab the Cherry’ does leave room for controversy. Dilip’s attempt to counter the ‘Thuggies’ with his drum-flurry fails. Only Arjun’s violent interposition can stop the gang. Thus, violent confrontation is portrayed as the only real means to counter violence. Furthermore, it could be argued that Gavin’s rendering of the ‘Thuggies’ as an amorphous mass of black male aggression precisely fits into the kind of depiction of the ‘black Other’ criticised by Alexander: ‘[b]lack youth in particular have been typecast into a role of almost pathological dislocation – culturally confused, alienated from both their parents and society at large, and implacably hostile’. 12 Nevertheless, once again it has to be repeated that ‘Stab the Cherry’ is a fictional text and as such is entitled to stereotypes for plot reasons. Furthermore, a few members of the gang, namely Ravi, Mukham and Arjun are portrayed in more detail and the latter two have strong qualms about the group’s behaviour. Thus, the ‘Thuggies’ in effect are by no means a homogenous gang, but are shown to be held together by fear and group pressure. The supernatural serves as an initial spark in both stories, as it sets a process in motion that allows Asha and Dilip to transcend psychological and sociological restraints, thus enabling them to solve their problems. Without the ‘on-air’ help of Will, Asha would have remained unpopular and at constant war with her father – without the help of the tree as a model victim Dilip would not have had the courage to resist the gang. Both texts take up an ambivalent stance towards the concept of ethnicity. On the one hand, they draw clear lines of division between ethnic communities, deriving their central conflicts from clashes between ethnic groups. Ravi and Mukham continuously accuse Dilip of mixing with ‘white trash’, while Asha must find a way of dealing with her father’s problematic attitude towards British culture. On the other hand, both texts move beyond these clear distinctions of ‘own’ and ‘other’ by showing their protagonists’ struggle to overcome ethnic divisions: Asha has a British role-model and wants to be part of a peer-group of mixed ethnicity. She struggles to transcend the traditional expectations of her father to marry early and instead aims at pursuing a career as a journalist. Dilip’s best friend is a non-Asian and he sees no reason for adhering to the demands of the gang to maintain ethnic separation. Music is shown to provide both an intercultural link, by bringing together British and Asian teenagers, as well as an intergenerational link, by uniting Dilip and

12

Alexander, p.5.


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Mr. Robinson in their passion for percussion. The same applies to Asha, for whom the choice of popstar entails a whole lifestyle, and which she uses deliberately to position herself in her peer-group. Both texts deconstruct the boundaries they have previously set up and can arguably be seen as providing examples of what David Hollinger defines as a postethnic stance: A postethnic perspective favors voluntary over involuntary affiliations, balances an appreciation for communities of descent with a determination to make room for new communities, and promotes solidarities of wide scope that incorporate people with different ethnic and racial backgrounds. 13

This can be seen as a motto for the other stories of Walking a Tightrope as well. Although, as already said above, they are either set in pre-millennial Britain or in Asian countries, a brief look at the reading audience they are targeted at will serve to illuminate the politics of the anthology. 14 In the context of the postethnic perspective of the two texts under scrutiny here, Romesh Gunesekera’s ‘Tightrope’ is of particular interest. Oscar, the Inarrator, displays uneasiness towards language, communication in general, and the accuracy of his memory. The story is the most complex and enigmatic of all, as the actual plot is hard to discern, leaves many gaps, and is often interposed by Oscar’s associations and reflections. Oscar’s friend and fellow philosopher Sparrow steals Oscar’s socks for no apparent reason. It remains open as to whether Oscar has an illness or whether he only goes to the hospital to visit his ill father. Oscar frequently puzzles over the communicative use of language and whether sharing one’s experience is possible. While it is fairly 13

David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p.3. 14 The narrators of all ten stories are teenagers, almost all are involved in intergenerational conflicts. The brief introductions to each story reveal that most of the stories contain autobiographical elements. In Farrukh Dhondy’s ‘Yellow Dog’, set in poor, rural India, Tara saves an ill little dog from the local dog-shooter. ‘One Small Step’ by Shyama Perera links the first moon-landing 1969 with the narrator’s own jump into adolescence, while the London of Aamer Hussein’s ‘Tsuru’ bears resemblance to the London of his own adolescence in the 1970s. Murad, the young Asian narrator, recounts his difficult relationship with Tsuru, a girl from Ghana. ‘Beaten’, by Bali Rai, is a frame-story set in a big Indian city. Like ‘Stab the Cherry’, it shows the dark sides of patriarchal power by depicting male violence. The narrator kills his father, who constantly beats his wife and threatens to kill her. Rukhsana Ahmad’s ‘First Love’ tells the story of Shama in diary-form, who is in love with an army pilot who is killed during a plane hijacking. Debjana Chatterjee’s ‘The Yeti Hunter’ and Adam Zameenzad’s ‘Ali, the Elephant and the Bicycle’ provide a somewhat light-hearted and phantastic contrast to the more sombre stories. The former’s protagonist Clive travels to the Himalayas in search of the abominable snowman, is rescued from a snowstorm by the Yeti itself, who turns out to be a telepathic female with whom he falls in love. The latter is a psychedelic romp through a fantastic world governed by strange physical laws, in which an outsider boy, Ali, befriends two other outcasts, a mournful elephant and a raven.

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clear that the story is set in Britain, neither the exact place, nor the time, nor the ethnic background of Oscar’s family are revealed. Thus, by omitting information about ethnic background relevant for the other stories ‘Tightrope’ is another, albeit different, example of a postethnic text. The fact that it lends its title to the whole anthology and that an excerpt is printed as a paratext on the back cover of the book add to its centrality. Both the age of the narrators and the (mostly) realistic settings of the stories aim at a younger audience. The juxtaposition of stories set in Britain with others set in Asia enable readers to encounter settings similar to their own, while also being introduced to different ways of living. Readers are thus invited to compare the ‘own’ with the ‘other’ and thereby recognise similarities and differences. The sequence of the stories in the volume underscores this aim: the first two texts, ‘Jubilee Dreams’ and ‘Tightrope’, are set in Britain, thus offering a starting point which the audience can relate to. The somewhat elusive ‘Tightrope’ with its nonetheless familiar setting is succeeded by ‘Yellow Dog’ which is a simple, plot-oriented story set in a poor Indian town or village in which living conditions differ from what British readers are used to: ‘Tara went into their house. It consisted of two rooms. In the front room they slept. The back room was the kitchen. Their tap and toilet were in the common yard at the back, which they shared with six neighbours’ (p.54). The alignment of the stories effects a textual movement beginning with the familiar and moving on to less familiar settings. The stories in the anthology thus are, in Mark Stein’s words, ‘not only perpetrators of Englishness, but conjurers of fresh cultural spaces’. 15 One last aspect worth mentioning here is the age-group targeted by the volume. Turning once more to the two stories in focus here, the relatively low complexity of the tree-symbol in ‘Stab the Cherry’ is a case in point: as a symbol of bravery and resistance it makes the story accessible for children and teenagers alike, although the frequent allusions to and the explicit depiction of violence make it appear less suitable for children. The story addresses social problems, such as the bleak outlook for adolescents in an urban surrounding – a problem that many young readers are familiar with. Asha’s conflict with her family, her changing body, and her social position in the class are typical for people of her age, girls and boys alike. The overall moral of the story is straightforward and easy to grasp and thus suitable for younger readers, while older readers can appreciate the finer nuances of irony implicit in Asha’s view of the world.

15

Stein, p.173.


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Keeping well away from the current star cult and marketing strategies surrounding some Black authors, the anthology is aimed at introducing relatively unknown writers to a wider range of readers. It assembles very different stories, most of which deal with problems of growing up in multi-ethnic societies. Some are more fantastic and action-oriented, while others focus on social problems. On the one hand, the volume’s juxtaposition of British settings with Asian ones highlights cultural and social diversity, while at the same time maintaining that the difficulties and pleasures of growing up ‘here’ are very similar to those encountered while growing up ‘there’. The goal of Walking a Tightrope is thus twofold: it both aims at depicting, but also at changing multi-ethnic Britain. This is what I believe to be the point of the double-meaning in Mark Stein’s concept of the ‘novel of transformation’, and why this model seems well suited for grasping the anthology’s strategy: The black British novel of transformation can be considered not only an arena for narrating the construction of voice; it has also been seen as a transformative genre, one that relates the formation of its protagonists but also describes and induces the transformation of their environs. [...] What I have termed the performative function of the novel of transformation relies upon vocalizations which strike a chord with a given novel’s readership. The image of a concert of voices which is polyphonic (with distinct melodies side by side; contrapuntal) and not homophonic (subordinate to a dominant melody), also allows us to formalize the notion of connecting shifting territories [...]. 16

By depicting young adults in a phase of transition, the anthology aims at transforming – at least a small part of – cultural discourse, thereby opening up a political dimension.

Works Cited Ahmed, Rehana, ed., Walking a Tightrope: New Writing from Asian Britain (Basingstoke and Oxford: Young Picador, 2004). Alexander, Claire, The Art of Being Black: The Creation of Black British Youth Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Chrisman, Laura, Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Gilroy, Paul, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race, (London: Routledge, 2004).

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Stein, p.173.

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Hampel, Regine, I Write Therefore I Am? Fictional Autobiography and the Idea of Selfhood in the Postmodern Age (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2001). Hollinger, David, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Huggan, Graham, ‘Virtual Mulitculturalism: The Case of Contemporary Britain’, European Studies 16 (2001), 67-86. Keller, James, ‘“Shady Agonistes”: Eminem, Abjection, and Masculine Protest’, Studies in Popular Culture 25 (2003), 13-24. Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge,1998). Stein, Mark, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2004).

Nadia Butt

Between Orthodoxy and Modernity: Mapping the Transcultural Predicaments of Pakistani Immigrants in Multi-Ethnic Britain in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) This essay focuses on the struggle between orthodox Islam and modernity among the people of the Pakistani community in contemporary Britain in order to map their cultural isolation with reference to Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers. It is postulated that the strife of orthodox Islam with modernity in the novel reflects tensions and conflicts between individuals and families within the ethnic group that lead to inhuman and irrational social practices such as ‘honour killing’ and ‘forced marriages’. By focusing on the attachment with radical Islam among the Pakistani immigrants as the only way to adhere staunchly to their native cultural mores, the aim is to reveal their transcultural predicaments in an age of worldwide cultural exchange, travel and migration. Since globalised modernity calls for a broader understanding of today’s crosscultural phenomena, this paper argues that there is an urgent need to translate traditional concepts of Islam into the global landscape of modernity so that the growing gulf between orthodoxy and social change can be bridged.

1. Introduction Multicultural Britain as a literary and cultural discourse has been long associated with the emergence of black British literature; but in recent years Asian British literature has been further differentiated from black British literature in a number of recent studies on multi-ethnic Britain 1 to highlight that the issues in Asian British writing differ considerably from those in black British literature. However, in postmillennial multi-ethnic Britain, we witness yet another development within the domain of Asian British writing, usually associated with the British-based ‘Indian’ writers such as Salman Rushdie or V. S. Naipaul. This development was initiated by the second generation of the migrant writers from ‘Pakistan’. One of these is Nadeem Aslam. 2 Aslam’s 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers focuses those isolated Pakistani communities who are still trapped in their orthodox religious cocoon and are struggling to reconcile themselves with everyday transnational challenges.

1

2

For a detailed study of black British literature and how it differs from Asian British literature see Mark Stein, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002), pp.3-35. Nadeem Aslam is a British novelist of Pakistani origin. He has written two novels, Seasons of the Rainbirds (1993) and Maps for Lost Lovers (2004).

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This paper sets out to address the struggle between orthodox religion and modernity among the members of an isolated Pakistani ethnic community in Britain in order to map their transcultural 3 predicaments with reference to Aslam’s latest novel Maps for Lost Lovers. By discussing the dogmatic version of Islam as a closed cultural system, 4 he postulates that the strife of orthodox Islam with modernity in the novel not only reflects religious fundamentalism among an isolated group of Pakistani immigrants, but also tension and conflicts between individuals and families within various ethnic groups (such as Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs) from the Indian subcontinent. As the plot progresses, we notice that this religious and ethnic tension eventually leads to inhuman social practices such as ‘honour killing’ and ‘forced marriage’ in the name of keeping ‘the indigenous cultural identity’ intact. Set in a Pakistani community in an English town which has been renamed by the Pakistani migrants themselves as ‘Dashte-e-Tanhaii’, translated from Urdu as ‘The Desert of Loneliness’, the novel revolves around Shamas, a former poet and current social worker and his religious wife Kaukab. Their three children, Ujala, Charag and Mah-Jabin, have already left home to escape their mother’s oppression before the novel begins. When Shamas’s brother Jugnu moves in with his beloved Chanda, they are murdered by Chanda’s brothers to protect the family honour because they were living in sin as an unmarried couple. Maps is set in the twelve months after the murders, depicting a claustrophobic society which is at the crossroads of culture, nationality and religion. We are taken to a town inhabited by impoverished and abused immigrants, who are depicted as losers on the margins of society. By focusing on the attachment with orthodox Islam among a certain group of Pakistani immigrants as the only way to adhere staunchly to their native cultural mores, my aim is to reveal their cultural isolation in multi-ethnic Britain. Since a profound association with religion not only isolates these immigrants from the host society but also from one another, their plight reflects a torn culture and a torn society, which they have created for themselves in their adopted homeland. In spite of a number of structural and thematic drawbacks, the uniqueness of the novel does not merely lie in

3

4

For concepts and a definition of the transcultural and transculturality see Wolfgang Welsch ‘Tranculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’, in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. by Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999), pp.194-231. For more details on the fundamentalist notion of Islam as a closed cultural system in relation to the crisis of modern Islam, see Bassam Tibi, The Crisis of Modern Islam: A Preindustrial Culture in the Scientific-Technological Age, transl. by Judith von Sivers (Salt Lake City: Utah University Press, 1988).

Mapping the Transcultural Predicaments of Pakistani Immigrants in Multi-Ethnic Britain

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charting ‘a clash of civilisations’ in fiction between the West and Islam, 5 but between Islamic fundamentalism and secular Muslims within one ethnic group. Hence, the novel does not criticise Islam as a static religion, but rather Islamic fundamentalists who harass liberal Muslims and hate non-believers. In an interview with a British newspaper, Aslam said that Maps is, in part, a response to the events of 9/11, and that he was inspired to ‘condemn the smaller-scale 9/11s that go on every day’. 6 In light of the author’s statement, this study of the novel negotiates the social and emotional dilemma of Islamic hard-liners in secular British society 7 who prefer to be antagonistic to their host country instead of making an effort to assimilate into the foreign culture and other existing ethnic communities like their British-born children. Despite the fact that the transcultural situation – a situation of inevitable cultural exchange between migrant and host society – is their life-world, they choose to oppose it, and thus suffer from isolation and loneliness as their chosen fate. The novel articulates various forms of loneliness, domestic and societal, individual and communal while demonstrating the values of orthodox Islam in conflict with modern Muslims and secular society.

2. At the Crossroads of Religion, Nation and Culture: Theorising the Predicament of our Transcultural World Recent theories of culture posit that globalised modernity has created a space of cultural encounters, processes and transactions, 8 since more and more people and their cultures are in communication with each other. In other words, amid global flows modernity has produced a ‘contact zone’ 9 in which more than a clash or a rift between much-quoted dichotomies like west/rest, east/west, and local/global, we can witness cultural or religious translation as a 5

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For various perspectives on Islam and the West, see Jocelyne Cesari, ‘Islam in the West: Modernity and Globalization Revisited’, in Globalization and the Muslim World: Culture, Religion, and Modernity, ed. by Brigit Schaebler and Leif Stenberg (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004), pp.80-112. Akash Kapur, ‘Little Murders’, in The New York Times, 22 May 2005 (10 February 2007). For a detailed discussion on Muslims in Britain in the context of multiculturalism see Tariq Modood, ‘British Muslims and the Politics of Multiculturalism’, in Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach, ed. by Tariq Modood, Anna Triandafyllidou and Richard Zapata-Barrero (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp.37-56. For different approaches to the theories of globalisation and modernity see Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990). See Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Introduction: Criticism in the Contact Zone’, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p.6. While Pratt employs the term ‘contact zone’ in terms of colonial encounters, the term ‘contact zone’ in this paper is used to address the space of cultural plurality in today’s transcultural world.

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constant process. However, for Islamic fundamentalists, this process of recent cultural translations on the local and global scale is a permanent threat; it may compel them to contest their ‘ideals of purity’ vis-à-vis culture, religion and nation. In effect, their immersion in these ‘ideals of purity’ ends up in a social crisis because in a world of movement and mobility, not ‘purity’ but ‘impurity’ in the cultural sphere is the order of the day. In discussing 20thcentury movement and migration, Edward Said reminds us, ‘No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind’ 10 (emphasis in the original). James Clifford’s reading of movement and mobility under the title ‘The Pure Products Go Crazy’ in his treatise on ‘the predicament of culture’ further tries to articulate the very dynamics of our transcultural era. Clifford states: This century has seen a drastic expansion of mobility, including tourism, migrant labour, immigration, urban sprawl […]. An older topography and experience of travel is exploded […] ‘Cultural’ difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness […]. A whole structure of expectations about authenticity in culture and art is thrown in doubt. 11

At present, worldwide mass migration and an increase in diasporic communities and transnational families challenge time-honoured concepts of indigenous identity. In fact, rootlessness and mobility is now increasingly a condition of modernity. The orthodox characters in the novel, however, deem this condition as a punishment for being born in a poor country like Pakistan and for migrating to a godless country like England. They are unable to realise that dislocation or displacement is an inevitable dimension of the present age of mass migration. The transcultural predicament is indicative of today’s much more complex phenomena of cultural entanglements, rootless histories, and ‘intertwined roots and routes’. 12 Our constantly changing globe calls for an interconnected world in which religion, culture and nation can not stay aloof from external or global influences. In the face of modern society, in which borders are

10 11

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Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), p.336. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp.13-14. See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Clifford argues that travel needs to be understood in a context of globalised modernity and not merely in a context of colonised conquest of the world. Hence travel emerges as an increasingly complex range of experiences, practices of crossing and interaction that trouble the localism of many common sense assumptions about culture and translation.


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transgressed and cultures transmogrified, 13 we are bound to believe in multiple religious, cultural and national identities to make sense of our multifaceted times that are both local and global simultaneously.14 Nevertheless, in the fictional realm of Maps, the orthodox Pakistanis try to reject the dialectics of having many identities, which is a direct consequence of travelling cultures15 , in order to restore their much loved ‘native persona’.16 Hence, they refuse cultural translation and stick to the primitive notions of a singular culture and identity, which are alien to the processes of globalised modernity. While Clifford interprets ‘the predicament of culture’ in terms of widespread cultural entanglements, fusions and transgressions, the idea of ‘transcultural predicament’ in the present context points to the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the conservative parts of Pakistani immigrant communities in multi-ethnic Britain. The novel shows that these communities remain blind to changing civilisation structures under the illusion of celebrating ‘authentic’ national, religious and cultural stereotypes. The members of these communities set up an isolated ‘colony’ to combat all that is ‘foreign and strange’ to their customs and traditions. Consequently, they face an insurmountable social as well as psychological challenge. Perhaps this is the reason that the leitmotif of loneliness as a symbol of self-imposed exile as well as cultural isolation runs throughout the plot as an inescapable social fact, for the Muslim immigrants have alienated themselves from the outside world in the hope of practising orthodox Islam. Subsequently, their notion of orthodox Islam prevents them from seeking cultural richness by letting their culture mix into the British, Hindu or Sikh culture. They stay hidden in a ghetto in order to follow the Islamic Laws (the Shariah) at the cost of dismissing cultural plurality even though plurality characterises the era of modernity. 17 For the 13

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15 16

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For more details on cultural complexity in the face of globalised modernity, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (London and Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 1996), pp.27-47. See Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, in Global Modernities, ed. by Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (London and New Delhi: Sage Publication, 1995), pp.25-44. See Clifford, ‘Travelling Cultures’, in Routes, pp.17-46. For an overview of present-day Pakistani culture and modernity, see Nadia Butt, ‘Pakistani Culture and Modernity’, in Daily Times Pakistan, 23 September 2004, p.5. See also Lukas Werth, ‘Pakistan: A Critique of the Concept of Modernity’, in Islam in the Era of Globalization: Muslim Attitudes towards Modernity and Identity, ed. by Johan Meuleman (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.143-70. See Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996), p.41. By interpreting culture in contemporary times, Hannerz maintains that what he is getting at is ‘a plea for pluralism, and a sense of complexity, in our conception of the acquisition of culture’ because we are no longer living in a single cultural sphere but plural cultural systems. Also see Johann P. Arnason, ‘Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity’,

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very conservative Muslims, practising the Shariah is a form of worship; accepting and endorsing the ways of the non-believers is thereby tantamount to committing a sin. The figure of Kaukab as the representative of such a mindset has already warned everybody, ‘[m]y religion is not the British legal system, it’s Islam’(p.115). 18

3. Honour Killing and Forced Marriage: Women as Victims of and Rebels against Islamic Puritanism In the fictional domain of Maps, men and women like Charag and Mah-Jabin, Shamas and Suraya, Chanda and Jugnu are equally victims of their orthodox parents, yet the sufferings and frustration of the woman in particular touch the reader. The theme of ‘honour killing’ runs parallel to the theme of ‘forced marriage’, emphasising the disastrous consequences of practising religion in its most rigid form. Such inhuman practices are carried out under the impression of adhering to the purest forms of religion because conventional Muslims consider Islam to be a pure religion. This is the reason that there is no room for cultural or religious hybridity in their version of Islam; the Koran and Hadith (the tradition of Mohammed) have declared it as a perfect code of life. The biggest predicament of these isolated immigrants in the novel is that they choose to interpret Islam in an orthodox fashion in the present times, claiming that Islam equates any form of alternation or mixture of religion with blasphemy. 19 As a result, despite the fact that women are capable of making a living by themselves today, orthodox believers declare women inferior to men due to God’s words about man’s superiority in the Koran. 20

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20

in Global Culture, ed. by Featherstone. Addressing pluralisation in the global world with a special reference to nationalism and modernity, Arnson maintains, ‘[b]y pluralization I mean the growing awareness of several interdependent but mutually irreducible components of modernity, and of the discrepancies and tensions between them’, p.220 (emphasis in the original). Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers (London: Faber, 2004). All further references appear parenthetically in the text. For more details on the issue of alteration and mixing in Islam, see Nadia Butt, ‘Negotiating Untranslatability and Islam in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator’, in Special Issue Matatu: Transcultural Modernities: Narrating African in Europe, ed. by Sissy Helff, Elisabeth Bakers, and Daniela Merolla (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp.165-178. Sura 4 in the Koran, ‘Women’, verse 4:34 reveals: ‘Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those for whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in bed apart, and beat them’. See The Koran, ed. and transl. by N.J. Dawood (London: Penguin, 2003), p.64.


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Women in the novel like Kaukab and Suraya are self-inflicted victims of the orthodox Islamic cultural system, whereas women from the new generation like Mah-Jabin, Kiran and Chanda are victims as well as rebels. The new generation is determined to fight against the irrational uses of certain religious laws to discover their way of happiness. At the age of sixteen, Mah-Jabin’s own mother talks her into marrying a cousin in Pakistan to prevent possible contact with a white or Hindu boy. After undergoing sexual and psychological molestation at the hands of her arranged husband, she seeks a divorce and goes back to Britain. Eventually, she settles in America on her own. Chanda is also sent to Pakistan to marry a cousin. Though this results in divorce, she is made to marry another cousin brought over from Pakistan when she is ‘found to be in love with a Hindu boy’ (p.87). He disappears the day he gets a British passport. Her parents decide to follow a received interpretation of Islamic law that instructs a divorced woman to wait for five, seven, ten or eleven years, depending on which interpretation of this law a person adopts, and compel their daughter to wait until the allotted period of separation from her husband is over. Chanda finally sets up a home with Jugnu to enjoy a stable life of love. The family structure and society at large is brutal and callous with respect to rebellious sons and daughters who dare moving an inch from prescribed boundaries of the supposed Islamic ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’. The immigrants choose to close the doors on anything contrary to their culture. Additionally, they reject any cultural form that is not in accordance with their traditions and taboos. Even when Chanda’s brothers are arrested for murdering their sister and her lover, their community believes that they should be exonerated for defending the honour of Islam; however, the British justice system decides otherwise. The killing, rather than taking up a central position in the story, acts as a mirror of the close-knit Pakistani community, especially for Jugnu’s brother and sister-in-law, Shamas and Kaukab. As the seasons pass, the reader is able to trace the transcultural predicaments of lost characters as they oscillate between orthodox and modern Islamic practices. Shamas faces first alienation and then temptation and adultery, while his wife struggles to maintain her Islamic piety and come to terms with the double murder and its terrible effect on her marriage, her family, and everything the couple was brought up to believe. The honour killing eventually unveils the gruesome implications of orthodox religion that the immigrants have cherished as their lifeblood. A review of Maps in The Economist reveals: Mr Aslam’s arresting prose that quietly and eloquently opens up the heart of Shamas and Kaukab’s family, and the author’s courage in questioning the more outrageous laws that are enacted in Islam’s name. So-called honour killings among Muslims in Europe are on the

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increase. British police recently reviewed 117 murder cases over the past ten years where such motives may have been involved. 21

If Aslam aims to address the downfall of Islamic fundamentalists in the novel for following wrong methods of observing certain religious rules and regulations, he also brings out transcultural anxiety among them as it eats into the vitals of their torn culture and torn society. The human struggle with religion is depicted even in the most religious and orthodox-minded characters in the novel. For example, Chanda’s parents, after the murder of their daughter, try to reconcile love for their murdered daughter with their faith in the religious tradition that condemns her. Chanda’s mother questions her husband for allowing the honour killing of their daughter when so many Pakistani girls are already marrying English men. Kaukab, pining for her dead brother-inlaw, must deal with the same irreconcilable facts. ‘He [Allah] tells her to have faith in his compassion’, Aslam writes of her tortured prayers to Allah. ‘And yet she doesn’t know what to do about the fact that she feels utterly empty almost all the time, as though she has outlived herself, as if she has stayed on the train one stop past her destination’ (p.270). Since a constant struggle between orthodox religion and modernity has created a social and emotional crisis among the isolated members of the Town of Loneliness, Aslam unfolds a psychology at war with itself. Orthodox religion has estranged man from man to such an extent that human bonds are reduced to a mere means of obeying the abstract laws of Allah. By unveiling the horrifying aftermath of entrenched orthodoxies, Aslam tracks the transcultural predicament of these immigrants who are resolved to stay trapped in a cocoon in an age of rapid cultural and technological transformations. He attempts to show the reader that in our constantly moving world, the dogmatic Islamists are preoccupied with pre-modern social norms, and stay true to their roots however intertwined and entangled these roots are today. The central cruelty, the act that drives the narrative, occurs before the novel begins. Surrounding the main event of Jugnu and Chanda’s murder are other no less gruesome ones that appear almost as incidental details but assert the nightmarish state of women in the Town of Loneliness. The members of a Muslim family, intent on separating a daughter from her Hindu lover, subject her to a brutal, finally fatal, torture. A 12-year old girl is prevented from seeing a gynaecologist lest her hymen be damaged. When her mother discovers that a young bride hasn’t slept with her husband during their first week of marriage, she advises her new son-in-law, ‘Rape her tonight’ (p.88). A number of passages in the novel can be read like an assault resulting from

21

‘A Travesty of Honour’, in The Economist, 1 July 2004, (10 February 2007).


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unnecessary religious rigidity from which all the characters’ unhappiness seems to originate. ‘Allah’s law is Allah’s law’, Aslam writes ‘and cannot be questioned’. Since Islam literally means ‘surrender to the will of God’, 22 the fundamentalists in the novel like to imagine the human being as merely a receiver of commands and an obedient servant of God. With such a religious attitude, naturally the room for human development in their closed society is bound to be very small. Therefore, the main plot of honour killing along with various subplots invites us to question the basis of asala, the Arabic word for ‘authenticity’ as the prime religious goal of the orthodox Islamic diasporic community in multi-ethnic Britain.

4. Forms of Racism: Muslims against Hindus/Sikhs, the Nonbeliever as the Hated Other The fictional narrative of Maps is interspersed with racist abuses regardless of whether the characters uttering them are white or Asian. Even though the Asian immigrants try their best to bar ‘the white racism’ as much as possible, no one can really avoid the most degrading label ‘Paki’ that was ‘not invented [in Britain] until the 1970s’ (p.283). ‘Race’ as a construct and as a new ethnic reality is an important consideration in the novel; especially so when Aslam has proclaimed himself that the novel ‘can be seen as an overview of race in Britain over the past fifty years’. 23 But this novel does not aim to reiterate the trumpeted British racism; instead, it places emphasis on the forms of ‘internal racism’ on the basis of religion and nationality, which have their roots in the partition of India in 1947 between Hindus and Muslims. Ironically, that had more fatal implications than ‘the white racism’. There is no mystery in the book as to who killed Chanda and Jugnu. They were killed, not by the local racist skinheads, but by Chanda’s own brothers because they violated the Islamic Law according to hard-liner Islamists. Kaukab concludes, ‘Jugnu died because of the way he lived’. Her daughter Mah-Jabin corrects her mother, saying, ‘He was killed’. Despite the fact that the novel has an underdeveloped plot, it weaves a ‘detailed tapestry about life in the Town of Loneliness’ and gives us an insider’s perspective on a hidden world: There are no terrorist bombs, nor Al-Qaeda links in Aslam’s novel. Nothing as sensational, but rather a mosaic of violence on a smaller, local level, of intimidation, and murder. The Pakistani community in the novel lives in a nameless, shapeless place, at once in England

22

23

Timothy George, Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? Understanding the Difference between Islam and Christianity (Michigan: Zondervan Press, 2002), p.21. ‘Nadeem Aslam on Maps for Lost Lovers’, (10 February 2007).

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and yet not there. It’s a bleak picture, particularly in the current climate. There is no integration in the novel, England, as it were, is absent. 24

The all pervasive irony of the whole situation is that the orthodox Muslims themselves act as oppressors of their own children and kinsmen while practising absolute religion. The novel invites us to consider that before condemning and blaming the British extremist or ‘the white racist’ for the cultural plight of displaced Asian immigrants, one must first acknowledge internal forms of ‘cultural racism’ within the Asian communities, which is propagated in the name of religious and cultural differences. In the Town of Loneliness, Kiran, a daughter of Sikh parents is made aware that she is ‘a darkie’ (p.283) and therefore an inferior race in the eyes of Pakistani immigrants. Because of her Sikh origin, she is not allowed to marry Kaukab’s brother who is Muslim. ‘Cultural racism’ is reflected in yet another episode in Kiran’s story when she falls in love with Chanda’s younger brother Chotta. Chotta, as a man of Islamic origin, is always confused about his liaison with a non-believer and often imagines his beloved a ‘whore’ when he is drunk. Kaukab is perturbed over her husband’s Hindu lineage even long after the death of her parents-inlaw. She thinks: Her parents were responsible for marrying her to an infidel. Her in-laws were Godless […]. She finally accused Shamas of not being a Muslim at all, the son of a Hindu, whose filthy infidel corpse was spat out repeatedly by the earth. (p.59)

This kind of repugnance is repeated in another instance when we notice that she is convinced that the whites like the Hindus are polluted to such an extent that mere contact can affect her own purity. ‘Kaukab had touched the white woman and would have to bathe and change her clothes to be able to say her next prayers’ (p.39). In the transcultural and transnational frame of the novel, the theme of self-imposed exile runs parallel to the theme of dislocation. Aslam writes at the opening of the novel: Millions of [Pakistan’s] sons and daughters have managed to find foothold all around the globe in their search for livelihood and a semblance of dignity. Roaming the planet looking for solace, they’ve settled in small towns that make them feel smaller still... (p.9)

Ostensibly, Aslam mourns the psychic loss of people who have left their homelands, their communities and culture, but in reality Aslam criticises immigrants of being nostalgic about the past, and this in turn hinders the process of assimilation into a new culture. As our fast changing present is constantly revising the past, it is not possible to imagine the past as ‘a foreign 24

Michael O’Connor, ‘Writing Against Terror – Nadeem Aslam’, in Three Monkeys Online – The Free Current Affairs and Art Magazine (10 February 2007).


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country’ but as something flowing into the present. However, Kaukab looks upon the past as the only inspiration in her life; the godless and decadent West has ruined her entire existence: ‘Every day – wishing I could rewrite the past – I revile the day I came to this country where I have known nothing but pain’. Maps is part of the literature of exile: a motif of loneliness, indicative of the loss of home/land, runs throughout the fictional narrative yet with a difference. It does not celebrate homeland as a utopia, but rather as a hub of terrifying social customs like ‘honour killing’ and ‘forced marriage’ that are imported to a secular country to propagate and promote the Islamic Law in a negative way. Though Samuel P. Huntington’s famous thesis of a ‘clash of civilizations’ 25 remains disputed in the face of increasing cross-cultural relations all over the globe, Aslam’s spectrum of individual and communal stories of religious persecution nevertheless raises the most crucial issue of the clash between Islamic fundamentalism and values of the secular West. However, Aslam’s narration documents the clash more on a domestic scale than on a political one, in order to emphasise domestic violence and aggression against secular values as well as against those Muslims who are inclined to take on secular ways of living within the domain of Islam. Despite choosing England as home, the immigrants of the Town of Loneliness are bent on imagining it as a hostile territory, especially when the English law does not accept the Shariah. This feeling of nostalgia, mixed with love for the Islamic homeland and loathing for an adopted secular territory, brings to mind ‘the old Islamic doctrine of the Pax Islamica’ according to which, the world consists of only two regions, the dar al-Islam, the House of Islam (which literally means peace), and ‘the dar al-herb, the House of War, which is identical with non-Muslim territory’. 26 It is no wonder, then, that only the fundamentalists and non-liberal Muslims feel ill at ease in the dar al-herb, which is the chosen country England. The orthodox Pakistani immigrants in the fictional realm of Maps like to imagine their migration to England ‘as temporary accommodation in a country never thought of as home – the period in England was the equivalent of earthly suffering, the return one day to Pakistan entry into paradise’ (p.96). Thus, instead of considering the transcultural phenomena as a new social reality in our ‘run-away world’, 27 they renounce it constantly to assert their religious rights

25

26 27

See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Tibi, The Crisis of Modern Islam, p.62. See Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Reshaping Our Lives (London: Profile Books, 2002), pp.1-19.

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that are considered to be above any other obligation of cultural integration or respect for the laws of a host society.

5. Orthodox Religion against Man: Corruption and Chaos in Practising Immutable Islamic Laws According to Clifford Geertz’s sociology of religion, religions represent cultural systems which are both influenced by processes of social change and are themselves able to affect them. 28 But one of the fundamental principles of the dogmatic Islamic religious system is that ‘it will not change, and indeed that it is not permitted to change, for it claims a definitive and final message or truth for the whole of mankind’. 29 Using this concept as a framework, Aslam’s final culmination of the plot leaves us with one central question: how far can orthodox Islam, based on the negation of change, and liberal Islam, based on the principles of change, 30 be compatible today, when introducing change in the Shariah is a heretical act for orthodox Islamists. In this context Islamic scholar Bassam Tibi points out: According to the orthodox Islamic conception, the revelation of the Koran, to the Prophet Muhammed, is the ultimate truth, valid for all times, all religions, and the whole of humanity. Within this interpretation, the Islamic religion is unalterable and cannot be adopted to any reality, for it is itself the ultimate religion, revealed by the Seal of the prophets (Koran: ‘Khatam an-nabiyin’ sura 33, verse 40); Muhammed is said to have proclaimed the final revelation of God. It is here that the question arises of how Muslims react to change, how they understand development and progress, or whether such concepts even existed before Islam’s encounter with the West. In Islam, there is only one absolute truth, valid for all time and not at all conditioned by history. The tendency of every religion toward the Absolute is of course a universally observable phenomenon, but in Islamic theology it is manifest more intensely than in any other religion. 31

Being aware of this crucial dilemma of the dogmatic Muslims in Britain, Aslam lays focus on their transcultural predicament whenever they imagine themselves to be haunted by ‘the decadent and corrupt West’ (p.63). Since they are persuaded that ‘of the seventeen great sins in Islam, unbelief is the 28

29

30

31

For more details on the sociology of religion, see Clifford Greetz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Bassam Tibi, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, transl. by Clare Krojzl (Boulder and Oxford: Westreview Press, 1990 [1985]), p.57. Liberal Muslims reject the orthodox version of Islam as they consider it a hindrance to the progressive process of civilisation. They are aware that an orthodox religion is frozen in time so it may find itself in sheer conflict with the inevitable course that every modern civilisation is bound to take since every civilisation is premised on the principles of change and mutation as Norbert Elias’ reflections on the process of civilisation suggests. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 2 vols (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1973). Tibi, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, p.9.


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greatest, worse than murder, theft, adultery’ (p.321), the religious extremists train their children to frighten the offspring of white people with hellfire instead of mingling with them. In the novel, Aslam cites the example of a seven-year-old Muslim child who has been telling his white schoolmates that they are all going to be skinned alive in Hell for eating pork and their parents will ‘be set on fire and made to drink boiling water because they drank alcohol and did not believe in Allah and Mohammad’ (p.161). The novel is not only a critique of insular ways of keeping Islamic customs alive in some pockets of the Asian Islamic minorities in multi-ethnic Britain, but also a vehement vituperation of corruption and chaos in practising orthodox religion. 32 At various points in the narrative, different characters use Islam as a justification for brutalising wives and daughters, condoning the sexual abuse of a small child, and, of course, murder, not to mention forgoing kinds of happiness that most Westerners take for granted. The portrait of Chanda’s two brothers Chotta and Baraha (which literally means ‘smaller’ and ‘bigger’ in Urdu) at the close of the novel shows their double standards regarding religion, individual freedom and liberty. They are supposed to act as paradigms of Islamic morality. However, Chotta is already in love with a Sikh woman, Kiran, which is in no way in accordance with the norms of Islam. He nonetheless chooses to kill his sister in the name of Islam for setting up a home with another man without marriage. Shamas catches a young Muslim cleric at a mosque sexually abusing a seven-year-old child; however this man is prevented from being punished due to his association with a holy institute and to save the reputation of Muslims. Suraya’s husband violates Islamic injunctions by drinking alcohol but makes his wife fulfil the Islamic duty as a divorced woman to marry ‘a new man’ in order to seek ‘a new divorce’ so that she could finally be united with her husband as an obedient Muslim wife. A series of major and minor episodes that involve religious and sexual morality paint a complete caricature of religion; the misuse of religion in the Town of Loneliness has caused man to be at war with his kinsmen as well as with the liberal society he inhabits. Herein lies the central conflict of the novel, in that it portrays the consequences of following religious purism in the wake of modernity. Through Kaukab in particular and the Islamic society in general, the novel displays a puritanical squeamishness about sex despite the fact that sex is no longer a taboo in either secular societies or liberal Islamic societies. As the child of a narrow, intolerant culture, Kaukab instinctively and fiercely equates sex with sin just like some religious extremists in the novel equate ‘murder for punishing adultery’ with ‘honour killing’.

32

For more insights into Aslam’s conception of God and Islam, see Nadeem Aslam, ‘God and Me’, in Granta Magazine (10 February 2007).

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6. Conclusion The novel demonstrates how orthodox Islamists reduce the space of multiple cultural encounters to the singular space of Islam because their view of ‘orthodox Islam’ celebrates singleness in the form of God, Mohammed and the Koran by dismissing multiplicity. Although Aslam condemns a number of religious practices of orthodox Muslims in multi-ethnic Britain and their insistence on a monolithic interpretation of Islam in his novel, he does not attack Islam per se. A number of important characters are neither orthodox Muslims nor religious extremists despite being dominated and intimidated by Islamic extremists. Shamas, Jugnu, Chanda, Charag, Ujala or Mah-Jabin as liberal Muslims always rebel and battle against those who use religion to oppress them or their counterparts. The plotline of the novel mainly focuses on ‘orthodox’ and ‘not liberal Islam’ because Aslam aims to highlight the consequences of dogmatic Islamic practices in a secular society. The manifestation of orthodox Islamic customs in the main plot and various subplots brings home to the reader that not all Muslims are necessarily engaged in customs like ‘honour killing’ or ‘forced marriages’ in the name of Islam but only those who decide on religious rigidity as a part of their faith. The title of the immigrant ghetto, ‘the Town of Loneliness’ further hints at the fact that not all Pakistani immigrants in Britain today are orthodox but only those communities who cut themselves off from cross-cultural interactions, either deliberately or under duress. By drawing profusely upon rich images and metaphors of pain and sorrow in the novel, Aslam seems to deplore the plight of Islamic fundamentalists who prefer to keep Islam in a water-tight compartment lest any outside influence tarnish its codes and character in an era of worldwide cultural criss-crossing. Thus their transcultural predicament mirrors a wide gulf between tradition and change, which ends up only in alienation and suffering in the domestic as well as public sphere. In our contemporary times in which social and religious truths are tied to the waves of change and mutation, newness and innovation, there is an urgent need to translate fundamentalist notions of Islam into ‘the global ecumene of modernity’. 33 Therefore, Aslam not only criticises various practices of orthodox Islam but the limits of traditional Islamists to embrace ‘hybridity, impurity, intermingling […] Mèlange […] hotchpotch’ in the wake of ‘how newness enters the world’ 34 (emphasis in the original). For, the movement of newness as modernity defines the present-day acts of cultural translation. Only by accepting cultural translation 33 34

See Hannerz, ‘The Global Ecumene of Modernity’, in Transnational Connections, pp.44-55. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Penguin, 1991), p.394.


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are the isolated immigrants able to come to terms with their transcultural predicament. This is how they can find a common ground that could end their constant confrontation with the new generation and secular cultural forms, and could finally prevent a clash between orthodox Islam and modernity. 35

Works Cited ‘A Travesty of Honour’, in The Economist Print, 1 July 2004 [accessed on 10 February 2007]. Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (London and Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 1996). Arnason, Johann P., ‘Nationality, Globalization and Modernity’, in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. by Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1990), pp.207-236. Aslam, Nadeem, Maps for Lost Lovers (London: Faber, 2004). ——. ‘God and Me’, Granta Magazine [accessed on 10 February 2007]. Butt, Nadia, ‘Negotiating Untranslatability and Islam in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator, in Special Issue Matatu: Transcultural Modernities: Narrating African in Europe, ed. by Sissy Helff, Elisabeth Bakers and Daniela Merolla (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp.165-178. ——. ‘Pakistani Culture and Modernity’, in Daily Times Pakistan, 23 September 2004, p.5. Büttner, Friedemann, ‘The Fundamentalist Impulse and the Challenge of Modernity’, in Islam – Motor or Challenge of Modernity/Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam 1 (1998), 57-80. Cesari, Jocelyne, ‘Islam in the West: Modernity and Globalization Revisited’, in Globalization and the Muslim World: Culture, Religion, and Modernity, ed. by Brigit Schaebler and Leif Stenberg (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004), pp.80-112. Clifford, James, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). ——. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

35

For a broader view of Islamic fundamentalism and the challenge of modernity see Friedemann Büttner, ‘The Fundamentalist Impulse and the Challenge of Modernity’, in Islam – Motor or Challenge of Modernity / Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam 1 (1998), pp.57-80.

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Dawood, N.J., ed. and transl., The Koran (London: Penguin, 2003). Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process, 2 vols (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1973). Featherstone, Mike, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990). Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). George, Timothy, Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? Understanding the Difference between Islam and Christianity (Michigan: Zondervan Press, 2002). Giddens, Anthony, Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Reshaping Our Lives (London: Profile Books, 2002). Hannerz, Ulf, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996). Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Kapur, Akash, ‘Little Murders’, in The New York Times, 22 May 2005 [accessed on 10 February 2007]. Modood, Tariq, ‘British Muslims and the Politics of Multiculturalism’, in Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach, ed. by Tariq Modood, Anna Triandafyllidou and Richard Zapata-Barrero (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp.37-56. ‘Nadeem Aslam on Maps for Lost Lovers’ [accessed on 10 February 2007]. O’Connor, Michael, ‘Writing Against Terror- Nadeem Aslam’, in Three Monkeys Online – The Free Current Affairs and Art Magazine [accessed on 10 February 2007]. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Robertson, Roland, ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, in Global Modernities, ed. by Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (London and New Delhi: Sage Publication, 1995), pp.2544. Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Penguin, 1991). Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994) Stein, Mark, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002).


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Tibi, Bassam, The Crisis of Modern Islam: A Preindustrial Culture in the Scientific-Technological Age, transl. by Judith von Sivers (Salt Lake City: Utah University Press, 1988). ——. Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, transl. by Clare Krojzl (Boulder and Oxford: Westreview Press, 1990 [1985]). Werth, Lukas, ‘Pakistan: A Critique of the Concept of Modernity’, in Islam in the Era of Globalization: Muslim Attitudes towards Modernity and Identity, ed. by Johan Meuleman (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.14370. Welsch, Wolfgang, ‘Tranculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’, in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. by Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999), pp.194-231.

Cordula Lemke

Racism in the Diaspora: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) This essay explores how the rhetoric of racism shapes the construction of identity in Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers. Set in a town in Britain, the community of Asian immigrants portrayed in the novel uses racist stereotypes to guard themselves not only against the cultural predominance of the white population, but also against their Asian neighbours. Racial and cultural purity are depicted as the moving force of their daily lives. In the course of the novel, the difficulties of linking cultural features with racism are foregrounded. With Etienne Balibar’s introduction of a distinction between primary and secondary features of identity into the discourse of the creation of national identity as a background, this essay sets out to unravel the different strands of identity and their connection to racism.

1. Introduction In one of the last chapters of Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers, Jugnu, the offending lover, scrawls a message for his beloved Chanda into the dewy grass to tell her where he is going. The message reads ‘The Vision’ and refers to an English farm where he intends to buy bread on the morning of their return from Pakistan. Little does he know that with his message he will not reach his lover but his murderer who will assault Jugnu on his way to the farm. The day he writes his message on the grass, the Hindu symbol for longevity, will be his last. However, his memory lives on and in the novel he is depicted like the heart in the allegory called ‘Vision’ by the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran. Khalil Gibran’s ‘Vision’ tells the story of a bird dying of hunger and thirst, as he cannot reach the fields and river surrounding his cage. In the vision the bird is, then, transformed into a human heart: I am the lost human heart, imprisoned in the foul dungeon of man’s dictates, tied with chains of earthly authority, dead and forgotten by laughing humanity whose tongue is tied and whose eyes are empty of visible tears. 1

The vision ends with the narrator sharing the heart’s grief. Aslam’s novel likewise mourns the loss of love which is trapped by the laws of Islam; or rather by an interpretation of Islam which does not only supply meaning to an individual life but defines the borders of a Pakistani diaspora in Britain. Set in a postmodernist world of determining structures, the novel explores how 1

Kahlil Gibran, ‘Vision’, in A Treasury of Kahlil Gibran, ed. by Martin L. Wolf, transl. by Anthony Rizcallah Ferris (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp.233-234 (p.234).

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the laws of Islam shape the lives of lovers and murderers alike. Like the heart in Gibran’s vision, the lovers cannot rely on a weeping eye inside the Pakistani community. The only characters who sincerely mourn their loss are those who are themselves on the margins and in the cross-fire. When the novel came out in 2004, it was celebrated for presenting audacious insights into the life of a Pakistani community in Britain. 2 Its refusal to paint a flattering picture of traditions imported from Pakistan and its dystopian vision can be seen as an unveiling account of the internal racism fashioning the diaspora. In this paper, I want to take a closer look at the workings of this internal racism as it is lived and presented by the various characters. It is my contention that the dystopian dead-end which the novel portrays can be traced back to a racist stance taken by its narrator.

2. Mapping Memory The Pakistani community in Maps for Lost Lovers shows the typical traits of a diaspora caught between belonging and longing, whose members invent a background that hardly reflects their home country. 3 In the novel, the experience of abused women who return from Pakistan implies that the community dreams of a mythical Pakistan that does not exist. Still, this image of Pakistan shapes their daily life. They rename streets and places after the streets and places of their home towns, thereby mapping and appropriating their new surroundings: Because it was difficult to pronounce the English names, the men who arrived in this town in the 1950s had re-christened everything they saw before them. […] the name that one of them happened to give to a street or a landmark was taken up by the others regardless of where they themselves were from. But over the decades, as more and more people came, the various nationalities of the Subcontinent have changed the names according to the specific country they themselves are from – Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan. 4 (p.28-29)

The process of renaming varies according to the cultural background of the immigrants and thus becomes an enormous palimpsest. However, it soon becomes evident that each layer is suspiciously guarded by the respective community. Each community maps out its own culture onto the grid of the town regardless of its former meaning. The Sikhs, for example, use a ruined abbey for their death rituals because of its proximity to a river, and the Muslims convert the house of a mad woman into a mosque, although it could also have been shunned for

2

3

4

See Ron Charles, ‘Holy Terrors’, in The Washington Post, May 18 2005 <www.washington post.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/17/AR2005051701289_pf.html> (27 February 2007). See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p.247. Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers (London: Faber, 2004), p.28-29. All further references appear parenthetically in the text.

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being impure. Memories are erased by new meanings provided by the memories of home, ‘[…] amassing a claim on the place bit by bit […]’ (p.156). The act of renaming even extends to the name of the town which is now called Dasht-e-Tanhaii: ‘The Wilderness of Solitude’ or ‘The Desert of Loneliness’ (p.29). Its English name is scrupulously avoided in the text – a fact that points once more to the strong will of the community to disregard its new location. At the same time, the absence of a place which the reader can trace on his map of Britain renders the town a utopian fantasy and foregrounds the tendency of diasporas to invent backgrounds for themselves. James Clifford has described this concept of a diaspora which reinvents its new location as being ‘[…] oriented not so much to roots in a specific place and a desire for return as around an ability to recreate a culture in diverse locations’. 5 Through their memories, the immigrants assert their right to be there and to make the new place inhabitable by laying claim on its intelligibility. Home is where their cultural identity is, home is where they understand the laws and rituals of society. In order to call these terms into question, the novel starts by misleading the reader about its setting: Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself. With their deliberate almost-impaired pace, they fall like feathers sinking in water. The snowstorm has rinsed the air of the incense that drifts into the houses from the nearby lake with the xylophone jetty, but it is there even when absent, drawing attention to its own disappearance. (p.3)

Only later is the reader told that the novel is set in Britain. Up to then, incense and snowstorms – which, of course, are not unheard of in the north of the Indian subcontinent – make a confident categorisation impossible. The snow that covers the landscape leaves it devoid of recognisable characteristics, while the incense is smelt even in its absence and thus creates a notion of eternity. Shamas, one of the protagonists of the novel, greets the first snow with an outstretched hand, a gesture which is explained as a ritual by which he commemorates the missing fifth season, a season explained as the Pakistani season of the Monsoon which comes between summer and autumn: ‘Among the innumerable other losses, to come to England was to lose a season […]’ (p.5). With the description of Shamas’s snow ritual, doubts about the location are finally dispelled. The fact that there is no Monsoon in Britain points to the truism that difference poses a threat to identity, or more precisely, to an immigrant’s identity. The first snow, therefore, gives rise to a ritual which is supposed to deflect danger. Here, the topic of longing is introduced for the first time. In the course of the novel, the whole web of memories acts like the levelling snow and like the 5

Clifford, p.149.

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smell of incense that envelops each individual member of the Pakistani community. The memories of the parents Shamas and Kaukab of the family, around which the novel is structured, determine every move of their daily lives. When Shamas tries to break out of the confines of his home, he does so within a strictly Pakistani cultural framework. Unlike his children, he does not adopt the ways of English culture in his search for sexual freedom but looks to Muslim and Hindu poetry from the Indian subcontinent. And when Kaukab finds out that her religious laws work against the safety of her children, she does not question the laws themselves or explore the solutions British culture has to offer. The diaspora might be scattered around the world and has become a global phenomenon, but its laws adhere to the traditions of an imagined ‘home’ country. By shrouding the new place in old memories, the new location is invented just like the home country. This process of invention, however, does not only serve to create a feeling of belonging, but works as a shield against otherness. In defiance of the new culture into which Shamas and Kaukab were forced to settle, they draw boundaries and map out borders in order to protect their memories and traditions. Although Shamas works for an organisation that helps the community of immigrants to tackle British bureaucracy, a place ‘[…] the neighbourhood turns to when unable to negotiate the white world on its own […]’ (p.15), his aim is not to facilitate their integration but to support his community in an ‘us versus them’ situation; them being the undefined mass of whites.

3. Laws of Purity Kaukab’s approach to the white population of Britain is marked by her indifference towards the English language, by the small radius of her movements and activities, which is reduced to two or three streets, and by the importance she attaches to her house as a bulwark against all kinds of enemy forces. Even though Kaukab dreams of moving to a better and richer area, an area which would set her apart in status, she is anxious not to leave the narrow confines of her Pakistani neighbourhood. Her only contact with the world beyond her community is when she buys cloth for her traditional garments on special occasions: ‘I don’t go there often – white people’s houses start soon after that street, and even the Pakistanis there are not from our part of Pakistan’. (p.42) She feels happiest when she does not have to leave the house at all. Most of her groceries are delivered from an all-Pakistani shop, her neighbours come and visit her, and the spices she uses in her cooking hold the demons of British culture at bay: ‘[t]here is so much outside the house that may not be brought into the house […]’ (p.93). Just as Kaukab


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meticulously stitches the borders of her shalwar-kameez, she tries to keep her house clean of Western influences by driving out potential daughters-in-law. Yet, the white population does not pose a tangible threat to the Pakistani community. The novel relates only one instance of racism directed against the community when a bus driver is called ‘Paki’ and told to go home. Other than the beatings which the murderers receive in prison (p.169), there is no case of physical violence. The general impression is that the white population acts in a rather open-minded way towards the Asian immigrants, as the examples of Jugnu’s and Charag’s white lovers and the pub, where East and West meet for drinks, show. In the world of the novel, violent racism is depicted as a thing of the past (p.11). Nonetheless, the key phrase amongst the Pakistani community is ‘white racist thugs’ (p.272). It is generally used when something is amiss in the community and there is no obvious culprit. Accordingly, Kaukab blames her eldest son’s teacher for supporting his interest in art and thereby undermining her expectations that he become a doctor: The art teacher’s letter had been ignored at home – the mischievous attempts of the whites to lead the boy astray, said Kaukab, an attempt to prevent the Pakistanis from getting ahead in life, encouraging them to waste time on childish things instead of working towards a position of influence. (p.123)

By then the reader is well aware that it is Charag’s own wish to become an artist, that he has no talent for science at all, and that Kaukab is merely looking for a scapegoat for her son’s apparent shortcomings. In the novel, calling whites racist, suspecting ploys, and treating whites as unclean, godforsaken objects is in itself racist. The accusations speak of racist prejudices which are not based on specific occurrences, but aim at strengthening boundaries and guarding traditions. To follow the definition of Martin Bulmer and John Solomos: […] racism is an ideology of racial domination based on (i) beliefs that a designated racial group is either biologically or culturally inferior and (ii) the use of such beliefs to rationalize or prescribe the racial group’s treatment in society as well as to explain its social position and accomplishment […] 6

In the case of Kaukab’s treatment of her white environment, the order is clearly reversed. Her inferiority complex, which is described in painful detail when she meets Jugnu’s first white lover, triggers a revenge mechanism. She feels culturally and biologically inferior and unwittingly acquires a role that fits her emotions. As she builds up a self-righteous rage, she finds herself in the embarrassing situation in which she serves dahl in her guests’ shoes which then makes her look like an uncivilised madwoman (p.40). In her disparaging 6

Martin Bulmer and John Solomos, ‘General Introduction’, in Racism, ed. by Martin Bulmer and John Solomos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.3-17 (p.4).

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those who disparage her, she first thinks of the treatment she receives, before she resorts to the stereotypes of impurity Islam has to offer in order to denigrate others and to draw boundaries. The white population, however, poses a minor problem, and is largely neglected. The real threat comes from other immigrants, from Hindus and Sikhs. In a reflection of the situation in Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs are seen as contaminating Muslim life even though the context of migration once served to unite them. After their arrival in Britain they shared a house and listened to the same music, to American jazz (p.13). Their choice of jazz can be seen as an attempt to mingle. On the one hand, jazz musicians point to a successful way of asserting one’s own culture within a foreign environment, and on the other hand, the use of elements of jazz in traditional Asian music has been practiced by Muslim musicians for a considerable time and stands for integration. 7 However, when the immigrants move on with their families, their initial unity and their open-mindedness towards the West gives way to racist suppression. The immigrants’ perception of the community as a shelter is, then, substituted by the compartmentalising laws of their home country. The old feuds are renewed with the different parties using the same racist stereotypes as in Pakistan; stereotypes that focus on the question of racial and cultural purity. The geographical proximity of their home towns on the Indian subcontinent calls for even stronger borders than those set up against the whites. Kiran, who used to be at the centre of the community’s unity when her father introduced the immigrants to jazz, is now shunned for being a Sikh. She is forbidden to marry Kaukab’s brother, a Muslim, and live with him in Britain for the same reasons that would have made her ineligible in Pakistan. Once again, it is Pakistan and the Muslim laws of purity that provide meaning; once again it is an image of Pakistan that reflects the needs of the diaspora. In a foreign environment, purity is at stake, and as a result racism reaches a new dimension. The main issue is the fear of losing one’s purity, be it biological as in the fear of miscegenation, or cultural as in the unclean habits of other religious communities. As Shamas’s parents proved in Pakistan, the fact that his father was a Hindu before his conversion to Islam is overcome by their deep love for each other. In Britain, however, Shamas and especially his brother Jugnu are disparaged for their Hindu background even though they were born and raised as Muslims. Whenever they act against the staunch beliefs and strict laws of the Pakistani community, the descent of their Hindu father is blamed (p.47). Thus, Jugnu and Chanda’s sinful relationship bears the additional blemish of miscegenation.

7

Ines Weinrich, ‘Jazz’, in Kleines Islam-Lexikon: Geschichte, Alltag, Kultur, ed. Ralf Elger (München: C.H. Beck, 2006), pp.152-153 (p.153).


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4. Borders of Identity The structure behind these racist attacks is described by Etienne Balibar in his analysis of the European Community. Boundaries that used to denote territorial borders lose their geographical meaning. However, far from being abolished altogether, they reappear in different guises and rearrange the maps of the cities. 8 Migration has been made easier after the disappearance of national frontiers so that now European cities are shaped by various ethnic groups and cultures. This, however, has not led to a happy mêlée of nations with the city as a gigantic melting pot, but raises the problem of new boundaries and borders to safeguard the values of the respective communities. These borders are created by introducing racist elements; a development which Balibar describes as apartheid within the European community. 9 Balibar explains these boundaries by focussing on the philosophical and psychoanalytical structure of identity: Every individual must construct an identity for himself or herself: but he or she can only do it by rejecting the roles imposed on him or her in the framework of transferential relations that he or she must participate in, that is, by adopting the positive or negative identification they imply. […] Each individual has a multiplicity of competing identities or ‘personalities’ constructed since childhood. 10

Individuals acquire identities in the process of appropriating social roles according to situations they are faced with and people they relate to. Thus, identities are not made up by one single role, but comprise various options. However, identities have to be relatively stable to enable the individual to tackle the world and its array of meanings. In the context of national identities, Balibar explains that individuals tend to relate first to identity concepts concerning class, gender, religion or family before they recur to national identities. Often, these so-called primary identities run counter to the process of national integration which can lead to repression and violence: Primary identities, in order to be incorporated into national identity, must be worked on for a long time and in some sense ‘deconstructed’: the ‘subjects’ must spend long hours sitting in the classroom for years in order for things to work well […]. The interest of the example of the educational system (but we should also think about the family, religious practice, professional orientation – in short, everything that Althusser had proposed calling ‘ideological state apparatuses’ and Foucault ‘disciplines’) is that it shows us and even makes us feel the level of structural violence (or ‘symbolic violence’) inherent in the process of deconstruction and reconstruction. 11

8

9 10 11

Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, transl. by James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p.1. Ibid., p.9. Ibid., p.26. Ibid., p.28-29.

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On the one hand, Balibar shows that the process of forming one’s identity is indispensable; on the other hand, the structure of identity embodies violence in general, and frequently resorts to racism. However, racist aggression and violence no longer follow just one direction. The main force of racist aggression is still exercised by cultural and ethnic majorities against minorities; however, the cases in which minorities attack other minorities are becoming more and more prevalent. 12 In Maps for Lost Lovers, racism is used to impose primary values. Children who do not adhere to strict laws of obedience are threatened with the prospect of not-belonging. If they do not obey Muslim laws, they will be expelled from the Pakistani community, as a girl is told in a shop: […] she’ll be given away to a white person who’ll make her eat pork and drink alcohol and not wash her bottom after going to the toilet – forcing her to use only toilet paper. (p.220, emphasis in the original)

Kaukab employs the racist accusation that her family seems to be adopting the ways of the whites in order to reinforce her own values. She assures herself of the supremacy of her traditions by ascribing any act of resistance from her children to their being contaminated by British ways of life. Shamas is bribed into supporting her interpretation of Islamic laws because she tolerates his rationalist ‘Westernised’ ideas and she graciously forgives his father his religious origin. In her accusations she makes her family believe that they have let her down as a mother and – even worse – they are disrupting her paradisiacal memories of Pakistan by giving in to satanic temptations. Kaukab’s traditions, which are supposed to provide a meaningful map in a foreign environment, are subject to criticism. In her blind reliance on a remedy against the male libido which a Muslim cleric has offered her, she unwittingly poisons her youngest son. She then pesters her daughter to return to her husband in Pakistan, only to find out that he had physically abused her. Even though she is terrified by the news, Kaukab reacts by simply making a mental note to look for a more caring husband next time. To question the practice of arranged marriages preferably with relatives from Pakistan is not an option, as it is part of the diaspora’s interpretation of the laws of Allah and thus located outside the influence of humankind (p.120). Kaukab’s perspective on the traditions imported from an invented Pakistan is contrasted with more critical voices. Shamas points out a street where a high rate of children are mentally challenged, in all likelihood as a result of the practice of arranged marriages between first cousins. Then, an unspeakably brutal exorcism is described in which a girl dies. Her parents are 12

Balibar, p.29.


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convinced that she is possessed by djinns, because she does not enjoy her matrimonial duties with an older man. Although the Pakistani community condemns the violence exercised by the cleric, the belief in ghosts does not abate, as it is seen as a vital part of Islam (p.186). Finally, there is the crime of honour: the community is divided between those who feel that death is the only answer to sinners like Jugnu and Chanda and a minority who despise religion for erecting fences against love. In the end, the narrator inserts a passage about a Christian priest who also preaches against sex outside marriage, thereby blaming religion in general for its intolerance and not just Islam. However, towards the end of the novel, the voice of the narrator turns out to be the least accommodating voice of all. In the beginning, the narrator stays neutral, but his comments become more and more explicit throughout the novel. Shortly before the murder of Jugnu and Chanda is related, the reader is introduced to the Muslim practice of slaughtering animals in detail: Chotta had come into the town centre after closing up the shop at nine because the seat covers needed changing. It was the only transport the family had, and in addition to personal travel it was used for the twice-weekly visit to the abattoir. The meat for the consumption of Muslims had to be slaughtered in a specific way: the animal had to be alive when its throat was cut and blood had to flow out of its body while it was still alive – the animal could not be stunned unconscious before being killed, as was the practice among non-Muslims; and all butchering from start to finish must be done only by a Muslim. The previous week, after the brothers had killed the lambs and sheep in the abattoir and brought them home in the van, blood and fatty liquid had leaked out of the plastic sheets and stained the seat covers. (p.350)

Knowing that Chanda’s brothers are cruel butchers, the reader is not surprised to hear – again in detail – how the lovers are brutally murdered, chopped up and burned. Moreover, the passage is noteworthy because of its didactic take. The narrator deems it important that readers without a Muslim background become aware of the most sordid details of a Muslim practice. Set in this context, the brothers’ harping on their duty as Muslims to punish Jugnu and their sister for being sinners appears in a new light. Now the message reads: Islam encourages behaviour that is violent, brutal and barbaric. In addition, the narrator points out that one of the brothers is having an illegitimate affair with a Sikh woman and that this brother is absolutely incapable of seeing any parallel between his behaviour and that of his sister. Thus, the narrator insinuates, Islam is not only barbaric but also unjust, which leads to the assumption that the Muslim laws must be man-made rather than god-given. All other introductions to Islam which the non-Muslim reader is presented with are passages in which a patriarchal system is shown to oppress women and children by imposing absurd laws of purity. A non-Muslim reader may well get the impression that Islam is only interested in sex. It endows men with unrestricted power to live their sadistic dreams and casts women and

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children in the role of victims. In the case of women, a religious Muslim woman must either be incredibly uneducated, which is Kaukab’s excuse, or mad like the woman who owned the house that was turned into a mosque. The narrator paints a strikingly bleak picture of this Pakistani community. While his characters remain inside the patriarchal structure of Muslim society, they are condemned to forego love. As the title suggests, they will be lost in a labyrinth of intolerance, racism, and violence. Even Shamas who tries to break out of this loveless cage of inhumane laws, is forced to desist and return. His poems and stories about true love, which he uses as a springboard, only catapult him back into submission when he finds out that his lover did not get involved with him to share his love but to fulfil another misogynist Muslim law. Yet, a closer look at Shamas’s involvement shows that all he was looking for was to fulfil his sexual desire and enjoy his lover’s youth.

5. Beyond Racism The only characters who manage to break free from this oppressive environment are Shamas and Kaukab’s children. They move out, adopt Western standards and are depicted as free people who are in the lucky situation of choosing their own lifestyle. Like the narrator, they despise Islam for breeding intolerance and injustice and with it they fight Kaukab, their mother, who enforces the seemingly barbaric values of Islam. As Kaukab’s lovingly prepared food turns into poison for Ujala, her children blame her and her longing for Pakistan for contaminating their lives. However, the only life outside the community that is shown in detail is the older son Charag’s. Apart from the possibility of following his vocation and painting, the lifestyle he embraces speaks mainly of sexual liberty. In the end, the narrator seems to propose that the only way out of the patriarchal violence of the community is to turn away from it and embrace the great possibilities of Western culture whose racism towards the Asian community is judged history. Just like John Major’s advertising campaign in the 1990s, the narrator’s choice of events suggests to the reader, and especially the non-Muslim reader, that ‘Life is better in Britain’. However, with this suggestion, the narrator adopts the same racist stance as the Pakistani diaspora. By reinforcing binary oppositions into his celebration of British culture and his condemning of Pakistan, he panders to the racist stereotypes of the white majority. After reading the novel, any racist is most likely to feel very much supported in his assessment of Asian minority culture in the diaspora. Nonetheless, a closer look at the novel’s treatment of racism might provide a different picture. There are a few instances where characters are shown to undermine or break out of the simple equation of ‘us versus them’. It could be argued that Shamas himself endorses Westernised ideas because of his


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communist background (p.80). However, as Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit point out in their book Occidentalism, the influence of communist ideas in Asia did not lead to a sense of community between East and West, but served to enforce occidentalist perspectives. 13 Communism foregrounds structures of injustice and, in its unifying rhetoric, offers an often violent way out by directing the anger of the masses of the ‘oppressed’ against an equally undefined mass of oppressors. Thus, by calling himself communist, Shamas does not have integration and a multi-ethnic world in mind as his own longing for Pakistan shows. 14 His aim is to change conditions in Pakistan, for which he was expelled, and not to settle in Britain simply for financial reasons. Their son Charag could be seen as creating a more hybrid identity. In the end, he uses his art to celebrate the community. His new project starts off from an old photographic archive which Charag plans to include in his paintings. In this archive, the negatives of all photographs are assembled which were taken from immigrants by the first generation onwards: ‘[…] perhaps I should try to incorporate into my art the lives of the people I grew up amongst – examine and explore them’. (p.318) The underlying assumption seems to be that this project will rewrite the history of Britain by including the immigrants. Charag, as a member of the second generation who has experenced both British and Pakistani culture, would be an apt mediator. However, Charag’s motivation also suggests a different interpretation. He is aware that his new project fulfils his father’s expectations in political art: […] now that he has mentioned that he might do something with the photographs of immigrants, Shamas knows that he is maturing as an artist, becoming aware of his responsibility as an artist. (p.319)

Some time ago, Shamas himself had thought of buying the negatives (p.244). However, as Shamas has no interest in creating a multi-ethnic environment in which different cultures merge but in strengthening the position of a secluded diaspora, Charag’s project, which does not leave the interpretive frame of his family, has more relevance regarding his role in his family than as a step towards hybridity. Charag’s unawareness of hybridity becomes evident when his British exwife Stella draws the attention to a newspaper article on Charag’s works, one of them a self-portrait of his torso with an uncircumcised penis. In this article, Charag is situated in strictly British surroundings while his painting suggests a harsh criticism of the environment he grew up in. The British context allows 13

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Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (London: Penguin, 2004), pp.42-43. Just like the other immigrants, who recreate their new environment with a paradisiacal Pakistan in mind, Shamas also renames places according to Asian mythology (‘Scandal Point’, p.156) or his own childhood in Pakistan (‘Safeena’, p.136).

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him to turn away from his family and question their values from an outsider’s perspective. Charag’s point, then, is to consider religion in general without a historicising context: What I am trying to say is that it was the first act of violence done to me in the name of a religious or social system. And I wonder if anyone has the right to do it. We should all question such acts. (p.320)

The ensuing discussion once more shows a battle between parents and children. The children, especially Ujala, attack their mother’s version of Islam, whereas Kaukab links her belief to her situation as an immigrant. Although the aim of her children is to distinguish between a racist construction of identity and those features which Balibar’s theory terms primary, Kaukab’s experience is too tied up with her limited point of view to let her see the advantages of such a distinction. Kaukab’s racist perspective is on display once more. She lives within the binary oppositions of racism because she is unable to imagine an identity not shaped by her memories of Pakistan. Up to the very end, Kaukab defends her strictly Pakistani version of Islam against accusations of brutality and misogyny. She firmly believes that it gives her ‘dignity’ (p.321), a visible identity provided by a firm set of laws. These laws are intended to protect her in a seemingly inhospitable environment, but they also stigmatise her as a dangerously old-fashioned, racist Pakistani woman whose horizon is too limited to allow her to see injustice. Even though Kaukab is given some rare moments in the novel in which her perspective is presented as a valid counter argument – ‘[n]ot everyone has the freedom to walk away from a way of life […]’ (p.115), the narrator still implies that changing one’s identity is a feasible task, if one follows the bright light of reason and does not adhere to a set of oppressive traditions. The bright light of reason in this novel certainly means getting rid of everything Pakistani, or more precisely, of every tradition perpetuated by one’s Pakistani mother. Yet, as stated before, racism inside the diaspora is used to convey the values which create primary identities. If the reader reconsiders the narration’s stance on the importance of distinguishing between racism and primary features of identity, a first impression of the narrator’s racist outlook needs to be amended and the narrator’s cultural racism could then be interpreted as veiling a deeply misogynist undercurrent.


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Works Cited Aslam, Nadeem, Maps for Lost Lovers (London: Faber, 2004). Balibar, Etienne, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, transl. by James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Bulmer, Martin and John Solomos, ‘General Introduction’, in Racism, ed. by Martin Bulmer, John Solomos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.3-17. Buruma, Ian and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (London: Penguin, 2004). Charles, Ron, ‘Holy Terrors’, in The Washington Post, May 18 2005 <www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/05/17/AR2005051 701289_pf.html> [accessed on 27 February 2007]. Clifford, James, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Gibran, Kahlil, ‘Vision’, in A Treasury of Kahlil Gibran, ed. by Martin L. Wolf, transl. by Anthony Rizcallah Ferris (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp.233-234. Weinrich, Ines, ‘Jazz’, in Kleines Islam-Lexikon: Geschichte, Alltag, Kultur, ed. Ralf Elger (München: C.H. Beck, 2006), pp.152-153.

Visual Art and Music: Picturing and Sounding Identity

Eva Ulrike Pirker

Images of Muslim Britain Go Global: A Reading of the British Council’s Touring Exhibition Common Ground The photography exhibition Common Ground: Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Experience in Britain was conceived by the British Council UK and Middle East in 2001 and finished in 2003. In it, work by eight British photographers or photographers’ teams document and reflect Muslim life in the UK. This contribution shortly discusses the political and cultural framework and presents a selection of exhibits. First, the ‘genesis’ and overall message of the project Common Ground will be considered. A look at the reception of the exhibition in different parts of the world and different communities will be included that may offer some insights into the meaning and pitfalls of a project such as the Common Ground exhibition. A second part is devoted to the specificities of the medium/genre photography in the context of the exhibition, but also in general. The last part is exclusively devoted to a presentation of selected works.

1. Introduction The British Council’s Common Ground exhibition is an international project that engages with Muslim identities in a postmodern, increasingly globalised world. It has emerged at a time in which Muslims and all aspects of their lives have come under heavy scrutiny in Britain and elsewhere. In this context, the exhibition aims at building cultural bridges and works against stereotypical images that have become particularly dominant in Western societies since 9/11. Recent research published in a report commissioned by the Mayor of London attests an outright demonisation of Muslims in the UK media whose coverage was closely examined during a representative week: Of the 352 articles that referred to Islam and Muslims 91 per cent were judged to be negative in their associations. Only four per cent were judged to be positive, and five per cent were judged neutral. […] In the tabloids, 96 per cent of all articles were judged to be negative, compared with 89 per cent in the broadsheets. 1

Islamophobic tendencies were officially identified in Britain’s society before 2001, 2 but negative stereotyping has since become a matter of course. The

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Greater London Authority, ‘The Search for Common Ground: Muslims, Non-Muslims and the UK Media’, London: GLA, 15 November 2007, VI. (15 November 2007). A report on Islamophobia in the UK was published in 1997 by the Runnymede Trust’s Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia: The Runnymede Trust, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All (London: The Runnymede Trust, 1997).

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generalising assumptions and islamophobic views which largely determine public discourses on Muslim life conveniently push aside the fact that from the Renaissance onwards, Islam has fulfilled a multitude of functions for Western culture and Western culture has, in turn, influenced the Muslim world. The encounter of Islam and the British Isles can be traced back to the twelfth century. By the late 14th century Muslim culture was reflected in English literature, 3 and Muslim scholarship was widely received among the learned on the Isles. Renaissance travel writing transmitted stereotypical representations of Muslim culture to an educated general readership, 4 but otherwise, mutual influences became manifest in exchanges of goods and culture; Elizabeth I formed strong and sustaining alliances with the Ottoman Empire and the North African ‘Moors’, always ‘with an eye to trade’ but also due to political motivations, as Nabil Matar argues: ‘From Elizabeth to Richard Cromwell and the Charles II, and whenever there was war with Spain or France, England served as a corridor between the Catholic continent and the territory of Islam’. 5 Efforts were made to draw distinguishing cultural boundaries, but ‘[u]nlike […] Spain, France, Portugal and Italy, England did not produce an anti-Muslim national epic’. Stereotypical anti-Muslim representations emerged rather gradually in ‘the ideology of early modern Britain’ 6 ; only in the colonial discourses that accompanied the materialisation of the ‘Second Empire’ were Muslims effectively relocated in the sphere of the ‘other’. The notion of European and, above all, British, superiority was no longer a matter of religion and culture, but one that entered political debate and was backed up by intellectual discourses and representational practices. 7 Simultaneously, however, the ‘Muslim other’ continued to be part of insular Britain and left its mark on British culture, science and everyday life. Today, around three per cent of the UK’s population are Muslim; 8 most of them live in urban centres, where they form 3.3 per cent of the inhabitants. By contrast, in rural areas the numbers of Muslims amount to less than 0.1 per cent. Circa fourty per cent of all British Muslims live in London and make up 8.5 per cent of the metropole’s population. Some individuals and families 3 4

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For instance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (‘The Man of Law’s Tale’). For instance in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (p.1589ff). Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp.22-23. For more information on Muslims in Renaissance Britain, see also Matar’s study Islam in Britain: 1558-1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Matar, p.14. For a seminal discourse analysis of the colonial construction of an Orientalist ‘other’ see Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1995 [1978]). Census 2001 (15 November 2007).

A Reading of the British Council’s Touring Exhibition Common Ground

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can trace their origins in Britain back for centuries, and Muslims had come to the Isles via various routes, for instance as servicemen for the armed forces during the world wars or as students at British boarding schools and universities, to name but two examples. However, the bulk of Britain’s Muslim population consists of post-war migrants from the subcontinent and their descendants. In the 1970s, when a second generation was on its way, and after the first legislation to restrict immigration had been passed, thousands of Muslim families came to settle in the UK as part of a wave of East African Asians who were expelled from the newly independent nation states. They came at a time when the societal acceptance of migrants and minority groups was particularly low. The encounter of Muslims and the majority group of non-Muslims in the Western ‘contact zones’ is complicated by the fact that it no longer occurs on the level of collective identification, but on that of individual quests. Second generationers born into Western societies face the difficulty of having to juggle two formations of culture 9 between which a dialogue appears to have become difficult. The fact that neither of these cultural formations is uncontested is often conveniently forgotten, and instead of commonalities, contrastive elements are stressed in public discourses as well as everyday life. To render the picture of today’s Muslim community accurately, it has to be mentioned that the majority of Muslims who have entered Britain as migrants from the nineties onwards are classed as political or economic refugees and asylum seekers. The group of so-called ‘illegal migrants’ is also largely made up of Muslims. Another growing Muslim group is that of converts to Islam, featuring a significant number of white English individuals. With its attempts ‘to explore the range and diversity of British Muslims’ experience of life in the UK’, 10 the Common Ground exhibition is a notable contribution that aims at breaking open notions of binary oppositions between supposedly contrastive ‘cultures’ and notions of a monolithic Islamic world. It was conceived in 2001, before 9/11, but in the aftermath of riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley. The exhibition also reflects the New Labour agenda and identity campaign for the nation that was vigorously pursued from 1997 onwards and places the celebration of cultural and ethnic diversity at the core of its efforts. The British Council has embraced the new 9

10

The term ‘culture’ has been appropriated in the formation of collective (e.g. national) identities and ideologies, and these influence, in turn, our understanding of culture and cultural processes. Once the term ‘culture’ is integrated in a narrative of formation, the aspect of its constructedness tends to get lost and it appears as a natural condition that is functionalised in the building of dividing lines between ‘the own’ and ‘the other’. Strictly speaking, there can be no ‘cultures’, only different forms of culture, and mindsets. British Council Arts, ‘Common Ground’ (15 November 2007).

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policies with significant consequences (for instance large-scale organisational restructuring 11 and the redefinition of directives) in the UK and in its offices worldwide. 12 As the organ that officially shapes the nation’s image abroad, the British Council’s institutional position between arts and politics and its role as a cultural mediator can be debated controversially. During the past decade, however, a development away from the mere carrying of British culture into the world towards building creative initiatives and networks could be observed. Nevertheless, the British Council still names distinct criteria for the artistic initiatives it supports: one of the four priorities listed in the web-presentation of the arts sector is ‘[s]ocial change: making sure that we’re supporting arts work that reaches out to all areas of society as well as reaching the more traditional consumers of the arts’. 13 In light of the more or less gross misrepresentations of Muslim life in the British media and beyond, the Common Ground exhibition could serve as a small, but significant, contribution to social change in Britain and the West, and a societally most relevant stance: As Stuart Hall has noted, ‘[…] how things are represented and the machineries and regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event, role’ (emphasis in the original). 14 Interestingly, the exhibition was not primarily conceived to be shown in Britain and Western Europe, but for the non-European ‘Muslim world’. Accordingly, it went on tour in South East Asia and then the Middle East, where a photographic dialogue was begun with local artists. During the tours, the exhibition was significantly enlarged with work by Indonesian and Middle Eastern artists. While much of the UKbased work was commissioned by the British Council from well-known artists who had contributed to the 000ZEROZEROZERO exhibition in London, the work added ‘on tour’ was gathered via competitions organised by the local British Councils. Common Ground must therefore be seen as a work in progress, an invitation to a discourse. The following passages attempt to problematise two questions that arise at this stage: how can photographs

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See for instance, my interview with Fiona Bartels-Ellis: ‘“Many of us live parallel lives”: Fiona Bartels-Ellis, Head of Equal Opportunity and Diversity at the British Council, in Interview with Eva Ulrike Pirker’, Anglistik 1 (March 2006), 181-193. Arguably, the British Council has also been one of the institutions that helped shape these new policies, having, for instance, hosted a noted conference entitled Re-Inventing Britain in March 1997, where issues such as the multicultural society, national identity and questions of representation were addressed. British Council Arts, ‘Who We Are’ (15 November 2007). Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston Baker et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1989]), pp.163-172 (p.164).


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contribute to a discourse and what are the specificities of the photographic medium/genre?

2. Questions of Medium and Genre According to Susan Sontag, photographs ‘objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. And photographs are a species of alchemy, for all that they are prized as a transparent account of reality’. 15 The idea that photographs capture reality is one of the oldest notions attached to the medium of photography. The conception of photography as an artistic genre has only and reluctantly emerged in the second half of the 20th century. While the art of photography has been triumphant in the Euroamerican context ever since, it still struggles for recognition in regions of the Asian and African world where Islam and Muslim culture are dominant factors. When the Common Ground exhibition toured the Middle East, photographic collage artist (and regional contributor to the exhibition) Camille Zakharia said in an interview, ‘This is a big deal for the Middle East because you don’t really see big photographic shows here. […] In the Middle East, photography is not considered high art’. 16 The difficult birth and claim for recognition of photography in parts of the ‘Muslim world’ is arguably linked to – albeit not exclusively determined by – the aniconism which is at the core of Islamic religious practice and manifests itself in spaces of worship and a variety of secular realms. However, there are considerable differences in aniconic practice depending on the region, the cultural and political framework, popular beliefs, and specific, historically rooted discourses. 17 Riyadh has been one of the stops of the Common Ground tour, and Saudi Arabia is, as art critic Judith Bumpus has maintained, ‘one of the most difficult countries in the world in which to be a photographer. The activity is not prohibited, but taking pictures in public, particularly of women, is taboo’. 18 Journalist Arifa Akbar has noted that in ‘many of the Islamic Gulf states […] – where the concept of figurative art is still contested by orthodox scholars – […] the show is a sign that the region is nudging towards

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Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), p.81. Soraya Roberts, ‘On Common Ground’, Time Out Dubai (UAE), 23 February - 2 March 2006, p.47. As Silvia Naef shows in a long overdue study there is no ban on images in the Qur’an; reference can only be made to the collection of Hadith. Silvia Naef, Bilder und Bilderverbot im Islam: Vom Koran bis zum Karikaturenstreit (München: Beck, 2007), pp.13-22. Judith Bumpus. ‘Saudis See How Their Sisters Live’, in Times Online, 10 May 2006 (15 November 2007).

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greater liberalisation’. 19 In the past, periods of strict aniconism oscillated with epochs of dominant figurative expression in almost all regions of the Muslim world depending on socio-political conditions and cultural developments. Historically, the aniconist mode usually emerged in the context of a need to strengthen the religious identity against other religious groups or in periods when religion was instrumentalised as a factor in other processes of collective identification. Today, forms of aniconic Islam exist in societies that are otherwise flooded by images via the mass media from within and outside. In some cases, the aniconic claim is adapted to the changing conditions of existence; in others, a retreat to an orthodox form of aniconism serves to strengthen a collective identity in a time when ‘contaminating’ influences threaten the religious integrity. 20 Needless to say, figural expressions about, and emerging from, a Muslim cultural context do not necessarily address, negotiate, or react to, aniconist claims. Nevertheless, in the realm of artistic creation and reception, awareness of the practice may be relevant. Within an aniconist context, photography plays a special role that is connected with its ambivalent function as a representational practice, described by Roland Barthes as the ‘photographic paradox’. The immediate ‘message’ transmitted by the photograph is ‘the scene itself, the literal reality’ of which the photographic image is ‘its perfect analogon, and it is this analogical perfection which, to common sense, defines the photograph. […] it is a message without a code’ (emphasis in the original). 21 Barthes distances himself from this common-sensical view of the ‘purely denotative status of the photograph, […] its “objectivity”’ by drawing attention to the danger of this status becoming ‘mythical’. He claims that the photograph really transmits two messages, one without a code and one with a code: the paradox is that the connoted (or coded) message develops here from a message without a code. This structural paradox coincides with an ethical one: when we want to be ‘neutral, objective’, we seek to copy reality meticulously, as if the analogical were a resistance factor against the encroachment of values […]: how then can the photograph be at once ‘objective’ and ‘encroached upon’, natural and cultural? It is by apprehending the mode of imbrication

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Arifa Akbar, ‘Photo Exhibition Depicting the Lives of British Muslim Women Tours the Globe’, Independent, 27 June 2006 (15 November 2007). On aniconism in Islam, see Jack Goody, Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence Towards Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics and Sexuality (London: Blackwell, 1997), particularly pp.39ff, and more recently, but only available in German, Almir Ibric, Islamisches Bilderverbot vom Mittel- bis ins Digitalzeitalter (Münster: LIT, 2006). Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation, transl. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), pp.3-20 (p.5).


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of the denoted message and the connoted message that we may ultimately be able to answer this question. (emphasis in the original) 22

The essay quoted here first appeared in 1961 and Barthes reluctantly called his attempt to develop a methodology of denoting the photographic message an ‘anticipation’. His considerations have later grown into a structuralist method that provides useful tools, not for seeing the photograph in/as an absolute system of signification, but as a system that is hinged on reality, draws from, and reflects back on, realities. The relationship between photography, consciousness and reality has been explored in detail by Susan Sontag. The notion of the photograph as analogon, or as ‘something directly stenciled off the real’, to use Sontag’s words, enables spectators to see it in a different light than works of art and narrative fiction that build on the principle of connotation and ‘represent and refer’. 23 For the aniconist who takes issue with acts of artistic creation that transmit connoted messages, but also for the general spectator, photography encourages a special form of reception: a photograph ‘is not only like its subject, a homage to the subject. It is part of, an extension of that subject’. Additionally, it is, as Sontag continues, ‘a potent means of acquiring [the subject], of gaining control over it’. 24 This acquisition on the side of the recipient has significant consequences: the photograph becomes the surrogate of a persona or an object; the spectator meets the photograph with a consumer’s attitude and a sense of ownership; photography is not only ‘the medium through which more and more events enter our experience’ but significantly the medium through which knowledge is furnished independently of the spectator’s lived experience. The photograph regulates and expands the spectator’s perception of reality. To view reality as an endless set of situations which mirror each other, to extract analogies from the most dissimilar things, is to anticipate the characteristic form of perception stimulated by photographic images. Reality itself has started to be understood as a kind of writing, which has to be decoded. 25

Barthes’s structuralist and Sontag’s reception-oriented approach have not forfeited significance in an age when on the one hand, photography is increasingly acknowledged as a diversified artistic genre in its own right and when, on the other hand, the truth-claim (‘objectivity’) of documentary photography undergoes heavy scrutiny in view of increasingly widely-mastered techniques of editing. When reading and ‘deciphering’ the exhibits of the Common 22 23

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Barthes, p.8. Susan Sontag, ‘The Image-World’, in Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978 [1973]), pp.151-180 (p.154 and p.155). Ibid., p.155. Ibid., p.160.

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Ground collection, it is worthwhile to keep the ambiguity of the photographic message, the photographic relation to reality and the positioning of the photograph between art and documentation, factuality and fiction in mind. Similarly to Barthes’s press photograph, the individual exhibits and series of exhibits stand in a tense relation to their context, i.e. their place in the exhibition and in the societal discourses.

3. Common Ground: Series and Images The Common Ground exhibition comes to the local curators without suggestions of how and in what sequence to hang the exhibits. It thus leaves a wide variety of choices and the possibility to put a focus on certain aspects and neglect others. Thus, local curators can strongly influence the message that the exhibition sends out to the viewers. The first catalogue made available by the British Coucil UK follows this path: It is made of loose leaflets, each containing five small prints of a series and information on the respective artist. The concept of loose leaflets suggests that the viewers of the catalogue (as the local curators of the exhibition) are free to choose the sequence and hierarchy of the exhibits. 26 Despite this open concept that allows for a multitude of emphases, Common Ground will always fulfill its basic aim of reflecting the diversity of the Muslim experience, unless a curator decides to omit a substantial number of exhibits or whole series. The series that immedially captures the gaze of the viewer and that will necessarily remain memorable is Suki Dhanda’s Shopna, a photo-story in large format whose eight images (125 x 125 cm) literally explode with colour. Applied on aluminum plates, the series shows the same figure, the fifteen-year-old girl Shopna in different everyday situations, partly with other figures, partly alone, mostly in establishing shots. The juxtaposition of images of Shopna as part of a group (either family or girlfriends) and Shopna alone, in intimate situations (alone in a close-up, on a chair and in prayer with her mother) and social interaction (at a pool table and in a fast-food restaurant with her friends; at dinner with her family) reflects the tension out of which subjects generate and form their identity: as a result of the influence of groups and social settings, but also of individual contemplation, reflection, perhaps (religious) spirituality. The artist has commented on her work in the following manner: My objective was to provide a deeper insight to the motivation rather than the outward appearance of the subjects. […] It is important to recognise that modern British Muslim girls have similar reference points and interests to any other British teenagers and are keen to 26

In contrast, the catalogue made for the show in the Arab Emirates comes in traditional bound form and guides the readers’ attention in a distinct way.


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expand their horizons beyond traditional social constrictions. This does not in any way undermine their devotion and loyalty to Islamic religious and cultural values. 27

Dhanda also mentions her immediate fascination with Shopna’s self-reliance and independence and manages to capture the sense of belonging and appropriation that characterises the mutual relationship between the figure and the space surrounding her. The negotiation of space and subjectivity is a central aspect in Shopna. One image shows Shopna on an English beach (fig. 1 in the appendix to this article) – the background features bathing and walking people and shows it as a public space. The view of the seaside, the mild climate, the unobtrusive sea and pale northern sky is one of the British Isles’ defining landscape views, one of the signifiers of Britain. At the centre of the image is the figure Shopna, standing in a reflective pose, head bowed, hands behind her back, apparently looking at a (perhaps: her) drawing in the sand; she neither disturbs the landscape nor disappears in it, but defines it: it is set off against her just as she is set off against it. It is her beach, her sky, her sand, not only to walk on but to draw in, to inscribe herself into, to appropriate. This image stands out among the series as the only photograph of Shopna alone in a public space. 28 It appears like an establishing title shot to the Shopna series. Here, Shopna wears a hijab with long pants and a tight shirt; other images show her in jeans. Dhanda claims, ‘Shopna defies all stereotypical perceptions of the hijab by integrating it into her everyday clothing, she wears the hijab as a mark of cultural respect and from a personal sense of identity’. 29 Clothing underlines Shopna’s practice of combining a supposedly Western lifestyle and Muslim cultural values. Another shot shows Shopna among her friends in a fast food-shop (fig. 2) in which varieties of burgers are advertised next to a framed image of Arab calligraphy. The photograph, as well as other images in the series, appear to be snap-shots that successfully capture the situation and its dynamic, here, for instance in the hands’ motion to the open mouths and the different directions of the girls’ gazes that evoke a communicative moment. Movement is also created by the mirror, the light and the windows reflected in the mirror. The mirror is a central part in the composition, and one of its connotations in this image is the interplay between worlds inside and outside, their reflection of each other, their inhabiting each other. Dhanda’s images literally appear as 27

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Suki Dhanda, in Common Ground [Catalogue], ed. by Brett Rogers and Andrea Rose (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2003), n.p. This is also one of the images that has been most frequently used in press reports on the exhibition; it has thus functioned as an introductory image to the Common Ground exhibition in many cases. Dhanda, n.p.

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moving images, and the spectators can picture the ensuing shots that would make up a scene. A more intimate image is that of Shopna alone in the family’s kitchen (fig. 3), crouched on a chair, hugging her legs, barefoot, head uncovered and pensive. The ready-made kitchen (like the pepsi-cans and burgers in the fast-food restaurant) reflects the way in which products are commodified in culturally diverse settings in the West and around the world. On a superficial level, the process of economic globalisation (often equalled with ‘Americanisation’) blurs ethnic or cultural difference, exposing social class-differences instead. The figure Shopna is at home in this global commodity, the ready-made kitchen, she uses it without giving it the least thought. She is the ingredient that adds life to the composition; the viewers are directed towards Shopna’s pensive gaze that gives them the impression of secretly looking in on her thoughts. Again, the interplay between space (in this example a global interior space) and figure, is emphasised. Spaces, interior and exterior, are presented in Dhanda’s series as welcoming, and being in need of, the subject inhibiting them, a subject that happens to be a self-reliant Muslim girl who knows her way around. How a British landscape, or rather a London cityscape, has been shaped by Muslim culture is shown in Rehan Jamil’s series of twenty-four photographs Allahu Akbar. Jamil presents religious spaces and mosques in a medium-size format (20.5 x 29.5, 26.5 x 39.5, and 33 x 49 cm) and blackand-white, the mode that according to the artist best represents his religion ‘with the simplicity and purity that only black and white film can create’. 30 The typology of places and sites and their interplay with the social, historical and architectural contexts surrounding them is examined. The photographed buildings range from makeshift mosques to purpose-built religious centres as the East London Mosque (fig. 4), finished in 1985 and extended into the London Islamic Centre in 2001. The mosque does not stand out in its environment, yet it shapes the surrounding space by blending in unobtrusively. Next to the exterior of Mosques and religious sites, Jamil shows everyday scenes of Muslim life inside religious buildings. These images representing religious life have the character of snap-shots; they highlight religion as part of the community’s everyday life, and often, they are shots from persons engaged in organisational activities, such as bookkeeping, undertaking, the studio of the Muslim Community Radio, etc. Prayer is not depicted as an elevated aspect, but as a normal communal experience that has to do away with makeshift situations. That photographs should be taken of this experience appears as remarkably unspectacular, and most of these images can be read in a rather literal way. The photograph of 30

Rehan Jamil, in Common Ground [Catalogue], ed. by Rogers and Rose.


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the shoe-rack (fig. 5) is an exception that evokes associations beyond the documentary. The shoes symbolise movement and transition, their being stored in the rack for the duration of prayer describes a Muslim practice, but also signifies a pause, a moment of reflection and back-pedaling in the fastmoving world beyond the mosque. Jamil’s use of the black-and-white mode for the sake of its purity is also a nod towards the documentary, an attempt to capture significant moments of a process and thus create an archive of images of religious life. Allahu Akbar demonstrates how East London’s sites are adapted for the purposes of its large Muslim community and how Muslim culture, architecture and religious life shape these spaces. The historicity of Britain’s Muslim communities is made visible in Tim Smith’s black-and-white documentary images Labour Exchange (31 x 47.5 cm). Twenty-seven photographs present migrants and their families from the Indian subcontinent who came to Britain after the Second World War with particular focus on the topicality of working spaces. An image of an empty shed in Bradford (fig. 6), for instance, explores the historicity of Britain’s industrial heydays, a huge clock set symbolically against the hall that is void of machines and provides ample room for the play of ghastly shadows. Images of (former) workplaces are complemented by portraits of firstgeneration post-war migrants, which is also the last generation to have been employed in the old industrial sectors. The portrait of three aged seamen (fig. 7) speaks of the ties between co-workers and individuals who have undergone the same generational (and migrant) experience, but it also points to their distinctiveness as subjects belonging to different religious and ethnic communities. Smith’s documentary images are situational shots, but never in a purely denotative sense. With considerable devotion to detail he captures everyday life in its complexity, and reality in its multi-layered meanings. In the photograph ‘Everyone’s Welcome’ (fig. 8), the ironical interplay between the advertisement and the scribbling on the wall is not part of the background, but an integral compositional aspect. Taken out of the photograph’s context, the messages smeared on the wall (the swastica, ‘NF’, ‘AC/DC’), and the advertisement would describe clear and specified messages sent by, and addressed to, distinct groups. The juxtaposition of these messages on the wall, but also in the photograph (where this juxtaposition is put in focus and the components are used like words and phrases of a found poem) renders them comical; the Asian children running out from underneath the wall appear to be either unaware of, or completely oblivious to, the conflicting messages above their heads, and seem to simply get on with their lives and play, regardless of the appearance of the space offered to them. The complexity of, and often adverse conditions for,

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migrants’ life in Britain in a process of industrial decline is presented as a historical stage, not as an absolute state. The historicity of British Muslim identities is complemented by a series of archival photographs taken in a Bradford studio during the 1950s and 1960s. The Belle Vue Studio, according to British Council information, was operated between 1926 and 1975 by old-style photographer Tony Walker. When Walker began to throw out the old glass plate negatives as he emptied his shop to be sold, the new owner was alerted, and thanks to his intervention, thousands of negatives have survived and are now in the possession of the Bradford Heritage Recording Unit. 31 Curiously, a very similar story has made its way into Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers where one of the protagonists’ ‘lost sons’, Charag, returns for a family reunion and hands his mother a present, an old photograph of the family: ‘I bought all the photographs and negatives from a photographer in town the last time I was here. They are from the 50s, 60s and the early 70s, of Pakistani and Indian immigrants. […] It was completely by chance that I went in to rummage around but then the photographer said he would be going out of business later in the year.’ Shamas [the father] can scarcely believe what has occurred. When the photograph is passed to him he, instead of looking at it, asks Charag, ‘Where are the others? Are they in a safe place?’ ‘[…] they are an important document’, Charag says, ‘They are safe, Father. I might want to do a series of paintings based on them.’ ‘I wanted the town to buy them, but as long as the people in them are celebrated somehow and not allowed to be forgotten, it doesn’t matter who has them.’ He places his hand on Charag’s shoulders. So the pictures have been saved! 32

The sixteen images chosen for the Common Ground exhibition and printed in a small (‘livingroom size’) format (16 x 22.5 cm) show the young Muslim migrants and their families in representative poses (figs. 9-11) Their proud appearance in front of the camera suggests a moment of having made it, having arrived, and betray nothing of their doubtlessly harsh everyday experiences. The message conveyed by these images is a carefully made-up story of success and the photographs in the Belle Vue Studio were often used to brighten up a bleak reality, telling more preferable stories compared to those on offer, stories to place on the livingroom drawer or to send back home. Tools used are props (sunglasses, cameras, watches), and specific

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Information from Brett Rogers and Andrea Rose, eds., Common Ground [Catalogue] (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2003), n.p. and the Bradford Museums Galleries and Heritage website (15 November 2007). A significant number of photographs taken by the Belle Vue Studio are accessible via this website. Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers (London: Faber, 2004), pp.318-319. For two readings of Maps for Lost Lovers, see the contributions by Butt and Lemke in this collection.


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photographic techniques. Particularly popular with the sitters, according to British Council information, was the production of ‘pale skin tones, valued in the sub-continent’, 33 a specialty of the photographer. Otherwise, Walker’s style and methods were long outdated by the 1950s and, according to the Bradford Museums, Galleries and Heritage Website, his studio would surely have closed had it not been for the arrival of immigrant workers of Asian and Caribbean origin. The conventions of the Victorian studio portrait, with its iconography of rigid, formal poses, had been exported across the British Empire. This style of image was precisely what these new immigrants wanted – something they could send home to show their new found wealth and success. 34

People travelled considerable distances to have their photographs taken at the Belle Vue Studio, and some of Walker’s sitters may have been the parents and grandparents of figures photographed by Jagtar Semplay in Leeds and Bradford one or two generations later. His series Scratching the Surface (cf. figs. 12 and 13) comments on the contrasting spheres and conditions for Muslim communities in England’s industrial North and the metropolis. Semplay’s series of twenty images questions the idea of a ‘common ground’ within Britain’s Muslim communities. Muslim life in Britain is, as the series shows, significantly determined by the distinct conditions of life in different regions, and Muslim identity and communities are, as are the bulk of British society, to a considerable degree defined by the still perceivable divide between the declining industrial North and the more affluent South. 35 Semplay’s shots show individuals of all ages in these distinct settings and offer glimpses at the wide range of British Muslims’ lifestyles and identifications. The use of a medium-to-large-size format (38.5 x 58.8 cm) and colour film (which rather serves to expose than to embellish) reflects the attempt to represent the multifacetedness of Muslim life and forms a contrast to Jamil’s attempts to render a religiously motivated, pure image of a community. Semplay’s images are striking, yet never euphemistic and the contrast elaborated in the images of North and South has a disquieting effect. The shots taken in Bradford (Semplay’s home) and Leeds, once centres of Britain’s textile industry that have only recently begun to recover from a long period of decline, massive unemployment rates and general depression, remind of the atmosphere described in Aslam’s novel for the nameless city Dasht-e-Tanhaii: communities have largely retreated to parallel lives and those among the younger generation who seek a future outside the limitations set by their social environment leave, mostly for London. The London spaces 33 34 35

in Brett Rogers and Andrea Rose, eds., n.p. Bradford Museums Galleries and Heritage website. First results of large-scale restructuring initiatives for the Northern centres have only recently begun to show.

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appear more inclusive and open, multiculture having left its traces, an entrepreneurial spirit hangs in the air. A girl is presented sporting the Union Jack on her back (fig. 13), while in Bradford’s Muslim community, the symbol of identification is, for instance, the flag of Pakistan. London’s East End is presented as a place in which cultural diversity is celebrated – in the North, by contrast, the older generation’s traditionalism and the influence of material culture on the youth have been amalgamated in a curious mixture. Semplay’s images remain ‘scratches on the surface’: figures often turn their back on the camera, wear sunglasses, heavy chains and other protective gear; as a result, they remain extraordinarily inaccessible to the viewers and present a striking contrast to Dhanda’s Shopna. The impression of a closed community and parallel society may also arise from Clement Cooper’s series Hijabi Sisters. As the title suggests, the hijab is in focus in this series of thirteen portraits of young Muslim school girls in Manchester. Cooper uses simple methods to give his black-and-white portraits (50.6 x 40.8 cm) a powerful appearance – a simple camera and tripod and conventional lighting techniques. The black-and-white mode is not used as a documentary means as in Smith’s series – it is heavily connoted by an air of spirituality that surrounds the girls. It is thus in intention closer to Jamil’s use of black-and-white, but Cooper’s aim is to explore the implications of his figures’ spirituality, not to express spirituality from within. The individual portraits, and even more the series as a whole, appear as not-of-this-world, an effect that is achieved by a direct spotlight on the sitter while the rest of the room remains dark and undefined. Other than in Smith’s documentations, contextualisation does not play a role and the individual sitter is set absolute. Nevertheless, there are documentary elements in Cooper’s overall approach – the series is complemented by audio recordings of the girls’ voices who were asked by the photographer to comment on their spirituality. While in the images, the display of diversity in hijab wear and the focus on the figures’ facial expression underline the sitters’ distinctiveness, the audio material shows the importance of the collectivity of their experience as Muslims. Their accents betray the girls’ rootedness in Manchester and are a marker of their regional English identity, whereas their attitudes towards spirituality, religious rules and gender issues appear as affirmations of a conformly orthodox Muslim identity. English regional and orthodox Muslim identification are, as the series shows, not mutually exclusive. The girls were asked to look directly at the camera, as can be seen in the portrait of Aisha Saleem (11) (fig. 14). Sitter Henna Jamil (9) (fig. 15) is one of the few exceptions, she averts her gaze. Both, nevertheless appear as self-reliant individuals and mature for their age. They wear the hijab with pride and, as the audio material confirms, as an outward sign of belonging to the umma, the


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community of Muslims. Cooper’s images captivate the viewer through the unusual pose of their sitters and their focus on the religious Muslim girls’ individuality; yet, particularly through the complementary audio material, they expose the girls’ complete dependency on their community and their pious reliance on an afterlife, a ‘heaven’ that relocates life on earth as a mere test. In a sense, Cooper’s exposure of the girls’ ‘confessions’ comes close to a bearing of their souls. The didactic voice in the audio introduction maintains that ‘Cooper’s frank and direct photographic style might help to dispel some of the myths and preconceptions about Islam’. 36 Arguably, it rather problematises the fact that some of these myths and preconceptions may be fed by precisely the sort of contents presented in the audio-material which adds a tragic, or perhaps ironic, note to the portraits. 37 Cooper’s series addresses an aspect that must not be left out in an anthologising, yet multiperspectival collection like Common Ground. Importantly, the aspect portrayed here is not the sole or defining moment in the British Muslim experience. Other works that are devoted to Muslim religious identification are the series by Sam Piyasena and Amyandtanveer. Piyasena has created a series of six large-format (83.8 x 66 cm) colour portraits entitled Converts to Islam (cf. fig. 18). In it, individuals pose for a photograph in an environment chosen by themselves. Their choices includes windows, mirrors and lamps, the common connotation of these objects being their perspectivity and their function as sources of light and reflection. Importantly, the sitters are from diverse backgrounds, although most of them are white English. Islam, according to statistics, is the fastest-growing religion world-wide. Despite a general upsurge of Islamophobic tendencies in Britain and elsewhere in the West, an increase of conversions to Islam has been registered. Some of the images in the series by Amyandtanveer, a photographers’ team from London, also include converts. They are, however, not the focus of Amyandtanveer’s contribution to the Common Ground exhibition; the team’s agenda is the portrayal of Muslim figures who have left marks on the nation’s music scene, and their respective choices of articulation. Groups such as Mecca to Medina have made their way onto the nine large transparencies (118.9 x 84 cm), but also individuals such as the choreographer Akram Khan (fig. 16) and the rapper and performance poet Fatima Kelleher (fig. 17). As in Piyasena’s portraits, the sitters were asked to choose the environment in which they were photographed. The transparencies are accompanied by musical samples from 36

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British Council, ‘Audio Material accompanying the works of Clement Cooper and Amyandtanveer’, Common Ground [Exhibition], British Council UK 2003. Some spectators have read Cooper’s portraits as allusions to Madonna-figures. Gathered from private conversations.

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each of the sitters and presents their different styles and musical modes, thus reflecting back on the theme of the exhibition, the diversity of the Muslim experience in Britain, but also the diversity of articulative choices and practices. The transparencies are to be hanged from the ceiling in a distance that allows them to shine through one another, communicate and send the spectator’s gaze in different directions. The wide range of sitters, environments and musical examples showcases the diversity of Muslim musical artists in Britain; like some of the shots in Dhanda’s Shopna and Rehan Jamil’s photographs of buildings, Amyandtanveer’s contribution makes a distinct statement about the way in which Muslim musicians shape British culture. A similar agenda also transpires in Sam Piyasena’s diptych that contains twenty close-up portraits of visitors to ArRum, a club in East London for young professional Muslims and Non-Muslims (one part is reprinted as fig. 19). The photographs have been printed on two large canvasses (127 x 81.3 cm) and are reminiscent of the squares on a chess board. Each photograph is accompanied by a different coloured rectangle containing the signature of the sitter. The sitters’ visible ethnic diversity, their mutual connectedness through the club and desire to encounter one another in a public space produces a positive message of a harmonious coexistence of Muslims and Non-Muslims in post-millennial Britain. Not surprisingly, the space of such an encounter is once again London, and Semplay’s reading of the metropolis as a more viable space for minority communities is confirmed. Here, things seem to move at a different pace compared to the rest of the country; yet, while it serves as a trendsetter, the capital also represents only one, very distinct, part of Britain. The idea of British landscapes is explored in detail by Anthony Lam who addresses the very general theme of migration in his series of fifteen images Port of Call, albeit assuming the perspective of a migrant who has entered Britain more recently as an illegal migrant or asylum seeker. Significantly, the bulk of today’s so-called clandestines and applicants for asylum in Britain are Muslims, a factor that makes an inclusion of their experience in the Common Ground project essential. Nevertheless, Lam’s landscapes, printed on medium-to-large size (60.9 x 83.8 cm) ragpaper are void of figures, they are rendered from the implied spectator’s perspective. These landscapes have nothing in common with the concept of the country that a migrant from the Asian or African continent may have. Indeed, the nation’s image abroad still includes mansions and parks and similar images that are incessantly massproduced by Britain’s heritage industry. Lam’s landscapes are grey, dull, unwelcoming and mostly deserted. Gates, closed shutters, empty bus stops, a phonebox smashed to pieces signify both a threatened and threatening space


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(figs. 20 and 21). Historian Robert Winder describes the West’s reaction to new forms of migration in the following manner: The West has erected an elaborate paper barricade – made up of passports, permits, cards and forms – which aims to prevent the world’s have-nots from encroaching too noisily on its haves. 38

Part of the ‘paper barricade’ are official government papers and declarations. Lam interrupts his images with phrases that can be found in the government’s white paper on immigration and integration Secure Borders – Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain. 39 Lam’s interplay of text and image not only serves to further deconstruct the fiction of a beautiful and welcoming English landscape that is there to be enjoyed by everyone, it also exposes the sometimes grand rhetoric of political and official papers as hollow in the light of a bleak reality.

4. Conclusion Any ‘anthologising’ photographic exhibition has to reflect the positedness of the medium between factual representation and artwork, the existence of connotative and denotative aspects in the photographic image, and furthermore, its possibilities to play with these aspects. Common Ground reflects the multitude of possibilities inherent in photographic practice. However, it does so not with the aim of displaying these possibilities for the sake of praising photographic art, but because these diverse artistic strategies reflect back on the subject matter and basic curatorial aim, the reflection of the diversity of the Muslim experience in the UK. As mentioned initially, this aim is programmatic in light of the British Council’s institutional practice of supporting political and societally relevant culture rather than a l’art pour l’art approach. It also fits in the diversity policies pursued by the British government from the late nineties, some of which are currently contested again and appear to stagnate. The artistically most challenging images are those that expose, question and outline the complexities at hand. The sum of the displays confirm that every culture and collective identity is based on contestations, and that subjectivity emerges as a complex system among these contested fields. ‘Westerners’ do not have the exclusive rights to the 38

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Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Little, Brown, 2005), xi. Home Office, Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain, 7 February 2002 (15 November 2007). For more information on the implications of the white paper in the context of the British government’s Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act (2006) see Kathy-Ann Tan’s contribution in the present collection.

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privilege of individualism – difference, individual development and contested concepts of identity are facets of every culture, every community, and certainly also facets of the Muslim community. As transpires at a closer glance, not only Muslim identities are portrayed in Common Ground, but also a nation in its process of finding an identity, a nation that is considerably shaped by its Muslim children. In his late work, Roland Barthes has come to apply his structuralist theory to the larger realm of culture and, having travelled extensively eastward, diagnosed the obsession with ultimate, universalist standards as a deeply rooted Western need. Seeing the nation as a construct, not fragile, but made of fragmentary notions, is an important step away from such universalisms. The process of rethinking national identity that has set in in the UK in the nineties is an important factor in the debate of the organisation of a viable, diverse society. The overall celebratory message sent out by Common Ground is not a fiction, it is the result of allowing a diversity of perspectives to enter a debate. Common Ground could serve as a small counter-weight to balance more simplistic, often damaging, representational practices with respect to Muslim life in Britain and the ‘rest of the West’. Shows in Russia and Germany have been supported by the British Council, but a tour of Europe or the USA has not been actively promoted so far. As an exhibition that does, indeed, reflect the many facets of Muslim life, it deserves to be shown and expanded in Western (European) contexts and not exclusively in the extraEuropean Muslim world.

Works Cited Akbar, Arifa, ‘Photo Exhibition Depicting the Lives of British Muslim Women Tours the Globe’, in Independent, 27 June 2006 [accessed on 15 November 2007]. Aslam, Nadeem, Maps for Lost Lovers (London: Faber, 2004). Barthes, Roland, ‘The Photographic Message’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation, transl. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985). Bradford Museums Galleries and Heritage [accessed on 15 November 2007]. Brett Rogers and Andrea Rose, eds., Common Ground [Catalogue] (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2003).


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British Council Arts, ‘Common Ground’ [accessed on 15 November 2007]. ——. ‘Who We Are’ [accessed on 15 November 2007]. British Council. ‘Audio Material accompanying the works of Clement Cooper and Amyandtanveer’, in Common Ground [Exhibition] (British Council UK, 2003). Bumpus, Judith, ‘Saudis See How Their Sisters Live’, in Times Online, 10 May 2006 [accessed on 15 November 2007]. Census 2001, [accessed on 15 November 2007]. Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All (London: The Runnymede Trust, 1997). Goody, Jack, Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence Towards Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics and Sexuality (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1997). Greater London Authority, ‘The Search for Common Ground: Muslims, NonMuslims and the UK Media’, London: GLA, November 2007. [accessed on 15 November 2007]. Hall, Stuart, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.163-172. Home Office, Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain, 7 February 2002 . Ibric, Almir, Islamisches Bilderverbot vom Mittel- bis ins Digitalzeitalter (Münster: LIT, 2006). Matar, Nabil, Islam in Britain: 1558-1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). ——. Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Naef, Silvia, Bilder und Bilderverbot im Islam: Vom Koran bis zum Karikaturenstreit (München: Beck, 2007). Pirker, Eva Ulrike, ‘“Many of us live parallel lives”: Fiona Bartels-Ellis, Head of Equal Opportunity and Diversity at the British Council, in Interview with Eva Ulrike Pirker’, Anglistik 1 (March 2006), 181-193.

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Roberts, Soraya, ‘On Common Ground’, Time Out Dubai (UAE) 23 February 2 March 2006, p.47. Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1995 [1978]). Sontag, Susan, ‘The Image-World’, in Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978 [1973]). ——. Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003). Winder, Robert, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Little, Brown, 2005).


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Appendix: Images

Fig. 1: Suki Dhanda, from Shopna. This and all following images reproduced with kind permission by the British Council.

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Fig. 2: Suki Dhanda, from Shopna.


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Fig. 3: Suki Dhanda, from Shopna.

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Figs 4 and 5: Rehan Jamil, from Allahu Akbar.


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Figs 6 and 7: Tim Smith, from Labour Exchange.

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Fig. 8: Tim Smith, from Labour Exchange.


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Fig. 9: Archival photograph from Belle Vue Studio (Tony Walker).

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Fig. 12: Jagtar Semplay, from Scratching the Surface.


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Fig. 13: Jagtar Semplay, from Scratching the Surface.

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Fig. 14: Clement Cooper, from Hijabi Sisters.


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Fig. 15: Clement Cooper, from Hijabi Sisters.

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Fig. 16: Amyandtanveer, Akram Khan.


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Fig. 17: Amyandtanveer, Fatima Kallehar.

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Fig. 18: Sam Piyasena, from Muslim Converts.


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Fig. 19: Sam Piyasena, part of the diptych ArRum.

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Fig. 20: Anthony Lam, from Port of Call.


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Fig. 21: Anthony Lam, from Port of Call.

Ingrid von Rosenberg

Female Views: Cultural Identity as a Key Issue in the Work of Black and Asian British Women Artists Ever since the first high tide of black and Asian British art in the 1980s, cultural identity has been an important issue in both male and female artists’ work, but perhaps most prominent in women’s art. Despite the same training at British art schools and a shared anti-colonial attitude, gendered differences are noticeable in the thematic approaches and – to a lesser degree – in the use of artistic media. Though both aspects are given attention, the following investigation concentrates mainly on thematic issues: while black male artists tend to focus on public events and symbols (the flag, the cross, the slave-ship), women turn to the personal and private, i.e. to the body and the domestic sphere as a highly politicised space. Analysing exemplary works by some prominent artists like Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Joy Gregory, Ingrid Pollard, Chila Burman and others, this article traces a general development from militant feminist beginnings in the 1980s to a sometimes serious, sometimes playful, exploration of female identity construction in the 1990s to a growing occupation with more general and more public issues in the 2000s, possibly as a consequence of a tenser political and social climate after 9/11.

1. Introduction Cultural identity, this essential component of our identity construction, has always presented a special challenge to diasporic subjects in Britain and elsewhere, as they are forced to negotiate between two cultures, often in the face of xenophobia, racism and manifold attempts at their social exclusion. Cultural theorists and writers like Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Salman Rushdie and Bill Ashcroft, rejecting an essentialist position, have, however, refused a purely negative view of the situation and instead stressed its potential to stimulate creativity. Thus, Stuart Hall in his influential article ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ wrote: ‘Diasporic identities are these which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference’. 1 Novelist Salman Rushdie argued: ‘Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy’. 2 One may add: neither for visual artists. It is commonly agreed that representations 1

2

Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp.222-237 (p.235). Salman Rushdie, ‘Imaginary Homelands’ (1982), in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta Books, 1992), pp.9-21 (p.15).

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are the sites where identities are most noticeably constructed. Ashcroft goes so far as to maintain: ‘The imaginative and the creative are integral aspects of that process by which identity itself has come into being. Cultural identity does not exist outside representation’. 3 For black and Asian British women identity construction has been an even more pressing task than for men, for they have to cope not only with positioning themselves in relation to the hegemonic culture and with marginalisation as ethnic Others, but also with discrimination as women in a maledominated society, and this includes black as well as white men. It is, therefore, small wonder that issues of cultural identity at the intersection of gender, ethnicity and mainstream culture have been at the heart of black and Asian British women artists’ work. In a brochure promoting The Blackwomen’s Creativity Project in 1982, artist Maud Sulter, one of its initiators, wrote: ‘As a black woman creativity is central to my existence. It is a means of survival […]. Within a hostile urban environment we deconstruct dynamisms of sex, race and class to survive’. 4 In this paper I will look at the various imaginative ways in which women artists have approached this issue, paying attention to the subject matter of their work, to artistic practices and some materials used. It is, of course, impossible to give a comprehensive overview in a short article. There are several possibilities to cope with this limitation. Rather than presenting two or three artists in detail, I have decided to highlight certain topical and artistic trends as being more illuminating. Not to be misunderstood: I do not argue from an essentialist position trying to detect a mystically common female quality in the works to be analysed, a kind of peinture féminine so to speak. Yet observation shows that the work of women artists indeed differs significantly in subject matter as well as in favoured techniques from that of their male colleagues despite the same training and the common ground of a shared anti-colonial attitude.

2. Militant Beginnings: Black Women’s Art in the 1980s and Early 1990s In a recent article Stuart Hall has subdivided the history of black and Asian art in Britain into three waves. 5 The first he dates from the 1940s to the late 1970s when quite a large number of artists from various corners of the 3

4

5

Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London and New York: Routledge, 2002 [2001]), p.5. Maud Sulter, ‘Blackwomen’s Creativity Project: an Overview’, in Passion: Discourses on Black Women’s Creativity, ed. by Maud Sulter (Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire: Urban Fox Press, 1990), pp.15-18 (p.17). Stuart Hall, ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three “Moments” in Postwar History’; History Workshop Journal 61.1 (2006), 1-24.

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Empire considering themselves part of a universalist, modernist movement, came to the ‘motherland’ in the hope of being welcomed to the European art scene only to be disillusioned by the experience of more or less subtle exclusion. The second wave of black and Asian art, by contrast, was carried by young people born in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, trained in British art schools and politicised by the racialisation of the public discourse of that time, the first alarming signals of which were the race riots of 1958. While the first wave of black art was almost exclusively a male affair, women – though not in equal numbers – were at the forefront of the 1980s arts movement. Motivated by similar activities in the United States, three young men, Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper and Donald Rodney, founded the Black Art Movement with a distinct political purpose. Its aim was, as Chambers later declared in an interview, to produce ‘art by black people largely and specially for black audiences, and which, in terms of its contents, addresses black experience’. 6 Characteristic was a combination of practical art work, theoretical writing and curating. The battle for exhibition space was essential to bring knowledge of black art to the public, especially the black public. Money, though not enough, was provided by the GLC and the British Arts Council as part of a strategy to defuse racial tension. Right from the beginning women artists like Lubaina Himid, Sonia Boyce, Joy Gregory, Claudette Johnson, Sutapa Biswas, Chila Kumari Burman and some others produced their own shows ‘on almost nothing’, as Lubaina Himid remembers. 7 In 1983 Himid, daughter of an African father and English mother, herself curated Five Black Women at the Africa Centre Gallery which was followed by Black Woman Time Now at the Battersea Arts Centre showing the work of fifteen artists in the same year. In 1985 Himid could stage a show at a more prestigious venue: The Thin Black Line represented eleven women at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in the West End. The art of women at that time did not differ from male artists’ work in the militant expression of their anger at the humiliations in past and present as well as in the proud self-confidence with which a new cultural identity asserted itself. Yet while men like Eddie Chambers or Keith Piper focused on historical and current public events and symbols (the flag, the cross, the slave ship, cruise missiles, etc.), women turned to the personal and the private, especially the body and the domestic sphere, which, however, did not figure 6

7

Quoted in Stuart Hall, ‘Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge – and After’, in Shades of Black: Assembling Black Art in 1980s Britain, ed. by David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom and Sonia Boyce (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp.1-20 (p.11). The articles assembled in this volume offer comprehensive studies of various aspects of black art in the 1980s. Lubaina Himid, ‘Mapping: A Decade of Black Women Artists 1980-1990’, in Sulter, pp.6372 (p.65).

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as a cosy haven protected from the rough winds of the public sphere, but – in accordance with the feminist insight that the personal is political – as a highly politicised space. Women’s struggle for an equal position within British society was represented in ‘small narratives’ set in domestic surroundings, often employing symbols from the artists’ (or their parents’) home culture. A prototypical and much reproduced example is Housewives with SteakKnives (1985) (fig. 1 in the appendix to this article) by Sutapa Biswas. Born in India in 1962, Biswas came to Britain at the age of three and a half. In this painting she draws on Hindu mythology: the image refers to Kali, an ambivalent goddess, who embodies the forces of creation and learning, but also of destruction. Kali’s traditional attributes lend themselves perfectly to a black feminist re-working: first of all her blackness, representing the fusion of all colours, but also her defiantly stuck-out tongue, her garland (originally letters) and her four arms performing contradictory gestures. In Biswas’s version one arm is swinging a knife, one clutching the scalp of a severed man’s head, one making a gesture of peace, while the fourth is holding a copy of Judith and Holofernes (1620) by female Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi, telling the story of another woman punishing male evil. The letters, once the garland and signifying the defeat of ignorance, are replaced by severed heads of identifiable white miscreants who better beware of the furious black housewife bent on revenge. Griselda Pollock has praised the work as a ‘grand image of female activity and moral purpose’ and a ‘powerful text about femininity’. 8 Yet the sheer materiality of the work hints at an underlying vulnerability. It is painted with acrylic and pastel on several pieces of white paper, which, mapped together and glued on canvas, tend to come loose and have to be refastened from time to time. This obvious, though in all probability unintentional, contrast between subject matter and materiality highlights the wishful nature of the image: rather than as a selfconfident statement of actual female power it appears as an appeal to Asian women to strip themselves of their traditional meek obedience and to think of self-determination. Among Sutapa Biswas’s strong figurative works of the 1980s there is a further example of an uncanny politicised domestic scene, The Only Good Indian… (1985). The image shows another housewife of apparently Indian origin watching TV and peeling potatoes, while the potato has metamorphosed into a resemblance of the then Home Secretary Leon Brittan, responsible for the treatment of the so-called ‘minorities’. Another Indian British pioneer of political art was Chila Kumari Burman, born to Punjabi parents in Liverpool in 1958. In the 1980s she produced 8

Griselda Pollock, ‘Tracing Figures of Presence: Naming Ciphers of Absence. Feminism, Imperialism and Postmodernity: The Work of Sutapa Biswas’, in Sutapa Biswas, ed. by Sarah Campbell (London: inIVA, 2004), pp.22-41 (p.25 and p.38).


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straight-forward agit-prop art, for instance collaborating with Keith Piper on the Southall Black Resistance Mural (1986). Yet more characteristic has become her use of her own body and face in her work. In Shotokan of 1993, a series of four images, for instance, she had herself photographed practising – and thus appropriating – a Japanese and, of course, male martial art. The images show her frozen in mid-kicks and boxing punches, her powerful aggression directed at the viewer. The reference is again to the wild women and goddesses of ancient Indian mythology, including Kali, and the message seems to be female self-assertion on behalf of Asian women in general. Chila Burman did, however, not stop at gestures of defiance but has produced a number of works in which she very effectively visualises the fluid process of identity construction by playfully experimenting with cosmetic and fashion elements from both her cultures as in the image 28 Positions in 34 Years (1992) (fig. 2). On 28 laser printed photographic self-portraits, arranged in four lines of seven and painted over in bright primary colours, she looks at the viewer in various costumes, sometimes elegant in Western style with hat and gloves, sometimes in Indian costume, sometimes clownesque, sometimes as a black tribal woman. Her expressions vary from flirtatious to mysterious, from ironic to serious. Other examples of such multiple self-portraits – which seem somewhat inspired by Andy Warhol’s work – are images from a series called Auto-Portraits (1992-1993). Here Burman uses the same photographs, some enlarged, others reduced to near invisibility, but all multiplied and arranged in a complex pattern, which produces a less cheerful, scarier effect. The images seem to highlight the potentially dangerous rather than the enriching effects of the in-between position, which may indeed threaten the wholeness of the psyche. This message is, however, mitigated by the reassuringly cheerful, bright colour scale. Lynda Nead commented: ‘There is a clear political purpose to these works’. 9 In 1993 Burman herself explained: My manipulation of the photographic image questions the idea of the photograph as a document of the empirical reality to reveal ‘an image’ of myself […] My work is about a continual exploration of my dual cultural identity and the construction of identities other than my own […] through experimental photography, both as subject and photographer and combined with painting and installation. 10

It does not seem surprising that Burman’s colourful serial self-portraits in carnivalesque disguise have been chosen for the book covers of postcolonial texts, e.g. for James Procter’s anthology Writing Black Britain 1948-1998 (2000) .

9 10

Lynda Nead, Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures (London: Kala Press, 1995), p.44. Quoted in ibid., p.46.

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Sonia Boyce, born in London in 1962, a black artist and academic since the first hour of black female art, started off as a painter but has since prefered other media. In her early work Boyce focused on gender roles and sexuality as determined by public politics, i.e. colonialism and patriarchy supported by Christian religion. 11 In a number of paintings she thematised the sexual harassment of black women by white men, for instance in Missionary Position I, in which a black woman is threatened by a large white hand, and in Mr. Close-friend of the Family, where a white man stretches out his hand to touch the breasts of a black girl. Yet Boyce also focused on female resistance and the progress of female self-assertion. In her ironically titled painting Missionary Position II (1985), set in the intimacy of the bedroom, for instance, she portrays a rather self-confident black woman, sitting up from her bed and keeping a modestly praying black man at bay with a commanding gesture of her hand. The ironic text, which is part of the image, runs: ‘They say keep politics out of religion and religion out of politics. Laard but look my trials nuh – but when were they ever separate? Laard give me strength’. The painting, which was bought by the Tate Gallery, seen in relation to Missionary Position I, clearly symbolises the growth of female self-confidence. Lubaina Himid, born in Zanzibar in 1954 of mixed origin, is a very versatile painter and academic, equally versed in abstract and figurative work. Like Boyce she focused on the historical conditions of black people’s social position and female resistance in her early work. In the painting Five (1992) (fig. 3), for example, part of a series called Revenge, Himid uses the intimate domestic space as the setting for an obviously political conversation. Two black women sitting at a drawing room table are talking politics with colonialism literally on their plates: Africa on one plate, and the stars and stripes of the American flag on the other. Jill Morgan suggests that their style of clothes and the cool interior recall the modernist scene in Paris in the 1920s, while the bright colours, especially the clear yellow of the wall, the terracotta of the floor and the Egyptian style flowers evoke Africa.12 These women, dressed in European clothes, are no longer objects or victims of colonialism, but mistresses of the discourse, which is indicated by their relaxed attitude and the sovereign gestures of their hands.

11

12

Cf. Gilane Tawadros, ‘Beyond the Boundary: The Work of Three Black Women Artists in Britain’, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker, jr., et al. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.240-277 (pp.266-267). The article first appeared in Third Text 8/9 (1989), pp.121-150. Jill Morgan, ‘Women Artists and Modernism’, in Lubaina Himid: Revenge, Catalogue (Rochdale: Rochdale Art Gallery, 1992), pp.17-25, p.22.


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Ingrid Pollard, a photographic artist born in Guyana in 1953, has never focused on women only, but staged her whole family in exemplary situations in which questions of cultural identity emerged as crucially important. In the 1980s and early 1990s she produced some intriguing work dealing with the interconnectedness of English landscapes and colonialism as it affected herself and her family in their sense of not belonging and their attitude to the idea of heritage. The arranged images, all ‘manufactured and deliberate as the assumptions and stereotypes about black people’, 13 accompanied by ironic captions, oscillate between longing and criticism. The series Pastoral Interludes (1987), for instance, consists of photographs of herself and family members wandering in the epitome of an English landscape, Wordsworth’s beloved Lake District, supported by thought-provoking captions such as ‘[…] it’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread…’. 14 Wordsworth Heritage of 1992 (fig. 4) takes up the Lake District theme again five years later, this time condensed into a poster figuring, in post-card fashion, four family scenes grouped around the conventional profile of the national poet. The caption again underlines the irony of the arrangement: ‘After reaching several peaks, Ms Pollard’s party stops to ponder on matters of History and Heritage’. 15

3. From the Mid-1990s to the Present: Exploring Identity Construction Things have moved on since the early 1990s, and we are now faced with what Stuart Hall has defined as the third wave of black art. Unfortunately he has not analysed this wave nearly as much in detail as the earlier two with the exception of a few remarks on the proliferation of artistic techniques. I will try to identify a few characteristics of women’s work as it has developed in the meantime. First of all, almost a total move away from painting can be observed in favour of a great variety of modern techniques such as digital photography, collage, video, any kind of installation, internet art. Sonia Boyce explained at a conference in Magdeburg in November 2006 that these techniques are less loaded with the burden of Western art history. However, they also allow a move away from a narrative approach to a performative one. What has remained, however, is the preference for discussing women’s 13 14 15

Ingrid Pollard, Postcards Home (London: Autograph, 2004), p.18. Ibid., pp.20-21. Ibid., p.59. Seaside Series (1988), a work in a similar vein, shows photographs of the artist herself on the beach of Hastings, the site ‘of the last successful invasion of Britain’ (ibid., p.50). Souvenirs like toys and drift wood plus again highly ironic captions complete the images.

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cultural identity in terms of the body and the domestic sphere, though the defiant feminist confrontation of society has been replaced by a more selfexploratory attitude. As to the body, an intriguing change has taken place. No longer the whole figure of a woman dominates the images as the heroine of small narratives, but body parts and clothing items, to be more precise: such parts of the body and such accessories as are traditionally seen to mark racial and cultural difference. The artworks transport ambivalent messages. On the one hand it seems as if black and Asian born women, despite all talk of a tolerant multicultural or even transcultural society, still feel vulnerable by exposure to the public gaze. They formulate their resistance by playing with allegedly fixed racial or cultural signifiers such as hair colour and hairstyles, lip forms, skin colour or the veil. Thus they deconstruct stereotypes and highlight the constructedness of appearance, revealing them to be treacherous signifiers of cultural identity. A sideline of such criticism are attacks on the current beauty craze, i.e. the universal obsession with Aryan good looks, which is forced on women all over the world by media and market and all-too-willingly internalised by many, as the rise of cosmetic surgery indicates. On the other hand, an element of joyful playfulness and self-assertion, already apparent in some of Chila Burman’s early photographic self-portraits, manifests itself in several works. Joy Gregory, a black artist born in Britain in 1959 to Caribbean parents, comments: The masses have embraced postmodernism with the enthusiasm of a child in an ice cream parlour. The people know they can be whom they want, when they want, with whom they want. Globalisation has led not just to the crossing of political and physical borders in a geographic space, but also to [that of] the internal borders of human identity and metaphysical space. 16

Some examples may illustrate the trends. In 1998 Sonia Boyce in an act of performance art invited women of various racial backgrounds to her studio to pose with an Afro and there took their pictures (fig. 5). When placed side by side, these images effectively question the automatic equation Afro equals black and straight hair equals white. A similar approach was used by black British artist Maxine Walker in an untitled photo series, in which she herself posed with varying facial expressions from serious to cheeky and wearing different wigs (platinum blonde, smooth black, curly black, dreadlocks) (fig. 6). Stuart Hall underlines the performance character of Walker’s work: ‘She “plays”, alternately, the working girl-about-town; sober church sister; sophisticated raver; and blonde babe’, adding thoughtfully: ‘at first, this

16

Joy Gregory, ‘The Blonde’ (19 June 2007).


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switching-identity business looks like a playful game’. 17 In her work Tongues (1997) Sonia Boyce used a slightly different technique to similar effect: close-up black and white photographs of the singing mouths of the members of a choir make it impossible to distinguish between the white and black singers. A photo series titled Grace by Eileen Perrier, a photographic artist born in Britain in 1974 of Ghanaian descent, also stresses the fundamental similarity between humans of different races: portraits of men and women, young and older, black and white, show the same cheerful smile revealing the same gap between the front teeth. An ongoing work by Joy Gregory, begun in 1998, consisting of photographs, drawings and texts entitled The Blonde, stresses the positive and even funny sides of shifting racial signifiers. 18 It circles around the notion of blonde beyond the old stereotypes associated with the fairy princess, the dumb, and the perfect sex object. First presented as an installation in a Canadian shopping mall, it can now be viewed as an interactive website 19 , ‘a light-hearted exploration of the Blonde through popular perception and public opinion’. 20 The website figures a collection of people wearing blonde hair, a flickering colour chart with ironic slogans plus an artist’s statement and is part of inIVA’s virtual gallery. In 1997 on the streets of London Gregory had noticed a strong trend among non-Europeans, both male and female, to dye their hair blonde or wear blonde wigs. She photographed and interviewed a number of them discovering as their main aim ‘a big personality change temporary or permanent’. Her observations led her to the question: ‘Is Blonde just the new post-feminist, post-colonial hair colour?’ 21 In other words: has it become the hair colour that signifies the overcoming of racially determined social boundaries? (cf. fig. 7) Gregory has also been fascinated by female accessories and their significance in the context of racial identity and femininity. In a series called The Handbag Project (1998), using salt printed photograms (a technique dating from the early days of photography), she presented handbags and other luxury articles found in South African junk shops, objects that tell of the riches and power of white ladies in the by-gone days of Apartheid. Two other projects Objects of Beauty (1992-1995) and Girl Things (2002), photographed with the same technique, figure items signifying the beauty craze: underwear, costume jewellery and tools for beautification like brushes, eyelash curlers, 17 18

19 20 21

Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, Different ( London: Phaidon Press, 2001), p.56. An overview of Joy Gregory’s work with artist’s comments is offered in Joy Gregory, Objects of Beauty (London: Autograph: 2004). <www.joygregory.co.uk/archive/details.asp?title=The%20Blonde>. Joy Gregory, ‘Artist’s Statement’ <www.iniva.org/xspaceprojects/gregory> (24 June 2007). Ibid.

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etc. While these images need some explanation to be fully understood, Cinderella Tours Europe (2001) is an easy to understand and specially charming series following the imaginary travels of a pair of golden pumps. The series consists of large coloured photographs of major European tourist sites, in which the pumps are conspicuously placed. They symbolise the greatest wish of Caribbean women Gregory had interviewed while taking their portraits: they all had confessed that what they would like best was to travel to Europe. Thus the images may be read as signifying a friendly and playful reversal of the colonial conquest (cf. fig. 8). Jananne Al-Ani, an artist and an academic born in Iraq in 1966 and living in Great Britain since 1980, is specially intrigued by a politically highly charged clothing item: the veil. While her special research interest is the representation of Middle Eastern women by late 19th- and early 20th-century European painters, photographers and writers, in her own art she explores Middle Eastern women’s situation today. About the veil she writes: The veil as a symbol, is not static but constantly shifting according to differing historical and political contexts. For example, the removal of the veil in public in Egypt in the early part of the twentieth century was a sign of defiance and feminist resistance. By contrast, in Algeria ithe 1950s and 1960s, the veil came to be seen by many, including the black intellectual and political activist Frantz Fanon, as a symbol of Arab resistance to French colonial oppression. 22

In her photographic work she stresses the ambiguity of the veil as a cultural signifier. She has produced several images of women of different ages in simple, long black garments and veils, using members of her own family as models, her mother, her sisters and herself. In most of these pictures the women, some completely covered, others half nude, sit in a row, returning the gaze of the photographer (and the viewer) unashamedly and selfconfidently, while their veils allow all kinds of associations – the veil as the concealing burka, the erotically suggestive half revealing veil, the veil of Western nuns. Thus, the stereotype of the veil as the unequivocal signifier of a reactionary, fundamentalist Muslim position is effectively deconstructed. Al-Ani’s images of her female relatives may be seen as a link to a second recognisable cluster of recent works by women artists: the domestic sphere and the family continue to be at the focus of many works, their meaning ranging from the very personal to the more general and historical. Family portraits may be used to ascertain the artist’s personal roots and political association as in a series Red, Gold and Green (colours from the Rastafarian spectrum) by Eileen Perrier, in which she photographed relations in their homes against a backdrop of a red, gold or green cloth (fig. 9). Chila Burman 22

Jananne Al-Ani, ‘Acting Out’, in Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art, ed. by David. A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros (London: inIVA, 2003), pp.88-107 (p.103).


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for her part has often used old photographs of family members, especially of her parents and herself as a child, for images that represent the personal as the more general, connecting it to the political context. Thus, for example, Portrait of My Mother (1995), a triple photograph of her smiling young mother in Indian dress, superimposed by a banknote, points to the motivation of thousands of immigrant women from South Asia, who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s for economic survival. Other images picture the ice cream van, with which Burman’s father, struggling like so many other fathers to feed their families, made a living in the 1950s. Bharti Parmar, another artist of Indian origin born in Leeds in 1966, in 2003 produced images that do not figure snapshots of her own family, but antique Indian family portraits, thus exploring the interconnected history of her two cultures, Indian and British. As part of the exhibition True Stories she recontextualised 19th-century photographs, found in the collections of Sir Benjamin Stone held at Birmingham Library. Parmar did not change the originals, but merely reframed them including hidden explanatory texts and setting them off against coloured backgrounds. Among the images selected, some full-length portraits of preciously dressed members of princely families in formal posture stand out: Sir Jung Bahadon and Chief Wife and Boy Prince, figuring ‘The Geikwar of Baroda wearing State Jewels, value £2,000,000…’ (caption). Impressively they represent the splendour and refinement of past Indian court culture (cf. fig. 10). In several of Lubaina Himid’s more recent work the family also plays an important role. Thus Double Life (2001) interweaves personal childhood memories of her mother and aunt, growing up as daughters of an English pub owner in the interwar years, with public history. Inspired by conversations with her relations, Himid created a series of semi-abstract paintings figuring grid patterns in bright colours as a backdrop to key items of their talks, e.g. knives and forks, a gollywog, a piano, a pit pony. In the exhibition the images were supplemented with documentary photographs from the time (made by Humphrey Spender of Mass Observation), thus placing the personal in the context of general history. Her work My Parents – Their Children, also of 2001, addresses the topic of mixed ancestry. Her maternal grandfather, an English publican, and her paternal grandmother from Africa, who never met in real life, are united in this painting with characteristic emblems below the image on the floor: sawdust and sand (cf. fig. 11).

4. After the Shock of Terrorism It is an intriguing question whether the disastrous events of 9/11 and 7/7 have worked as a turning point, shocking the artists mentioned into a totally new direction, i.e. to address public events and developments more directly.

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According to e-mail correspondences with several of them, they all have been deeply shocked and express fear of deteriorating racial relations, but they have not changed their artistic orientation. This may have something to do with the fact that, with the exception of Jananne Al-Ani, none are Muslims, i.e. not personally under suspicion. Joy Gregory, for instance, wrote: ‘I don’t think the climate that has emerged around 9/11 has had much impact on my work, but I am a middle-aged black woman and seemingly no threat to anyone. ‘ 23 Similarly Ingrid Pollard commented: ‘The 9/11 has not impacted on me particularly. Just the normal fear of unexpected actions. I don’t seem to fit the profile the State seems to be targeting. But I do realise it is just one step away from lumping all people with “differences” together’. 24 Bharti Parmar, declaring herself ‘a non-practicing Hindu’, writes: ‘Issues of belonging and identity have always underpinned my work as an artist. However, I would not say that 9/11 has had a direct effect upon the work as I do not consider my work to be overtly political’. 25 It seems, however, that some have indeed intensified their political commitment, yet they have remained true to their more indirect approach and the issues they pursued before the events. In general a trend to broaden the view beyond strictly women’s concerns seems to manifest itself. Sutapa Biswas, for instance, declared: In terms of my own practice, I would say that the world events since 9/11 have pushed me to continue making work which in many ways is about ‘love’, about fear, and to continue to work with the kinds of themes that have been central to my works since prior to 9/11. Namely issues of time, desire, feminism and cultural identity, and memory. 26

In short films Biswas has explored general themes like the passing of time and the nature of memory, but has also continued to address questions of colonial history and cultural identity. Her style has become more subtle than in her youthfully militant early work, and her focus has shifted from the position of women to generational relations, a move which to a certain extent may have been triggered by her father’s death and the birth of her son. A specially interesting example of a new approach to the topic of cultural identity is Birdsong (2004), a film consisting of four shots figuring her young son Enzo (incidentally, also another example of the use of the family). The first shows an origami winged horse circling in the air, the second a little Indian boy (Enzo) on a sofa in an English drawing room looking up intensely, while the third reveals the object of his gaze, a live horse. The final shot returns to the origami horse slowly coming to a halt. For this work Biswas specially rented a derelict 1930s house and furnished the sitting room 23 24 25 26

E-mail from Joy Gregroy, 5 June 2007. E-mail from Ingrid Pollard, 6 June 2007. E-mail from Bharti Parmar, 31 May 2007. E-mail from Sutapa Biswas, 5 June 2007.


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very carefully with 18th- and 19th-century English furniture, her own favourite books, family photographs and Enzo’s toys, thus bridging the time periods as well as personal life and cultural history (cf. fig. 12). The images are rich in connotation: they show a dreamlike realisation of a little boy’s dream (Enzo wished for a horse to be kept in the drawing room), they carry hints at the mythological and cultural meanings of horses (Pegasus, Fallada, Equus etc.) and, above all, they hint at the diasporic presence in a very English environment, which in the third generation has become a matter of course. As Biswas explained in an interview, the horse and the colours of the room deliberately echo a painting by George Stubbs, Lord Holland and Lord Albemarle Shooting at Goodwood (1759). 27 Like Biswas Pollard has also continued with the themes that occupied her before the traumatic events. For some time she has shown herself fascinated with patterns in our natural environment, producing work that seems almost abstract. In a group exhibition of 2001 entitled Landscape Trauma, she contributed large-scale photographs of geological micro-formations in closeup (cf. fig. 13), which, as Jorella Andrews has observed, ‘take on the appearance of complex tracts of land as they might be chartered by aerial photography or cartographic means’. 28 What is more, they are amazingly beautiful and suggestive, plunging us, as Andrews added, ‘into fantastical, haunted worlds, abstract yet surreal’. At the moment Pollard is working on the patterns of weather systems, but is also involved in work on the 1950s immigrants from the Caribbean, thus continuing her commitment to the black experience in Britain. Lubaina Himid has recently returned to the topic of slave history, already the subject of earlier work, e.g. of the series Revenge. It is possible that she was inspired this time by the approaching second centenary of abolition in 2007. In 2004 Himid produced a work of impressive scope and physical dimensions, a huge, colourful installation entitled Naming the Money of one hundred cut out, life-sized, painted wooden figures of slave servants, both male and female. The work was first shown in Newcastle in 2004 and since in a reduced version in the V & A. Characteristic of her work is the personalising and positive approach. Refusing to present the black slaves as mere anonymous victims, Himid stresses their achievements and contributions to Western culture, for slaves were not only exploited as cotton pickers, but also employed and often appreciated as servants, craftspeople and entertainers in rich men’s households, sometimes dressed as courtiers. In contrast to 27

28

Stephanie Snyder, ‘In Conversation with Sutapa Biswas’, in Sutapa Biswas, ed. by Sarah Campbell (London: inIVA, 2004), pp.8-19. Jorella Andrews, ‘Dispossessing the Land’, in Landscape Trauma in the Age of Scopophilia, ed. by Richard Hylton (London: Autograph, 2001) pp.57-63 (p. 59).

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European painters of the 18th century who included black servants in their works, Himid provides each figure with an individual personality by giving them two names, an African and a European one, signifying the two identities they had to reconcile, and a craft: there are ceramicists, herbalists, dog trainers, toy makers, drummers, dancing masters, viol da gamba players, shoe makers, map makers and painters. Each figure is also given a voice, which tells a brief life story ending on a positive note, which in the original exhibition could be heard on a soundtrack. The stories are told in five lines following the same pattern (cf. figs 14 and 15): My name is N’Wambia They call me Dan I used to play on hilltops Now I play in ballrooms But I have my songs

My name is Nilla They call me Jenny I used to grow herbs to cure the sick Now I grow flowers to please the rich But they are very beautiful 29

Himid’s work is in spirit related to Bernardine Evaristo’s revisionist historical verse novel The Emperor’s Babe (2001). Evaristo, also tired of seeing the black past represented only as a case for shame and compassion, invented a strong black presence in Roman Londinum as the beginning of a black history of Britain to be proud of. Meanwhile Himid has continued her commitment to her own version of slave history. Her latest project, presented in the Judges’ Lodgings Museum in Lancaster in 2007, is called Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service and consists of paperworks as well as painted objects. The objects are 100 old ceramic plates, jugs, tureens collected from local junk and antique shops, all overpainted with references to the city’s involvement in the slave trade: pictures of rich slave owners, elegant houses, boats, documents, abstract African patterns and, above all, again and again, faces of black slaves (cf. fig. 16; here, the head of a slave on a plate). Himid’s intention was a double one: to visualise the city’s involvement in slavery and at the same time to honour the anonymous, unnamed slaves by giving them individual faces. The paperworks concern the present. They are pages from the Guardian of 2006, on which images of black people appear. Annoyed that they are most often not included for serious purposes, but used for decoration, ‘to add colour’ or ‘lift a story’, Himid painted over the pages with colourful patterns to underline the misuse. 30 Chila Burman, alongside some non-political work in which she, for instance, applied her strategy of the multiple image to decorative collages of flowers, has kept up her political art. In 2004 she declared: ‘My political 29

30

Quoted from the catalogue of the Newcastle exhibition: Lubaina Himid, Naming the Money (Newcastle: Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle, 2004), p.19 and p.25. Lubaina Himid, ‘Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service’. Text from the leaflet advertising the 2007 exhibition.


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commitment will continue to be evident and my new work will explore many of the issues that affect us in 2004, wars, famines, disasters, Third World debt, sugar problems, obesity concerns, the North-South divide, the escalation of AIDS’. 31 Since the early 2000s she has produced a comprehensive body of work, focusing on her old subject of Asian femininity, challenging stereotypical assumptions about Asian women. Additionally Burman has discovered a new topic: the impact of Bollywood, which, she suspects, far from raising a deeper understanding of Indian culture, has merely led to a ‘fetishism of things Indian’ 32 and, one might add, confirms the traditional Indian ideal of the submissive woman whose only marketable asset are her good looks serving to attract a potent husband. While Burman has continued to make her own collages using her own face as before, she has recently also worked together with local girls from Hackney in several workshops, producing collages, photomontages, installations and websites. The works are as colourful as ever and draw for inspiration on ‘Bollywood and popular culture, fashion and found objects like bhindis, flower petals, patterned fabric and lingerie. They form the backdrop to political satire’. 33 One result of the workshops is the net-specific work A Moment to Herself (2002), another is on the way. The project Candy Pop and Juicy Lucy, based on a solo show in 2006, began with three weeks of workshops with young Hackney residents in the summer of 2007, climaxing in an ice cream party on 18 August. It is difficult to present her moveable work (the images move on the screen, sometimes to a soundtrack) here, but one image may give an impression of her ironic feminist pop art (cf. fig. 17).

5. Conclusion As is the custom, I will try to come to some conclusion. First of all a warning seems necessary: the list of women artists mentioned here is by no means complete. Some very influential artists like Maud Sulter and Zarinah Bhimji, whose work was presented at the 11th Documenta in 2002, have not been mentioned, as happens with an exemplary approach. Secondly, cultural identity is not the only topic the artists mentioned have dealt with. Yet it is a fact that the issue has occupied a central place in black and Asian women artists’ work, and for understandable reasons. The artists themselves had to and have to cope with the in-between situation and the extra difficulties women have to overcome in a male dominated society, including the art world. In 31

32 33

Quote by Chila Burman in anon., ‘Chila Burman and other Shows’, April 2004 <www.bbc. co.uk/Nottingham/culture/2004/04/chila_burman_preview.shtml> (15 June 2007). Chila Burman, ‘A Moment to Herself’ <www.amoment2herself.com> (15 June 2007). Ibid.

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their work the artists have approached the problematic topic in greatly differing ways. It does not seem exaggerated, however, to diagnose a general development from militant attitudes in the 1980s to more self-confident, playful and subtly ironic treatment of identity formation in the 1990s, followed by a tendency towards a new seriousness in the 2000s, probably as a result of a tenser political and social climate. Whether autobiographical and personal references and social observations have been used or rather mythological, allegorical or historical symbolism, the artists have always taken care that the economic and political conditions of the individuals’ situation have been made transparent. As to the techniques and materials preferred, it is difficult to generalise as all artists have developed their own favourite methods. Yet again a few generalising observations seem possible. In the early phase painting and drawing, which were probably most accentuated in art school, prevailed with women artists often applying traditionally female media like pastel, watercolour and crayon. I have already commented on the remarkable shift to modern technological media from the 1990s on, and here some artists like Sonia Boyce, Chila Burman, Joy Gregory have proved especially flexible and keen on experimenting. As the most popular technique, however, photography stands out, practised by some like Pollard and Perrier exclusively, by others like Gregory, Burman and Boyce frequently. A satisfactory explanation is not easy to find, yet this preference may have something to do with the very topic. Cultural identity is about positioning oneself in social reality, and photography, however much stylised, reflects elements of reality. As Burman has written, it is a mistake to take photographs as ‘documents of empirical reality’, yet they at least closely refer to it. Several artists like Gregory and Burman have dared and apparently enjoyed the step forward from still photography to moving pictures in videos, films and, most recently, on websites. Finally, two absences seem worth noting. One is sculpture, which is very rare among women artists, possibly because it is physically hard work. The other, perhaps more astonishing absence is textile art. In marked contrast to some male artists like Yinka Shonibare and Hew Locke and some American women artists, who have taken up the patchwork tradition, black and Asian British women – with very few exceptions – have avoided textile art. One of the exceptions is Bharti Parmar, who has a special interest in Victorian commemorative artefacts including hair jewellery and has even stitched The Lord’s Prayer with her own hair. This does not mean that the other female artists are not interested in fabrics. Many of the images discussed overflow with textiles: hats, veils, scarves, dresses and underwear abound, yet they are removed from the touch and mediated by photography. Black British women artists seem anxious not to be pushed into a female separatist corner, for


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textile arts such as tapestry or embroidery have traditionally been associated with women and looked down upon as a mere craft in contrast to the higher arts of painting or sculpture. Even Bharti Parmar, when she effectively set off some Victorian style miniature portraits of Indian people against rich silks, satins and velvets reminiscent of classical oil paintings, did so by means of digitally produced photographs (cf. fig. 18).

Works Cited Al-Ani, Jananne, ‘Acting Out’, in Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art, ed. by David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros (London: inIVA, 2003), pp.88-107. Andrews, Jorella, ‘Dispossessing the Land’, in Landscape Trauma in the Age of Scopophilia, ed. by Richard Hylton (London: Autograph, 2001) pp.57-63. anon., ‘Chila Burman and other Shows’, April 2004 [accessed on 15 June 2007]. Ashcroft, Bill, Post-Colonial Transformation (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Bailey, David A., Ian Baucom and Sonia Boyce, eds., Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Burman, Chila, ‘A Moment to Herself’ [accessed on 15 June 2007]. Campbell, Sarah, Sutapa Biswas (London: inIVA, 2004). Gregory, Joy, ‘Artist’s Statement’ [accessed on 24 June 2007]. ——. ‘The Blonde’ [accessed 19 June 2007]. Gregory, Joy, Objects of Beauty (London: Autograph: 2004). Hall, Stuart, ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three “Moments” in Postwar History’, History Workshop Journal 61.1 (2006), 1-24. ——. ‘Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge – and After’, in Shades of Black: Assembling Black Art in 1980s Britain, ed. by David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom and Sonia Boyce (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp.1-20. ——. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp.222-237.

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Hall, Stuart and Mark Sealy, Different (London: Phaidon Press, 2001). Himid, Lubaina, Naming the Money, Catalogue (Newcastle: Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle, 2004). ——. ‘Mapping: A Decade of Black Women Artists 1980-1990’, in Passion: Discourses on Black Women’s Creativity, ed. by Maud Sulter (Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire: Urban Fox Press, 1990), pp.63-72. Morgan, Jill, ‘Women Artists and Modernism’, in Lubaina Himid: Revenge, Catalogue (Rochdale: Rochdale Art Gallery, 1992), pp.17-25. Nead, Lynda, Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures (London: Kala Press, 1995). Pollard, Ingrid, Postcards Home (London: Autograph, 2004). Pollock, Griselda, ‘Tracing Figures of Presence: Naming Ciphers of Absence. Feminism, Imperialism and Postmodernity: The Work of Sutapa Biswas’, in Sutapa Biswas, ed. by Sarah Campbell (London: inIVA, 2004), pp.22-41. Rushdie, Salman‚ ‘Imaginary Homelands’ (1982), in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta Books, 1992), pp.9-21. Snyder, Stephanie‚ ‘In Conversation with Sutapa Biswas’, in Sutapa Biswas, ed. by Sarah Campbell (London: inIVA, 2004), pp.8-19. Sulter, Maud, ed., Passion: Discourses on Black Women’s Creativity (Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire: Urban Fox Press, 1990). Tawadros, Gilane, ‘Beyond the Boundary: The Work of Three Black Women Artists in Britain’, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader , ed. by Houston A. Baker, jr., et al. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 240-277.


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Appendix: Images

Fig. 1: Supta Biswas, Housewives with Steak-Knives (1985). This and all following images reproduced with kind permission by the artists.

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Fig. 2: Chila Kumari Burman, 28 Positions in 34 Years (1992).


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Fig. 3: Lubinia Himid, Five, from the series Revenge (1992).

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Fig. 4: Ingrid Pollard, Wordsworth Heritage (1992).


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Fig. 5: Sonia Boyce, The Audition (1998).

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Fig. 6: Maxine Walker, Untitled (1995).


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Fig. 7: Joy Gregory, Blonde (1998).

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Fig. 8: Joy Gregory, Cinderella in Paris, from the series Cinderella Tours Europe (2001).


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Fig. 9: Eileen Perrier, Auntie Bernia, from the series Red, Gold and Green (1997).

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Fig. 10: Bharti Parmar, Sir Jung Bahadon and Chief Wife, part of the exhibition True Stories (2003).


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Fig. 11: Lubinia Himid, My Parents – Their Children (2001).

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Fig. 12: Supta Biswas, scene from Bird Song (2004).


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Fig. 13: Ingrid Pollard, Dehiscence, one of Pollard’s contributions to the exhibition Landscape Trauma (2001).

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Fig. 14: Lubinia Himid, N’Wambia the Drummer, part of Himid’s work Naming the Money (2004).


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Fig. 15: Lubinia Himid, Nilla the Herbalist, part of Himid’s work Naming the Money (2004).

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Fig. 16: Lubinia Himid, part of Himid’s work Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service (2007).


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Fig. 17: Chila Kumari Burman, Invite Card (2006).

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Fig. 18: Bharti Parmar, Cameo I (1999).

Christoph Härter

The Dub Renaissance – Reflections on the Aesthetics of Dub in Contemporary British Music This essay will argue that the aesthetics of Jamaican sound system culture dominates recent developments in British dance music. Particularly the dubstep scene, rising from the margins of London in the early 2000s, can be located within the Jamaican tradition, as it widely draws from dancehall culture and the form of the dub mix. However, dubstep music does not simply apply forms of sound system culture, but transforms the aesthetics of the sound system with the sound system’s own narrative means. Sound system culture is equipped with a range of forms that break down temporal linearity and spatial containment. In this context, it is crucial that form is not just surface. Be it traditional reggae or contemporary dubstep, both represent a cultural tradition which rather produces functional forms than merely superficial formalism.

1. Introduction After jungle and garage, dubstep music is the latest significant addition to a range of computerised dance music styles that stem from London’s multi-ethnic, youthful subculture. Since its inception in the early 2000s, dubstep enjoyed little publicity until 2006. Today, music critics, academics and film makers show tremendous interest in what used to be no more than a regional subgenre of UK garage known as ‘the Croydon sound’. Thus, The Wire magazine makes a dubstep LP its record of the year in 2006, two dubstep tracks appear on the soundtrack of the Academy Award-nominated film Children of Men, and in 2008, even the Sun features a portrait of dubstep protagonist DJ Skream. Naturally, this essay does not explain the huge popularity of dubstep at the moment. However, I would like to shed some light on the textual structure of dubstep music in order to locate it within a larger cultural frame, the Jamaican sound system tradition. As dubstep reflects and therefore transforms the aesthetics of Jamaican sound system culture, we can conclude that Jamaican culture, in its fragmentation, dominates the culture of certain urban areas in Britain. The specific aesthetics of the sound system is characterised by a variety of performative modes and the formal aspects and narrative strategies of dub. Both apply to dubstep music. This essay will focus on how this works in terms of aesthetics, rather than exploring the socio-political context that surrounds cultural production. In order to do so, I will firstly comment on the cultural history of the sound system and analyse the types of media and the modes of performance that have been used in that context. This will also touch upon forms of literary expressions which are informed by or are part of sound system culture. Then,

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I will examine how dubstep takes up and transforms these media and modes of expression. The examples in the final section will cover different types of media: Caspa’s vinyl album Ave it Vol. 1, Shackleton’s 12” vinyl singles ‘Blood On My Hands’ and ‘Hamas Rule’ and finally Kode 9 & The Spaceape’s CD Dubstep Allstars Vol. 3, which itself compromises two different types of carrier media, the 12” vinyl single and the one-off acetate or dubplate.

2. Sound System Coordinates: Dub Mix and Dancehall Performance As for the cultural history of the Jamaican sound system, one cannot deny that the sound system was born out of economic pressures right from its inception. Starting in the early 1950s as a cheap alternative to expensive dance bands, the sound systems still stand out as Jamaica’s loudest medium of social comment for the ‘ghetto dwellers’. The people who operate the sound system, the talking DJs, function as mediators between crowd and machine. While at the microphone, they refer to the everyday concerns of the Jamaican lower class, similar to the role of the Calypsonian in Trinidad. Sound system culture, and the local record industry that surrounds it, meets these concerns through corresponding genres. The most consistent genre is certainly that of the love song. However, as far as the talking DJ’s performance is concerned, two stage characters seem to be crucial: the Rudeboy and the Rasta. Both seem to be each other’s alter ego, however, and the characters overlap when it comes to the dancehall performance. By the early seventies, the radical social, political and religious agenda of the Rastafarians eventually became an audible part of Jamaica’s cultural production. These so-called ‘rebel music’ or ‘roots records’ associated with the Rastafarians became the dominant genre within the sound system culture of the 1970s. One can discern two groundbreaking developments that sprang from this period. Firstly, the talking DJs became increasingly important figures. They started recording, smoothing the way for the development of dancehall music or ‘ragga’, as DJ-dominated reggae is called in the UK. Secondly, the dub mix emerged. Both developments are linked to the principle of ‘versioning’, i.e. the recycling of previously recorded material. A ‘version’ or ‘riddim’ is a basic, circular pattern of bass and drum interplay. By the first half of the 1970s, it became common practice among music producers to use one and the same riddim over and over again. 1 This development was possibly triggered by the advent of multi-track recording in Jamaica. Another source of inspiration is, however, linked to the most impor1

Crucial in that respect was Osbourne ‘King Tubby’ Ruddock, a sound system owner who had set up a multi-track voicing studio where post-production of previously recorded material could be done.

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tant carrier medium in the sound system business: the ‘soft wax’ dubplate, or just plainly, dub. A dub is a one-off acetate that usually carries up to four tunes. These dubs are exclusive to the particular sound system operators. The use of dubs goes back to the sound system competitions of the fifties, when sound men like Coxsone Dodd and Duke Reid battled for musical supremacy. Essentially, dubs provide what Benjamin calls the aura of a work of art, its presence in time and space, its ritual character. 2 I will cover the ‘dancehall ritual’, including the issue of ‘sound war’ in more detail later. As for the technical possibilities, multi-track recording provided the foundation for the multiple use of one popular version in different mixes, vocal, instrumental or plain drum and bass to leave space for the increasingly talkative DJs to deliver their interpretations during the sound system performance. As far as literary history is concerned, the DJ’s talkover marks the beginning of socalled dub poetry. Linton Kwesi Johnson remembers: I came up with the term ‘dub poetry’ [...] as a way of talking about the deejays, [...] because at that time [...] I tried to argue that what they were doing was really poetry, and that it had a lot in common with traditional African poetry in so far as it was spontaneous, improvisatory and had a musical base. 3

According to this definition, the seemingly nonsensical interpolations of a talking DJ can be regarded as literature. In contrast to LKJ’s approach, there is a different theory to grasp the structure of so-called dub poetry in the light of the second musical revolution that emerged from 1970s Jamaica, i.e. the dub revolution. Dub poet Mikey Smith subscribes to this approach, when, in the early eighties, he cryptically predicts that ‘dub going to be the future [...], it haffi go dubwise’. 4 Smith refers to the high art of the radical remix. He claims that this was the inspiration for his poetry, comparable to the influence of jazz on Langston Hughes. While the early dub versions were originally just intended to leave space for the talking DJs, the dub mixes would gradually grow into a form of art in their own right, with the mixing engineer as artist. One characteristic of that form is its original ‘nakedness’. A dub version is reggae stripped down to its bones, lethal bass and pounding drums, providing a basic polyrhythmic pattern. On top of that, delay effects, flashing echoes, reverberation and flanging devices do their best to break down temporal and spatial linearity. Various layers are put on top of each other, as in a palimpsest. However, these levels seem to 2

3

4

Cf. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), p.1168. Quoted in E.A. Markham, ed., Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 1989), p.256. Quoted in Markham, p.256.

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intersect with each other. This becomes clear when one looks at sound in relation to time and space. With regard to experiencing time in the dancehall, bass lines bubble continuously, while echo and delay effects create temporal ellipses. The construction of dub is inherently unstable – one can never tell which element breaks down or increases prominence. On the spatial level, the specific threeway construction of Jamaican sound systems causes an equally disturbing effect. While the deep bass section seems to vibrate from literally everywhere due to the low frequency’s spherical spreading, the sound pounding out of the mid range and treble speakers can be traced specifically. How does this technology affect the listener’s perception? Perception shifts from hearing to feeling. The lower the frequencies, the less audible the sound becomes. Low frequencies at high volume can even be seen in the form of vibrating air. Essentially, frequencies below 40 Hz (sub-bass) create indisposition. 5 The sound system can therefore be read as a means to reproduce an empirical reality of constant fear (bass) coupled with day-to-day instabilities (mid, treble). As a result, the individual meanings of individual elements change. Dub subverts form and thus changes meaning. It breaks down form by weaving forms together. Thus, for example, an originally sweet soul vocal, appearing in dubbed-out bits and pieces over a megawatt sound system, may lose its original sweetness in combination with a fearfully pounding sub-bass. Dub as a musical genre in its own right has vanished in Jamaica. 6 The DJ records were to dominate the sound system dances from the 1980s onward. However, the structure of dub is still audible, visible and readable, though it surfaces by different means, with the dancehall DJ rather than the dub engineer being the crucial figure. Various genre records come to prominence in the sound system performance. An important element that determines their use is their strategic value during a ‘sound clash’, the war-like competition between two rivalling crews. The sound system performance draws from an array of performative modes related to the DJ’s interaction with both the crowd and the types of records that he plays. Stolzoff tries to distinguish six modes of performing: juggling, clashing, reality, culture, sacrifice and war.7 In between these modes, 5 6

7

Film scores, for instance, make use of this fact sometimes to evoke a sense of fear. In Britain, however, a unique dub scene has emerged from the Jamaican communities during the 1980s and 90s. This so called ‘roots & culture’ circuit is heavily informed by the Rastafarian faith and still prefers dub to vocal records. Its outstanding representative is Lewisham’s Jah Shaka. Cf. Norman Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). War, not to be confused with the ‘sound war’ during a clash, is the performative mode that the sound system crew constantly tries to


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the performance oscillates back and forth. Sometimes, and this reflects a continuity between dub and dancehall reggae, different modes apply at the same time, interacting and intersecting with each other, thus changing their individual meaning. I would like to focus on clashing, culture and reality as these are the most obvious strategies reappearing in contemporary British dubstep. According to Stolzoff, the clashing mode focus[es] on the sound system as musical assassin since the ultimate mark of difference is seen as the ability to kill. These [...] sound boy killers articulate with the aesthetics […] of the gangster-as-nihilist, one who can take life without mercy [...]. As such, clashing tends to divide the dancehall into rival factions, reproducing the way that the electoral system splits the black lower class. 8

The themes of the ‘reality’ performance emphasise ‘racism, class-consciousness, political corruption’ and target the rich, the politicians and the police, thus creating a sense of a ‘unified group of poor black people’. ‘Culture’ refers to the ‘dancehall performance as a sacred ritual and directly addresses Rastafarian concerns’. Rastafarianism basically constructs a utopia of an African paradise lost. Therefore the performative mode which addresses ‘culture’ transcends the fixed time frame of history. Both ‘reality’ and ‘culture’ try to appeal to unity among the crowd, opposing the dividing capacities of ‘clashing’. However, and this emphasises the paradoxical complexity of Caribbean culture in general, both ‘can be used [...] as a part of an overall clashing strategy’. 9 The polyvalence of a sound system performance reflects the structural make-up of the dub mix, although dub mixes have disappeared from the Jamaican scene. On the UK garage circuit, however, the emergence of socalled dubstep seems to announce a ‘dub renaissance’. The following exegesis focuses on how the aesthetics of dub, being inherently open to transformations, brings forward the transformation of its own narrative strategies. A few contemporary dubstep records, all of them vastly different from each other at a first glance, will serve as examples.

3. Ave It! On the musical level, Caspa’s vinyl EP Ave it Vol. 1 is a rather obvious take on Jamaican traditions. It relies on reggae samples and utilises the characteristic off-beat which plays a significant part in traditional reggae music. As for

8 9

avoid. It is the form of actual physical violence. Juggling refers to the warm-up time, when records are seamlessly woven into one another. Sacrifice is basically communal scapegoating of gays, police and ‘informers’. Stolzoff, p.210. Ibid., p.210.

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their musical make-up, Caspa’s tracks are digitally updated reggae combined with the oscillating basslines that are typical of older digital genres. 10 Both elements carry certain meaning, albeit transformed by dub-wise strategies. In addition, the record takes up and transforms the clashing mode. This is a record made in order to ‘kill’, so to speak. Two tracks, ‘Big Headed Slags’ and ‘Custard Chucker’ are particularly strong in that respect, designed for lethal use in the dance. Both feature vocal samples from live sound system recordings, featuring Killamanjaro’s DJ Ricky Trooper shouting ‘kill dem!’ and ‘let the war begin!’ over minor key synthesiser surfaces, before the equally dark, wobbly bass lines drop in eardeafening volume. Indeed, this combination seems ‘fitting’ in musical terms. However, if one tries to attribute a particular meaning to a particular sound, one might claim that wobbly basslines and off-beat reggae have oppositional implications. The reggae part could be read as a means to reproduce fear. The acid house basslines, and the emphasis is on ‘acid’, are normally associated with the happily drugged-out raves of the late 1980s and the early 90s. However, both parts lack crucial elements within themselves, leaving space for a dub-wise transformation of meaning. The reggae part simply lacks bass. Therefore it cannot reproduce the fear that surrounds the cultural production of Jamaica. The acid part hammers with minor key darkness instead of an ecstatic major key wobble. Thus, the combination of both translates the fear of the periphery into the hedonism of the metropolis. Equally interesting is the form this product takes. It comes as a four-track double-vinyl EP and is not available on digital media, such as CD or MP3. Each track runs at 45rpm, one track per side. Therefore, it is particularly DJfriendly and exclusively aims at performative use, leaving flexible space for reinterpretation, similar to the dubs played on Jamaican sound systems. The vinyl EP is a carrier medium that compromises the advantages of both the acetate dubplate and digital media, providing sufficient circulation while suggesting an aura of exclusivity. On the visual level, and this is rather unusual for a kind of medium that often comes in a plain white cover, the sleeve features playful artwork. It is striking that the artwork bears aesthetic similarities to the actual record. Seemingly oppositional meanings overlap as fixed places and time frames break down, challenging notions of contained culture. Formally, the picture on the record sleeve is a comic strip with features of traditional American cartoons, elements of hip hop graffiti and slight traces of Japanese manga. The aesthetics of African-American hip hop culture stands for the romanticised ‘realness’ of disenfranchised youth culture in general. The truly artificial realism of manga points in the opposite direction: Japan has developed into the most profitable 10

For example acid house, jungle and UK garage.


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market for urban music in recent years. At the margins, ragged pictures of the cartoon character Casper 11 flutter to the ground. The amalgamation of these elements suggests an increased globality of cultural influences combined with a conscious re-evaluation of the elements that it merges. Hip hop resides at the centre, while fragments of Hollywood almost disappear at the margin. At the picture’s centre, we can see a figure (probably Caspa the artist) standing in front of a London tube station, dressed in the hip-hoppish gear of graffiti writers, throwing around hand grenades equipped with miniature loud speakers, looking towards the spectator with a gesture that totally befits the record’s title: ‘ave it!’. This is a take on the clashing mode in surreal visual terms. The picture shows a war-like situation. The sky is darkened by smoke. The tube station is built of scoop-bin bass speakers instead of brick and glass. On top of that, a modified London Underground label bears the name of Caspa’s record label: Sub Soldiers. ‘Sub’ refers to sub-bass, the fearful frequencies below 40 Hz, ‘soldier’ is an alternate title for a rudeboy in the lower ranks. Within the composition of these images, we can discern a rupture of fixed meanings. Thus, the horror of war is paradoxically played down in a children’s comic strip, while the artist not only performs the role of ‘gangsternihilist’, but even fashions himself as a terrorist, playing the appropriate character to fight sound war in recent metropolitan discourse.

4. How to Kill a Sound Boy At first glance, as well as at first listen, Shackleton’s 12” vinyl singles ‘Blood On My Hands’ and ‘Hamas Rule’ are far from any Jamaican cliché. Both records reflect a different, more subtle approach to Caspa’s. Both artists seem to utilise the violence of sound war, draw on its imagery and radically break down its original form. However, Shackleton rejects dancehall and jungle samples. Instead he refers to German krautrock and Lebanese qawwali, embedded in an ironic take on the crude imagery of death metal. Let us again focus on the records‘ artwork, before going into the music. Aficionados of Jamaican music might reject Shackleton’s records for the design of the sleeves. Sam Shackleton calls his imprint Skull, and the notorious sleeve designs, featuring dancing skeletons and death metal imagery, seem rather repulsive to those who normally buy records with smiling Rastamen on their cover. The artwork, however, emphasises the record’s ability to ‘kill’, similar to the sleeve of Caspa’s EP. It reflects the clashing mode, although with a sense of the ironic, as it totally exaggerates the rhetoric of sound war. Thus, ‘Hamas Rule’ is subtitled ‘Sound Boy’s Bones 11

Casper, the ‘friendly ghost’, was originally a character of a children’s TV series in the 1960s. A Hollywood feature film of the same title appeared during the 1990s.

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Get Buried in the Dirt’, ‘Blood On My Hands’ is alternately dubbed ‘Sound Boy’s Nuts get Properly Ground Up’. If we take a close look at its musical structure, ‘Blood on my Hands’ owes its formal aspects primarily to the dub tradition, although the track draws from various discourses. These other discourses are Islamic mysticism and the English literary tradition. We can discern three levels that carry elements of these discourses, melting into and destabilising each other at the same time. An up-tempo percussion pattern represents the first level, carrying the listener throughout the whole record. A short poem represents the second level. It is delivered in an odd, artificially low-pitched voice, appearing at the very beginning of the track and then reappearing in dubbed-out form. Appended to the poem is a sample from a reading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘The mind and the spirit remain invincible’. The third level comes as a devastatingly heavy bass line that does not enter until the second half of the track, being the most obvious connection to the sound system tradition. However, the first two levels subtly draw from the sound system tradition as well. The featured poem comes in a broken call-and-response pattern that resembles a psalm and the oriental percussion equals the mystical quality of the Rastafarian chants that characterise a ‘culture’ performance. Thus, the use of oriental instrumentation, which is even more prominent on ‘Hamas Rule’, suggests a cultural positioning within the mystical traditions of Islam. In contrast to the mystical implications, however, the oriental percussion carries a beat that is typical of house music and ‘two-step’ garage productions that used to dominate the hedonistic club scene in the early 2000s. Thus, the mystical element is framed by a secular context, whereas the secular element is loaded with a religious quality. Put on top of a slow and heavy bass line, this juxtaposition creates an atmosphere that oscillates between fear and exaltation. The vocal part is somewhat unusual for a record that is supposed to make people dance. It seems to be far from the Jamaican dub tradition and rather echoes the free verse visions of T.S. Eliot than the rhythmically pounding realism of LKJ: When I see the towers fall It cannot be denied As a spectacle, it is a realization of the mind You see, I’m standing on the mountain top and letting out a scream, It’s the language of the earth, it is the language of the beast


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There’s no point to look behind us, we left the corpse behind ‘cause flesh is weak and forms break down, They cannot last forever. When I see the towers fall, Fall, Fall […]. 12

The opening vision suggests the subjective fulfilment of a wish (‘a realisation of the mind’), being sold as an objective truth (‘it cannot be denied’). An artificially low pitched and laid-back voice represents indifference towards the ‘spectacle’ – not necessarily the actual event. The opening line is repeated after the first stanza. Then it breaks down to repetitions of the word ‘fall’ on the first stroke of each following bar, resulting in a straight rhythm pattern that intersects with the percussion part. Finally, a fragile polyrhythmic structure evolves from the ruins of repressive constructs. A crucial point is how the element of destruction makes this record a successful tool in the DJ’s box. In other words: what makes this record a ‘sound boy killer’? There is the hypnotic building up of tension and an overpowering low-frequency bass line. However, there is something intrinsically violent to the track, justifying its title. The title ‘Blood On My Hands’ raises questions of violence, cause and effect. Whose hands? Whose blood? The middle part of the poem provides evidence. Formally, it breaks down the psalm-like pattern of call (‘when I see’ etc.) and response (‘cause flesh is weak’ etc.), therefore destroying its religious meaningfulness. In addition, it represents a second narrative level within the poem. The speaker positions himself within the realm of nature. Like the lyrical self of Walt Whitman’s poetry, for example, man reproduces nature (‘scream’) through the primitivistic ‘language of a beast’. Unlike in Whitman, however, the artificially low-pitched voice seems to be just the wrong medium for communicating a ‘natural language’. Shackleton’s musical weapon seems to aim at the constructors of repressive ‘towers’, i.e. ‘the system’ in the sense of a ‘reality’ performance. His record thus mingles ‘clashing’ and ‘reality’ to identify ‘the system’ as the ultimate opponent. The image of ‘the towers’ is linked with the realisation that ‘forms’ necessarily ‘break down’. It reflects the ‘realisation of the mind’ that equals the ‘spectacle’. Therefore, the vision of ‘falling towers’ equals what happens while the speaker is ‘standing on the mountain top’: the corpse is left behind. If one takes into account recent history, the reference to ‘the towers’ is of course more than just a metaphor. The poem tries to explore the logic behind 12

Transcript taken from an interview with Sam Shackleton, by Martin Clark a.k.a. Blackdown (16 October 2007).

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terrorism. If human nature (‘letting out scream’) is responsible for the rupture of artificial form (‘towers fall’) as well as for the breakdown of natural form (‘corpse’), then terror is the result of the complexity of human nature which strives for destruction. Ironically this is justified with the biblical phrase ‘flesh is weak’. It is significant that a Christian quote serves as an ‘excuse for terrorism’ here, whereas the logic of Islamophobia basically says that Islam was the source of terror. It is also striking that the speaker encounters the metaphorical breakdown of form with the same nihilistic tranquillity that he conceives of death. This is the ‘gangster-nihilist’ with a degree in philosophy, invincible in his ‘mind and spirit’. He is the one who has blood on his hands while sitting on his sofa watching TV. And this paradox makes ‘Blood On My Hands’ a murderous weapon. Indeed, sound boy’s nuts get properly ground up.

5. Allstar Structure Rupture While both examples from Caspa’s and Shackleton’s oeuvre represent media which have been designed for performative re-interpretation, Kode 9 & The Spaceape’s CD Dubstep Allstars Vol. 3 is an example for how this reinterpretation works. However, and this is due to the fact of its medial makeup, a CD can only serve as a reproduction of the actual production process. The CD simulates what the artists’ performance delivers ‘live and direct’. Indeed, this seems odd, as the solitary sofa experience is certainly different from the social ritual that is taking place while the artists perform. The use of a CD, however, has a different purpose. The Dubstep Allstars series has been launched for promotional reasons. It works like an advert, promoting the ‘scene’, but what makes it interesting for both consumers and critics? Is there something more artistic to it than mere advertising? It is useful to have a look at the CD’s narrative structure, which indeed reflects narrative strategies from the Jamaican tradition. The narrative structure of Dubstep Allstars Vol. 3 is made up of three narrative levels operating with entirely different voices, overlaying and intersecting with each other, thus changing each level’s individual meaning. Firstly, there is the level of the individual tracks, all instrumentals with one strong exception. The CD contains 28 tracks, seamlessly mixed into one another by DJ/producer Kode 9 who acts as the voice of the second narrative level. Two thirds of the tracks are exclusive one-off dubplates, a fact which signifies the strong link between today’s producers and the Jamaican dub tradition. None of the record fragments are longer than two minutes, some are even shorter than one minute, with dissonant bits and pieces of the surrounding tracks blending in. Kode 9 not only applies the mode of juggling in the high speed manner. He also changes the original purpose of juggling. Instead of


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warming up the listener, he provides a coherent narrative frame. However, given the complex, multi-layered structure of the dubs and vinyls that Kode 9 selects, juggling also serves as a means of breaking down the structure of Kode 9’s records on the one hand, while on the other hand the record’s individual implications tackle coherent juggling. Kode 9’s narrative position is therefore arguably strong. In effect, this paradoxical strategy makes it very hard for the listener to discern what the original record sounds like. The Spaceape a.k.a. Daddy Gee controls the third narrative level. He is not a talking DJ in the dancehall tradition but consciously adapts the style of dub poets LKJ and Mutabaruka. This is significant insofar as Spaceape subverts the notion that dub poets belong to the sphere of university readings whereas talking DJs belong to the sound system performance. By breaking up their context, a transformation of both talking DJ and dub poet takes place. This transformation is an inversion of the original relation between word (talking DJ) and sound (dub). Whereas dub was originally intended to leave space for the DJ to talk over, Spaceape’s laid-back dub poetry style leaves space for the music to ‘talk’ over his performance. The first half of Spaceape’s performance consists of short aphorisms. These are endlessly repeated and cut together in various positions. As a result, this allows the music to interact with his voice, finally breaking down to the mere key words, culminating in dubbed-out word pieces supplied with massive echo effects during the second half of the CD. Thus, Spaceape makes deliberate use of the form of the dub mix, disrupting the structure of his very own short poems. In addition, Spaceape challenges the structure of the narrative coherence constructed by Kode 9, even extending his poems over the structure that Kode 9 suggests. In the light of this, we can say that his position as narrator is equally strong. All three narrative levels intersect with each other, providing the highly multi-layered structure of the entire mix. The mix kicks off with two introductory tracks before Spaceape takes the microphone. The very first track, Kode 9’s own ‘Nine Samurai’ sets the mood for what is to come. It is an exemplary dubstep track, with uptempo percussions contrasting with a slow, heavyweight sub-bass. As for the samples used, a dark horn arrangement straight from the funeral procession adds a gothic quality to a vocal sample of madman dub engineer Lee Perry. After an opening which one may easily conceive as ‘Jamaican gothic’, the only full vocal track featured on Dubstep Allstars comes in, the highly interesting ‘Dem A Bomb We’. ‘Dem a Bomb We’ is credited to Jamaican dancehall DJ Warrior Queen, who is notorious for her songs on men’s sizes in the Lady Saw tradition. 13 13

Take for instance Money Honey, another one on Kode 9’s Hyperdub imprint, which is about a woman’s hard work as a plumber. Given the equation of ‘work’ and ‘sex’ in Jamaican Creole,

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This time, however, she vents her anger at the 7/7 London bomb attacks, supported by a grimy update of a hardcore dancehall rhythm: Bombs here, bombs there, bombs fear, bombs scare Bombonaut, bo bo bo bombs everywhere King’s Cross, Euston back to Travisstock Square.

The ‘bo bo bo’ staccato in the last line is a sort of energetic shout, an onomatopoeic reproduction of gunshots which is familiar in the dancehall as a means of stimulating interaction between performer and audience. Structurally, it serves as a rhythmic conjunction. ‘Bombonaut’ is Warrior Queen’s own exciting creation, a word-play in between ‘bomb’, ‘astronaut’ and certainly the Jamaican curse bomboclaat, i.e. a tampon, suggesting a relation between the bombers and the latter. After the very obvious positioning in the opening chorus, verse one deals with Warrior Queen’s scare after the bombings took place: ‘Me see a rucksack me hair stand up with fear, all deh pon me mind is it a bomb in there?’ Verse two addresses the bombers directly: If you think you were treated unfairly, Even you or your fellow country You should deal with the cause more sanely Don’t just go killing people innocently

From a Eurocentric point of view, Queen’s hardcore style may definitely seem inappropriate, if one tries to appeal to someone’s reason by shouting the person down. However, it would be wrong to read this as a simplistic approach towards terror. The opposite is the case. Despite the experience of terror, Queen does not fall into an explicit sacrifice mode of ‘burning’ or ‘cursing’, which would be the appropriate thing to do for a hardcore toaster in that respect. Instead, she has at least a little compassion for the bombers, she acknowledges that they ‘were treated unfairly’ and, on top of that accuses ‘Mr Big and Mr Mighty’, i.e. the politicians, for committing unidentified ‘crime’, for which ‘we pay the penalty’. Therefore, ‘Dem a Bomb We’ is a piece which transforms dancehall’s most controversial mode into a relatively fair judgement on the issue of terrorism and its political context. The last verse, however, keeps the controversy on religiously motivated terror going, after Queen’s regaining of strength in the face of the attacks, laid down in a dissonant cover version of Gloria Gaynor’s disco hit I Will Survive: First I was afraid, I was terrified To think someone would have killed themselves for taking innocent lives

she perfectly mingles proletarian realism with pornography and female self-assertion. Lady Saw is one of the few female DJs in Jamaica. Her focus on slackness, i.e. sexually explicit lyrics, delivered in a kind of inverted sexism, has caused a major row in male-dominated Jamaican society. For a detailed analysis of the Lady Saw controversy see Stolzoff, p.238ff.


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But now I’m really strong, not afraid to say you’re wrong You just can’t go around killing people in the name of Islam!

Warrior Queen continues with a transformation of the culture mode, in an ironical take on the psalm form to sum up the pseudo-religious motivation of the bombers: From the dust of the earth my God created man, but man created human to be walking timebomb, What’s your religion? Sorry I forgot: you’re a fucking madman!

Interestingly, she makes a difference between man and human, suggesting that ‘human timebombs’ are a product of male supremacy, of the very Mr. Big and Mr. Mighty mentioned before, and attests that the bombers’ only religion was plainly ‘being a fucking madman’. ‘Dem A Bomb We’ is an angry echo of the London bombings. However, it is an echo which is conscious of the tensions within a multicultural society. Therefore it avoids the violent modes of the dancehall. Instead, it represents a feminist perspective on the matter. Kode 9 now blends in the third track, Geeneus’ ‘You Know Me’, and Spaceape takes the microphone, in a fashion entirely different from Warrior Queen’s hardcore dancehall style. Spaceape sounds very similar to Mutabaruka, though he delivers his speech in a more laid-back, ganja-inspired mode: To rupture a structure nobody mek this ting corrupt, ya testaments I say to the spirit of the culture.

Obviously, the content of Spaceape’s opening lyrics reflects the CD’s destructive structure. In addition, the lyrics are informed by various sources. ‘To rupture a structure’ is not an ordinary toast, as an ordinary toast would rarely draw from what sounds like post-structuralist concepts. 14 Spaceape manages to employ bits and pieces of most sophisticated theories and introduces them to sound system culture. The line ‘nobody mek this ting corrupt ya’ precisely refers to the latter, ensuring communal, authentic enjoyment within a dance, opposed to the corruption in ‘Babylon’. The line ‘testaments I say to the spirits of the culture’ turns towards the culture mode. ‘Testaments’ implies a religious approach towards black history (‘spirits’). Therefore, without explicit references to, say, ‘Jah’ or ‘Rastafari’, 15 Spaceape locates himself within a Rasta-informed ‘culture’ tradition. The transformation of culture becomes clear, for instance, when he claims that he was ‘guided by subliminals that’s from another galaxy’, replacing Rasta with plural sci-fi 14

15

Spaceape mentions Deleuze next to Mutabaruka among his influences. . The usual references to the Rastafarian god, often associated with Haile Selassie, the last Ethiopian emperor.

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guidance. 16 As for the clashing mode, he claims that ‘living Spaceapes [...] [are] stimulating the audio nerve directly. Come flex with me!’ and suggests a bodily connection between spaceape(s), sound machine and crowd, coupled with an appeal to the listeners to move (flex) communally. Spaceape mingles clashing and culture modes by asserting the purpose of his and Kode 9’s art in the light of ‘the system’, the socio-political context which a culture DJ would probably identify as ‘Babylon’. Spaceape continues: It’s a worrying time to lift your head up from the covers with no obvious answers to the questions being smothered. Blinded by the fictions of an audio addiction leads the senses to a place of imperceptible conditions [...] To be alive inside of disya dangerous system locked in and twisted out of all recognition. This is the systematic of the tings I have seen I’m lost in paranoia’s most beautiful dream An escape is made through a thousand doors With a sub-bass emerging through the open floor

Spaceape’s poem reproduces alienation and incarceration under medial pressure. The solution (‘escape’) that he suggests is art, i.e. sound, the lethal ‘sub-bass’. However, he does not promote an essentialist world view, as he says: ‘the truth lies [sic] somewhere between a lie and a fiction’. He completely dismisses the category of truth, which stands in harsh contrast to the religious culture mode that he employs at the same time. In general terms, the actual transformation is achieved by the strategic juxtaposition of the sound system’s performative modes. Religion thus becomes anti-religion and ‘killing’ becomes a means of creation. As for the voice’s self-positioning towards ‘the system’, he connotes ‘paranoia’ with the positive ‘beautiful’, therefore questioning mainstream aesthetics in relation to the socio-political dimension of ‘the system’. Spaceape then focuses on what can be identified as the ‘others’, the system’s unconscious collaborators, just before Kode 9 blends in the fourth track, ‘Haunted’. Digital Mystikz’s ‘Haunted’ provides an appropriate basis for Spaceape’s struggle with alienation. One may assume that both ‘the alien virus’ and the ‘close encounter’ in the following bit are synonymous with the bodily experience of bass frequencies. Spaceape’s toast goes ahead: Victims themselves of a close encounter – desperate of doctors, constructors Becoming infected, vexed, by an alien virus, 16

It is crucial at this stage to remind us of other ‘spaced-out’ musical ambassadors of the Black Atlantic, such as Sun Ra and George Clinton with his LP Mothership Connection. Both artists draw from science-fiction imagery to constitute what one may call an ‘imaginary homeland’ of diaspora Africans.


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so alien so viral. [...] We are hostile aliens immune from dying

Kode 9’s high speed juggling allows track five, Skream’s ‘I’, a very early appearance during the fourth track, foregrounding a heavily echoing ‘I’ vocal sample intersecting with Spaceape’s voice. Spaceape now restarts his toast from the beginning of his performance. The technique of repetition provides the line ‘strange how tings seem to remain the same, while all the while we try fi mek change’ with an almost self-ironic connotation. In addition, seconds before he starts, Kode 9 blends in a melodic portion of track six, therefore shifting the meaning of the repeated lines to a different level. Spaceape’s references to his sub-bass, which was ‘transparent in the way that it moves with sufficient memory to cut clean through’ the listener, is strongly supported by the track’s pumping bass line. It seems that Spaceape is completely into paranoia, when he repeatedly phrases ‘hallucinating senses’, just after the rolling up-tempo track ‘Groovin’ comes in. However, this is just a glimpse of the highlights that are to come. In the tradition of the call-and-response pattern, Kode 9 answers Spaceape’s hallucinogenic vision with accordingly acidic sounds, which are already part of the anthemic ‘New Life Baby Paris’ (track 8). Ironically, this monster of a dubplate contrasts sounds from tripped-out acid house with a ‘conscious’ reggae vocal sample, which proclaims: ‘roots music for everybody, [...] music about the future and the judgement which is to come’. The judgement comes in the form of a heavyweight four-on-the-floor bass drum pattern coupled with bell sounds and Spaceape’s repetition of the preceding sample. While Kode 9’s juggling speeds up, an orgasmic female vocal sample is answering Spaceape’s ‘roots music’ phrase: ‘forever!’. This is one of the musical highlights of the mix. We are exposed to the trippy character of acid house and jungle, with two voices oscillating between culture and hedonism, being connected by Spaceape’s laid-back comments, altogether embedded in an aesthetic of call and response. Strings samples, reminiscent of Hollywood in Technicolor, now contrast with a super-heavy, roots-inspired bass line and Spaceape dropping the key words of his previously performed aphorisms: ‘Worrying time, head up, covers, obvious answers, questions smothered, blinding fictions, audio addictions, senses, places, conditions [...]’. Spaceape’s toast culminates in his previously used ode to the sub-bass. Accordingly, for a few seconds, this very sub-bass stands alone, being completely stripped down, before the sample of a panting breath keeps the time, suggesting again a direct connection between bass and body. The sound of cracking whips then connects the aforementioned organic sample with the next track, Skream’s ‘0800 Dub’. It is tempting in this instance to claim that the represented relation

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between body and whip is a transhistoric, poetic rendering of slavery. Therefore, one may interpret this as an application of the culture mode onto instrumental music. 0800 Dub may give some further clues in this direction. The track is based on a hardly ever modulating sine bass. On top of the bass line, a monotonous semitone modulation is constructed, using a synthesised baroque cembalo imitation. In addition, a female vocal sample (‘ah-haa’), modulating alongside the same semitones, pierces itself into the listener’s ear. This synthetic sound construction is an application of the culture mode, insofar as it reminds us of the European soundtrack of mercantilism and therefore, colonialism and slavery. It is crucial in this respect that the culture mode would normally relate to black history. In this case, however, it relates to the European perspective. This is ironic in two ways. Firstly, the synthetic rendering of elements of baroque fugues is very obvious mockery. Secondly, a contemporary listener will automatically be reminded of the cacophonic soundtrack produced by cellular phones and computer games. Is this part of the ‘audio addictions’ that we are exposed to, according to Spaceape? If, for instance, a cultural reggae tune sublimates the traumas of physical and, to borrow Bob Marley’s phrase, ‘mental slavery’ by trying to re-invent a musical Africa, then this interpretation might be quite fitting. Skream reinvents bourgeois European musical traditions and reduces them to a mockery of the soundtrack of capitalist mass consumption. On top of Skream’s eerie masterpiece, Spaceape delivers one of his best toasts. For this purpose he loosely covers The Specials’ classic ‘Ghost Town’: Disya place is coming like a ghost town, disya town is coming like a wasteground, remember the good old days inna the ghost town, we used to dance and rock till the music drop inna the boomtown.

The combination of Skream’s dark dubstep anthem with Spaceape’s lyrics brings to mind pictures of a depopulated city in times of post-nuclear contamination. There is an explicit reference to music in the last line, which ironically relates to the dubstep scene’s own alienation from the two-step garage circuit (‘we used to dance and rock’ etc.). After delivering their most psychotic audio visions, Kode 9 & Spaceape increasingly bring the instrumentals to the fore. Spaceape repeats his previously performed parts, breaking them down more and more via heavy delay and echo effects. Kode 9 supports them with increasingly dark instrumentals, changing the implications of both the repeated poems and the underlying records. Indeed, the mood gets darker and darker. Most tracks feature synthesizer string surfaces, which could well be found on gothic and dark wave records,


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but still contrast with the ‘body of sound’ (Spaceape), the ever dominant subbass. Spaceape’s coherent poetry finally gives way to the instrumental tracks beginning with track 14, Digital Mystikz’ ‘Intergalactic’. This one employs the science-fiction imagery we have heard throughout Spaceape’s performance on a purely musical level. The synthie horns arrangement of the previous track (Skream’s ‘Tortured Soul’) fades out, resembling the ‘Vader March’ from George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy. Kode 9 leaves enough space to bring the rootsy arrangement of ‘Intergalactic’ to the fore. The composition starts with reggae melodica but dives successively through various musical discourses, chasing sampled rags from hip hop classics, bollywood soundtracks and jungle anthems through the echo chamber. The repetition of the echoes comes in a triplet structure, in contrast to the binary structure of the underlying beat, resulting in perfect polyrhythm. As a result of this circular polyrhythmic structure, the mix seems to lack an ‘end’ in the ordinary sense. However, this totally befits the CD’s entire concept which tackles fixed meanings with dub-wise instability. As Spaceape proclaims during the first half of the mix: ‘in the end there will be no end, just open-ended suggestions’.

6. Open-ended Suggestions It is indeed striking that dub still stands out as an innovative functional form as it reappears in the promising music that has emerged from the margins of London. One can conclude that dub is a means for tackling concepts of fixed frames of time, space and meaning. It is a form that once sprang from a highly fragmented culture, the culture of Jamaica, and now finds its way into the highly fragmented culture of urban Britain. The question that is still left open is: why does this happen? I think it is tempting to construct an identity from the empirical reality of Kingston, Jamaica and the empirical reality of Croydon, South London. Both empirical realities seem to produce similar cultures, as far as the music is concerned. However, I have chosen a rather traditional approach, concentrating on ‘close listening’, ignoring the power politics that surround cultural production. Future projects could reveal more in terms of the music’s socio-political context. One might not only come up with results that visualise the globalisation of the aesthetics of the periphery. One might also come up with conclusions which discern a globalised expansion of the terrors that worldwide peripheries are exposed to everyday.

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Works Cited Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001). Clark, Martin a.k.a. Blackdown, Interview with Shackleton, 30 November 2006, [accessed on 16 October 2007]. Kode 9 & The Spaceape, Dubstep Allstars Vol. 3 (London: Tempa, 2006). Markham, E.A., ed., Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 1989). Shackleton, Sound Boy’s Nuts Get Properly Ground Up EP (London: Skull, 2006). Shackleton & Appleblim, Sound Boy’s Bones Get Buried In The Dirt EP Vol. 1 (London: Skull, 2006). Stolzoff, Norman, Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Sub Soldiers presents Caspa, Ave It Vol. 1 (London: Sub Soldiers, 2007).

Film II: Borderlines and Contested Spaces

Sissy Helff

Scapes of Refuge in Multicultural Britain: Representing Refugees in Digital Docudrama and Mockumentary Within the context of the multicultural topography of present-day British culture, this article sets out to apply a transgeneric framework to the filmic representations of refugees, their experiences of loss and expatriation as well as the construction of modern identity in a multicultural nationstate. Working with the popular documentary formats of mockumentary and digital docudrama, I aim to analyse Michael Winterbottom’s mockumentary In This World and two short digital docudramas produced by refugees in a BBC workshop. It is argued that each format utilises a particular combination of narrative patterns, visual strategies and well-known imagery in order to set their refugee story into motion. By drawing on a variety of different refugee perspectives, it is postulated that an understanding of the societal debates articulated in the selected movies can only be achieved when read alongside or even placed within current debates of multicultural Britain.

1. Introduction In the advent of an increasingly visible multi-ethnic topography of British culture, mainstream institutions such as the BBC tend to act as the traditional flagships of national culture while becoming more and more involved in implementing multicultural discourse in media products.1 Within the British cultural landscape, not only television programmes, films and documentaries, but also digital stories 2 are gaining importance. Many of these represent ethnic autobiographies. 3 The stories which are mostly created and produced 1

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For a discussion on the relationship between mainstream British institutions and the British cultural landscape, see Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg, eds., Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film Since the 1990s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp.14-15. For a treatment of digital storytelling, interactivity and the format of digital life narrative, see my article ‘Narrating British-African Life in Digital Space’ (with Julie Woletz), in Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World, eds. John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam (Oxford and New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008 forthcoming). Mary Louise Pratt uses the term ‘autoethnography’ to describe how colonial subjects, in their various representations, interact with the coloniser’s terms. ‘Autoethnography’ hence critically addresses the dialectics of external and internal effects on modes of representation: see Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge: 1992), p.7. Since I view present-day multicultural Britain neither as a colonial nor postcolonial site, Pratt’s approach cannot be fully integrated in my analyses of contemporary filmic representation of refugees. However, it is suggested that ‘new’ power structures such as national cultural politics and aggressive politics of a global market intensely dictate cultural production. Accordingly, I read the image of the refugee as reflecting a negotiation process between artists and a specific demand for certain images and story lines.

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in BBC storytelling workshops are usually made available on BBC webpages and a special selection is also broadcast on television. All digital stories present ‘digital life narratives’, 4 which illuminate the personal level of storytelling by claiming that the stories presented mainly draw on personal archives. The format of digital life narrative radically represents the wellknown credo of ‘dramatising life’ which, since the late 1920s, has become a major cinematic-strand within documentary filmmaking. The very idea of dramatising life, which has often been reformulated, 5 has developed into a widely accepted creative outlet for the making of documentaries, mockumentaries 6 and digital life narratives. Thus it comes without great surprise that the BBC highlights this very credo when it explains the art of digital storytelling on its web sites: People create their own personal stories which reflect the richness and variety of life using photos from their family albums, favourite possessions, even long-lost treasures from their loft. Participants learn to craft their scripts, record their voices, lay down music and edit still images and video. 7

The films I have selected to compare with Michael Winterbottom’s mockumentary In This World (UK, 2002) are two short digital movies, Sokphal Din’s Never Give up Hope (Wales, unknown) 8 and Alpha Bah’s My

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As I have already argued elsewhere, the term digital life narration describes a new cultural practice of storytelling (on the part of the author) on the one hand, and a distinct usage of the media of film (on the part of the user/viewer) on the other. See my article ‘Narrating BritishAfrican Life in Digital Space’. As a reaction to the heavy exploitation of the documentary format during the second world war (and here the ‘propaganda movies’ of the Third Reich come to mind) a reformulation of this ‘dramatising life’ principle calls for a clear distinction between fictitious and factual materials. For a detailed discussion, see, for instance, Peter Zimmermann’s Hybride Formen: Neue Tendenzen im Dokumentarfilm (Munich: Goethe Institut, 2001), pp.6-7. Steven N. Lipkin, Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe define the mockumentary as follows: ‘Mockdocumentary is entirely fictional yet, unlike most docudrama, appropriates the lock of documentary much more closely […] Documentary aesthetics are appropriated mostly for stylistic reasons and to emphasize the humor […] Critique mock-documentaries engage more critically in the form’s inherent reflexivity towards factual discourse, and raise questions about both the documentary form and wider factual media practices’. ‘Docudrama and Mock-Documentary: Defining Terms, Proposing Canons’, in Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, ed. by Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2006), pp.11-26 (p.16). For a detailed historical background of digital storytelling and the aims of the BBC storytelling workshops, see the following website (25 January 2007), in particular the introduction ‘What is Digital Storytelling: Some Frequently Asked Questions’. The movie may be accessed on the following website: (25 January 2007).

Representing Refugees in Digital Docudrama and Mockumentary

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Perfect Moment (Cardiff, October 2002), 9 both of which were produced in BBC storytelling workshops and can be classified as docudramas. 10 In light of the refugee stories presented here, the distinction between such different formats as mockumentary and docudrama is central. Indeed, this essay will argue that format influences the flow of a story. While each format offers a particular set of narrative possibilities, it also sets rather rigid limitations on plot development. This is not to argue that narratives only function within the framework of their respective format. All format-bending approaches, such as widely successful hybrid formats, actually defy this argument. However, this essay suggests that analysing a story without considering its format as well as narrative and stylistic devices produces similarly problematic readings. Hence, this essay puts forward an approach that holds up structural devices against the backdrop of societal change and cultural politics. Assuming that cultural politics by and large reflect the socio-political correctives of British mainstream institutions, it is imperative to examine media products using an analytical sensibility that addresses this connection. Furthermore, as if to make this already multifaceted issue more complex, such films often employ formulas meant to satisfy the demands of a global market, a market that domesticates media products and literature alike for a mainly Western consumption. 11 This undeniably post-Marxist undertone proposes that neither identities nor emerging visual narratives can ever be securely fixed within a discursive context. While one might recognise structures that place a story in relation to discourses of hegemonic power such as race, nation, ethnicity, social class, gender, etc., it becomes clear that an individual’s needs motivate and drive a respective storyline. These needs, stimulated both by textual and extratextual impulses, ultimately translate into words, images and sounds. 12 This also goes for the rapidly growing field of ethnic autobiography. In his self-reflexive, investigative take on postcolonial literature and criticism in 9

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The movie may be accessed on the following web-site: (25 January 2007). Steven N. Lipkin, Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe characterise the format of docudrama in the following way: ‘The “docudrama” tends towards person-centered “biopics” and “social dramas” – individual stories illustrative of particular issues – popularized by the American film industry. “Docudrama” is used on both sides of the Atlantic, but would be recognized by most Americans as the key term’, p.16. For a full-length study of the connection between exoticist discourse and postcolonial literature, see Graham Huggan’s compelling The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). For a further distinction and discussion on textual and extratextual narrative motivations in refugee life writings, see Sissy Helff, ‘“Refugee Life Narrative”: The Disturbing Potential of a Genre and the Case of Mende Nazer’, in Special Issue Matatu: Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, eds. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff and Daniela Merolla (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 286-300.

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general and ethnic autobiography in particular, the postcolonial critic Graham Huggan tackles the perplexing relationship between the production and consumption of ethnic life writings and observes that such texts ‘signal the possibility of indirect access to “exotic” cultures whose differences are acknowledged and celebrated even as they are rendered amenable to a mainstream reading public’. 13 In his reflection on the connection between global economic demands and local cultural production, Huggan uses the image of an ongoing ‘struggle’ in order to explain the complex world of the literature and arts market with its conflicts and overlapping interests: The struggle that ensues is a function of global economic demands as well as local cultural interests; thus it is that [many of the so-called ‘Forth World’ writers] have succeeded in articulating their own highly distinctive life-narrative and histories while continuing to engage energetically with the global condition of postcoloniality in which their works, and lives, are enmeshed. 14

Homing in on the British cultural landscape, Barbara Korte and Klaus Peter Müller address similarly problematic questions but choose a different vantage point. In their reading of representational alternatives to stereotypical conceptions of a national British culture, they conclude that ‘[…] it is widely accepted that Britain is in the process of re-defining itself along flexible terms that derive from modern and contemporary identity concepts, concepts of a pluralized self, and this is increasingly expressed in contemporary writing.’ 15 This drives home the fact that a neat and definite explanation of the relationship between the shifting fields of cultural encounters, emerging stories and select generic devices is difficult in itself to obtain. Nevertheless, this critical acumen suggests that a self-reflexive approach to stories and the authentic voice they represent might provide deeper insights into the multilayered dimensions of ethnic autobiographies and their employed cultural codes. Such a perspective puts forward the argument that a critical approach might become particularly prolific if life stories and their articulations of lived experiences were read within a framework combining structural considerations with contextual approaches. In consequence, the representation of the protagonist and the narrative voice, the depiction of ostensibly authentic social spaces and the mapping of places gain importance within documentary narration. The emerging cinematic cartographies can be linked to what Huggan calls ‘literary cartography’ that ‘not only examines the function of maps in literary texts, but also explores the operations of a series of territorial strategies 13 14 15

Huggan, p.155. Ibid., p.176. Barbara Korte and Klaus Peter Müller, ‘Unity in Diversity Revisited: Complex Paradoxes Beyond Post-/Modernism’, in Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), pp.9-33 (p.16).


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that are implicitly or explicitly associated with maps’. 16 It is, as Huggan states, ‘the process of matching map to text, or text to map’ that ‘involves the reader in a comparative that may bring to the surface flaws or discrepancies in the process of mimetic representation’. 17 The resulting tension between mimetic representations of refugees’ lives and the imagination at work in the translation of places into a cinematic cartographical map challenges viewer’s ideas of space, representation and knowledge. In this context, we start to wonder to what extent depictions of real places underline the authentic character and tone of a story. And since most refugee stories revolve around protagonists’ ideas of migration, their various journeys, and attempts of seeking refuge, audiences often find themselves confronted with an individual’s personal fate and fantasies. In light of this, one can conceive that a differentiated and format-sensitive reading of such stories is required in order to locate and disclose internal and external narrative motivations. In order to first provide a picture of what such a reading might produce, however, it is essential to view the selected movies not only within the framework of plot developments, visual narrative devices and format, but also against the backdrop of cultural politics as expressed in funding schemes of British political and cultural institutions, such as the Arts Council of England, the British Film Institute, the Film Council, the BBC and Channel 4.

2. Inventing the Lives of Refugees in a Mockumentary Mode In numerous ways, Michael Winterbottom’s award-winning mockumentary 18 invests in the transfer of documentary aesthetics to fiction film, which is becoming increasingly commonplace in contemporary film. The opening sequence of In This World utilises documentary narrative devices when it introduces the audience to the actual setting of the movie: the Shamahtoo Refugee Camp in Pakistan. This geographical information is provided in radiantly coloured lettering before a voiceover draws the audience’s attention to the story of Afghan refugees in general and the life of the young Afghan Jamal in particular. This combination of ‘authentic pictures’ and vibrant lettering is an example of the transfer of documentary aesthetics to fictitious narration because it playfully highlights the narrative and imaginary possibilities of the mockumentary. The film is about the story of Jamal, who flees with his older

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17 18

Graham Huggan, Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p.31. Ibid., p.22. Winterbottom’s In This World was awarded the Golden Bear at the 53rd Internationale Filmfestspiele in Berlin.

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cousin Enayat from a refugee camp in Pakistan to cross Turkey, Italy, and France before he arrives in the city of London. Jamal manages to survive the dangerous trip, but his cousin dies of suffocation when both are locked in a freight container on a ship bound for Italy. In an investigative journalistic manner, the omniscient narrator opens the movie in a factually entertaining mode: 53 000 Afghan refugees live in Shamshatoo Camp at the city of Peshawar in Pakistan. The first arrived in 1979 fleeing the Soviet invasion of their country. The most recent came to escape a US-led bombing campaign which began on October 7th, 2001. Many of these children are born here, but Jamal [the protagonist] is an orphan, he works at a brick factory and gets paid less than a dollar per day. It is estimated that 7.9 billion dollars were spent on bombing Afghanistan in 2001. Spending on refugees is far less generous. The daily food ration is 240 grams of wheat flour, 25 grams of vegetable oil and 60 grams of poultry. Every family is given a tent, a plastic sheet, a few blankets and one stove. 19

The narrator draws extensively on meticulous information by providing not only a record of social and historical details but, and this is even more important, a list of facts that include even individual rations of different food items. Thus, the movie positions itself generically from the very start. The purpose in the opening sequence is to establish a reliable and realistic picture of the Afghan refugees’ situation in Pakistan. By doing so, the conventions of documentary film are being placed in the service of critical examination of a fictional subject. In order to be read correctly, In This World relies upon the viewer’s knowledge of both the tradition of documentary filmmaking and the social situation of refugees. This is probably why the film invests so much in the photographic portrayal of refugee children, especially in the opening sequences, reminding the informed audience of the striking photographic work of the Brazilian photojournalist-cum-artist Sebastio Salgado. Similar to Salgado’s photo collection The Children: Refugees and Migrants, 20 which consists of nearly one hundred photographs portraying refugee and migrant children, Winterbottom’s film represents migrants, refugees, and displaced children in detention and refugee camps in remote places. This profoundly intertextual setting presupposes once more an informed audience and thus reinforces the following statement by Steven N. Lipkin, Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe: Mock-documentary talks to a ‘knowing’ audience even more directly than the docudrama. It is assumed that audiences will be able to distinguish between fact and fiction in media representation and thereby to participate in the inherent playfulness of the form. What marks the mock-documentary out from the ‘hoax’ or ‘fake’ is this contract set up between producer

19 20

Michael Winterbottom, In This World (UK, 2002). My transcription of the sequence. Sebastio Salgado, The Children: Refugees and Migrants (New York: Aperture, 2000).


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and audience. It requires the audience to watch as if at a documentary presentation, but in the full knowledge of an actual fictional status. 21

Such a conscious choice of format allows a broader creative realm, which in turn provides greater artistic freedom to invent refugees’ and asylum seekers’ stories outside political schemes and particular national motivations. Openly and consciously playing with the imaginary, the format provides a testing ground for the different representations of refugees. It is within this format that all claims of truth might be light-heartedly thrown overboard, which, as a kind of countermove, generates a buffer zone for the narration. This dialectics might therefore create an open space for speaking out unpleasant truths. The synthesis between fiction and non-fiction crystallises particularly well in the movie’s theme of travel, which includes several references to ethnographic film and visual travelogues. 22 The theme of travel emerges on two levels: First, in long distance shots visualising the hazardous overland trip of the two young men, and second, when the various sections of their trip are translated into travel routes which the audience can follow on a map. While the young traveller’s itinerary is neatly mapped out for the audience, neither Jamal nor his older cousin Enayat make use of a map at any point in time in the story. It can be argued that within Winterbottom’s mockumentary, spatial practices work on different narrative levels: on the one hand, on the plot level when the two protagonists cross borders, and on the other, on a formal level in the combination of documentary pictures and paratextual devices. By drawing so intensely on mapping strategies, Winterbottom’s film plays with modes of ethnographic narration. The anthropologist Nancy Schmidt describes the general and basic outline of mapping devices as a conscious predominance of cultural information within a text. 23 However, by moving the direct mapping of the journey and hence the production of a topographical account to a paratextual level, the mockumentary, in a Brechtian sense, reminds the audience of its own constructedness. This narrative practice hinders the audience from being completely drawn into the story. The tension emerging from telling fictitious life stories while virtually following refugees’ routes on a topographical map visualises the ‘realness’ of refugees’ journeys on a metaphorical level. It can be argued, therefore, that this mapping strategy is another way of bringing the fate and the stories of asylum seekers back into the audience’s view and lifeworld.

21 22

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Lipkin and others, p.17. For more on recent perspectives on ethnographic film and visual travelogues, see the special edition ‘Travelogues and Travel Films’ in Visual Anthropology 15.1 (2002). See Nancy Schmidt’s ‘The Nature of Ethnographic Fiction: A Further Inquiry’, in Anthropology and Human Quarterly (1981), 8-18.

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3. Working Refugees’ Lives into Digital Docudrama The two short digital movies Never Give Up Hope and My Perfect Moment, unlike Winterbottom’s mockumentary, are life narratives that vividly play with the format of the documentary drama, or docudrama. They combine documentary content with fictional form, often by using documentary as well as dramatic film devices. These particular docudramas are introduced prior to viewing by an abbreviated selection of cuts and stills of the narrative. This selection does not serve as a synopsis, but as a trailer of the film. Accordingly, the two narrator-protagonists, Sokphal Din and Alpha Bah, introduce their stories in both a documentary and dramatic way. When Sokphal Din recalls the disaster of war and mental and physical terror which made him leave Cambodia and reduced him to an asylum seeker fleeing to Great Britain, in his introductory blurb viewers are inclined to picture the scenes of horror in their minds. His cryptic sentences seem particularly apt for underlining the tragedy of these dangerous experiences: ‘We went back to Phnom Penh, but nothing [was] there. All family disappeared, nothing left.’ 24 Bah, by contrast, opens his narrative on a positive note by describing his arrival in Great Britain as a step toward his new life, in which everything starts changing for the better, as follows: ‘When I first arrived in London I volunteered my time as a translator. When I moved to Cardiff I left my telephone number for anyone that might need it. I was quite shocked when I answered that special call.’ 25 Narrative patterns of ethnic life writing also dominate the digital docudramas. When the digital movies start, both storytellers introduce themselves as autodiegetic narrators, providing their biographical information: ‘I [Sokphal Din] grew up in Phnom Penh wanting to be a doctor, but in 1975 that was all taken away from me, when we were forced out of our house and away from our home at gunpoint’. In a similar vein, Alpha Bah starts his story with ‘My Name is Alpha Bah’ before the narrative moves on to illuminate his comfortable, middle-class life before the rebels invaded Freetown. Din and Bah were supported by film professionals in the creation of their storyboards and the production of their short digital movies. The threeminute movies are in fact slide shows made out of private media artefacts. Although both stories are first-person narratives, the movies never show the actual telling of the story. However, it appears obvious that the voiceover is always spoken by the author/producer, as language particularities in pronun-

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The introductory blurb to Sokphal Din’s movie can be found in the section ‘Family Histories’ (25 January 2007). The introductory blurb to Alpha Bah’s movie can be found at the following source on the Internet: (25 January 2007).


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ciation and small mistakes are not corrected. Both the use of personal archives and the ‘authentic voice’ of the author/producer seem to guarantee the truthfulness and authenticity of each story. Furthermore, the voiceover narration is also provided in a transcript for each short movie, and small errors remain uncorrected there as well. While this might all be part of an intended aesthetics, it ultimately adds to the credibility of the stories. Against this background, both stories unfold a tragedy which seems even more genuine when the narrators start to focus on their experiences of flight. Bah decides to leave his family and job behind and escapes his homeland in the middle of the night by crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a little boat. Finally he arrives in a refugee camp in London, UK, where he starts to work as a translator. When he is placed in Wales, he leaves behind his mobile number in case of an emergency. One day he receives a call from a young woman from Sierra Leone who has left her country with her two children. Within the first few minutes of the call a strange familiarity embraces the two speakers and Bah realises that the voice of the woman on the phone belongs to his long-lost wife. With the support of help workers, the family is eventually reunited and this reunion marks the perfect moment in Bah’s life. Bah’s life story gets ‘uncannily’ close to the viewer because his film works with an intriguing combination of a documentary style, a fact-based narration and a startlingly private tone. Throughout the plots, both narrators give their stories real faces: their own and those of their loved ones. Consequently, both narrators not only draw upon personal pictures, but also a homodiegetic narrative device in order to underline the personal and authentic tone of their movies. Such visual and oral narrative techniques suggest first-hand stories and thus ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ refugee experiences. This narrative quality is further enforced in Bah’s film through documentary devices: two close-ups of newspaper articles announcing the reunion of the Bah family with photographs and bold black headlines. Bah’s story is also framed by other paratextual elements: two brief sequences presenting an opening headline and the final credits in which he thanks aid workers for their part in the family’s reunion. Both sequences weave together white lettering against a black background and thus playfully reverse the newspaper aesthetics of black ink on white paper. By employing this particular framework, the whole story appears to gain an ostensibly objective shape. In contrast with such documentary modes of narration, the sequences depicting the narrators’ actual escapes from their home countries make use of more dramatic narrative technique. Din’s movie invests relatively little in ‘special effects’ (he uses the fading of a picture from lighter to darker

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colouring in order to imply the passing of time) and focuses rather on creating dramatic tension through speech: Life didn’t get any better in Cambodia under Vietnamese rule. In 1983, we decided to escape for a better future and we hope[d] to find my father. We walked all night through mine fields, swim [swam] across river and heavy rain and all the time very frightened. My mother was in so much pain, she couldn’t go on anymore. She told me to carry on without her, but I wouldn’t go. I wasn’t going to lose my mother as well. We arrived at refugee camp on Thai border. The camp was hard, but at least we had freedom from Pol Pot and the Vietnamese. Through the Red Cross we came to England in 1987 to set up home for the first time for 12 years. That was such a happy day. 26

Conversely, Bah’s narrative relies more on special effects by combining various experimental shots with his haunting story of seeking refuge. All of Bah’s flight scenes show his escape as distorted and moving shots of a tile floor taken by a digital camera with the sound of shoes on the tiles from the off. This dramatic film style continues with distorted, unrecognisable images, in digital storytelling often referred to as ‘invented pictures’, 27 with an overlaid title while Bah talks about the violent local military forces and their ‘Operation: No Living Thing’. 28 In the next scene, the camera zooms out on to still water while Bah’s voice tells in a voiceover that he left his country in a small boat during the night, thinking this would cost him his life. The words ‘Worth Trying’ roll across the screen with the still water as a background while Bah narrates them. This composition of image and sound suggests a deeper metaphorical meaning and reflects danger and fear. By depicting the still water in this light, Bah’s rough and traumatic experiences of travelling across the Atlantic Ocean come alive. At this moment a creative tension between the narrative voice and the film scene emerges. The audience starts to understand that the sea, in Bah’s film, can only function as a metaphor for an individual story that comes alive in Bah’s re-memorisation and storytelling. It is clear to the audience that the peaceful and almost romantic picture of the harbour in Bah’s movie depicts an intimate facet of a refugee’s arrival. It is obvious that there are no personal photos portraying Bah’s actual getaway and arrival. Instead, the filmic devices rather represent the protagonist’s emotions in a way that combines a voiceover with still or moving images, generating a personal, albeit ‘highly imaginary’ visual-narrative. Through these 26

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The transcript of Sokphal Din’s movie can be found at the following source on the Internet: (25 January 2007). Joe Lambert, Digital Storytelling: Cookbook and Traveling Companion. Produced by the Center for Digital Storytelling (Berkeley, CA: Digital Diner Press, 2003). Version 4.0, and (1 March 2006), p.18. The transcript of Bah’s movie can be found at the following source on the Internet: (25 January 2007).


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scenes, which are filmed in Cardiff, the movie connects the motif of the arriving refugee with a ‘real’ locality and thus makes the existence of refugees in Wales visible by means of invented pictures. 29 In the context of these refugee docudramas, the unreliable moving images used condense the homodiegetic narrator’s experiences of flight and refuge and translate painful feelings into a universal cinematic language. Din’s narrative, by contrast, presents a digital family photo album through which he seeks to honour his dead mother. This motivation becomes clear in a final shot showing a photograph of his mother together with the dedication ‘In Memory of My Mother’. This impetus is pointed out again in the extrafilmic material of an interview in which he describes what effect he had in mind when he produced the film: ‘I believe when my sister and brother see this film, it will make them remember what we had been through. It will also to put my family closer together and stronger.’30 No doubt Sokphal Din and Alpha Bah’s docudramas use emotional narrative patterns in order to get their stories across to the audience. Both movies end on a very positive note. Bah is finally reunited with his long lost family and Din experiences Great Britain as his and his families’ place of refuge. Thus he finally concludes: ‘Even though my childhood was destroyed, and my future totally different, all my experiences have made me a stronger person.’ Against the backdrop of similar catastrophes in Cambodia and Sierra Leone, both films narrate intimate reflections on some of the most traumatic and most perfect moments in the lives of the narrator-protagonists. In regard to cultural politics, it is important that both movies close on an optimistic note. My optimism, however, dwindled when I started browsing through different kinds of BBC-produced digital life narratives dealing with multi-ethnic British society. Further some suspicion lingered when I did not come across any digital life narratives which set into motion a refugee or migrant world in contemporary Britain that went beyond this affirmative scheme. 31 The homogeneity of such refugee storyboards is striking and not easily explained. While the linearity of the digital refugee docudrama is surely connected to the actual survival of a refugee and his or her ability to tell a 29

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For further discussions of invented pictures and other modes for constructing ‘reliable stories’ by utilising unreliable narration in postcolonial/transcultural literature and film, see Sissy Helff’s ‘Signs Taken For Truth: Orchestrating Transcultural Aesthetic through Narrative Unreliability’, in Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English, vol. 29 (Trier: WVT, 2007), pp.277-288, and ‘Lost in Lantana: Unreliable Narration and Troubled Masculinities’, HJEAS Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 12.1-2 (Spring-Autumn 2006), 297-308. Interview with the story-teller: (25 January 2007). This research was conducted between November 2006 and January 2007.

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story, it still does not explain why the stories always show a ‘perfect’ life in Britain. The question remains whether these refugee storyboards exemplify the reach of highly functional control mechanisms in the cultural politics of many public media operations. In his pilot study on the image portrayed in the media of refugees, especially in broadsheet newspaper, and its relationship to the policy process, the British sociologist, Ronald Kaye reaffirms the general hypothesis of this essay when he states ‘that stereotyping of refugee and asylum seekers is occurring in many parts of the European media’. And he is certainly correct to subsequently suggest that while the issue of refugees and asylum seekers remains contestable in the political arena, and therefore susceptible to the vagaries of political competition, the scapegoat of refugees and asylum seekers by politicians, aided and abetted either consciously or unconsciously by parts of the media, will continue. The probable outcome is likely to be devalued and undermined, unless governments can be persuaded of the potentially positive contribution that refugees and asylum seekers can make. 32

It is tempting to read the BBC digital docudramas and their representation of the refugee protagonist-narrators as such potentially ‘positive’ contributions to the British media landscape. Sadly, Roland Kaye’s call for further studies on the portrayal of the refugee is still greatly lacking more than a decade later. Therefore, a major study on the cinematic representation of asylum seekers and refugees in British television, and I would include documentary narratives and film, still remains to be written.

4. Stereotopia: Uses and Abuses of the Image of the Refugee The refugee stories in both docudramas discussed here do not correspond to the images of suffering and dying refugees that, through the media, have become so ingrained in our psyche. Unlike these news and media images, the two docudramas here depict arrival in the host country in a positive light, suggesting a new beginning for the displaced person and a way of getting back to ‘normal life’. Especially the mapping of Bah’s new home Cardiff in My Perfect Moment conflicts with the usual hard-luck story of the suffering and homeless refugee. Sokphal Din’s Never Give Up Hope also points out the positive turn in the life of the Din family since their arrival in Great Britain. In this respect, both movies do not endorse the conventions of commonly known refugee narratives; the happy ending appears somehow too good to be true, and too harmonious to represent the tragic life of the average asylum seeker. 32

Ronald Kaye, ‘Redefining the Refugee: The UK Media Portrayal of Asylum Seekers’, in The New Migration in Europe: Social Constructions and Social Realities, ed. by Khalid Koser and Helma Lutz (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) pp.163-182 (p.180).


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Michael Winterbottom’s haunting images of refugees suffocating in steel containers are in stark contrast to those presented in the docudramas. The trope of arrival in In This World thus triggers alternative plotlines in the minds of viewers while getting closer to the common-place media coverage of refugees. The refugee story represented in the media appeals to viewers’ emotions through the motif of the universal trauma of personal loss through separation from one’s family, 33 and it is exactly this trope which is overcome in both digital stories. Viewers of both genres are confronted with their own perception of narrative truth and ostensibly authentic storytelling. It is here that the difference between mockumentary and digital docudrama becomes apparent because the latter makes use of feedback options in which users are asked to interact by sending their comments on the digital life narration. A user who introduces himself as ‘Paul Stewart from Reading’ comments for instance on Din’s story in the following way: ‘Your story made me feel really strong, compared to our society and what happened to you. We would like to know more of your story.’ 34 This interaction actually integrates reader’s responses into the act of reading because some users might start reading the feedback before they watch the digital movie. With this in mind, Never Give up Hope and My Perfect Moment could be seen as describing both an individual’s search for his story as well as the fabrication of the fate of refugees in Britain. In contrast to Winterbottom’s significant use of the map to narrate and follow the protagonists’ journey from Pakistan to Great Britain, echoing such well-known scenes as the opening sequence of Casablanca (1942), both digital movies are without such cartographical representations of dangerous travel. In this respect, the digital life narratives present journeys and histories of which the documentation was and, to some extent, still is lost to us through the turmoil of war. The ‘fictitious’ elements taken from Wales such as the harbour and the tile floor eventually enable Bah to narrate and visually map his story while Din’s storytelling exclusively relies on private mementos depicting ostensibly ‘authentic’ places in Cambodia, Vietnam and Great Britain. Both digital refugee life narratives show, in fact, very little of refugees’ lives in Great Britain. Rather they depict the protagonists’ lives in a state-sponsored multicultural disguise. In this context Heide Safiza Mirza’s critical analysis of 33

34

See, for example, recent refugee narratives such as Mende Nazaer’s Slave (London: Virago, 2004), Francis Bok’s Escape from Slavery (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2003) and Henriette Akofa’s Keine Zeit für Tränen: Mein Leben als Sklavin in Paris (Munich: Ullstein, 2001). Comments on Sokphal Din’s story are posted on: (25 January 2007).

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the social and cultural texture of British society in regard to belonging to or being excluded from an imaginary Britishness based on ethnicity seems not to be an issue in the affirmative multicultural make-up presented in the films. 35 Whereas Mirza points out that racism is still an integral part of today’s Scottish, English and Welsh identity politics, 36 these movies do not point to these issues directly. Nevertheless, both digital life narratives openly address different forms of racisms in Cambodia and in Sierra Leone. While introducing the difficult political situations in both protagonist-narrators’ home countries in order to highlight their need to escape, their narrated lives remain somehow indistinct, static and strangely lifeless in the host country. It seems as if Din and Bah embrace their new lives without having to face greater difficulties and thus have found their scapes of refuge. However, such happy ends challenge the reliability of the stories and underline the BBC’s current function as an affirmative translator of cultural difference within multicultural Britain. In this respect, the figure of the refugee, as represented in the two digital docudramas, is turned into an emblem of successful lifemaking in multicultural British society. In light of this statement, the question remains whether the powerful credo of ‘dramatising life’, as introduced in the 1920s, can be seen as a strategy of cultural politics. If this is the case, then the image of the refugee and his or her represented life story in BBC digital docudramas perfectly illustrates a mainstreaming tendency which has already left its traces on cultural works by Black and Asian Britons: Undeniably, Britain still is a society in which racism and racial discrimination exist. At the same time, however, there is now a general cultural climate - manifested especially in Britain’s urban regions, its official cultural politics and its media landscape - marked by an enhanced awareness and positive evaluation of cultural diversity and facilitating minority access to its main sites of cultural mediation. 37

The emerging cultural topography of Britain projected by the digital life narrations selected here thus unquestionably confronts readers with dimensions of cultural mediation, especially in the movies’ strategic and staged authenticities. In this way, these docudramas prove to be particularly adept at blowing the horn of seeing a multicultural British society as a kind of refuge by rendering personal stories as multicultural and to some degree even transcultural artefacts. Winterbottom’s mockumentary, in contrast, fortunately goes astray in its representation of multicultural British society by investing in a portrayal of the dislocation and the non-place of illegal travellers within

35 36 37

See Heide Safia Mirza, ed. Black British Feminism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1997). Ibid., p.3. Korte and Sternberg, p.9.


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Western societies. 38 In doing so, the mockumentary In This World punctures the genre of refugee life narration by intrepidly inventing and presenting the fictional refugee characters’ life stories in such a ‘reliable’ way, in terms of narrative technique, that the audience is prone to take the invented story for real. What we are left with then, I would suggest, is a critical awareness that cultural products do indeed at times reflect and celebrate cultural politics on the plot level as well as in their specific usages of format. Seen from this angle, it seems problematic to analyse cultural works using a semiotic approach that does not consider the extratextual world as the main source of information. Thus, a critical position in which viewers take up the task of analysing inclusionary and exclusionary practices of increasingly globalised societies and cultural productions is as much needed today as it was imperative in the advent of postcolonial criticism.

Works Cited Akofa, Henriette, Keine Zeit für Tränen: Mein Leben als Sklavin in Paris (Munich: Ullstein, 2001). Binder, Susanne and Jelena Toši, eds., Refugee Studies and Politics: Human Dimensions and Research Perspectives (Vienna: WUV, 2002). Bok, Francis, Escape from Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003). Helff, Sissy, ‘Lost in Lantana: Unreliable Narration and Troubled Masculinities’, HJEAS Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 12.1-2 (Spring-Autumn 2006), 297-308. ——. ‘Signs Taken For Truth: Orchestrating Transcultural Aesthetic through Narrative Unreliability’, in Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English, vol. 29, ed. by Sabine Volk-Birke and Julia Lippert (Trier: WVT, 2007) pp.277-288. ——. ‘Refugee Life Narrative: The Disturbing Potential of a Genre and the Case of Mende Nazer’, in Special Issue Matatu: Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. by Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff and Daniela Merolla (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), pp.286-300. Helff, Sissy and Julie Woletz, ‘Narrating British-African Life in Digital Space’, in Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World, ed. by John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam (Oxford and New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008 forthcoming). 38

The film’s narrative deterritorialisation works on two levels: first, it points to the limitations of multicultural societies, and second, it confines the boundaries of documentary narration to the narrative plane in order to negotiate them.

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Hockings, Paul, ed., Visual Anthropology Special 15.1 (Travelogues and Travel Films. January - March 2002). Huggan, Graham, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). ——. Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). Kaye, Ron, ‘Redefining the Refugee: The UK Media Portrayal of Asylum Seekers’, in The New Migration in Europe: Social Constructions and Social Realities, ed. by Khalid Koser and Helma Lutz (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) pp.163-182. Korte, Barbara, and Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream: Black and Asian British Film Since the 1990s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004). Korte, Barbara, and Klaus Peter Müller, ‘Unity in Diversity Revisited: Complex Paradoxes Beyond Post-/Modernism’, in Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s, ed. by Korte and Müller (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), pp.9-33. Lambert, Joe, Digital Storytelling: Cookbook and Travelling Companion. Produced by the Center for Digital Storytelling (Berkeley, CA: Digital Diner Press, 2003). Lipkin Steven N., Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe, ‘Docudrama and MockDocumentary: Defining Terms, Proposing Canons’, in Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, ed. by Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2006), pp.11-26. MacDougall, David, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Mirza, Heide Safia, ed., Black British Feminism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1997). Nazer, Mende and Damien Lewis, Slave: The True Story of a Girl’s Lost Childhood and Her Fight for Survival (London: Virago, 2004). Nichols, Bill, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge: 1992). Rhodes, Gary D. and John Parris Springer, eds., Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2006).


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Schmidt, Nancy. ‘The Nature of Ethnographic Fiction: A Further Inquiry’, Anthropology and Human Quarterly (1981), 8-18. Salgado, Sebastio, The Children: Refugees and Migrants (New York: Aperture, 2000). Winterbottom, Michael, dir., In This World (UK 2002). Zimmermann, Peter, Hybride Formen: Neue Tendenzen im Dokumentarfilm (Munich: Goethe Institut, 2001). Internet Sources: [accessed on 1 March 2006]. [accessed on 25 January 2007]. [accessed on 25 January 2007]. [accessed on 25 January 2007]. [accessed on 25 January 2007]. [accessed on 25 January 2007].

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‘If you’re not on paper, you don’t exist’: Depictions of Illegal Immigration and Asylum in Film – on Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002) and Code 46 (2003) In this paper I compare two films by British director Michael Winterbottom (b.1961). Both In This World (2002) and Code 46 (2003) deal with, in Winterbottom’s own words, ‘people having no papers and trying to travel from one place to another and the problems that creates’. Yet, the films are made in two very different genres – the former is a pared-down documentary drama shot on digital video (DV) that adopts a mimetic mode of representation, chronicling the desperate journey undertaken by two Afghan refugees from Pakistan to London, whereas the latter is a U.S.$ 7.5 million science-fiction futuristic love story set in a world divided into megacities and desert slums, where travellers need special papelles (passports or visas with insurance) to travel between cities. This paper will thus look at the depiction of the issues of ‘illegal’ immigration, political and economic asylum, exile and displacement in these two provocative films and ask how convincingly they use two different modes of representation – documentary realism versus science-fictional allegory – to challenge the widespread media coverage of immigration and asylum issues, thus offering a means of critiquing the culture of fear and paranoia in Britain’s socio-political climate today as disseminated by these dominant discourses.

1. Introduction The transition into the new millennium has seen a heightened urgency to deal with an issue that remains a priority on the agenda of governmental and legislative bodies in the United Kingdom – that of immigration. Since their election in 1997, New Labour has enacted a two-pronged approach in a concerted effort to regulate the number of immigrants coming into the country. On the one hand, their policy concerning skilled economic migrants has been liberalised to encourage the influx of people who are needed to fill job vacancies, hence fulfilling purely utilitarian purposes. On the other hand, the government has imposed repressive, almost draconian, restrictions on people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. Asylum seekers who make claim to rights provided for in the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees or the European Convention on Human Rights are still subjected to strict procedures of application once they reach British soil, and the processing of these applications can take anything up to three years or more. The slogan of New Labour’s 1998 white paper on immigration policy, Fairer, Faster and Firmer – A Modern Approach to Immigration and Asylum, which sought to clear the backlog of asylum applications under Conservative rule, effectively did little to alleviate the problem. Interestingly, however, the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001) gave rise to a

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renewed urgency for a re-thinking of British immigration policy and effectively framed the immigration debate within a new discourse of ‘managed migration’. This term was coined in a second white paper specifically on the immigration issue published in February 2002, with a title no less ambiguous than the previous one: Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain. The paper contained the essence of what was to become New Labour’s ‘new’ approach to immigration, a strategy of ‘managed migration’ within the context of a global economy. As Paragraph 1.3 on page 23 of the white paper states: ‘Managing’ migration means having an orderly, organised and enforceable system of entry. It also means managing post-entry integration and inclusion in the economy and society, helping migrants to find their feet, and enabling members of the existing population to welcome them into their communities. 1

The response of the British public to New Labour’s policy of ‘managed migration’, however, has been ambivalent, ranging from scepticism to anxiety, due largely to the discourse of fear and paranoia proliferated by the media with regard to issues of immigration (especially illegal immigration) and asylum, more so than from direct contact with immigrant communities. In a survey by MORI UK (Market and Opinion Research International) in 2003, for example, the greatest levels of phobia and anxiety were found to be in towns and districts of cities where immigrant infiltration of local communities was low or even non-existent. In contrast, areas which had experienced significant levels of immigration appeared to harbour least misgivings about its potential outcomes. As part of its ‘managed migration’ scheme, a parallel attempt to clamp down on illegal entry into Britain has recently been made in the form of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act (2006) which issues severe penalties against employers who illegally hire people without work permits, documentation or papers. Similarly, in a bid to speed up the deportation and removal of foreign nationals (including asylum seekers) from British prisons, Home Secretary Charles Clarke declared in his ministerial statement in April 2006: My aim is to ensure that the foreign national population is managed effectively and proactively, that the number of people held in prisons under immigration powers is kept to the absolute minimum and that we have the sentencing powers and identification referral and caseworking systems in place to consider and action deportation procedures for every foreign national prisoner

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Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain. Nationality, immigration & asylum white paper, published 7 February 2002. Available on the internet at .

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who has committed a serious crime, and that we are in a position to effect removal at the earliest point of release. 2

Current figures from the Home Office reveal that every year, between 3,500 and 5,000 asylum seekers (principal applicants and their dependents) are deported. These are only the official figures for those who have actually made applications on paper to remain in Britain. The number of illegal immigrants who arrive in the country and remain invisible, without existing on paper, lies between 310,000 and 570,000 (Immigration minister Tony McNulty, 2006). As of January 2007, in an effort to further curb the number of illegal immigrants, members of the public have been able to, for the first time, report illegal workers and illegal immigrants using the free ‘Crimestoppers’ telephone line. In conjunction with this move is the government’s pledge to double the budget for deportations to nearly £300 million and the planned creation of 650 extra detention spaces for illegal immigrants by the end of 2007. With these statistics in mind, it is not surprising that, in the last few years, the genre of film has witnessed a responding urge to address the issues of political and economic asylum and illegal immigration within a different framework. 3 In seeking to present an alternative discourse to that proliferated by politicians and the media, and hence implicitly offering a means of critiquing the unwarranted paranoia and public anxiety surrounding these issues, these films attempt to give voice to the subaltern, thereby establishing a position from which the latter, in Spivak’s famous phrase, can speak. 4 In 2

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Source: (20 July 2007). Other films that deal with illegal immigration include ‘Dirty Pretty Things’, (UK, 2002, dir. Stephen Frears, a film about the clandestine sale of illegal immigrants’ body parts in exchange for British passports), ‘Et après’ (‘And After’) (Morocco, 2000, dir. Mohammed Ismail) set in Northern Morocco, which tackles the social problems of the prostitution and marginalisation of the woman, as well as clandestine immigration, ‘La Promesse’, (Belgium, 1996, dir. JeanPierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne) (Norsk title: ‘Løftet’) a film about illegal immigration and black labour in contemporary Belgium, and ‘Mare Nostrum’ (1993, dir. Stefano Mencherini) a powerful documentary about illegal immigrants and stowaways who finally reach the shores of Italy. The documentary also portrays the everyday life of ‘regulars’, those who are entitled to visas but still have to live as stowaways due to the iniquities and delays in the enforcement of the law. 2006 also saw the release of ‘What Means Motley?’, (2006, dir. John Riley and John Ketchum) an Irish-Romanian comedy about illegal immigration from Eastern to Western Europe. The film is a fictional account based on a real event in 1999 when, in a daring immigration scam, a group of 41 desperate Romanians disguised themselves as a folk choir and applied by post to take part in a little-known choral festival in Sligo, Ireland. The Irish consulate handed out the visas, but once the Romanians arrived in Dublin, some of them applied for asylum, and others simply ‘vanished’ without a trace. I am, of course, referring to Gayatri Spivak’s essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1988), pp.275-280.

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this paper, I will ask the question of how this is carried out, and to what end, by looking specifically at two films by British director Michael Winterbottom – In this World, a harrowing semi-fictional documentation of the clandestine journey that two Afghan refugees make to seek a better life in Britain, and its companion piece, Code 46, a science-fiction love story where an illegitimate relationship develops between an investigator of illicit people smuggling rings and an ex-illegal immigrant who forges travel visas. The question arises as to whether, and to what extent, Winterbottom circumvents the problems that Spivak suggests in her essay, namely that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate the condition of the subaltern by giving them collective speech will invariably encounter the difficulty of, first, an assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people (hence erasing the socio-political and cultural differences between immigrants) and, second, a dependence on Western intellectuals to speak for the subaltern rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. By using very disparate modes of representation – documentary realism versus science-fictional allegory – these two films attempt to create two different methods of critiquing the widespread fear and paranoia rampant in the socio-political climate in Britain with regard to the issue of illegal immigration and asylum. The first method, as exemplified by the realistic mode of the documentary film, works by mimetically representing the grim realities and hardships that immigrants encounter on their journey to the host country, hence seeking to criticise prevalent intolerant attitudes towards immigration. The second method, as embodied in the allegorical mode of a science-fiction love story, seeks to deconstruct those attitudes altogether by questioning the basic ethical tenets of human behaviour, questioning what gives one group of people the right to regulate and police the movements of another, and sentimentally presents love as a universal force that ultimately transcends all borders and boundaries.

2. Smooth Border-Crossings? Not In This World Shot in documentary-style on DV (digital video), In This World is a fictional account of two Afghan refugees who make their way from the Shamshatoo refugee camp in the Peshawar region of Pakistan that borders Afghanistan, to London. The line between fact and fiction is blurred, however, by the use of realistic film devices such as close-ups, unsteady tracking sequences, nightshot, as well as the lack of conventional three-point lighting and camera filters, all of which create a level of immediacy and urgency as well as reflect/mirror the unsettled nature of the journey undertaken. The inspiration for the film arose partly as a result of the British general election in 2001 when the topic of asylum and immigration was a pressing issue for all political parties in the


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aftermath of a horrendous incident in Dover in the U.K. in June 2000, in which 58 Chinese immigrants were found suffocated to death in a shipping container that had transported them from China to England. Winterbottom and his longtime producer Andrew Eaton therefore wanted to make a film that would depict the painstaking efforts that people made to come to the U.K. by reconstructing the asylum seeker’s journey in detail. When research for the film script was being carried out, scriptwriter Toni Grisoni combed through hundreds of first-hand accounts by illegal immigrants. Many had crossed into the U.K. via the refugee camp at Sangatte, 5 France, located near the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. Grisoni and associate producer Fiona Neilson went to visit the camp; though denied permission to enter, they managed to sneak in and draw first-hand accounts from the refugees staying there. Back in London, Grisoni and Neilson met with young Afghan men who had been smuggled into the U.K. from Afghanistan and Pakistan. In listening to and recording their accounts, Grisoni recalls that it was difficult to get the actual details of the journeys from these men, because the length and tedium of these journeys, the anxiety and disorientation they felt due to being bundled in and out of cars, trucks, and boats made it problematic to recall the specifics of their whereabouts or their progress. As one refugee being interviewed put it, ‘[y]ou don’t know what country you’re in; you just want to get it over with. It [the horror of the journey] was something to be forgotten’. 6 The terror of the journey is, of course, not easily forgotten, and In This World’s unflinching documentation of each stage of the two male protagonists’ journey affirms this. The plot of the film is fairly straightforward. It is February 2002, in the northwest province of Peshawar, Pakistan, near the Afghan border. Sixteen-year-old Jamal, an orphan, lives in the Shamshatoo refugee camp and earns less than $1 a day working in a brick factory. Jamal’s older cousin, Enayat, lives in the bustling heart of Peshawar, where he works at his family’s market stall. Enayat’s uncle decides to send him to London, where his prospects will be brighter. Jamal knows a man who can facilitate the journey, whom he later introduces to the family. Jamal is also quick to point out that since Enayat doesn’t speak English, he will need a companion and translator (i.e. Jamal) who does. The hefty upfront fee for the journey is paid in dollars and rupees, and Jamal and Enayat become part of the estimated one million people annually who place their lives in the hands of people smugglers.

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Sangatte was closed in November 2002. Production notes to In This World, available online at <www.milestonefilms.com/pdf/ InThisWorld.pdf> (20 July 2007).

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From Peshawar, they board a bus heading southward for Quetta, where they are to contact the ‘fixer’ who will arrange their passage into western Pakistan. The uncertainty of the plight of the cousins is reflected in the closeup shots of the confined spaces that they have to live in, rooms in which metal bars in front of the windows separate them from the world outside and, conversely, the world outside from them, illegal migrants, stowaways who must remain hidden from the public eye. Days and weeks of tedium and anxiety are followed by sudden, frantic activity when it is time for them to move on. The uneasiness that Enayat feels with the ‘fixer’ in Quetta and the language barrier with the Iranian lorry driver who bundles them into his vehicle reflect the sense of cultural dislocation that refugees and immigrants experience at every step of the way to the destination country. From Tehran, Jamal and Enayat travel into the country’s Kurdish region, bordering Turkey and cross the border at night, hiking in the bitter wind and snow while trigger-happy, armed soldiers patrol below. The border-crossing scene is filmed entirely in nightshot; the viewer can barely make out the fuzzy outlines and jagged movements of Jamal, Enayat and a young Iranian boy who shows them the way. Cut to the next scene; it is early morning, and Jamal and Enayat are sitting atop a snow-capped mountain on the Turkish side of the border, enjoying the stillness. ‘It’s nice here’, Enayat remarks to Jamal. The irony of his comment creates a sense of foreboding that increases to an almost unbearable level in the climax of their journey, a harrowing 40-hour passage sealed in a freight container leaving Istanbul for Trieste, Italy, crowded with other immigrants and refugees. This sequence is perhaps the most affecting one in the film. It is also filmed in nightshot, where the light eerily illuminates one character at a time, and real time is slowed down nightmarishly in parts. The viewer sees the suffocated stowaways and hears their cries for air and pleas as they bang on the door to be released. When the ship reaches Trieste, the only two survivors are Jamal and an infant, who is immediately taken into care by the Italians. Enayat does not survive the journey, and the audience is painfully made to watch as Jamal shakes his lifeless body, tears streaming down his face. 7 Jamal then makes his way across Italy to the refugee camp at Sangatte, France. There, he meets and befriends a young Turkish man who had been working illegally in London in a restaurant before his asylum application was refused. There the final leg of the journey to the U.K. takes place, with Jamal and the Turkish man stowed away underneath the chassis of a truck which is about to board a freight train headed for the U.K. The film’s unflinching, ‘realistic’ documentation of each stage of an Afghan asylum seeker’s journey 7

Enayat’s death is only acknowledged much later in the film in the scene where Jamal makes a phonecall home from London to tell Enayat’s uncle that he is ‘no longer in this world’.


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from Pakistan to the U.K. is clearly meant to depict and mimetically reflect the anxiety, disorientation and sense of dislocation that refugees and asylum seekers the world over feel while undertaking this passage.

3. Watching You – Codes of Surveillance in Code 46 In contrast to In This World’s mode of realistic documentation, Code 46, in its recourse to fictional mediation, and in its many intertextual references – from futuristic cult classics such as Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 starring John Hurt, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (an adaptation of the book by Ray Bradbury) to the film noir classics of the 1950s such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train – Code 46 simulates rather than mimetically represents the issues of illegal immigration and asylum. Continuing its exploration of ‘people having no papers and trying to travel from one place to another and the problems that creates’, 8 the film expands its frame of reference to include the new millennium’s increased anxiety, almost to paranoiac extent, to document, monitor, trace, track and regulate the movement of people across the globe. In Code 46, each individual’s entire history and personal information (including criminal convictions, medical treatments, etc.) are encoded in a file and stored in a database so that any authorised officials working within the system can retrieve it at the touch of a button. The technology depicted in the film is not all that futuristic when the audience realises that it bears striking similarities to systems of surveillance and navigation that are already being currently employed, such as that of GPS (global positioning system). Developed by the U.S. Department of Defence and launched in 1978 initially as a tool for mapmaking and land surveying projects, GPS utilises satellite navigation systems and the signals they transmit to determine the receiver’s location, speed and direction. It has become an indispensable aid to navigation around the world, an important resource used for the scientific study of earthquakes, as well as in the synchronisation of telecommunication networks. The ease with which this tool can be abused to provide a means of surveillance, to determine the exact location of a vehicle or person and to record its/his/her position at regular intervals in order to create a log of movements is very palpable indeed. Code 46 hints at this darker side of such an abuse of technology for the purposes of surveillance and control. The plot is simple, and much of the scenery of In This World – the refugee camps, people in deserts, people 8

Wendy Mitchell, ‘Michael Winterbottom on Code 46: Typical Love Story in an Atypical World’, Indiewire (20 July 2007).

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outside the system, without papers, excluded from the structures of civilisation – become an integral part of the social fabric of Code 46. The film’s spatial and temporal setting is a futuristic world where megacities are heavily controlled and only accessible via checkpoints. Outside these cities lie shanty towns in deserts, crammed with non-citizens, people without ‘papelles’ (special travel permits or IDs issued by the totalitarian government, reminiscent of the ‘Ministry of Information’ in another cult science-fiction classic, Brazil directed by Terry Gilliam) who are forced to live ‘al fuera’ (literally, ‘outside’) as persona non-grata. The male protagonist, William Geld (Tim Robbins), is a family man who works for the government as an investigator, tracking down illegal people smuggling rings that manufacture false papelles. When he is sent to Shanghai to pursue one such case, he meets a woman named Maria (Samantha Morton). Although he realises she is behind the forgeries, he falls in love with her, turns a blind eye to her crime and they have a wild, passionate affair before he returns to Seattle. Unknowingly, William and Maria violate Code 46, a law that states that any two human beings who share the same nuclear gene are prohibited from having sexual relations because of the dangers of incestuous reproduction it poses in the age of embryo splitting and cloning techniques (in a surprising and rather Oedipal twist in the tale, we find out later in the film that Maria was cloned from William’s long-dead mother!). When William is sent back to Shanghai to finish investigating the case, he tracks Maria down, only to discover that, after being charged with a Code 46 violation, she was taken to a clinic where her foetus was aborted and her memories of the man and the sex-act, completely erased. In its representation of illegal immigration and the surveillance techniques used to monitor and track potential criminals who provide migrants with false visas, Code 46 works on several levels. On a basic level, we have the love story of two people from opposite spectrums of society who are drawn together. On a deeper level, however, the film is a social commentary on the culture of surveillance and control, the hierarchies of power, and the dangers which arise as a result of an abuse of that power. Of particular relevance to the notion of surveillance in the film is Michel Foucault’s discussion, in Discipline and Punish, of the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century design of a circular prison divided into individual cells, all of which can be observed from a single vantage point of an enclosed central tower. 9 Foucault argues that what establishes control in the Panopticon is the analytical arrangement of space, and not the status or power of the person in charge; the position of visual authority can be occupied by schoolboy or prison warden 9

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), pp.200-228.


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alike. In the Panopticon, a series of blinds and partitions further ensures that the observer remains invisible to those who are under surveillance. The power of the gaze is thus conferred onto the observer, while for those under surveillance, visibility is a trap. In Code 46, the structure of the Panopticon is alluded to twice: first, in the futuristic-looking hotel in which William stays in Shanghai, with its curved corridors, such that all rooms face each other in a perfect circle, and again in the Sphinx papelles factory where Maria works. In the latter instance, a process of double surveillance is being carried out – each individual worker is monitored by three supervisors (themselves employees of the Sphinx) who are stationed in glass cubicles above them, and these supervisors and the workers are, in turn, observed by the general manager of the factory from his office. 10 Due to the fact that the superior position of the manager coincides with the role affirming the regulatory order that makes this position possible in the first place, the Sphinx papelles factory in Code 46 perfectly demonstrates the principle of the Panopticon. When William visits the factory to investigate a case of false papelles, he steps into the manager’s office and observes the workers from above. His gaze (and that of the film’s audience) lingers over Maria, whom he has bumped into casually in the lobby of the factory that very morning. What is effectually enacted, in this scene, is the circumspective force of William’s (male) gaze, while the answering gaze of the (female) other, Maria, is suppressed. This is exactly why Code 46 is troubling at times – in its representation of Maria as a conflation of female stereotypes (suffering Madonna and tempestuous Eve), the film perhaps inevitably discredits its own attempt to create a viable and ethical alternative position from which to counteract mainstream media’s dominant depiction and coverage of illegal immigration. The closing sequence of Code 46, for example, which depicts Maria in the desert wrapped in a shawl and clothes of a vagabond, depict her as the archetypal fallen woman. Filmed in slow motion, the close-up shots of Maria wandering the desert are interspersed with shots of William reconciling with his wife by engaging languidly and unhurriedly in sexual intercourse, hence heightening the discrepancy in the states of existence between those who legally live within the system and the outsiders who are left to their own devices of survival in the wastelands and shanty-towns outside of civilisation. 10

Interestingly, the general manager of the Sphinx factory is played by veteran Indian actor Om Puri, a casting decision which is significant on two counts. First, it ironically represents the surveillance of people who manufacture papers for travel purposes by a foreigner who oversees them, and, secondly, it acts as a reference to the increasingly significant role that India is playing in the global economy, yet simultaneously to the abuses its workforce suffers in terms of cheap labour and miserable sweatshop production conditions.

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Interestingly, however, the relationship between William and Maria paradoxically complicates the divide between the law-abiding citizen and the ‘invisible’, ex-illegal immigrant now working within the system of lawenforcement. At one point in the film, when Maria is showing William digital clips of people whom she has helped obtain false papelles in the past, Maria says to him, ‘Look at their faces – they’re beautiful. They have something that we don’t have. You look like one of them’. This likening of William, a model citizen and enforcer of the law, to non-citizens or illegal immigrants who live outside the system, reflects the slipperiness of the boundaries and arbitrariness of criteria that place people on one side of the divide or the other. Moreover, both William and Maria feel a sense of estrangement from the societies they inhabit; both experience a sense of alienation within a futuristic vision of a multicultural megacity where traditional boundaries have dissolved, where memories can be erased and hence ‘history’ can be altered. The alternative to the bustling, multicultural city then, in Code 46, is ‘al fuera’, or, literally, the spaces outside of the city. This is the space that the illegal immigrants or non-citizens in Code 46 occupy, on two levels. On the one hand, there is the sprawling expanse of the desert (a direct reference to refugee camps such as Shamshatoo). On the other, there is a ‘Chinatown’like shanty-town world where people can book hotel rooms anonymously and papelles are not needed for insurance or ‘cover’. In one scene towards the end of the film, William and Maria check into such a hotel. When William offers the hotel owner his papelle for insurance cover, the man laughs amicably and says, ‘[y]ou won’t need that here’. ‘Al fuera’ is thus the territory of illicit interactions and shady deals, but also a place where humanity is extended and proffered at its most basic, generous level. In its depiction of the plight of illegal immigrants or non-citizens, therefore, Code 46 emphasises the sense of physical and economic restriction and dislocation imposed onto the lives of these individuals, who have no other choice but to occupy spaces outside of civilisation. Yet, there is also a counter-culture element of ‘al fuera’ that offers a space filled with genuine humanity that the bustling and impersonal megacities lack. In offering these dual aspects of ‘al fuera’ – the sprawling desert as a space that has no physical or visual boundaries (which, of course, warrants a comparison with the act of physically crossing geographical and political boundaries that illegal immigrants from the middle-East have to enact repeatedly on their journey to Western Europe) and the slums/shantytowns that effectively posit a counter-culture of their own – the film thus problematises any singular conceptualisation of the worlds that illegal immigrants or non-citizens inhabit.


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4. Controversy or Contradiction? As companion pieces, it is certainly useful to view these two films together in a complementary way; that is, with the idea that Code 46 explores the gaps and silences of In This World. My hesitancy in applauding both films unreservedly, however, resides in the disquieting fact that, in its portrayal of the cultural difference, anxiety and dislocation that illegal immigrants face, as well as the physical and social ‘outsideness’ that they inhabit, the films perhaps unwittingly fall prey to reiterating the dichotomy of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, lawful citizen versus illegal immigrant. While they can be viewed as useful precursors in the field, and would hopefully encourage more filmmakers to engage responsibly and ethically with a topic that lies at the heart of sociopolitical concerns in contemporary culture, I would nevertheless suggest a more critical attitude to the discourse of difference that these two films unquestioningly embrace, primarily because this discourse tends to take cultural differences as a given. In adopting a global approach where East is conflated with West and where the political boundaries between the two are not clearly demarcated, and in transposing the problems of illegal immigration and asylum into a science-fictional setting, Code 46 creates a plotline in a present/near future devoid of historicity. Similarly, although historiographical factors are perhaps ‘documented’ more specifically in In This World, the tendency to coalesce and synthesise the motivations and experiences of Jamal, an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan, and the Turkish asylum seeker whom he meets in Sangette, so as to create an overarching ‘authentic’ illegal immigrant experience, is rather disquieting. At this point, the film does not sufficiently deconstruct or problematise the discourse of difference before absorbing it into its politics of inclusion. In This World thus falls prey to reinscribing a reductive politics of inclusion which does not adequately acknowledge the diverse historical backgrounds and varied motivations of people who travel as illegal immigrants to a host country. As already mentioned, another reason why I find the representational politics of both films problematic is that their depiction of women veers towards essentialist constructions. The reduction of women to the formulaic character of Maria in Code 46 who is effectively a conflation of feminine stereotypes – seductive temptress and outlaw as well as innocent, suffering Madonna – and, conversely, their lack of representation altogether in In This World seem to weaken the ethical project that both films initially put forward. Although it won the Golden Bear, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Peace Film Prize at the 2003 Berlin International Film Festival, for instance, In This World essentially glosses over, in its depiction of the journey of two Afghan male refugees, the reality of escalating figures in the illegal trafficking of women and children who are then forced into

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prostitution or a slave-like existence as menial labourers in the country of settlement. Perhaps one reason for this is the fact that, as with all underground trafficking, reliable sources of information are difficult to come by, and the ‘fixers’ and traffickers themselves remain deliberately elusive in order to escape getting caught by the law. 11 Nevertheless, it remains a valid point of contention that the only two women in the film are minor characters who are not even named. These reservations that I have with both films effectively raise two questions in turn: how efffective are these films in carrying out their aesthetic and ethical project of dealing with trauma, and do they create adequate alternative realms from which the subaltern can speak? Gayatri Spivak’s warning that any attempt to speak for the subaltern instead of allowing the subaltern to speak for themselves will only result in a damaging re-inscription of political domination, economic exploitation and cultural erasure, and Jean-François Lyotard’s claim of the sublime/absolute untranslatability and unrepresentability of trauma, 12 are two factors that problematise the depiction of the subaltern – in this case, illegal immigrants and women – in Winterbottom’s films, ironically reinstating Theodor Adorno’s proximity to silence as the only possible form of representing suffering. 13 Interestingly, in this respect, Code 46 does not adhere to a code of silence but works within a mode that attempts to escape the ‘burden of representation’ altogether. 14 By opting for a genre antithetical to the documentary, that of allegory, it attempts to create a futuristic or fantasy realm where the unrepresentability or untranslatability of the Abject or horror that illegal immigrants face can be explored in a more symbolic, and hence objective, manner in a context furthest removed from subjective reality. In doing so, however, it ceases to depict the complexity of the socio-political realities as well as the larger historical formations that have led to illegal immigration and asylum as a contemporary global phenomenon. It is therefore my contention that both the documentary form and its allegorical alternative, as posited by In This World and Code 46 respectively, fail to, firstly, create a viable discourse which counteracts that produced by mainstream mass media coverage of illegal immigration in Britain, and secondly, offer a feasible position from which the subaltern can speak. 11

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The illegal trafficking of women is a serious global problem that, in my opinion, has not yet sufficiently been addressed. For a good overview of the situation in the Middle Eastern countries, India and Pakistan, see Bimal Kanti Paul and Syed Abu Hasnath’s article, ‘Trafficking in Bangladeshi Women and Girls’, The Geographical Review 90.2 (April 2000), 268-276. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: the Sublime’, Artforum 20.8 (1982), 64-69. Adorno’s infamous claim that ‘Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch’ (‘After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’) was first expressed in his essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), pp.17-34. Kobena Mercer, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text 10 (1990), 61-78.


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Despite seeking to offer viable alternative modes of socio-political and cultural critique in response to the widespread culture of paranoia and fear in Western Europe over the issues of illegal immigration, In This World and Code 46 ironically come dangerously close to reinscribing some of the essentialist claims and stereotypes that they purport to challenge. The former’s realistic mode of documentary falls short of fulfilling its ethical project of dealing with and representing trauma, as well as meeting up to its objectives and expectations of shattering mainstream misconceptions, on account of its lack of representation of female asylum seekers and its involuntary reiteration of the opposition of lawful citizen (‘us’) versus illegal immigrant (‘them’). Conversely, by making no claims to accurately represent or depict the reality of economic and political migration, Code 46 ultimately fails to offer a satisfactory alternative realm from which the subaltern can speak, as evinced by the stereotypical representation of its female protagonist and its positing of a global politics that does not adequately elucidate historical and cultural difference.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), pp.17-34. Clarke, Charles, ‘Deportation and Removal of Foreign Nationals’, 25 April 2006 <www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/cm060425 /wmstext/60425m01.htm#60425m01.html_spmin4> [accessed on 20 July 2007]. Fairer, Faster and Firmer – A Modern Approach to Immigration and Asylum. Nationality, immigration & asylum white paper, published 27 July 1998. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), pp.200-228. Hasnath, Syed Abu and Bimal Kanti Paul, ‘Trafficking in Bangladeshi Women and Girls’, The Geographical Review 90.2 (April 2000), 268-276. Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Presenting the Unpresentable: the Sublime’, Artforum 20.8 (1982), 64-69, reproduced in Contextualizing Aesthetics: From Plato to Lyotard, ed. by H. Gene Blocker and Jennifer M. Jeffers (Beverly, MA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1998), pp.347-354. Mercer, Kobena, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text 10 (1990), 61-78. Mitchell, Wendy, ‘Michael Winterbottom on Code 46: Typical Love Story in an Atypical World’, in Indiewire [accessed on 20 July 2007].

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Secure Borders, Safe Haven – Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain. Nationality, immigration & asylum white paper, published 7 February 2002. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1988), pp.275-280. Winterbottom, Michael, dir., Code 46 (UK 2003). ——. In This World (UK 2002).

Barbara Korte

Envisioning a Black Tomorrow? Black Mother Figures and the Issue of Representation in 28 Days Later (2003) and Children of Men (2006) The representation of black people in film and television has long been a prime area of concern in Black British Studies. Misrepresentation is still an issue, but the media have come a considerable way from the days when the stereotyping of minority ethnicities, usually in deprecating terms, was the rule. Black and Asian characters that challenge stereotypes have appeared with increased frequency, also in the work of white filmmakers. This tendency in cultural representation is interlinked with a new political emphasis on Britain’s multi-ethnic identity, and it is particularly striking where it occurs in films that envision Britain’s near future, such as 28 Days Later (2003) and Children of Men (2006). Both films can be seen as part of a general revival of apocalyptic cinema, but they have distinctly British settings and themes and evoke British traditions of fiction about the end of the world. This article considers how and with which possible implications both films represent non-white characters in general, and their black female protagonists in particular, and whether these female characters carry a special ‘burden’ of representation.

1. Introduction: Black Characters in British Film – Relations of Representation The representation of black people and its political implications has long been a prime area of concern in Black British Cultural Studies and in Britain’s black artistic communities – especially in relation to film and television, where the representation of race is hardly avoidable since immediately visible. In his seminal, late-1980s article ‘New Ethnicities’, Stuart Hall summarised the main points in the black British critique of and struggle for adequate representation: The cultural politics and strategies which developed around this critique had many facets, but its two principal objects were, first, the question of access to the rights of representation by black artists and black cultural workers themselves. Second, the contestation of the marginality, the stereotypical quality, and the fetishized nature of images of blacks, by the counterposition of a ‘positive’ black imagery. These strategies were principally addressed to changing what I would call the relations of representation. 1

By the time he was writing, Hall claimed, a third concern had come to the fore, relating to the ‘politics of representation’ because ‘how things are 1

Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.163-172 (p.164).

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represented and the “machineries” and regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event, role’. 2 At the beginning of the 21st century, mis-representation of non-white people in the cinema and on television is still an issue in Britain, 3 although one must concede that the mainstream media – and not merely oppositional filmmaking – have come a considerable way from the days when a blunt stereotyping of minority ethnicities, usually in deprecatory terms, was the rule. 4 An important factor in this development is the extent to which minority-ethnic filmmakers themselves have gained ground in mainstream British cinema and television. 5 Increasingly, also the work of white filmmakers portrays black and brown characters in a manner that challenges stereotypes, as for instance Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss (2004). In films like Loach’s, the ethnicity of non-white characters – and of course their actors – remains a thematic issue. In other instances the casting of characters with non-white actors appears to be ‘colour-blind’ in the sense that an actor’s skin pigmentation seems irrelevant to the role he or she performs or to the film’s overall ‘message’. Even then, however, one might claim that a character’s ethnicity may be decoded as significant, quite independent from the decisions that led to an actor’s selection for a role in the first place. In the case of the films to be discussed here, neither screenwriters nor directors have publicly commented on why (or at what stage in the films’ development) they decided that one of their central characters should be black; indeed, in 28 Days Later this blackness is not an open thematic concern at all. Yet, as will be argued, the fact that an important character is black is part of the films’ semantics, and since both films are very obviously concerned with contemporary Britain and its near future, this blackness is likely to be decoded in terms of the vision of Britain that the two films project. Both 28 Days Later (2003) and Children of Men (2006) are part of a revival of apocalyptic cinema that began with the approach of the new millennium and experienced a further upsurge after 9/11.6 They are commercial 2

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Hall, p.165. On the 1980s state of debate around the representation of blackness in British cinema see also the influential collection of papers in Black Film, British Cinema, ed. by Kobena Mercer (London: Institute for Contemporary Arts, 1988). See Rajeev Balasubramanyam’s contribution to the present volume. On stereotypical representations see, among other publications, Jim Pines, Representation and Blacks in British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1991). See Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream: Black and Asian British Film Since the 1990s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004). On the tradition of apocalyptic film see Kim Newman, Millennium Movies: End of the World Cinema (London: Titan Books, 1999) and John W. Martens, The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television (Winnipeg: Shillingford, 2003).

Black Mother Figures in 28 Days Later (2003) and Children of Men (2006)

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films aimed at a cross-section of the audience within Britain and abroad. Their directors, Danny Boyle and Alfonso Cuarón respectively, do not belong to a black British community (Cuarón is not even British). However, the social settings, topographies and some themes of their films are recognisably British even for viewers abroad, and they also evoke a specifically British tradition of fiction about the end of the world such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), and John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1953). These overt markers of Britishness combined with a central presence of a black character invite a reading of the two films in the context of the rhetoric with which Britain officially attempted to re-brand its image under the government of Tony Blair: as a multi-ethnic country whose past, present and future have to be envisaged in terms of ethnic diversity. One of the prime aims formulated by the Commission on the Future of Multiethnic Britain, set up in January 1998, was the proposal of ways ‘of making Britain a confident and vibrant multicultural society at ease with its rich diversity’.7 With their focus on catastrophe, both 28 Days Later and Children of Men offer a predominantly dystopian view of British society and its (self-)destructive impulses, but they end with at least the indication of some utopian hope. In each case this utopian perspective is conspicuously linked with a black female character. In the British context, an association of the future with nonwhite characters seems a fairly recent phenomenon 8 arguably conditioned by Britain’s current ethnic composition and political rhetoric of cultural diversity. Under these premises, the following reading of 28 Days Later and Children of Men will discuss how and with which possible implications these films about a future Britain represent non-white characters in general, and their black female protagonists in particular. A final section will then ask whether these female characters carry a special ‘burden’ of representation that avoids stereotyping of the kind Hall mentions in the quotation above but instead raises other concerns about the relations and politics of representation.

7 8

Parekh, Bhikhu, ed., The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (London: Profile, 2000), p.viii. A science fiction novel of the late 1990s, Ronald Wright’s A Scientific Romance (1997), envisages a future for Britain that is black, but in a completely different manner than the two films discussed here. With the help of a time machine, the protagonist of this novel travels far into a future where mankind has become almost extinct. The only survivors up in Scotland have turned black, possibly as a consequence of the increased rate of ultraviolet radiation. In Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998), which is set during an ice age in 2050, the mixed-race protagonist migrates from Britain to Africa, where he survives and is thus able to narrate the catastrophe.

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2. 28 Days Later The Britain of 28 Days Later is at once contemporary and strangely unfamiliar, right from its early moments during which a deserted London – represented by some of its most famous sights, such as the Houses of Parliament or the more recent London Eye – is the film’s protagonist. The capital and indeed the entire country have been depopulated after an aggressive psychological virus has been released by animal rights activists. The film’s first images show the activists storming a research institute where chimpanzees have been infected with a virus that promotes a state of permanent Rage. In its physical symptoms, Rage resembles the new plagues of our time such as Ebola or BSE; its symbolic dimension is also fairly obvious: Rage stands for a brutalisation of society nourished, among other things, by the media images of that brutality. The laboratory animals have been exposed to (real) news footage of street fights, war scenarios, and a brutal hanging, and paradoxically, their liberators are also violent. After its release, the virus spreads within 28 days, reducing a large proportion of the British people to zombie-like creatures with a desire to kill before they starve to death. Britain has apparently ended in chaos. A government no longer exists, and all other institutions have also been destroyed, apart from a rudimentary military operating for themselves. The male protagonist, a bicycle courier named Jim (played by Cillian Murphy), has escaped infection because he lay in a coma in hospital after a traffic accident. After waking up, he is completely disorientated, attacked by a group of infected persons, and saved by a tough black woman, Selena (Naomie Harris), and her white friend Mark. Mark is then infected himself and killed by Selena, who becomes Jim’s guardian. Selena and Jim find two other survivors, the white cab driver Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his adolescent daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). Together, they try to reach an army unit near Manchester who claim that they have found a cure for Rage. Frank falls prey to the zombies and has to be shot, but the rest of the group reach the army camp, which is located in an old mansion surrounded by a park and evokes past glories of British civilisation. The military unit consists of only nine men led by Major West (Christopher Eccleston), who plans to ‘rebuild’ civilisation and social order but whose approach represents precisely the kind of violence by which the country has been destroyed in the first place: to the soldier, killing has always been ‘normal business’. For obvious reasons, West displays a particular interest in the two women among the London group. He has promised his men women since ‘women mean a future’, and, more profanely, because the men want sex. After moments of extreme crisis and horror, Selena, Hannah, and Jim manage to escape.


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Another 28 days later, the film, in its finally released cut,9 shows the three survivors in an idyllic Lake District scenario whose quality is just as mythical as the deserted London at the film’s beginning. In the final shots, the survivors signal to a military jet which may take them back to the community of other survivors, though the film remains open in this respect. The fact that they are found by the military of all institutions may indicate that the violence which almost destroyed Britain is likely to return (or continue). When they signal the pilot with big letters that they have manufactured out of sheets, the word reads ‘Hell’ until the final ‘o’ is attached. 10 As far as the general presentation of black people is concerned, the film suggests the normality of a black presence in contemporary British society. The search notices in the film’s early London scenes show photographs of missing whites and blacks, and an impression of urban multiculturalism is further enhanced through a shot of a giant billboard from Benetton’s famous multicultural campaign at the time when the film was shot. The surviving army unit is predominantly white, but there is a black soldier among its uninfected members whose ethnicity is taken for granted and who acts like one of his white peers. He does not take sides with Selena, for instance, when she is about to be raped. The infected soldier whom his comrades keep in chains for experimental purposes (to see how long it will take a Rage victim to die) is also black, but the cruelty of his treatment does not seem to be racially motivated – the film leaves no doubt that a white infected soldier would be dealt with in exactly the same manner. Considered in this light, the fact that the group of survivors includes a black woman does not appear to be a special statement but simply the acknowledgement of a demographic fact. However, Selena’s status is highly conspicuous, firstly because she is part of a very small group of survivors, and secondly because the role she plays in that group is that of a strong leader with ‘masculine’ qualities. 11 When Jim first meets her, Selena is a character who has learned to suppress her emotions and to focus completely on survival – killing the infected whenever necessary, even where they are her friends. ‘Everyone for him- or herself’ is the principle on which she acts. 12

9

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In an alternative ending published on the DVD version, Jim dies of injuries he has received during their escape. Significantly, Jim also shouts ‘hello’ at the beginning of the film when he wakes up in hospital and is about to discover the disaster. ‘Hello’ is repeated several times shortly before the infected attack, so that the ending is actually ambiguous. The film’s original British audience would also have associated the actress Naomie Harris with the character of Clara in the multi-part television adaptation of Zadie Smith’s novel about multi-ethnic Britain, White Teeth, that was broadcast by Channel 4 in the autumn of 2002. In the highly intertextual film that 28 Days Later actually is, the portrayal of Selena as a fighter may have been inspired by the black female lead in an American classic of End-of-the-World

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Later, however, when she appreciates the warmth and love between Frank and Hannah, Selena becomes emotionally involved again, develops hope and feelings of love for Jim, and acts as a surrogate mother to Hannah. She appears more feminine, and her function as the female centre of a mixed-race nuclear family is particularly emphasised in the final Lake District scenes, where Selena is seen working at a sewing machine (rather than with the gun which is her initial prop). Throughout, the film presents the family unit as an antidote to a society destroyed by rage and egotism; Jim is deeply affected when he finds his dead parents, with whom he had a good relationship, and Frank and Hannah are always depicted as a very close father-daughter team. The family theme is significantly intertwined with the film’s discourse about Britain, or rather, England. Signifiers of Englishness comprise not only iconic sights of London, but also of ‘the country’. The country scenes were shot, as the credits tell us, near Salisbury and in the Lake District. Their idyllic potential is exploited in the film and heightened by a soundtrack in which sacral music (‘Abide with Me’, ‘Ave Maria’, etc.) features prominently. After the survivors have left London, one sequence shows them during a picnic amid the remains of a church or abbey that reminds one of the proverbial green and pleasant land of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’. Next to the picnic spot is a meadow where the survivors are enchanted by a family of horses (conspicuously, they are of mixed colour: two white horses and their dark foals) that signify a natural way of life untouched by Rage. Here it seems that the survivors have left the hell of the city behind and reached an environment of redemption. This, however, is deceptive since they will run into the soldiers only a little later. Nevertheless, the element of redemption is repeated and emphasised in the film’s final scenes that are not shot on digital video like the rest of the film, 13 but on 35mm film, which gives them a more cinematic aesthetic: panoramic images of the Lakes landscape evoke the sublime, but also, arguably, an element of the unreal. Indeed, when Jim, Selena, and Hannah are shown in the closing shots of the final release, they almost appear like a holy family – survivors through whom England may recuperate – and the mother figure of this family is black. As Major West says in the film: Women mean the future, and Britain’s future, as suggested at the end of 28 Days Later through the mere presence of Selena, will presumably be more black than it is at present.

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film, The Omega Man (USA 1972, dir. Boris Sagal), who is also introduced saving the male white protagonist with a gun in hand. This visual aesthetic is especially suitable for the film’s city scenes; digital (security) cameras having become a medium through which city life is recorded on a daily basis.


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3. Children of Men An even more overt presentation of a black woman as a mother of the future, and in this case with obvious allusions to the Madonna, is found in Children of Men. The film is set in London and Surrey and, again, goes for a distinctly English atmosphere – without any suggestion of the iconic or idyllic, however. The film’s London is derelict, and its countryside has become a retreat for the political opposition that is markedly unsafe. As a matter of fact, one icon of traditional rural Englishness, a flock of sheep, is cited ironically when the animals run erratically through the chaos of a refugee camp. Neither in terms of its aesthetic nor of its content does this film suggest that England might become a pleasant land again, except for its very final scene. Children of Men is set in a grim near future, in November 2027, when, as an extrapolation of current demographic developments, women all over the world have become infertile. The last child on Earth was born 18 years ago. Facing extinction, all societies have been thrown into anarchy, but Britain is the last country where some degree of social order has been maintained: ‘The world has collapsed, only Britain soldiers on’, proclaim the news on omnipresent video-screens in one of the early sections of the film. However, order is only barely maintained by the army and a paramilitary police force, ‘Homeland Security’. Terrorist attacks by resistance groups have become everyday events, cameras survey everything, and citizens are encouraged to spy on each other: ‘Report any suspicious activity. [...] Report all illegal immigrants. Suspicious? Report it’. Filmed in a documentary, handy-cam style, London is presented as an urban space that has deteriorated into a war zone where the rich barricade themselves off against the poor. Nevertheless, the country is flooded with unwanted refugees from everywhere, including the territories that used to be European states. Political and economic migration is no longer associated with the so-called developing countries only but has become a global and multi-ethnic phenomenon. The film’s Britain (or what is left of it) is also portrayed as multi-ethnic: non-white Britons are integrated into security forces, resistance groups, and the rich establishment. But despite this representation of a society that apparently takes its own diversity for granted, the film, like 28 Days Later, also makes blackness a special issue since its Madonna figure is a black, although not British, woman: Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), who is about to give birth to the first child on earth after eighteen years, has come to Britain as an unwanted refugee. She is sheltered by a resistance group, the ‘Fishes’, who demand equal rights for refugees. They are afraid that the government might want to use the baby for its own purposes, take it away from Kee, and give it to a ‘rich black British lady’ instead. They try to get Kee on a boat of the ‘Human Project’, a humanitarian organisation that tries to find a remedy against infertility and

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save mankind. This plan gets the white male protagonist, Theo (Clive Owen), involved. A former political activist but now a disillusioned alcoholic after the death of his only child from influenza, he is paid by the Fishes to get transfer papers from London to the coast, and he accompanies members of the Fishes, Kee and her midwife on their way south. Things get complicated when the Fishes are divided about whether they should really give the mother over to the Human Project or keep the baby for their own purposes. After an actionfilled escape and pursuit, Theo and Kee manage to find retreat in a coastal detainment camp for refugees, Bexhill-on-Sea – a place that epitomises the nightmare scenarios of the 20th and 21st centuries, alluding to the Warsaw Ghetto, Nazi concentration camps, contemporary war zones, and political ‘prisons’ such as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Bexhill is a hell where the military abuse, torture, and kill migrants (of all ethnicities), and where different groups, for example Muslim refugees, start uprisings that are countered by brutal military action. Bexhill, however, is also the place where Kee gives birth to her child. The story of this birth is told with very obvious allusions to the Christian nativity story 14 and does not eschew the sentiment and cliché connotes. Kee, the persecuted woman, reveals her pregnancy to Theo – a surrogate father like the Biblical Joseph – in a cowshed that evokes the stable in Bethlehem. And like the birth that takes place in Bethlehem, the one that takes place in Bexhill is a miracle: the black infant (not a boy but a girl) in Kee’s arms forces the soldiers to lower their weapons and bend their knees in face of the baby that might become the saviour of mankind. The child he has helped to save even redeems Theo for the loss of his own child and the miserable life he has led. Theo dies of a wound received during a shootout in Bexhill but knows that his life has eventually had a purpose. The film’s final images show a canonised Kee in a rowing boat, with the infant in her arms, awaiting the Human Project ship. And indeed the ship emerges out of the mist, dramatically lit as an icon of hope in the dark, and symbolically named Tomorrow. In very explicit terms, the film makes the point that a black woman, and a refugee woman, for that matter, might guarantee a future for Britain and the whole world. The emphasis on the hope-bearer’s blackness is even more conspicuous when one takes the film’s source into account. Children of Men adapts a novel by P.D. James of the same title (first published in 1992), following its basic plot and characters as far as the theme of infertility is concerned, but making one significant change: in the novel, the pregnant woman is white (and only the midwife is black). Cuarón’s adaptation streamlines James’s novel

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Like in 28 Days Later, the soundtrack throughout the film enhances a sacral atmosphere.


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and gives it a topical political reference by linking the issue of a reduced birth rate to the issue of migration – a migration which, by implication, is offered as salvation to a society unable to regenerate itself out of its own resources.

4. Burdens of Representation Revisited The two films discussed here have several features in common. They comment on and extrapolate problems of the society and time from which they originate (such as violence, growing tendencies towards surveillance in urban spaces, the militarisation of society), and both suggest that citizens of the so-called first world may also be forced to become refugees in case of catastrophe. This is a major point in Children of Men, and a minor one in 28 Days Later, where an old newspaper from the early days of the epidemic tells Jim that the British, trying to escape from Rage, have caused a global refugee problem and even carried the infection abroad. 15 As examples of apocalyptic fiction, the films also share typical elements of this genre. Much apocalyptic fiction in film and literature follows a gendered pattern in which the originators of catastrophe and most of its survivors are male and in which women are presented as bearers of hope because without them, procreation and a renewal of mankind would be impossible. When Major West in 28 Days Later states that ‘women mean a future’, this is not only the result of his pragmatic analysis, but also a metageneric reference. The very genre into which both films are inscribed already burdens the female characters with a significance which, from a feminist perspective, is problematic because it tends to reduce women to biological functions. Selena in 28 Days Later is seen by the military as at least a potential child bearer (apart from being expected to act as a prostitute), and Kee in Children of Men is an actual child bearer moulded after the ultimate Western icon of motherhood, the Madonna. The scene in which she reveals her pregnancy to Theo amid a group of cows might be perceived as particularly offensive in this respect, ‘naturalising’ and ‘canonising’ the woman at the same time. In terms of gender, then, both films – partly determined by generic tradition – offer a traditional and clichéd form of representation. In terms of the representation of blackness, the films at first sight appear to be more politically correct. As far as the ‘relations of representation’ are concerned, to come back to Stuart Hall’s terminology, they certainly do not offer a negative black imagery: they portray a realistic percentage of black

15

On the topicality and representation of the refugee ‘problem’ for the developing world see also the contributions by Sissy Helff and Kathy-Ann Tan in the present volume. In the genre of apocalyptic film, Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004), is another example which shows first-world citizens transformed into refugees: the inhabitants of a frozen United States storm the Mexican border and have to seek refuge in their poor neighbour’s country.

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(and other non-white) people in a variety of social roles in a Britain that is depicted as a multi-ethnic society. Black Britons are fully integrated citizens even in the world of Children of Men, where discrimination is directed against illegal migrants rather than minority-ethnic groups and where the status of white European refugees, for instance from Germany, appears to be as low as that of refugees from Africa or other parts of the world. For the central female characters in both films, however, blackness is invested with a special significance – even though these women are very different types: Selena in 28 Days Later is a self-confident, non-marginalised person, while Kee in Children of Men is a refugee restricted to a largely passive role. In both cases, however, the women’s blackness, through its intersection with their femininity, is so tightly associated with hope that blackness seems to become a signifier of the only utopian potential which Britain – and mankind in general – might still have. That this potential is insecure is suggested in both endings by a basic openness of plot and a visual style that lends the final images a surreal atmosphere. Nevertheless, blackness is associated with a specific – and inherently positive – otherness: the otherness of a future that is better than the world which the two films depict as their present. Selena and Kee literally embody the message that, if Britain has a future, this future will depend upon people who are not white. In this special sense, the black female characters in both films are also fetishised. They do not carry the burden of representation in that they are meant to stand for Britain’s entire black community, 16 or for a multi-ethnic society in general, but they do stand for a utopian potential which both films associate with cultural and ethnic diversity. And in this respect, the two films about a future Britain are products of a contemporary political rhetoric that proclaims – and markets – the multi-ethnic society as a vision for the future.

Works Cited Boyle, Danny, dir., 28 Days Later, written by Alex Garland (UK 2003). Cuarón, Alfonso, dir. and co-writer, Children of Men (UK/USA 2006). Emmerich, Roland, dir., The Day After Tomorrow (USA 2004). Gee, Maggie, The Ice People (London: Metro, 1999). Hall, Stuart, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.163-172. 16

On this understanding of the term see, among others, Kobena Mercer, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text 10 (1990), 61-78.


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James, P.D., The Children of Men (London: Faber, 1992). Korte, Barbara and Claudia Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream: Black and Asian British Film Since the 1990s (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004). Loach, Ken, dir., Ae Fond Kiss (UK 2004). Martens, John W., The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television (Winnipeg: Shillingford, 2003). Mercer, Kobena, ed., Black Film, British Cinema (London: Institute for Contemporary Arts, 1988). Mercer, Kobena, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text 10 (1990), 61-78. Newman, Kim, Millennium Movies: End of the World Cinema (London: Titan Books, 1999). Parekh, Bhikhu, ed., The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (London: Profile, 2000). Pines, Jim, Representation and Blacks in British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1991). Wright, Ronald, A Scientific Romance (London: Anchor, 1997).

Fiction II: Reading and Writing the Metropolis

Michael Mitchell

Escaping the Matrix: Illusions and Disillusions of Identity in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) While ethnic and geopolitical concepts of identity still dominate much of the discourse on the organisation and adaptation of societies like the UK, in which words like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘Britishness’ remain current, the attacks of 7/7, involving British-born youth of Pakistani and Caribbean origin, made it clear that choices and patterns of identity were driven by more complex and as yet scarcely understood social currents. Hanif Kureishi, whose story ‘My Son the Fanatic’ so prophetically foreshadowed these developments, asks ‘What are identities for?’ We are perhaps entering a phase of postmodern play of identity, where role assumptions and role reversals set up completely new sets of values. Gautam Malkani’s novel Londonstani charts this kaleidoscope of identities through the linguistic and cultural prism of its narrator, a member of a Hounslow Punjabi gang, and shows how expectations are reversed and loyalties forged amid the ostentation of London’s ‘bling’ culture. The essay seeks to identify and evaluate the main elements of Malkani’s novel and its contribution to the discussion of identity, in particular its suggestion that identity is marked less by authenticity than impersonation and imposture. It also shows how the novel’s references to the film The Matrix relate to Gnostic antecedents in the task of freeing the imagination.

Fate jumbled them together, God knows how; What e’er they were they’re true-born English now Daniel Defoe, The True Born Englishman

1. Performing Identities — Serve him right he got his muthafuckin face fuck’d, shudn’t b callin me a Paki, innit. After spittin his words out Hardjit stopped for a second, like he expected us to write em down or someshit. Then he sticks in an exclamation mark by kickin the white kid in the face again. — Shudn’t b callin us Pakis, innit, u dirrty gora. Again, punctuation came with a kick, but with his left foot this time so it was more like a semicolon. — Call me or any a ma bredrens a Paki again an I’ma mash u an yo family. In’t dat da truth, Pakis? — Dat’s right, Amit, Ravi an I go, — dat be da truth. The three a us spoke in sync like we belonged to some tutty boy band, the kind who sing the chorus like it’s some blonde American cheerleader routine. Hardjit, Hardjit, he’s our man, if he can’t bruckup goras, no one can. Ravi then delivers his standard solo routine: — Yeh, blud, safe, innit. (p.3) 1

1

Gautam Malkani, Londonstani (London: Fourth Estate, 2006), p.3. All further references parenthetically in the text.

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The spectacular opening of Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani is all about identities. The white (gora) is being beaten up for allegedly calling Hardjit a ‘Paki’. On the surface, then, we are dealing with a reversal of the 1970s phenomenon of ‘Paki-bashing’, what we might call another example of the Empire striking back. But that identity of ‘Pakistani’, fixed as a racist insult by aggressive gangs as part of their own teenage identity, to go with the short haircuts, ankle-length jeans and boots and anti-intellectual contempt for hippie inclusivity, was even then not geographically valid, being applied without distinction to anyone from the Indian subcontinent. Hardjit now complicates matters by turning the term into an epithet of solidarity with his own group. He explains: An out a us four bredrens, none a us got a mum an dad wat actually come from Pakistan, innit. So don’t u b tellin any a us Pakis dat we b Pakis like our Paki bredred from Pakistan, u get me. (p.6)

Before continuing to beat the white boy up he elaborates that to call a Paki a Paki you need to be an honorary Paki yourself, and here he includes the narrator, Jas. Now, although this is not revealed until the final pages of the book, Jas is in fact white too, so his assumption of an identity like that of the others is not only ironic but more fundamentally a performance, a fiction: hence the imagery of the performing boy-band. The members of the group which the narrator and Hardjit, a Sikh, are now part of call themselves ‘desis’. The categories by which so-called ethnic minorities became known under the umbrella concept of multi-culturalism have clearly ceased to relate to genuine or authentic objective characteristics, like signifiers detached from a signified. The children of immigrants, the ‘second generation’, did not assimilate into a broader British identity or remain within the identity parameters of their parents, but instead have chosen to pick and mix elements of identity like fashion accessories to fashion their own subjective and performative identities. This can be seen when the narrator traces the labels others have placed on what he calls their ‘scene’: First we was rudeboys, then we be Indian niggas, then rajamuffins, then raggastanis, Britasians, fuckin Indobrits. These days we try an use our own word for homeboy an so we just call ourselves desis... (p.5)

Social archaeology reveals that ‘rudeboy’, originating in the Kingston ghettoes, was copied from Caribbean youngsters too tough to be molested by white racists and respected for their ‘cool’ behaviour and dangerous aura. Rudeboys, the escape artists of an oppressive colonial culture stretching back to slavery, brought with them drugs and the music of rebellion and self-expression for black people through their portable sound systems. From the gangs and rap

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artists of the USA came the idea that the categories used as insults could be worn as a badge of pride – as in ‘Niggaz With Attitude’ – so ‘Indian niggas’ even uses the insult of Columbus’s ‘discovered’ Indians to conflate East and West, as in the singer Apache Indian. The term ‘Rajamuffins’ mixes the land of the Raj, turned to rulers, with ‘ragamuffin’, another adopted word for rudeboy. Pakistan becomes associated with ragga in ‘raggastani’. Apart from the Caribbean / Indian mix there is of course the mix of British and Asian, spiced with insult, in ‘Britasian’ or ‘Indobrit’, while ‘desi’ simply means ‘countryman’, suggesting a unity between the diverse groupings of the Indian subcontinent which the fights described between Sikhs, Hindus and Moslems belie; the word itself thus becomes ironically inappropriate, as it has freed itself from its geographical referent. Such a performative identity becomes a matter of choice, as Jas makes clear in the case of the ‘coconut’ (also called ‘Bounty bar’ or ‘Oreo biscuit’), a description of someone brown on the outside and white on the inside. At first sight this might make it seem a matter of race, a way of referring pejoratively to someone who is a traitor to his ethnic roots, someone who has assimilated to the white lifestyle of the former colonialist oppressors, who has ‘sold out’. In fact, it is a social choice too, with a different set of fashion accessories, but a choice nevertheless. ‘He’d made a choice just like I’d made a choice when I started kickin about with Hardjit. But the coconut’s choice was the wrong choice’ (p.23). In particular the ‘coconut’ drives a Peugeot 305, has long hair, ‘grungy’ clothes, a novel and newspaper in his car, speaks English with a ‘poncey’ English accent and cannot talk ‘his own language’, and listens to Coldplay, REM or Radiohead. In contrast Hardjit (even his name is a performance through the added ‘d’) works out at a gym to build a sculpted body, has exactly the right shape of facial hair, wears designer-label clothes and chunky ‘bling’ jewellery, uses an expensive mobile phone and is only seen in a Beemer (BMW) with spinner hubcaps and a personalised numberplate. It would be incorrect, in other words, to think of a ‘coconut’ in ethnic terms, but as more closely related to social grouping and gender. 2 The ‘coconut’ described is someone who has made a decision about fashion contrary to the particular masculine self-image which Hardjit and his group 2

Malkani produced an undergraduate thesis on British South Asian identity in the 1990s, about which he has written: ‘The importance of gender identity was most apparent when I asked kids to provide tangible definitions of “coconuts” – a derogatory term of abuse among South Asian kids that signifies those deemed to have assimilated too far with mainstream society and thereby become white on the inside despite being brown on the outside. In response, interviewees often didn’t answer in terms of race or ethnicity, but in terms of gender: coconuts were deemed to be too skinny, too sensitive – and more importantly, too effeminate.’ (Gautam Malkani, ‘Machismo and Masculinity in Londonstani’ (15 July 2007).

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have adopted as their performative norm. Hardjit does not want, as he puts it, to end up ‘in ten years’ time, workin in Heathrow fuckin airport helpin goras catch planes to places so they can turn their own skin brown.’ (p.23) He understands the nature of power in a society which shows no mercy to anyone who allows themselves to be exploited. He and his friends realise that the consequences of failure to achieve one’s own performative identity is to be forced into an objective role created by the more powerful. I remember back in da day when most desis round here were like dat gimp, goes Amit — Skinny saps pretendin like they were gora so no one treat’d dem like dey’d just got off da boat from Bombay, innit. But all da gora fuck’d wid dem anyway. (p.23)

2. Textual Orientation To return to my initial quote, the novel’s opening strives for an immediate assertion of its own identity as a literary artefact through the self-referential expectation that the words should be written down, which is what they are of course, and through the description of the kicks in terms of punctuation. By means of this the writing, as well as the narrator’s stance, is given a degree of self-awareness which always borders on irony, even without knowledge of the twist in the book’s ending. This can be observed at various points in the novel involving intertextuality, such as the narrator’s allusions to the Walchowski brothers’ film The Matrix (1999), which are picked up by Arun, the brother of one of the gang – ‘Jas, what the fuck are you talking about? You sound like that dude from The Matrix’ (p.238). – The style in Londonstani has been criticised in reviews by the creative writing academy establishment because it has falsely been assumed to be arbitrary and, with its mixture of street slang and text-message abbreviations, merely fashionable, whereas it, too, is carefully fashioned, like the identity it portrays. The effect is one of alien naturalness and a convincing reproduction of speech rhythms, the texting abbreviations actually mimicking the curiously isolated pronunciation of words and syllables that contrasts with the elisions of bourgeois standard English. The vocabulary is also a composite of Punjabi, Caribbean, London and American street slang with an admixture of swearwords and the ubiquitous ‘innit’, designed to represent a typical demotic of its period rather than absolute authenticity of certain terms in ephemeral fashion. The language is a fabric worn by its narrator like a costume as a conscious part of his performance. It thus conforms to Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of language as an object of representation, an artistic image: The artistic image of the language must by its very nature be a linguistic hybrid (an intentional hybrid): it is obligatory for two linguistic consciousnesses to be present, the one being represented and the other doing the representing. [...] Indeed, if there is not a second representing consciousness, if there is no second representing language-intention, then what


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results is not an image [obraz] of language but merely a sample [obrazec] of some other person’s language, whether authentic or fabricated. (original emphases) 3

Bakhtin points out that the effect of this is to allow the author to ‘penetrate into the interior of the other’s speech’ and to ‘create a perspective for it’ 4 and thus to enable a performative dialogue that both makes the language accessible and distances the reader from it enough to view it critically. This style is as much a performative artefact as the modified Trinidadian used by Sam Selvon in The Lonely Londoners (1956), the adolescent slang of Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) or the fictional argot of Alex and his droogs in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). It is perhaps that novel, with its similar descriptions of ultraviolence, rather than Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), with its more naturalistic dialect, which provides useful comparisons. Burgess’s portrayal of teenage identity forged both with and against prevailing social and political trends (in this case the slang taken from Russian rather than Punjabi and rap-speak) emphasises both the freedoms and pressures that his rebellion brings. In the end, of course, it is the process of growing up itself in Alex’s case which is shown to be more fundamental. Two other works that should be mentioned in contextualising the novel also plot the parameters of its optimistic potential as well as the pessimistic dangers. Londonstani’s portrayal of a performative identity outside the norms of social groupings suggests the chance of a crosscultural act of identification with the Other, a bridge of imagination such as has long been advocated by Wilson Harris as a liberation from selfperpetuating oppressions, and the antecedent here is Colin MacInnes’s classic but neglected studies of a teenager’s view of London in Absolute Beginners (1959) and of cross-cultural interaction both there and in City of Spades (1957). On the other hand Malkani himself includes a reference to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) in the first chapter, alluding to the tribal pressure to conform – identity as being identical – in group behaviour freed from institutional constraints. So even though the narrator, Jas, has escaped from a white identity and been accepted by his new group as part of their composite identity, they are still subject to peer and societal pressures which influence their choices. For instance, their speech is not chosen freely but has become a rigid code. The narrator can use codeswitching or ironic distance to show that he is not entirely confined within the code, but he cannot change or influence it 3

4

Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. by Michael Holquist, transl. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp.259-422 (p.359). Ibid., p.358.

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without sacrificing his credibility within the role, as becomes clear in ‘Rudeboy Rule # 4’: According to Hardjit, it don’t matter if the proper word for something sounds fuckin ridiculous. If it’s the proper word then it’s the proper word Yard is one a them words. If it was me who was the American hiphop G or whoever the fuck it was who invented all this proper speak, no way the proper word for house’d be yard. That’s the garden, for fuck’s sake. I in’t feelin the word crib either cos that’s what American babies sleep in. Also, I wouldn’t decide that the proper word for wikid is heavy. Why they decided that The Shit should mean The Greatest I got no idea, maybe cos bad’s always meant good. But more than all a this, if I was the Proper Word Inventor I’d do two things differently. I wouldn’t decide that the proper word for a dickless poncey sap is a gay batty boy or that the proper word for women is bitches. That shit in’t right. I know what other poncey words like homophobic an misogynist mean an I know that shit in’t right. But what am I s’posed to do bout it? If I don’t speak proply using the proper words then these guys’d say I was actin like a batty boy or a woman or a woman actin like a batty boy. One good thing though: now that I use all these proper words I’m hardly ever stuck for words. I just chuck in a bit a proper speak an I sound like I’m talkin proper, talkin like Hardjit. I just wish I was the Proper Word Inventor so I could pick different proper words, that’s all. But, seeing as how I in’t that person, we were cruisin to Hardjit’s yard in Ravi’s ride, checkin out the bitches round the high street. (pp.45-46)

An awareness of homophobia or mysogynism does not prevent its wholesale adoption within the chosen identity.

3. ‘Family-related Shit’ Mysogynistic and homophobic attitudes, together with aggressiveness and gangster bravado, suggest that the identity of these young men is also a product of teenage angst – the exaggerated sexual boasting and preening, ‘chirpsing’ of girls, the fear of being thought a batty-boy (Caribbean for bottom-boy or homosexual) coexist with pervasive strains of homoeroticism both in the admiration Jas clearly feels for Hardjit and in the way Hardjit seems to view his own performance with a mixture of self-regard and insecurity. His body, after all, is ‘built’ (perhaps, it is hinted, using steroids), his appearance ‘designer-desiness’, and the presence of Jas to witness all this is also his own work, Pygmalion’s creation as both audience and fellowactor. Then there is the disdain for ‘poncey’ activities like intellectual pursuits, and the need to derive power from inspiring fear. The white boy beaten up at the start of the book has not, as Hardjit asserted, called anyone a ‘Paki’ or insulted his mother. As he says, ‘I didn’t even say nothing, Jas. Nobody would ever be so stupid as to mess with you lot any more’ (p.13). An identity that offers power tends to corrupt: I’ll daydream that I’m a Nazi. I know it sounds like I’m being a wanker cos they were scum like suicide bombers, killin all them people an that. But were they all wankers? At least they


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walked and talked proply. An even if you reckoned they walked or dressed stupid, at least nobody’d take the piss outta them. Fuckin saluted them instead. (p.32)

Such adolescent assertiveness is also a reaction to the family, particularly mothers. When at home, Hardjit and the others behave with an almost excessive deference, like true mafia mama’s boys. The hilarious incongruity of Ravi’s allowing the shopping he has done for his mother at Boots to be inspected by his auntiji also reminds the reader how much of their front is play-acting: they live at home, not in the ghetto, and the Beemer they drive around in belongs to Ravi’s mother. The identities the boys perform in reaction to their parents and their cultures are a typical teenage mix of proud inheritance and rejection. Where the parents’ culture is marked by custom and calcified nostalgia, the children seek rule-governed purity of purpose, whatever that purpose is. Hardjit is better informed about the Sikh holy scriptures than his parents, though he is caught in the old Faustian trap of confusing the spiritual and the material, the mental warrior with the martial-arts bruiser. Fanatical identities can easily be constellated in such material, and indeed Hardjit’s fiats about such things as interracial or inter-religious dating already incline in that direction. The family identities with which the younger generation are interacting are those of immigrants, whose connections with India are still evident in their imperfect English and their regular contacts with their country of origin. Their expressions of identity in language, dress, cuisine and customs have become rigid over the course of time, reinforced by nostalgic illusions about the world they have left, and motivated more by anxiety over the opinions of others of their own community, with whom they feel in constant competition, than by natural social interaction. The success they have achieved in their new environment is expressed in exclusively material terms (the latest electronic equipment, satellite dishes and so on) tempered by insecurity (Amit and Arun’s family have three separate burglar alarms and put silk on the carpets to prevent them being stained by drinks that are not on the tables because these have already been put away for protection). Their wealth is for show rather than use, and as Sanjay points out, his father ‘knew nothing about me that wasn’t on my CV. [...] It means his recognition is dependent on the extent to which I boost his prestige’ (p.307). The parents’ attitude clearly acts as a motor for the children’s rebellion, but it is usually a typical teenage rebellion rather than a liberation, a refusal to accept parental control. The narrator says: Always tryin to control us so that they can live out their dreams through us. It’s like they want to have our bodies, like a fuckin fancy dress outfit or someshit […] Why d’you think we end up choosing the lifestyle an the career they’d choose if they had our bodies? Why

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d’you think we end up havin the wedding they’d have if they had our bodies, with the wife they’d choose if they had our bodies? (p.197)

Bodies, after all, are part of the material world, even if the costumes of identities can be swapped and abandoned. The parents react to the rebellion by claiming that their children are becoming ‘Westrenised’. Their demands for the observance of custom lead to what the narrator calls ‘complicated family-related shit’ as Arun’s family are engaged in a constant feud for power and respect against the ‘girl’s side’: his fiancée’s family. In one of the plot’s more surprising turns this will lead to Arun’s suicide.

4. Adding Values Whereas Jamaican rudeboys forged their identity as a response to destitution and wore their wealth as an outward sign of defiance, the desis have adapted the materialism of their parents and of British ‘affluenza’ society with the ostentation of American rappers to make a fetish of designer brands, fashionable restaurants and clubs, and fast cars. ‘Bling’ culture, shiny, expensive and superficial, is also part of their performance; in the novel the guru they find of this aspect of globalised post-Thatcherite Britain is Sanjay, a clear derivative of Kureishi’s Salim from My Beautiful Laundrette. With him they contract to supply stolen mobile phones for what becomes the most negative portrayal of the role they have assumed, where nothing is real or genuine except the cash. The phones are a phoney facade (the pun is Sanjay’s) behind which he hides his sources of income in the so-called ‘carousel fraud’ involving the syphoning off of taxpayers’ money through fictional transactions between fictional companies endlessly repeated. Into this fiction he also draws real companies which are sucked into a kind of black hole. According to the Guardian, carousel fraud was estimated to have cost EU taxpayers €50bn in 2006, more than the Common Agricultural Policy, and enough to require the trade figures to be rewritten because they were thought to be largely fictional too. 5 To obtain the last phones, Sanjay blackmails Jas using faked photos as evidence suggesting that his short period dating the Muslim Samira has gone further than it has, thus turning his former group against him and leading to the novel’s denouement, in which he suffers the same fate as the white youth at the beginning and is responsible for the destruction of his father’s warehouse. The carnival performance ends on Ash Wednesday. When, during a seminar on multiculturalism after 7/7, Hanif Kureishi asks ‘What do you think identities do? What are identities for?’ one of the replies 5

Ashley Seager and Ian Cobain, ‘VAT Fraud Costing Europe €50bn a Year’, The Guardian, 11 July 2006.


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he receives is ‘They help you make sense of who you are,’ while another is ‘We should be teaching people how to be uncomfortable with their identities’. 6 The novel certainly throws an interesting light on these concepts. However, another answer must be that they give people a sense of security, of trusting in the loyalty and cohesiveness of the group. Part of the sense of shock expressed by some commentators after the July bombings reflected the perceived lack of loyalty to an entity called ‘Britishness’. The only representative of Britishness in Londonstani is Mr. Ashwood, a former teacher of the narrator’s. Though he is first introduced in an ambivalent light, both admirable and vulnerable, he is built up as a powerful figure who will return the gang to values based on education, respect and the rule of law, until his efforts only lead to the friends being drawn into the orbit of Sanjay, who he thought would be a good influence. When nothing is as it appears to be, good intentions count for little. None of the alternative loyalties in the book prove durable: Jas’s dream-girl Samira is not the intimidating representative of Islam that he had feared, but she is soon bored with him when his needs become tiresome and her beauty can entice any number of admirers. Jas’s former friends disappear as soon as they hear he has been going out with a Muslim: ‘basically the three a them wanted to beat Samira’s three brothers to beatin me’ (p.278). When Sanjay urges Jas to steal his own father’s phones his resistance is minimal. Expediency wins over loyalty every time.

5. Escaping the Matrix In conversation with Arun, Jas compares the world of fixed categories of identity, which they first gave the illusion of transcending, to the matrix in the film of the same name: — No, my friend, I go, — castes don’t exist. It’s all bullshit, all in The Matrix, all part a some illusion created by people who want power over others. You did history with Mr Ashwood, right? The world’s full a categories a people that were just, like, invented randomly. How can someone be Brahmin an someone not be Brahmin if the categories don’t really exist in the real world? (p.239)

I have already indicated that the novel’s intertextual references are chosen deliberately, and it would be wrong to assume that the importance given to The Matrix is merely due to its cult status. It may be helpful to say a little more about the film, as certain intriguing conclusions can be drawn from its use. The film relates how Neo (the novice), dissatisfied with the world he is living in, is initiated by Morpheus (sleep – the unconscious – the transmuter) into a 6

A conversation between Monica Ali, Paul Carlin, Paul Gilroy, Kate Hext, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Natasha Street, Sandra Young and Colin MacCabe, Critical Quarterly 48.2 (Summer 2006), 1-44 (p.9).

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group of rebels who have knowledge of the true nature of the material world and the way that human beings are imprisoned within it. Morpheus tells him: Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. 7

This apparently real, material world is in fact the Matrix, comparable to the virtual parameters of a computer programme. Morpheus explains: Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Neo: What truth? Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.... Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. 8

Neo, fulfilling the prophecy of an ordinary housewife called The Oracle, is taught by Morpheus, betrayed by Cypher, opposed by the agents of the conventional, inspired by the love of the girl Trinity, and becomes ‘The One’ who is able to see the Matrix for what it is and escape its constraints. Among other religious and philosophical parallels, it has not escaped the attention of numerous observers that the film has roots in ancient Gnosticism 9 – a heterogeneous belief system persecuted as heretical by the established Churches – which held that the material world was a prison under the control of a demiurge who believed himself to be God. Human beings, however, carry within themselves splinters, or sparks, of the true, absent God, with whom, through knowledge of their true situation, they hope to be reunited. A resurgence of interest in the Gnostic tradition has led to new and fruitful ways of approaching many previously obscure literary works and contemporary texts. 10 As far as The Matrix is concerned, Neo’s recognition of the true divine spark in himself and others and the way he uses it to free himself from bondage to the material and to systems of convention and exploitative power indeed have clear Gnostic parallels. The problem, as writers as diverse as Marlowe and Yeats have pointed out, is to establish the

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The Matrix (USA 1999, written and dir. by Andy and Larry Wachowski). Ibid. A list of online essays can be found at (15 July 2007). For further information on Gnosticism and its relationship with literature and thought up to the present see Michael Mitchell, Hidden Mutualities: Faustian Themes from Gnostic Origins to the Postcolonial (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006).


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exact relationship between the material and the non-material, summarised by Aristotle’s distinction ‘on kai me on’ (being or non-being – to be or not to be), which Gnostic-inclined thinkers have realised is a false opposition. The film The Matrix, which seeks its resolution in scenes which perhaps rely too much on Hollywood special effects and violent showdown, fails to convince that it can offer a solution. The ability to see through the unreality of the Matrix, although it appears to be all that exists, is a function of the imagination. 11 It can be done in fiction, particularly through using a Bakhtinian sense of carnival masquerade 12 in a postmodern play of identities in order to bring an end to the metanarratives of racism, nationalism and exclusion. If, as Malkani hopes, his novel is read by people who don’t usually read novels and thus inspires their imagination, he will fulfil a Morpheus-like role comparable to the Gnostic/Hermetic alchemists’ shape-shifting Mercurius. Like Neo’s escape from the Matrix, it may engender a surge of optimism: ‘I’m going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible.’ 13 However, without a conscious cross-culturality of the type Wilson Harris has continually urged – and which in his latest novel The Ghost of Memory (2006) takes as its starting point the victim of arbitrary identification, a man mistakenly shot as a terrorist, who then falls into a work of art brought alive as a play – there is a danger that equally rigid categories will simply take their place. Though Jas can hardly be called an impostor for freely playing the roles available to him, there is still a curious void within him, a lack of true human feelings or genuine warmth. Perhaps the novel’s hint of a new beginning, his Hindi expression of gratitude to the nurse who is aware of his true identity, is a sign of optimism. If not, if there is nothing but masquerade and illusion, there have been enough indications that the resulting disillusion can turn into a much darker dance.

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Significantly, The Matrix includes references to Lewis Carroll, both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well as to Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. ‘The mask is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself. The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural boundaries [...]; it is based on a peculiar interrelation of reality and image, characteristic of the most ancient rituals and spectacles.’ Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, transl. by Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), pp.39-40. The Matrix.

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Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. by Michael Holquist, transl. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp.259-422. ——. Rabelais and His World, transl. by Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), pp.39-40. Burgess, Anthony, A Clockwork Orange (London: Heinemann, 1962). Frears, Stephen, dir., My Beautiful Laundrette. Screenplay by Hanif Kureishi (UK 1985). Golding, William, Lord of the Flies (London: Faber, 1954). Harris, Wilson, The Ghost of Memory (London: Faber, 2006). MacCabe, Colin, ‘A Conversation between Monica Ali, Paul Carlin, Paul Gilroy, Kate Hext, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Natasha Street, Sandra Young and Colin MacCabe’, Critical Quarterly, 48.2 (Summer 2006), 1-44. MacInnes, Colin, Absolute Beginners (London: Allison & Busby, 1980 [1959]). ——. City of Spades (London: Allison & Busby, 1980 [1957]). Malkani, Gautam, Londonstani (London: Fourth Estate, 2006). ——. ‘Machismo and Masculinity in Londonstani’ [accessed on 15 July 2007]. Mitchell, Michael, Hidden Mutualities: Faustian Themes from Gnostic Origins to the Postcolonial (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006). Salinger, J.D., The Catcher in the Rye (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1951). Seager Ashley and Ian Cobain, ‘VAT Fraud Costing Europe €50bn a Year’, The Guardian, 11 July 2006. Selvon, Sam, The Lonely Londoners (London: Alan Wingate, 1956). Wachowski, Andy and Larry, dir., The Matrix (USA 1999). Welsh, Irvine, Trainspotting (London: Secker & Warburg, 1993).

Ellen Dengel-Janic

‘East is East and West is West’: A Reading of Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism (2006) In his first novel Tourism (2006), Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal, through the voice of his cynical protagonist Bhupinder, gives a rather uncompromising and bleak account of contemporary London and its diverse communities. Instead of representing unstable, shifting and hybrid identities, Dhaliwal seems to relapse into essentialism, cultural difference and racial stereotype. The reader is constantly confronted with disturbing clichés and generalisations, which, are, however, part of the novel’s satirical mode. Rather than read his work as a reversal of the immigrant’s marginalisation, I will focus on the novel’s farcical rendering of the condition of contemporary ethnic urbanity. In this respect, I will examine the novel’s satirical mode and how its exaggerated essentialism and sweeping generalisations are part of a destabilising discourse. Thus, I will argue, Dhaliwal purposefully levels provocations at the liberal bourgeoisie which he deems responsible for racial segregation in the media and the literary world as they ‘are desperate to be seen to celebrate diversity’ (Times Online, April 2005).

1. Introduction The current popularity of writers like Zadie Smith and Monica Ali seems to tie in with the Western liberal middle-class taste for the exotic, yet postmodern mix of cultural difference and the performance of multiple identifications related to race, class and gender. Claims of authenticity and a catering to exoticism are combined in writers such as Gautam Malkani and Tony White, who portray second generation subculture. 1 Clearly positioning himself on the other side of the spectrum in his novel Tourism (2006), 2 Nirpal Dhaliwal, through the voice of his cynical protagonist, dismantles any attempt to represent London’s celebration of ethnic diversity and hybridity. The optimism concerning multiculturalism dating to the preceding decade seems to have been abandoned by Bhupinder, a young Sikh writer, who uncompromisingly dissects the

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In his famous polemical article ‘“Commonwealth Literature” Does Not Exist’, Salman Rushdie already points out the predicament of the diasporic writer of being judged according to notions of authenticity: ‘Authenticity is the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogenous and unbroken tradition.’ Salman Rushdie, ‘“Commonwealth Literature” Does Not Exist’, in Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (New York: Granta Books, 1991), pp.6170, (p.67). Nirpal Dhaliwal, Tourism (London: Vintage, 2006). All further references appear parenthetically in the text.

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relations between race, sex, and class in his portrayal of 21st-century multiethnic London. 3 Indeed, the novel moves beyond the social comedy of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and its cynical detachment suggests a very different understanding of ethnicities in Britain. Instead of portraying the unstable, shifting and hybrid identities as Smith does, Dhaliwal seems to relapse into essentialism, cultural difference and racial stereotype. The reader is constantly confronted with disturbing clichés and stereotypes, which, as a reviewer claimed, can only be stated by the disenfranchised voice of an immigrant. 4 Rather than read his work as a reversal of the immigrant’s marginalisation, however, I will focus on the novel’s farcical rendering of the condition of contemporary ethnic urbanity. In this respect, I will examine the novel’s satirical mode and how its exaggerated essentialism and over-generalisations are part of a destabilising discourse. In addition to this, I will discuss how, through Bhupinder, the antagonising protagonist-narrator, Dhaliwal purposefully levels provocations at the liberal bourgeoisie which he deems responsible for racial segregation in the media and the literary world as they ‘are desperate to be seen to “celebrate diversity”’. 5 One could very well approach this novel exclusively from a perspective which draws on postcolonial concepts of difference, diasporic identity, and the representation of the disenfranchised marginalised ‘Other’. Furthermore, one might also use concepts such as hybridity, the generation gap, mass media and popular culture to look at it from an angle that allows for an examination of specific problems of second generation immigrants. All these approaches certainly have their validity. However, to grasp this particular novel’s problematic representation of race, class and gender, I will use a literary studies approach (with a narratological perspective) in combination with postcolonial concepts. 6 My observations are therefore based on three 3

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John McLeod also considers the fact that the rather positive view of a hybrid and multicultural London might be replaced by a more bleak vision of the city in the 21st century. However, his analysis of writers like David Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar and Bernardine Evaristo leads him to the conclusion that they partake in a ‘refashioning of London as a transcultural space of social possibility […]’ John McLeod, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p.21. This notion, of course, can hardly be detected in Dhaliwal’s Tourism. Claire Mapletoft, ‘Review of Nirpal Dhaliwal’s Tourism’, <www.bookmunch.co.uk> (21 May 2007). Nirpal Dhaliwal, ‘Gosh, Brown and Talented? Super’ Times Online, 16 April 2005. Postcolonial studies have indeed influenced literary analysis, not only concerning English literature from former colonies, but also as far as canonical English texts are concerned, which have been reconsidered under postcolonial paradigms. Yet, our methodological approach can still be enlarged by narratological concepts, which so far have been largely missing from postcolonial literary studies. Recently, however, there have been attempts at a

‘East is East and West is West’: A Reading of Nirpal Dhaliwal’s Tourism (2006)

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interrelated narratological and genre questions: what is the position of the narrator-protagonist, what are the ideological implications of this position and how does the satirical mode reveal or conceal these implications. The last question I will look at is what is the function of narrative closure?

2. Dhaliwal’s Protagonist as Flaneur In contrast to Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), there is no desire in Tourism for a connecting, even though clearly artificial, ethnic identity, no seeking of a group identity forged out of popular and youth culture, consumerism and the use of a common linguistic code. There is also no engagement with the struggle for acceptance by white British society. Instead, the narrator posits himself as a lonesome, post-modern observer, detached and disengaged from a wish to conform, bond and belong. Dhaliwal effectively uses the figure of the flaneur as a foil for his protagonist, notably employing a ‘naturalistic’ depiction of the city and its inhabitants as the rationale of the flaneur’s observations. 7 To illustrate this detached way of commenting on life in the metropolis, here is an example: The seats were upholstered with green velvet, on which sat the locals, ageing quietly and staring at the television screen, at Thierry Henry mopping sweat from his temple. These people were, I guessed, from the council estate at the end of the street. A listless man with oily hair and a limp moustache sat beside the television. He wore an ancient pin-striped suit and sipped a glass of Scotch, a forgotten cigarette cindered between his fingers. There were a dozen others like him, with pasty sunless faces, dressed like thrift-shop mannequins, silently watching the football. (pp.11-12)

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more systematic approach to postcolonial narratology. See, for example, Gerald Prince, ‘On Postcolonial Narratology’, in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp.372-381. The flaneur as a symptomic figure of Fin-de-Siècle and Modernist fiction has recently resurfaced in literature as well as literary studies. His popularity can be explained by his adaptability to postmodern modes of telling. Consider the following definition: ‘The flaneur, though grounded in everyday life, is an analytic form, a narrative device, an attitude towards knowledge and its social context. It is an image of movement through the social space of modernity […]. The flaneur is a multilayered palimpsest that enables us to move from real products of modernity, like commodification and leisured patriarchy, through the practical organization of space and its negotiation by inhabitants of a city, to a critical appreciation of the state of modernity and its erosion into the post-, and onwards to a reflexive understanding of the function, and purpose, of realist as opposed to hermeneutic epistemologies in the appreciation of those previous formations.’ Chris Jenks, ‘Watching Your Step: The History and Practice of the Flaneur’, Visual Culture, ed. by Jenks (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp.142-160, (p.148). For recent examples of the flaneur see Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002) or Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003).

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Dhaliwal, in the vein of his classical predecessors, writers of modernist city novels, has a comparable approach to the figure of the flaneur. The city through the eyes of the postmodern observer consists of depictions of a variety of urban dwellers, belonging to different classes, races, sexualities etc. Prototypical modernist depictions of the city, exemplified by writers like Henry James, have arguably similar intentions, such as making the city a protagonist in itself, but also ‘enacting the colonizing gaze of the tourist’. 8 Using an analogous strategy in Tourism the central and dominant white male identity is suddenly no longer unmarked, 9 the invisible position of the powerful gaze is unveiled; furthermore, it is represented and depicted as powerless and undesirable. What this quote illustrates is the effective reversal of the colonial gaze; 10 by this process the hierarchy and power structures inherent to British society are turned upside down. Yet, this newly gained powerful position is not inhabited by the disenfranchised ‘Other’, but by someone who fashions himself as a disinterested tourist who encounters and interprets the other culture. However, this position has to be re-affirmed by repeatedly evoking the difference of the ‘Other’. Targeting mostly the white lower class, Bhupinder positions himself as superior in the urban space – where economic struggle is most apparent, and upward mobility can be achieved by people of different races, ethnicities or genders. This unsettling of the hitherto quite fixed hierarchy creates a state of uncertainty, in which the acquisition of a more powerful position, in terms of class, has to be continuously reestablished and affirmed. Even though the protagonist’s mockery of different groups such as the British lower class, tourists from Australia and South Africa, homosexuals and women does not exclude his own community, surely, through the filter of a detached point of view, a reverse racism is played out. But how can the reader ascertain if the text’s and not the narrator’s position is racist? It might be only the narrator’s racist ideology, which the text exposes but does not endorse. Questions of reliability arise, of subjective point of view, of distance 8

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Brigitte Bailey, ‘Travel Writing and the Metropolis: James, London and English Hour’, American Literature 67.2 (1995), 201-232 (p.202). In 19th-century travel literature, the tourist has often been compared to the coloniser. These texts have been seen as bringing the ‘“foreign objects” in the traveller’s field of vision under conceptual control’ (p.201). A similar process is depicted in Tourism, Bhupinder acquires a powerful, yet at the same time seemingly disengaged, gaze. Cf. Gayle S.Rubin’s analysis of hierarchies based on gender, class, race, etc. Gayle S. Rubin, ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. by Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge, 1984), pp.267-319. I am referring to Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of the colonial gaze. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).


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between narrator and implied author. Concerning the subjectivity of the narrator’s perspective, one might argue that his emphasised distance and objectivity to whatever he chooses to portray and render in his monologues on race, sex and class, create the illusion of objectivity, and therefore obscure the position from which he speaks. This is what Roland Barthes calls ‘writing at zero degree’. With regard to Camus’s L’étranger (1942), Barthes defines this style of writing as follows: it would be accurate to say that it is a journalist’s writing, if it were not precisely the case that journalism develops, in general, optative or imperative (that is, emotive) forms. The new neutral writing takes its place in the midst of all that shouting and all those judgements, without becoming involved with any of them; it consists precisely in their absence. But this absence is complete, it implies no refuge, no secret; 11

Undoubtedly, however, the question is whether writing can ever be objective. Along those lines, Edward Said rightly points out that Camus’s text can very well be seen as an act of concealment and complicity by excluding the colonial situation from its representation of Meursault’s murder of an Arab. 12 Therefore, Barthes’s term ‘écriture blanche’ cannot be seen as a mode of writing without ideological inscriptions. The zero-degree style is in itself fraught with ideological meaning. Whether this is the case in Tourism can be clarified by looking at the ideological implications of the narrator’s posing as a tourist. The narrative voice is ascribed to a character who is clearly defined as occupying a specific position in Britain’s cultural makeup, yet he claims to be a free-floating, independent character, who is not attached or feels a sense of community or belonging to a specific ethnic identity. In contrast to his precedents, such as Sam Selvon’s, Hanif Kureishi’s, Salman Rushdie’s and Zadie Smith’s Londoners, Buhpinder is a tourist who at least claims that he is above and beyond the need to be rooted, to belong or to settle down. Definitions of tourism and the role of the tourist are legion, yet what seems to be apt in describing Dhaliwal’s choice of title as well as his protagonist’s self-fashioning is to compare the tourist to the ethnographer. According to Robert Chi modernity has produced the tourist as ethnographic agent; 13 Bhupinder enacts this in passages rendering life in urban London: 11 12 13

Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (London: Cape, 1967), pp.82-83. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p.208, p.219. Robert Chi, ‘Toward a New Tourism: Albert Wendt and Becoming Attractions’, Cultural Critique 37 (1997), pp.61-105 (p.67). Erik Cohen’s proposition to categorise tourism as a guest-host relationship would have been interesting in respect to how Bhupinder negotiates his own position as an outsider to British society. In sociologist studies one approach is to ‘focus […] on the visitor component of the tourist’s role. Its proponents conceive of its touristic process as a commercialisation of the traditional guest-host relationship through which strangers were given a temporary role and status in the society they visited. […] This

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When I first moved to Hackney, in 1996, Hoxton was aflame with ambition and ideas. It was the Mecca of ‘Cool Britannia’. Artists, designers, musicians, creative people working in every type of media had set themselves up there. Before they arrived the place was an empty buffer between the City and the immigrant slums of East London. (pp.173-174)

So far, the ethnographic gaze along with information about the set-up of a specific urban area is the foil for Bhupinder’s monologic passages. Yet, while he claims to be a quasi-ethnographic observer, his disinterestedness is revealed as a mere mask. This becomes visible as he provides more information on the history of this particular place. Seemingly neutral information is suddenly transformed into polemical and provocative statements: This was its attraction: white people gauge their cool and creativity by the degree they tolerate being in proximity of blacks and Asians. People from across Britain flocked there in the mid-nineties; for a few years the area had vibrancy I had never seen before. I’d never seen white people so confident and open. (p.174, emphasis in the original)

Bhupinder plays the agent provocateur in the way he exploits cultural stereotyping, at the same time he enforces a politics of difference. Dhaliwal, by using such a protagonist, positively launches an attack of ‘political incorrectness’ at the implicit Western liberal middle-class reader. Next to the protagonist’s provocative stance and ‘political incorrectness’, his satirical take on his own cultural roots has to be examined. 14 Using irony, humour and satire, he ridicules his own family, and along with it the prototypical immigrant family in Britain: BEHOLD!, THE ASIAN family: unit of tradition, moral strength and business acumen. Behold!, my mother: matriarch and fulcrum, proud bearer of sons, stately in her new sari, her one eyebrow draped across her forehead like a trophy pelt, her moustache downy like an adolescent boy’s. (p.34)

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approach proved fruitful in studying the evolution and dynamics of relationships between tourists and locals and in analyzing conflicts within roles and institutions dealing with conflicts’. Erik Cohen, ‘The Sociology of Tourism: Approaches, Issues and Findings’, Annual Review of Sociology 10 (1984), pp.372-393 (pp.374-375). The parallel between immigration and ‘[t]ourism as commercialised hospitality’(Cohen, p.374) could be fruitful for an exploration of the status of immigrants in opposition to tourists, both of which demand a constant negotiation of cultural difference. In this respect, a definition of satire based on the text-reader relationship might help to illuminate Dhaliwal’s use of the satirical mode: ‘In fact, contrary to what the satirist may claim in defence of his or her own work, the satirist’s primary aim has generally been to upset our conventional and literary expectations – not to validate them.’ Rita A. Bergenholtz, ‘Toni Morrison’s Sula: A Satire on Binary Thinking’, African American Review 30.1 (1996), pp.89-98 (p.90). In addition to this, one might also keep in mind that satire uses ‘a rhetoric of inquiry, a rhetoric of provocation, a rhetoric of display, a rhetoric of play’, as Dustin Griffin claims; cf. Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), p.39.


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This is definitely taking humorous depictions of immigrants à la Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith and Meera Syal a step further. In regards to both class and ethnicity, the protagonist distances himself from his Punjabi background. Dhaliwal creates a postmodern flaneur who turns away from his own culture, and instead seeks access to upper class lifestyle with its promise of luxury and leisure. Thus, undoubtedly, Dhaliwal’s novel differs greatly from the prototypical mode of the immigrant tragedy which has already been satirised in one of Monica Ali’s characters in Brick Lane (2003) who melodramatically exclaims: ‘This is the tragedy of our lives. To be an immigrant is to live out a tragedy’. 15 Even though the predominantly sarcastic and satirical tone of the narrative voice advocates a disengaged reading of cultural difference, a closer look at the novel reveals a subtext which suggests otherwise. The biographical information which is given, as for example in the following quote, hints at a sublimation of the experience of xenophobia: There was also a school photo of Rani and I, staring empty-eyed at the camera: Rani’s hair was in two plaits that fell either side and out of shot; mine was in a knot on top of my head, tied in a Donald Duck handkerchief. Soon after, in time for high school, I wore a turban, blighting my adolescence. When I got rid of it and had a haircut, Mum spent three days in fast and prayer, interrupted only by sleep and fits of tears. My father never wore one, and my mother wasn’t even baptised, but England brought out the zealot in her. I didn’t eat a hamburger until I was eighteen, didn’t have a proper shave until I was twenty. (p.39)

The satirical mode can evidently function as an outlet of protest, and a sublimation and refinement of anger and indignation at social inequality and ostracism. Another instance which gives away this suppressed indignation is the narrator’s account of his former best friend’s Marlon’s story (p.16f). Marlon conforms to the idea ‘of keeping it real’ as propagated by American popular music and TV shows such as the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. This, for Marlon, means that he models his identity on an ethnicity, a kind of ghetto authenticity, which, in Bhupinder’s view, hinders him in progressing in terms of successful schooling and a professional career. 16 A similar oscillation between disengagement and involvement is produced by the double position of the narrator, firstly as writer and secondly as tourist. Using two non-exclusive, yet different points of view, the tourist’s, whose comments and interpretations of city life make up large parts of the novel and the writer’s, whose engagement with his chosen subject-matter is emphasised at the end of the novel, Dhaliwal creates an ambivalent narrative voice. The

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Ali, Monica, Brick Lane (London: Doubleday, 2003), p.114. Evidently, ‘keeping it real’ as non-conformism at the same time exposes a made-up authenticity which consists of a playful display of ethnic markers. Yet, as the narrator sees it, this can also lead to a self-inflicted stigmatisation.

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latter type of writing has to be termed confessional, i.e. personal and emotive, as pronounced in the following lines: I’d always thought there was a novel in me. I thought my change in fortune, my windfall, would let me write it. Except I can’t. I’ve scribbled thousands of banal sentences during these months, and can’t find it. It’s not there. If it is, it is behind this thing, this colossus that’s blocked my sight for twelve months. I look into the sky and I see it; I stare at the wall, the floor, the mirror, my fingernails, and I see it. So I’ve jotted down my memories, preparing for my project, my opus – my confession. (p.8)

This opening statement is a clever strategy used for two purposes: on the one hand, Dhaliwal caters to the publishing market’s interest in the ‘authentic immigrant’ voice, on the other he writes in the tradition of the fictional autobiography, a well-established genre in British literary history. Despite the fact that the predominantly disengaged tone is not confessional, the interspersed personal history, however, as well as the narrator’s sublimated indignation at Britain’s racist society, testify to a greater engagement with current problems resulting from institutionalised racism. Thus, Dhaliwal also comments, on a meta-level, on the position of the second-generation writer, who in his view, does not simply produce an authentic discourse, but tells the immigrant story with a narrative twist.

3. Gender Constructs: Dhaliwal’s Perspective on Masculinity and Femininity Finally, I will now come to the third literary concept, the form of closure of the narrative. Closure is achieved by two strategies; one is framing the story with the narrator’s travels. Another form of closure is achieved when Bhupinder eventually finds out that he is the father of Sarupa’s child, the woman whom he always desired. His journey, in two ways, his quest for sex and women and his search for a home space, come to an end. Gender and race enter a dialogue in this final assertion of his masculinity by having a child called Rekha, with a mother who is Indian, too. Recalling the image of Portobello Road as a ‘miscegenist heaven’ (p.52), as Bhupinder calls it, the family – even though it is not clear whether they will ever live together as one – as a redeeming and reparative unit, is undoubtedly referred to. This, of course, again casts a shadow on the credibility of the earlier postmodern, cynical detachment of Buphinder the flaneur. At this point one could ask if the image of the family as proposed ideal makes the novel relapse into conservatism? After having unmasked left-wing ideas and reversed the hegemonic gaze, can it eventually postulate heteronormative structures? Is the novel then successful concerning its potential for a revision of dominant ideologies? If whiteness is dismantled, essentialist views of ethnicity are questioned, what about the open sexism in the novel?


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After at first having been repelled by the sexist implications of the text, I have come to re-formulate my view on the aspect of gender as depicted in the novel. At first glance one might argue that Tourism creates an ambivalence by, on the one hand, subverting the power structure, white/non-white while still maintaining the male/female stereotyping in depictions of sexuality. Certainly, Dhaliwal’s own comments on his novel hint at his rather stereotypical view of gender, and a quite problematic stance towards ethnic masculinity: In my novel, Tourism, I write about working-class men and upper-class women, and about the dynamic between men of different ethnicities as they seek an identity for themselves. The omega male is generally a white-boy phenomenon. Confronted by the more robust masculinities presented by some black and Asian men, white men have cultivated an extreme effeteness, possibly trying to mark themselves as being more civilised. While black music has grown increasingly macho, indie bands are composed of pasty, withered sissies. Both are parodic, revealing how unsure men are today of how to present themselves. The aggressive, crotch-thrusting rapper is a moronic response to the alpha females who have long dominated the black community, managing careers and raising families with little or no male support. 17

However, if one also considers Dhaliwal’s revealing statement on the insecurities of Asian masculinities one might come to a different conclusion: Asian men flounder, unable to decide between the enticements and insecurities of western life, and the rigid certainties and comforts of traditional patriarchy. Few know how to integrate the competing elements of their masculinity into an honest, functional whole. 18

Despite the fact that it is very doubtful that such an ‘honest, functional whole’ exists, this quote demonstrates that Asian masculinity is seen to be greatly destabilised by conflicting gender norms, due to a hybridisation of cultures. This can also explain the masking of a growing uncertainty and insecurity which is depicted in the development of the fictional character Bhupinder. Whether one can see the exaggerated masculinity expressed in Bhupinder’s sexual prowess as a means of concealing the disturbing aspect of changing gender norms, can be decided by examining the different forms of masculinity and femininity which are evoked throughout the novel. Femininity as expressed in the character Sarupa is tied to superiority in terms of class and education. Similarly to his relationship with Sophie, a beautiful and successful young woman, Bhupinder’s love for Sarupa is ultimately defined by difference in class. The great gap between them is predominantly expressed in how the settings and locations – mainly associated with the two diverse groups Bhupinder befriends – are portrayed. Bhupinder’s and his friends’ world of Hackney, his family in Southall, and Sophie’s and 17 18

Nirpal Dhaliwal, ‘Man About the House’, The Sunday Times Online, 26 March 2006. Ibid.

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Sarupa’s world of minimalist apartments in West London and country houses in the Cotswolds are undoubtfully exhibiting the great contrast in economic and social standing. Masculinity, moreover, is not only limited to heterosexual relationships, but includes homosexual relationships as portrayed in Rory and his partner Shamir. Even though Bhupinder’s views on the subject of race, class and gender are often politically incorrect, his attitude does not endorse a heteronormative worldview, as becomes obvious in the following line: ‘My life was no vindication of heterosexuality’ (p.87). Furthermore, if one assumes that the ultimate marker of masculinity is fatherhood, Bhupinder’s role as father is not socially and publicly acknowledged, i.e. he is only informed by Sarupa that he is the biological father of her child, but the novel does not suggest that he will be actively involved in the child’s upbringing. His achievement of fatherhood, therefore, cannot be perceived in conventional heteronormative or even patriarchal terms. Interestingly, this final closure in the form of fatherhood occurs at a time when Bhupinder (similar to Monica Ali’s comic character Chanu, who returns to Bangladesh, though for different reasons) eventually makes his passage to India. Traveling East, he first stops in Sinai, but then plans to go on to India, more precisely to the Punjab, ‘to the village that my mother left’ (p.245). Recounting his memories he gives an impression of India, intermingling the image of India as pure and spiritual space – a notion which is alive in both Western and Indian imaginations – with ideas of kinship and belonging, as he says ‘[o]lder now, I remember a great deal else: the enormous sense of space, the depth and complexity of people, the unaffected love of relatives I had only just met’ (p.245). Thus, celebrating a sense of home, referring to more than just stereotypical images of India, the novel’s closure encourages a reading of globalisation, migration and urbanisation as producing its correlative in the way the local, origins and roots are projected as spaces of desire. Some theories of globalisation posit that we once lived in an ontologically secure collective ‘home’. Roland Robertson, in contrast to this, claims that globalisation involves the reconstruction, in a sense the production of home, community and locality; 19 therefore, locality can be seen as an aspect of globalisation, not its counterpart.

19

Cf. Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, Global Modernities, ed. by Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (London and New Delhi: Sage Publication, 1995), pp.25-44.


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4. The End of Multiculturalism? An Attempt at Re-Defining the Local and the Global Certainly, this localisation or desire for re-localisation surfaces at the end of Tourism, and reverberates in other recent immigrant narratives, literary as well as filmic, such as Brick Lane, White Teeth and Second Generation, a Channel Four production aired in 2003, in which a similar journey from hybrid immigrant culture to the desired home in the mother country is mapped out. Not only does narrative closure cater to the need for form and the tying up of loose ends in the plot, but in Dhaliwal’s text it becomes obvious that this closure marks the transformation from posing as a detached tourist within British culture to being a tourist in a more traditional sense. Bhupinder’s tourism – interestingly very similar to recent portrayals of second-generation’s desire for re-location – can be explained by a certain nostalgia inherent to tourism. Robert Chi claims, basing his assumptions on John Frow (1991), that tourism is defined by nostalgia for four things, namely ‘historical greatness, wholeness of the subject within a moral order, individual freedom, and personal authenticity’. 20 The narrator’s personal history as depicted in the novel is definitely void of all the above-mentioned characteristics. Therefore the transition from tourist within to traveller to the East is a clever and convincing move. As the above examples show, Tourism, as a novel, uses narrative strategies such as subjective point of view, frame narrative and closure to underline a position which presents two aspects of immigrant identity. Firstly, an alienated and distanced protagonist takes the reader on a tour through multiethnic London pointing out the failure of liberal and leftist politics. Secondly, he reclaims India as his fantasised home country. Not necessarily because he is Indian, but because India offers an imaginary space on which the homing desire can be projected. The multi-ethnic and globalised metropolis and a human need for a local cultural identity, or to use Gilroy’s term, ‘conviviality’, 21 the novel suggests, are not mutually exclusive, but are both part of the contemporary availability of multiple alliances and allegiances. 22 In this respect, the novel reflects a zeitgeist which is akin to urban existence, and the validity of postcolonial reflections for general concerns becomes very clear. 20 21

22

Chi, p. 66. Paul Gilroy introduces the term in After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). As a reaction and in opposition to works like Samuel P. Huntington’s (in)famous work The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), there has been a tendency in recent years to rethink globalisation in terms of possible alliances. Paul Gilroy’s After Empire, as well as, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006) are certainly showcasing this trend.

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No doubt, the novel can be also read as an attack on liberal political correctness and the white middle-class intellectual’s celebration of multiculturalism as expressed in the following passage: […] a delicate young couple who were reading the Guardian and drinking fruit smoothies. One read a piece on GM crops; the other glanced through a feature on Iranian art-house films. Both wore short hair, Levi’s, sandals and black rectangular spectacles; their faces bore the idealism, the vague suicidal melancholy of white British liberalism. (p.53)

Certainly, this speaks of a great disdain for leftist and liberal ideology, and formulates an indirect critique of Labour policies and leftist thinking which produces a feel-good multiculturalism, empty slogans of tolerance and political correctness as the ultimate means to an egalitarian multi-ethnic Britain. Along similar lines, Dhaliwal has attacked fellow Asian-British writers who, in his opinion, shy away from addressing the issue of ‘street-level multiculturalism’. In a provocative way, which proves to be his trademark, he argues that writing should no longer be ‘monopolised by the glib sentiments of an Oxbridge elite, seeking to impress their equally aloof and inexperienced liberal white peers’. 23 His approach to ethnicity and ostracism is certainly different from most current British-Asian writers’, but the choice of setting, the high society circles the protagonist moves in, does not exactly turn this novel into a pioneer text of ‘street-level multiculturalism’. In After Empire, Paul Gilroy posits that ‘the state of permanent emergency in times of “war against terror” […] [t]he languages of “race” and absolute ethnicity ensure that this natural hierarchy, which is also social and cultural, cannot be renegotiated’. 24 In this context, one might argue that Dhaliwal, on the one hand, turns this hierarchy upside down, while on the other, he complies with a politics of difference. However, the inclusiveness of Bhupinder’s views and the fact that he does not stop short of satirising his own ethnicity make for an unconventional and provocative way of tackling the issue of race. As Bhupinder puts it: ‘Negotiating our difference with these people is a trip. It always will be. But it’s funny. It gives us something to talk and laugh about’ (p.219). Reading Dhaliwal’s Tourism as a reaction to middle-class liberalism, New Labour’s war on terrorism and the subsequent redefinition of multiculturalism of 21st-century Britain might sound a bit far-fetched, yet its provocative tone and touchy subject matter has to be contextualised by aligning it with the contestation and revision of multiculturalism from both leftist and conservative political factions. What Dhaliwal perceptively calls a ‘yearly nod to multiculture’ (p.36) when he describes a Diwali dance 23 24

Quoted in Sam Leith, ‘Notebook’, Telegraph.co.uk, 3 April 2006. Gilroy, p.64.


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performance at a school, exposes the ineffectiveness and superficiality of a feel-good multicultural politics, which simultaneously masks an ongoing institutionalised racism. Of course, one could agree with critics who posit that multiculturalism has deteriorated into an empty slogan. And in times when world politics is dominated by ‘civilisational clashes’ and ‘wars on terror’, the disappearance of multiculturalism calls for a re-negotiating of difference with an awareness of transcultural and global realities. However, this too seems an over-generalising and rather obscure statement. 25 Instead, what I have tried to show is that by provoking liberal and leftist sentiment, Dhaliwal’s novel, in a disturbing way, forces one to confront the continuous power of a politics of difference in a Western, supposedly liberal, democracy.

Works Cited Ali, Monica, Brick Lane (London: Doubleday, 2003). Appiah, Anthony Kwame, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. (New York: Norton, 2006.) Bailey, Brigitte, ‘Travel Writing and the Metropolis: James, London and English Hours’, American Literature 67.2 (1995), 201-232. Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero (London: Cape, 1967). Bergenholtz, Rita A., ‘Toni Morrison’s Sula: A Satire on Binary Thinking’, African American Review 30.1 (1996), 89-98. Chi, Robert, ‘Toward a New Tourism: Albert Wendt and Becoming Attractions’, Cultural Critique 37 (1997), 61-105. Cohen, Erik, ‘The Sociology of Tourism: Approaches, Issues and Findings’, Annual Review of Sociology 10 (1984), 372-393. Dhaliwal, Nirpal, Tourism (London: Vintage, 2006).

25

I am certainly not trying to criticise transcultural theory as such. The validity of the approach as proposed by Frank Schulze-Engler is indisputable. He suggests a rethinking of the concepts of ‘culture’, ‘nation’ and ‘difference’: ‘As ‘transnational connections’ in a globally interlinked ‘eucumene of modernity’ come to the fore, ‘transculturality’ is emerging as an analytical tool geared towards exploring strategies of coping with cultural complexity on the level both of collectives and of individuals’. Frank Schulze-Engler, ‘Theoretical Perspectives: From Postcolonialism to Transcultural World Literature’, in English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion, ed. by Lars Eckstein (Stuttgart: UTB, 2007), pp.20-32 (p.28). However, for an analysis of a text, such as Dhaliwal’s Tourism, which criticises a feel-good multiculturalism as well as flaunts a politically incorrect stance, a transcultural approach does not fully do credit to the strategies the text employs.

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Dhaliwal, Nirpal, quoted in Sam Leith, ‘Notebook’, Telegraph.co.uk, 3 April 2006 [accessed on 15 May 2007]. Dhaliwal, Nirpal, ‘Man About the House’, The Sunday Times Online, 26 March 2006 [accessed on 15 May 2007]. ——. ‘Gosh, Brown and Talented? Super’, Times Online, 16 April 2005. [accessed on 15 May 2007]. Frow, John. ‘Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia’, October 57 (1991), 123-151. Gilroy, Paul, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). Griffin, Dustin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994). Jenks, Chris, ‘Watching Your Step: The History and Practice of the Flaneur’, Visual Culture, ed. by Jenks (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp.142-160. Mapletoft, Claire, ‘Review of Nirpal Dhaliwal’s Tourism’, www.bookmunch. co.uk. [last access on 21 May 2007]. McLeod, John, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). Prince, Gerald, ‘On Postcolonial Narratology’, in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp.372-381. Robertson, Roland, ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, Global Modernities, ed. by Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (London and New Delhi: Sage Publication, 1995), pp.25-44 Rubin, Gayle S., ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. by Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge, 1984), pp.267-319. Rushdie, Salman, ‘“Commonwealth Literature” Does Not Exist’, Imaginary Homelands (New York: Granta Books, 1991), pp.61-70. Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). Schulze-Engler, Frank, ‘Theoretical Perspectives: From Postcolonialism to Transcultural World Literature’, in English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion, ed. by Lars Eckstein (Stuttgart: UTB, 2007), pp.20-32.

Yvonne Rosenberg

‘Stop Thinking Like an Englishman’ or: Writing Against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights (2005) In a post-9/11 geopolitical climate, Tommy Akhtar, the protagonist of Patrick Neate’s novel City of Tiny Lights – published in 2005 shortly before the 7/7 bombings – lives a life of various identities in multi-ethnic London: a Ugandan-Indian, a ‘Paki’, an ex-mujahideen, Marlowewannabe, cosmopolitan, Londoner, and an Englishman. Yet, he always stays in the position of the immigrant because the often limited contemporary view of the other has led to the perception of internally homogeneous groups. In the course of the novel, it becomes clear how central the issue of fixed labels is in a society characterised by the linguistic and cultural need to taxonomise, securing apparently coherent identities. This article has two closely connected goals. The first is to discuss racial and cultural identity as metaphysical concepts, which inflammatory reporting, however, has often engrained in society as biological facts. The second and more important aim is to stress the need to re-formulate seemingly fixed concepts like alterity and terrorism in order to open up perception and to avoid racial stereotyping. Therefore, I will analyse the connection between the construction of meaning, the linguistic games and the cultural codes in Neate’s novel.

London-born author Patrick Neate, who won the 2001 Whitbread Novel Award for his second novel Twelve Bar Blues, has a strong interest in writing about questions of identity, ethnicity, and racial discrimination. In his latest novel City of Tiny Lights 1 he tackles problematic issues of contemporary multicultural metropolitan life, such as racialised anxiety and white narcissism, in a post-Chandleresque detective plot. The text is steeped in images of crosscultural urban life in a geopolitical climate after 9/11: published in 2005, shortly before the 7/7 bombings, the novel deals with several attacks on the London underground. The prototypical setting of a hard-boiled detective novel is the American metropolis: like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, the main characters of traditional American detective fiction tend to be ambivalent and non-locatable, walking the line between good and evil in a corrupt and often violent society. In contrast, classic English gentleman detective fiction is often set in London or the countryside, presenting a more or less idealised society, which is disturbed by a mysterious murder, as epitomised by Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Placing an ethnic hard-boiled sleuth in London discloses the heterogeneity,

1

Patrick Neate, City of Tiny Lights (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006). All further references appear parenthetically in the text.

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individuality and inconceivability of the British metropolis and its inhabitants. As the narrator-protagonist in Patrick Neate’s novel puts it: ‘Amazing all the worlds you never see in this city because of your own particular London lifestyle’ (p.241). Both types of detective fiction claim that the solution to the mystery of a murder, the punishment and identification of the culprit, will inevitably lead to the stabilisation of social order. Characteristic of the murder detection plot is a process of analytical deduction, based on the symbolic order, which leads to a conception of the universality of truth and to the one and only solution of the puzzle: at the end all signifiers seem to reveal their significations, or in other words ‘[n]othing is more definitive, complete, and single-minded than the ending of a detective story’. 2 Neate’s text changes this assumption by diversifying the two modes of genre fiction and some of its generic conventions. The novel questions commonsense reasoning and deduction based on ideologically charged premises and does not answer a desire for orientation. Thus, Tommy Akthar, the protagonist of Neate’s novel muses: ‘I decided to write down the facts of the situation as it currently stood. I found a paper and pen. I didn’t get far. I knew the facts of the situation as it currently stood and writing it down wasn’t going to help anyone but my biographer (Tommy Akthar, Private I, something like that)’ (p.267). Tommy Akthar is unable to find the truth by stringing together seemingly obvious facts based on mere commonsense thinking. In Neate’s hard-boiled novel, the plot’s brutality highlights the corporeal reality of violence and the vulnerability of society. Thus, crime is shown to be a social issue and therefore to refer to intersubjective relations and the community. The novel clarifies how the crimes are embedded in larger questions of national and postcolonial politics. Moreover, the novel points out that the protagonist’s Ugandan-Indian background is considered to be a social marker of outsider status. Standing on the margins of the dominant cultural discourse, the protagonist is definitely not in a position of social control. He is a Private Investigator and cricket aficionado who finds himself hired by Exoticmelody, a prostitute, to find her flat mate Sexyrussian, who disappeared two nights earlier. When the client with whom Natasha – alias Sexyrussian – was last seen, turns out to be a British MP who is found dead in a hotel room, Tommy is already fascinated by a case that promises more action than tracking down straying husbands. After tracking down Natasha’s whereabouts he cannot drop the case because he has this ‘strange affection 2

Susan Sweeney, ‘Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction, Narrative Theory, and Self-Reflexivity’ in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. by Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (Urbana: Western Illinois University, 1990), p.5.

Writing Against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights (2005)

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for the truth’ (p.107). Plunging deeper into the investigation he is confused and unable to locate the enemy in a system that is not clearly divided into friend and foe – the intentions and actions of Intelligence Agencies and a terrorist recruiting network (PWA) 3 turn out to be much more inconsistent and ambivalent than their stereotypical presentation in mainstream media: ‘That was a shift. Check the understatement. It struck me that the PWA had got their way. It struck me that Jones [MI5] and Paradowski [CIA] had got their way too. They were all on the same side. London was scared’ (p.299). By the end of the novel, Londoners are still scared and the culprits are neither punished nor revealed to the public. Consequently, society cannot declare itself innocent by shifting the blame onto one individual suspect. Parallel to this investigation, we get to know the story of Tommy’s immigrant family, especially the story of his father, Farzad, the first generation immigrant who came to London from Uganda in the early 1970s fleeing the regime of Idi Amin. Moreover, Tommy actually regards himself as an English cosmopolitan, i.e. he does not feel homeless or exiled. Throughout the novel he has to face the fact that although he feels very British, he is not really accepted as an Englishman. When he is interrogated by the police his nationality is questioned, which forces him to scrutinise his sense of Britishness. This enquiry focusing upon Tommy’s presumed membership in the Muslim faith leads to an equation of religion with ethnicity, and he is overtly classified as ‘dangerous’. He is left in complete disillusionment and has to reconsider his former idea of British democratic fairness, epitomised for him by the game of cricket: ‘The opposition – and they were the opposition – might have been playing by the rules but they’d abandoned the spirit of the game’ (p.288). The idea of a multicultural society remains endangered by fantasies of white supremacy: It sounded to me like she [an MI5 officer] wanted people to be scared. I thought about her use of language: euphemistic, for real. I wondered if she believed what she was saying. I wondered if she even understood what she was saying. I thought about ‘our way of life’, hers and mine. I wondered if we shared one. I thought about my way of life as variously, a Ugandan Indian, a Paki, an immigrant, a Londoner, an Englishman. I wondered if it was worth protecting. (p.291)

Britishness suddenly appears to be synonymous with whiteness. Plurality and diversity, in the ‘English’ view represented by the MI5 officer, become ostensibly dangerous features of society and are said to bring destruction and chaos. City of Tiny Lights presents a picture of immigrant London which agrees with Paul Gilroy’s notion that ‘[t]hey have been among us, but they

3

The PWA, in this case, is not the abbreviation for the Private Eye Writers of America but for Post-Western-Alliance.

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were never actually of us’. Immigrants are always treated as traitors because ‘immigrants are doomed in perpetuity to be outsiders’.4 This attitude is surely far from what Derrida calls the ethics of unconditioned hospitality. The concept of unconditioned hospitality negates the discourses of sovereignty and absolute autonomy in order to welcome the other without condition. The novel seems to implement a state similar to Derrida’s model in Farzad’s home which is referred to as a ‘parallel universe’ (p.323). In the course of the novel, several uninvited people arrive at this realm where the difference of the other is accepted. The concept is a seemingly utopian one which would include a passive relation towards alterity: ‘Ou bien l’hospitalité est inconditionnelle et sans limite ou elle n’est pas’. 5 In contrast to Derrida’s concept, the text reveals that Muslim culture is actively constructed as a distinct, inaccessible, and homogeneous whole – in other words, it is perceived as an encapsulated community. What it comes down to is that by this act of reductionism, the other is locatable in ‘the commonsense lexicon of alterity’ (pp.33-34) despite Britain’s obvious ethnic and national diversity and essential contradictions which Tommy Akthar describes as follows: The England I knew was a cheek-by-jowl kind of place where seemingly polar opposites were wedded by nation, frustration and location, location, location: stroppy Pakis to small town racists, the morally fundamental to the morally bereft, office juniors to senior management, thug-lites to petrified pensioners, suburban swingers to pregnant pubescents, coke-addled hookers to coke-addled media whores, aspirant Africans to resigned Rastas, loaded gym freaks to obese benefit junkies, entrepreneurs to economic migrants, organized crime to chaotic bureaucracy, politicians to terrorists, hopeless to hopeful. And like all marriages these were for better or worse, richer or poorer, till death them would part as discovered by one Anthony Bailey, MP [the murdered politician]. (p.274)

1. The Commonsense Lexicon of Alterity and the Illusion of Fixed Identities City of Tiny Lights shows us a present-day London that is scared, a mood to which British mainstream media greatly contribute: ‘They said they’d be right back after the news with the latest band formed on the latest reality show, plus tips for concealing your cellulite, plus a phone-in: “Islam – friend or foe?”’ (p.300). Media reports are shown to have a direct impact on individual human lives, as people are labelled and categorised: ‘“According to the British media,” Farzad began “Azmat Al-Dubayan is a notorious fundamentalist terrorist.” He held up a finger like I was trying to interrupt. I 4

5

Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), p.134. Mohammed Seffahi, Manifeste pour l’hospitalité. Autour de Jaques Derrida (Grigny: Paroles d’aube: 1999), p.148.


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wasn’t. “I said according to the British media, Tommy boy”’ (p.157). The use of language is never ideologically neutral but used to create an atmosphere of xenophobia: ‘In the absence of trust, fear is a solid basis for a relationship. [...]: keep the people scared and you’ll keep them in check. And keeping them scared of you is the simplest but keeping them scared of an idea (Communism, Islam or whatever) is the height of progress’ (p.102). Discriminatory practices are actually encouraged through the media and their ostensibly neutral commonsense coverage. Even if a more objective presentation is given by the media, Tommy has to realise that many people do not listen because it is not part of the usual racial and cultural stereotyping that has been habitual in sensationalist reporting: I blinked. I asked the TV to say that again. The TV was uncooperative. Had the geezer actually said something worth hearing? He had. No religious motives. No connections to other terrorists. The camera panned the faces of assembled hacks. It was too little too late. Nobody was listening anyway. (p.301)

My main thesis is that Patrick Neate’s novel problematises the insufficiency of words and the absence of full representation which becomes undeniably obvious in a climate of fear. Language has to admit its powerlessness and is thus reduced mechanical enunciation. However, perhaps the most unfortunate result of fear is that people tend to delineate fixed categories, digging a trench between us and them, ignoring historical contexts, making up entities and groups. In this dualistic system it is most important to name, identify and locate the other as stable signifiers or arbiters of identity. Manichean terms are thus used as a ‘commonsense lexicon’ which builds a dominant discourse that implies a certain legitimisation and truth. Thus, Gerd Baumann remarks on the power of seemingly natural and self-evident concepts: ‘This false fixing of boundaries is a direct consequence of the reified version of culture, and this reification is the very cornerstone that holds the dominant discourse together across all political divides’. 6 The dominant discourse which implies a fixed lexicon demonstrates the limits of infinite alterity within hegemonic governments and its potential loss of civil liberties. This is described by Farzad as follows: One: when someone is labelled a terrorist, they are immediately removed from the rules of humanity that regulate us all. Two: the nature of war as agreed by civilized society is that it is fought within such a set of rules. (pp.158-159).

Moreover, the lexicon is also utilising terms like tolerance to guarantee the status quo. Tommy, the immigrant, is merly tolerated, and tolerance is, according to Derrida, just ‘a paternalistic gesture in which the other is not accepted as 6

Gerd Baumann, Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.11.

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an equal partner but subordinated, perhaps assimilated, and certainly misinterpreted in its difference’. 7 It implies that ‘I am leaving you a place in my home, but do not forget that this is my home’. 8 In the course of the novel, Tommy realises what his father, Farzad, meant when he talked about life in exile and that even bureaucracy and the mark of being British in one’s passport cannot disprove racial discrimination and ethnic profiling: [...] coming through Heathrow is always a riot if you are of ethnic persuasion. You can almost see the Immigration officers rubbing their hands in anticipation. You can almost smell their disappointment when they clock your British passport. You can almost hear them thinking, Lucky bastard. You can almost be bothered to tell them that there’s no luck about it and that they should read colonial history. (p.194)

In Gilroy’s terms, ‘[d]ifferent people are still hated and feared, but the timely antipathy against them is nothing compared to the hatreds turned toward the greater menace of the half-different and the partially familiar’ (p.137). Because knowledge and control are only existent within certain signifying systems, people who are located beyond the system and not in a commonsense lexicon are seen as uncontrollable. The self-assuring repetition of this commonsense lexicon seems to conquer the loss of authority and to reinforce existing power hierarchies. Farzad describes this behaviour as follows: ‘You may not think straight but your vocabulary is flawless’ (p.312). The surface seems to be under control and no one questions the status quo. The lexicon is used by the dominant culture to describe and thereby to fixate the other. By securing one’s own identity the other is labelled with an illusionary inferiority and with a difference to which we can attribute responsibility and guilt. Tommy remarks about the terrorist-figure in the novel, Al-Dubayan: ‘Then I figure that if he didn’t exist someone would have to invent him’ or ‘If you believe that something is undetectable, then the fact that you can’t detect it becomes evidence of its existence’ (p.166). Within City of Tiny Lights the media widely reports that Al-Dubayan is a Muslim terrorist. In broad terms, the public continues to believe in reality via TV. This problematic aspect of perception is also stated in an argument made by the cultural theorist David Hawkes: ‘[B]ut the real battle takes place in the realm of perception. Governments devote unprecedented attention to constructing ideological narratives that “spin” their adventures in appropriate fashion’. 9 It seems that the permeability and contextual definition of all ethnic boundaries would destroy fixed categories and therefore the illusion of control and superiority, or as Gilroy argues: ‘When national and ethnic identities are represented and 7

8 9

Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jaques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), p.16. Borradori, p.127. David Hawkes, Ideology (London: Routledge, 2003), p.180.


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projected as pure, exposure to difference threatens them with dilution and compromises their prized purities with the ever present possibility of contamination’. 10 It is worth noting here that identity politics based on what Gilroy called ethnic absolutism are additionally problematic because they encourage people to see themselves only as members of religious or cultural groups. As an indirect consequence of this representation, the image of a multi-ethnic London is too often criticised without an awareness of global complexities and experiences of living. That Britishness is not a self-evident concept and that our future is not defined, is a creative approach which is often too easily dismissed, as Gilroy observes: Everybody knows that conceptual innovations cannot bring racism to an end, but they do have their uses. They can reveal how sharply scholastic theories diverge from common sense. They can highlight the regrettable fact that the life-threatening jeopardy provoked by being racialized as different is undiminished and may even have increased now that ‘race’ and its certainties can claim to heal or at least calm the anxieties over identity, which have been precipitated by the insecurities and inequalities of globalization. 11

In City of Tiny Lights, Tommy faces the fact that Britishness is a mere construction, the product of human powers and projections: ‘I could have hypothesised that a conception of British patriotism depends on a conception of what it means to be British’ (p.209). The stable self-representation of imperial power, the Empire, naturalised superiority and imaginary concepts like the self-disciplined gentleman and the fairness of cricket, the stable centre of a mythicised imperial past, are negated. This does not imply that all changes have positive outcomes but that transgression of imagined borders is inevitable in procedural concepts of cultures and identities. Tommy puts it like this: It made me think of Sir Garfield Sobers. I grew up with his 365 against Pakistan in ’58 as the benchmark for Test batsmanship. It was a record and one that stood for so long that it seemed like it would never be broken. [...] Then Brian Lara broke it in ’94 and thirty-six years of received wisdom, consensus and myth was suddenly shattered. [...] Certain commentators have written that the game has changed [...] The point is that when Lara creamed England’s finest to all points Antiguan in ’94, he crossed an invisible line of the imagination, and when it had been crossed once, it was a whole lot easier to cross it again. So London was never a city where opportunists exploded kids on your doorstep; not because it couldn’t happen but because it didn’t. And then it did. So London was different. (pp.299300)

These arguments against an essential fixation of metaphysical essences are also applicable to the term terrorism. In the following, I wish to therefore analyse 10

11

Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line (London: Allan Lane, 2000), p.105. Gilroy (2004), p.60.

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the ‘fixed lexicon of terrorism’ via a reading of City of Tiny Lights. I want to reveal the reductionism and essentialism that goes hand in hand with the unreflected use of the term which Farzad criticises thus: ‘I told you I don’t like that word. It is just a noise. Meaningless. Like a bowler’s appeal. The young cricketers these days have quite forgotten what they’re saying’ (p.169).

2. The Negotiation of Meaning or Writing Against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism Tommy’s father Farzad has always tried to force his son to become a perfect English gentleman but Tommy just learned to love the ‘gentleman’s game’. Thus, he draws analogies between cricket and life in general to analyse the world hermeneutically. That Tommy is ‘a man of principle’ (p.127) who has ‘a strange affection for the truth’ (p.107) might nevertheless be one reason for his being caught in a system of fixed labels and binary oppositions. At the beginning of the novel there are clear boundaries and fixed categories in Tommy’s England and therefore he thinks that he can make out two oppositional poles: friend and foe. Tommy sees life as a game – in which one is playing according to fixed rules. There are two sides and one – the better one – is going to win which actually sounds like fair play. In the course of the novel, he has to realise that the rules of the game are not that simple and that to know the ropes does not imply that everybody sticks to them: ‘They [the policemen] began to ask me questions of the rhetorical variety. Only these were rhetorical questions to which they had all the wrong answers’ (pp.207208). Apparently fixed terms are based on conventions, language is a system of interpretation, and the more slippery a concept the easier it is to appropriate it in an opportunistic manner. The problem is that the prevailing discourse relies on an already organised interpretation that uses popular media and official rhetoric in a hegemonic fashion to form public opinion. The same applies to the term terrorism. It is a fixed category which leads to blindness rather than insight: ‘When a car is clamped they place an enormous sticker on your windscreen. Religious fundamentalist? Terrorist? These labels are just the same: easily applied, hard to remove and designed to obscure your view’ (pp.159-160). These labels are part of the commonsense lexicon. Norms which are inscribed in our language foreclose the reflexivity of language and actually illustrate the powerlessness of naming, identifying and describing. Furthermore, we find astonishingly simple equations in language that reduce social complexities between terms like culture, ethnic identity, and nature. Everything seems to be a homogeneous whole – or a superlative: ethnic identity, fundamentalism and terrorism – producing the subsequent criminalisation of marginalised groups or communities. Paul Gilroy remarks


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that ‘immigration is perceived as a master analogy of warfare’, 12 and Farzad in City of Tiny Lights observes: Therefore I dislike the way the establishment and the celebrated fourth estate in this country – my country – use the word ‘fundamentalism’ when their meaning is ‘fanaticism’. It is yet another example of every Tom, Dick and Harry playing silly buggers with the English language. (p.158)

The already organised interpretation in a commonsense lexicon is used to empower its users by purporting concepts that are believed to ground knowledge and meaning. The novel as a whole clarifies that knowledge or meaning are not based in a finite logos – or finite language: meaning is not grounded in metaphysics but rather is inter-linguistic, where words and signs negotiate meaning. And as a result Farzad demands: ‘Stop thinking like an Englishman’ (p.313), implying that his son is just naively adopting pre-given answers without reinterpreting and negotiating its context-bound meaning in specific contexts. Thus, terms like Britishness or terrorism can be interpreted and negotiated in different ways. The novel stages a deconstruction of the opposition between determinism and absolute freedom. In contrast to the prevailing public opinion, terrorism is not a self-evident concept. It has to be recognised as a discourse with an ideological purpose, as Derrida holds: Not all terrorism is voluntary, conscious, organized, deliberate, intentionally calculated: there are historical and political situations where terror operates, so to speak, as if by itself, as the simple result of some apparatus, because of the relation of force in place […]. 13

This means that violence can also be the labelling of the non-accepted other who is set outside the limits of an imagined English identity. The more people are othered through exclusion, the more English identity becomes ideologically dangerous. As a consequence, the essence of terror is not just the physical elimination of those perceived to be different but can also be the eradication of difference in people, namely their individuality. 14 And Tommy observes: ‘I think about this city of tiny lights that was on the verge of whothe-hell-knows and how many of those lights might have been and, I guess, might yet be extinguished’ (p.121). Though homogeneity is illusionary and dangerous, we nevertheless need some congruity in our language, words and metaphors, which form the underlying 12 13 14

Gilroy (2004), p.161. Borradori, p.108. Derrida has explicitly proposed using the word violence as an alternative rather than the confused words war and terrorism which despite their confusion work as destructive, ascriptive labels.

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principles of our lifeworld and our identities. Without any sense of knowledge, meaning, and congruity our lifeworld would be falling apart. In that respect, my point is that City of Tiny Lights works against a fixed lexicon of alterity as well as of terrorism not by merely revealing their uselessness but, moreover, by at the same time creating and negotiating meaning by using apparently eccentric metaphors and idioms, or in other words, by abandoning thinking in fixed categories only. These linguistic games are not arbitrary neologisms but variations and intertextual allusions of well known patterns. The protagonist refers to this creative act once as ‘bastardising Voltaire’ (p.320). 15

3. Literary Strategies: Writing Against a Fixed Commonsense Lexicon City of Tiny Lights as a whole aims at destabilising the structural priorities of binary constructions and ethnic boundaries. It demonstrates that we live in a society characterised by the cultural and linguistic need to taxonomise and that we rely on a set of imposed standards that makes identification with Englishness possible for some people, but accepts the exclusion of others, depending on context and intention. The destabilisation of fixed concepts can be found on different levels of the text: the characterisation of the protagonists and its implied identity politics, the use of language and stylistic devices, the crossing of genres as well as the narrator’s point of view. The following section introduces the strategies which undermine the ideologically charged dominant discourses of unity, presence and origin without denying their material effects on people’s lifeworld. In contrast to the image of a fixed and coherent self, Tommy Akhtar is performing his identity in a multi-ethnic part of West London. In this ethnically mixed neighbourhood Tommy lives as a Ugandan-Indian, a ‘Paki’, an exmujahideen, Marlowe-Wannabe, cosmopolitan, Londoner, and an Englishman. Clearly, he is no diasporic character rooted entirely in the myth of a shared Ugandan history. Neate’s protagonist is constantly shifting between his new life and his past existence. As a detective Tommy is not just searching for the truth but also for authenticity in the midst of postcolonial and postmodern confusion. The novel shows that identity emerges as a cluster of unstable categories: mutually independent criteria that cut across each other in many ways. Although we are talking of an identity in progress 15

Voltaire’s quotations are challenged and these re-citations are used to describe the fluidity of cultural mechanisms and principles. More precisely, we have a context-bound dialogue of discourses and language. The challenged quotations change the idea that texts have fixed meanings. This demonstrates the dynamic potential of language as well as the contingent and context bound meaning of words.


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we can not randomly select a place of final destination. Tommy describes this aspect of identity formation as ‘life as tourism’ (p.47) or as a perpetual detour which highlights the arbitrariness of knowledge and questions the complete autonomy of decision: ‘most roads don’t lead nowhere special: they just pass places’ (p.39). We can not consciously defy the control of the dominant discourse or completely ignore the rhetoric of those who are allowed to speak – and who are able to construct a lexicon of alterity. Tommy formulates this insight in the following way: ‘Welcome to the city of tiny lights. It takes you a lifetime to get somewhere you’ve no particular desire to go’ (p.34). Still, Neate’s protagonist apparently uses the dominant discourse – which often relies on equating community, culture and ethnic identity – for his personal aims: ‘I gave her the mysterious Asian eyebrows by way of apology’ (p.9) or: ‘I guessed he did the archetypal Arab as well as I did archetypal Paki’ (p.269). While this cannot guarantee him independent agency, it shows that Tommy is aware of the way in which he is represented or racialised, and he knows that in some contexts the stereotypical speech and behaviour of the immigrant can help him to reach his goals. Mimicry is employed strategically, here, but even though there seems to be an agency that suggests ontological priority to his various roles we come to realise that, in Judith Butler’s words, ‘[t]here is no making of oneself outside of a mode of subjectivation and, hence, no self-making outside of the norms that orchestrate the possible forms that a subject may take’. 16 Tommy cannot change the social norms surrounding terms like truth, mankind or meaning, yet he can attain linguistic agency by citing the dominant discourse to his own end and thus uncannily reiterate its power – by bastardising Voltaire. Yet Tommy is not the only character playing to type. The whole novel works with constant references to exaggerated racial stereotypes: ‘[t]he average Caribbean person is intrinsically idle, isn’t that so?’ (p.247) or ‘Africans are as honest as the day is long and, if they are not, you can tell straight away because they have such honest faces that they’re unable to hide it’ (p.248). These hyperbolic simplifications show how absurd these generalisations are: 17 by the use of comical tone, the pointlessness of overt essentialism, and emerging ambivalence, it becomes clear in the course of the novel that ethnic boundaries are defined relatively rather than objectively, even if people continue to conflate culture and identity with race and nature. Tommy and his father show us that culture and identity exist only insofar as they are performed and negotiated. In this respect, the novel makes clear that culture 16 17

Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p.17. Nonetheless, these simplifications also point to the illusion that racial difference could be a stabilising force in the process of identity formation without noticing any de-individualising effects or cultural segregation.

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is neither a determining force nor an imprisoning cocoon and therefore also not a safe haven: ‘There is no authentic culture, Tommy boy: It is an international ice rink and that is how you and I manage to skate across it with such ease and grace. […] We’re ice-dancers, Tommy, ice dancers’ (p.126). It is thus possible to transgress racial and cultural boundaries, but it remains difficult and risky because as Paul Gilroy observes, we are all sealed up inside our frozen cultural habits, and there seems to be no workable precedent for adopting a more generous and creative view of how human beings might communicate or act in concert across racial, ethnic or civilizational divisions. (p.76)

City of Tiny Lights, moreover, writes against a fixed lexicon through its pervasive recourse to metaphor and word games. Traditional approaches to metaphor are no longer valid here: the opposition between concept and metaphor, implying that a concept is closer to reality than a metaphor, crumbles. Based on the insight that there are no pre-linguistic categories and that meaning is a process of semantic differentiation and not an entity, City of Tiny Lights propagates the notion that metaphors are as close to – or as far removed from – reality as every other linguistic concept. The metaphors used in Neate’s novel are as meaningless as every other word that implies a stable and fixed analogy or meaning, and are therefore neutralised in their capacity to disrupt the dominant discourse. Yet working with such unusual and often eccentric analogies, metaphors and varied quotations, the effect remains that the text encourages a more dynamic and open-minded approach to language: ‘The truth is a lie nobody contests.’ Who said that? […] Originally, however, it was the Emperor Napoleon who said the same of history. I have merely updated his maxim for our accelerated culture. He [Farzad] went on: ‘If the truth did not exist we would have to invent it’. (p.154)

Neate’s approach to language ties in well with Judith Butler’s identity politics where the resignification of conventional meanings functions as resistance to normative conditions. The more eccentric Tommy’s metaphors become, therefore, the more he is able to interpret and understand the actions that surround him: But it’s not about sides. Or it is but it’s more like a round robin. […] It’s like the NatWest Series. It’s like a triangular tournament where England play West Indies and New Zealand and the top two go through to the final. Sometimes you end up cheering for the black caps against the Windies. They’re not on your side as such but if they win it helps you out. It’s all about staying in the tournament, know what I mean? (p.270)

In its focus upon unconventional metaphors, the novel criticises the assumption that meanings are fixed by highlighting signification’s dependence on context. It becomes increasingly clear that the meaning of words is rooted in the beliefs and intentions of their users, rather than in fixed propositions which are not open to hermeneutics: ‘[D]on’t communities, cities, countries and whatever primarily exists in the imagination of their residents?’ (p.299)


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Finally, the most pressing questioning of fixed meanings is implicit in Neate’s choice of genre. At a first superficial glance City of Tiny Lights follows the conventions of a Chandleresque hard-boiled detective novel. However, details also allude to film noir or what Neate calls ‘Chiswick noir’, and with its many pictures and images it constantly reminds us of a comic strip. There are elements of the postcolonial metropolitian novel in the tradition of Samuel Selvon’s Lonely Londoners (1956), but there are also allusions to the bildungsroman: after all, readers learn about Tommy’s transition from childhood to adulthood, loaded with the conflicts of building a self and creating individuality against the restricting social order. 18 All generic aspects are patched together to form a hybrid novel that is not mimicking reality but rather describing a reality not yet representable. What is more, this melange of genres aims at breaking down hierarchies between pulp and literary fiction: by freely mixing elements of both types, the text casts doubts on the possibility of objective value judgements (based on mere conventions). This doubt about objectivity is also mirrored by Neate’s firstperson narrator who is neither omniscient nor wholly reliable, pointing to the impossibility of finding the truth or gaining a complete picture of the heterogeneous whole through the perspective of one character: ‘I’ve got a lot of stories. Some of them are true. Most of them contain some truth’ (p.64). To conclude, it follows that the novel suggests continuous negotiation. This includes the dialogue with the other and openness to alterity in an attempt to work with differences. Questioning the meaning of terrorism is not to deny its material effects – still, the text offers an ideological critique of preconceptions and stereotypes. In spite of the dreadful outcome of terror’s physical reality it is of the utmost importance to be aware that terrorism is a dangerously elusive concept and should not be easily simplified. City of Tiny Lights shows that Britain’s xenophobic response to the attacks on New York, Madrid and London might lead to political absolutism. The novel confirms, I believe, Derrida’s assumption that terrorism is the symptom of an auto-immune disorder which implies a certain kind of self-destruction whereby defensive mechanisms turn the system against itself. The novel is interested in the limits of concepts and what happens when they are challenged, and this challenge can by all means be an ethical one: an ethical stance of openness and responsibility towards the other, a condition Tommy Akhtar virtually achieves in Farzad’s ‘parallel universe’ which is a place of dissent and conflict but also of negotiation where difference is accepted. So we breathe a sigh of relief when finally we hear that in Neate’s London ‘[t]he lights in the city are tiny but [still] distinct’ (p.213). 18

If we focus on Farzad it can also be described as an artist novel.

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Works Cited Baumann, Gerd, Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Borradori, Giovanna, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jaques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). Butler, Judith, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Gilroy, Paul, Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line (London: Allan Lane, 2000). ——. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). Hawkes, David, Ideology (London: Routledge, 2003). Seffahi, Mohammed, Manifeste pour l’hospitalité: Autour de Jaques Derrida (Grigny: Paroles d’aube, 1999). Sweeney, Susan, ‘Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction, Narrative Theory, and Self-Reflexivity’, in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. by Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (Urbana: Western Illinois University, 1990), pp.1-14.

Stephan Laqué

‘A deconstructed shrine’: Locating Absence and Relocating Identity in Rodinsky’s Room (2000) This essay considers the post-Freudian concept of the crypt as a spatial frame for the construction of hybrid identities. It traces the topography of the crypt in the Museum of Immigration and Diversity at 19 Princelet Street and in Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein’s Rodinsky’s Room, which is based on the disappearance of David Rodinsky from his room above the synagogue at 19 Princelet Street. While Lichtenstein seeks to uncover and document the history of Rodinsky in order to construct a Jewish identity for herself, Sinclair’s narrative respects the elusive nature of Rodinsky and ensures the room remains ‘empty’ and unfixed. Even as it elicits widely heterogeneous readings and approaches, the crypt emerges as a structure which resists appropriation and preserves the alterity of the other within the self, a structure which is pertinent not only to buildings and texts, but also to societies and cultures.

1. A Museum of Immigration and Diversity? The backdrop for this essay is Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets, in London’s East End. For centuries immigrants on their way from the docks of London into the centre of the city have settled in this area. In the late 17th century, Huguenots fleeing religious persecution at the hands of Louis XIV came. King Charles II offered sanctuary to the French protestants and Spitalfields came to be known as ‘Petty France’. During the 18th century, Catholics from Ireland arrived and were followed in the latter half of the 19th century by Jewish immigrants from all parts of Eastern Europe driven by pogroms in their home countries. The area around Brick Lane and Wentworth Street changed into ‘Little Jerusalem’ and in 1900, 95 per cent of the population in that part of Whitechapel was Jewish. During the 20th century, people from further afield arrived – first from the Carribean, then from Bangladesh and most recently from Somalia. The face of Spitalfields, or ‘Banglatown’ as it is now often called, changed again to accomodate the newcomers as buildings that had been Huguenot weavers’ shops and kosher butchers were turned into curry houses. In Spitalfields, wave upon wave of immigrants has found both an accessible community and affordable housing – although now that the nouveau riche of the capital along with artists like Gilbert and George have discovered the charm of the area, rents are soaring. When getting off the tube at Liverpool Street Station, one is greeted by the shiny new facade of the redeveloped western end of old Spitalfields Market. Continuing east down Fournier Street, the smells and bustle of Brick Lane

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begin to be felt. Turning left into a small sidestreet off Brick Lane, the atmosphere changes drastically as one steps into the quiet of Princelet Street. An uninterrupted row of elegant Georgian houses on either side of the road offers a perfect film-set for adaptations of Charles Dickens novels. Right in the middle of this terrace, No. 19 – no more conspicuous than the dark facades surrounding it – is home to, or rather represents the ‘London Museum for Immigration and Diversity’; the first museum of its kind in Britain. In the 1980s the house was acquired by a charity which has been trying to preserve the fragile building exactly as it stands and has opened it as a museum to general acclaim – a museum of rooms and spaces without display cabinets and polished exhibits. How can this largely empty place, which refuses to display or expose anything, function as a museum? And why, I venture to ask, is this unspectacular Georgian house perceived as a special place, as a place that can stand for and spark meditation on immigration and diversity? I want to argue that 19 Princelet Street is indeed special: the house is special because of its unique topography, a topography which captures the structure governing processes of cultural contact, integration and exchange.

2. A Haunted Place Spitalfields is an obvious choice for a museum dedicated to immigration and ethnic variety. It is what Patrick Wright has termed ‘a classic inner-city “zone of transition”’. 1 It is an unusually rich and fascinating palimpsest of diverse ethnic groups that have left their mark on British culture. But what is so special about the delapidated Grade II listed house at No.19 Princelet Street? In 1719, the house was first occupied by the family of an affluent Huguenot master silk weaver 2 and saw major restructuring in 1869, when a synagogue was attached to it in the space behind the house where originally a garden had been. Though various groups of immigrants have shaped the house and left their traces, 19 Princelet Street is a relatively modest example of cultural layering when compared to other buildings in the area. A far more striking example would be the building at the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street, which was originally built as L’Èglise Neuve by Huguenots in the 18th century and was later turned first into a Methodist chapel, then into a Synagogue and most recently into the Jamme Masjid mosque. Houses which bear witness to the complex multicultural heritage of immigrants abound in the area, but the fascination of 19 Princelet Street lies elsewhere. I want to

1 2

Patrick Wright, ‘Rodinsky’s Place’, London Review of Books, 29 October 1987, 3-5 (p.3). On French immigration in Spitalfields see Chris Thomas, Life and Death in London’s East End: 2000 Years at Spitalfields (London: Museum of London, 2004), pp.91-93.

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argue that it stands out as an ideal monument to ‘immigration and diversity’ because it is a haunted place. In 1980, a locked room was discovered in the attic above the disused synagogue. David Rodinsky, an orthodox Jew, had lived in this former silk weaver’s garret. One day in the 1960s, Rodinsky left his room and simply disappeared. When the room was opened more than a decade later, everything looked as though its tenant had just left for a quick pint: the solidified leftovers of lunch, newspapers, open notebooks, clothes and even the imprint of Rodinsky’s head on the pillow all lay dormant under a thick layer of dust. Apart from heaps of junk, the room held a bewildering array of books and notes in no less than fifteen different languages, among them Russian, Japanese, Summerian, Greek, Chaldean, Accadian, German and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. There was a plethora of notes in different languages ranging from Cabbalistic meditations to shopping lists, from etymological speculation to an extensive collection of Irish drinking songs. Thousands of contradictory traces of an unusual and totally forgotten life were scattered about the room, but left no clue as to the fate of the person who had lived there. Rodinsky, the Jew who had vanished from the face of the earth, soon became a legend triggering any number of hypotheses and myths. The story of ‘the mad scholar in the attic’ was material fit for a gothic novel, turning grim if one remembers that Spitalfields is the area that saw the Ripper killings of 1888. The confrontation with Rodinsky’s room has fittingly been described in terms of the unconscious and of Freud’s ‘uncanny’, of the return of something familiar which has been lost or repressed. Though this essay will take its cue from psychoanalysis, I want to argue that the spacial structure of the Rodinsky myth calls for the use of a different metaphor and a different approach. Right next door to the busy life of Brick Lane and in the middle of a rapidly changing community, a room has been sealed and forgotten, has been preserved as a space of absence and lifelessness – a ‘crypt’ has been created. The term ‘crypt’ as I want to use it here, was introduced by Jacques Derrida in his 1977 essay ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’. 3 Derrida is here reading the monograph The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy by Abraham and Torok, who in turn are reading Sigmund Freud’s work on his most notorious patient, the Wolf Man – chiefly Freud’s From the History of Infantile Neurosis of 1918. Freud’s Wolf Man was the Russian Patient Sergei Constantinovitch Pankeiev who, at the age of 3

Jacques Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, transl. by Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, transl. by Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp.xi-l.

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four, had a dream in which he saw a pack of six white wolves sitting in a tree outside his window. Freud assumed that this dream was triggered by the boy having witnessed his parents wearing white underwear while having sexual intercourse a tergo and that the memory of this ‘primal scene’, which the Wolf Man supposedly observed when he was a year and a half old, had turned into a traumatic experience. The details of this analysis and its debatable merits as a defence of the claims of psychoanalysis need not detain us here, but while Freud was looking for a ‘primal scene’ or ‘primal fantasy’ buried in the patient’s unconscious, Abraham and Torok search the different languages spoken by the Wolf Man – Russian, English and German – for a ‘libidinal word’ as the pivot of his psychosis. What they eventually find is the Russian word ‘tieret’, ‘to rub’, which they see as the libidinal taboo-word in which various processes of repression within the Wolf Man’s psyche converge. In view of this astute and incisive linguistic analysis which prioritises language, it is highly surprising to see Derrida retracing his hallmark steps in his reading of Abraham and Torok. 4 Even as he considers their intricate linguistic interpretation, Derrida all but dismisses the linguistic turn. Rather than on language, his focus here lies on topography. He cuts the references to names and language from the neologism ‘Cryptonymy’ of Abraham’s and Torok’s subtitle and reduces it to the ‘crypt’. This ‘crypt’ is not just another fancy metaphor, but very much a space of brick and mortar as in a building: ‘[c]aulked or padded along its inner partition, with cement or concrete on the other side, the cryptic safe protects from the outside the very secret of its clandestine inclusion [...]’. 5 This cryptic space preserves a secret as well as ‘everything a crypt implies: topoi, death, cipher’. 6 Even though language is involved and the secret which is guarded by the crypt can be construed in terms of words and writing, Derrida focuses on the topographical structure of the crypt which is at once both an integral part of the building surrounding it and its other: The crypt is [...] not a natural place [lieu], but the striking history of an artifice, an architecture, an artifact: of a place comprehended within another but rigorously separate from it, isolated from general space by partitions, an enclosure, an enclave. 7

4

5

6 7

Cf. Zoltán Dragon, ‘Derrida’s Specter, Abraham’s Phantom: Psychoanalysis as the Uncanny Kernel of Deconstruction’, The AnaChronisT 11 (2005), 253-269 (p.260-61). Derrida, ‘Fors’, p.xiv. J. Hillis Miller is both fascinated and baffled by this passage which forms the starting point of his chapter on ‘Derrida’s Topographies’, in Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp.291-315. Miller tries to assimilate Derrida’s explicit reference to architecture by relegating it to the realm of the literary: ‘The words do not seem to refer to any “real” cement, caulking, or padding. Could they be “literary”?’ (p.295). Ibid., p.xiii. Ibid., p.xiv.


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Rodinsky’s garret above the disused synagogue very much carries ‘the striking history of an artifice, an architecture’ and, like Derrida’s ‘crypt’, it is a challenge to its environment. It is marked by ‘the topography of an other’: [T]he crypt [is] a foreign body included through incorporation in the Self, and the ghost effect, more radically heterogeneous insofar as it implies the topography af an other, of a ‘corpse buried in the other’ – these two structures did something more, and other, than simply complete or complicate the anticipations of a program. They introduced into it an essential unruliness [...]. 8

The same kind of unruliness is introduced by the crypt which is Rodinsky’s room. The man and his room are ‘foreign bodies’ which at the same time belong to and stand apart from their surroundings, while they impose their presence on the onlooker or reader. Much like a specter, the crypt is an uncanny, uncontrollable and unruly presence. It results in a ‘ghost effect’ whereby its intangible presence dominates and conditions the reality of its surroundings. Semantic space and, above everything else, houses are haunted by ghosts, by specters, by crypts. Indeed, a house is only a house in so far as it is haunted. As Derrida points out in Archive Fever: ‘haunting implies places, a habitation and always a haunted house’. 9 While the ghost of Rodinsky and his crypt-like room therefore haunt the building at 19 Princelet Street, they are essential factors in turning the place into a house, into a space that houses history and meaning. Only insofar as it is a haunted house can the building become a museum of diversity, a place which preserves the extraordinary and unruly. Above the public space of the synagogue, Rodinsky’s room is a private crypt, sealed, yet part of the structure. It is removed from the religious acts of communication and processes of social exchange which go on in the synagogue and in Brick Lane, while all the time it is there, guarding the semantic potential of the unknown. Derrida distinguishes between the ‘forum’ and the ‘safe’: Within this forum, a place where the free circulation and exchange of objects and speeches can occur, the crypt constructs another, more inward forum like a closed rostrum or speaker’s box, a safe: sealed, and thus internal to itself, a secret interior within the public square, but, by the same token, outside it, external to the interior. 10

8 9

10

Derrida, ‘Fors’, p.xxxf. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, transl. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p.86. On haunting in Derrida see also Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), pp.162-174. Wigley boldly claims that ‘the word “haunting” is etymologically bound to that of “house”’ (Wigley, p.163). Derrida, ‘Fors’, p.xiv.

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As Derrida’s translator Barbara Johnson shows in a footnote, the etymology of the neologism ‘Fors’ in Derrida’s title puts this entanglement between inside and outside in a nutshell. 11 The crypt forms an unlocatable ‘beyondplace’ or ‘no-place’ which challenges boundaries which separate the inside from the outside, the private from the public and the citizen from the stranger. Rodinsky’s garret is just such an in-between space which resists and subverts the economy of the public space around it, an integral part paradoxically removed from its surroundings. Subverting boundaries, the crypt removes the encrypted object from the cognitive reach of the observer looking for clear-cut outlines. The crypt does not delimit or define, but withdraws and evades. However, this process of evasion is not an act of annihilation; on the contrary, the objects which the crypt preserves are only created by the crypt, as an effect of being encrypted. The structure of the crypt is therefore primary: ‘[t]he Wolf Man’s Verbarium [...] indicates that the Thing is to be thought out starting from the Crypt, the Thing as a “crypt effect”’. 12 Hillis Miller has outlined the implications of this claim: ‘[f]rom now on all maps, topographies of the person or of communities, will be oriented by the question of the crypt’. 13 The ‘question of the crypt’, the crypt as a structure which is never tangible, always there and not there, maintains processes of exchange and interrelatedness. It governs the topographies of people and communities and is thus inherent in the cultural dynamics which rest in ‘immigration and diversity’. Cultural multiplicity and hybridity are governed and made possible by the structure of the crypt.

3. Reading the Crypt: Rodinsky’s Room Like the Wolf Man’s ‘primal scene’, Rodinsky is encrypted and remains elusive. Without ever becoming present, he haunts the house at 19 Princelet Street and those who come within the sway of his specter. The room does not contain him, but creates his cryptic force: The Thing is encrypted. Not within the crypt [...] but by the crypt and in the Unconscious. The ‘narrated’ event, reconstituted by a novelistic, mythodramatic-poetic genesis, never appears. 14

11

12 13 14

‘The word fors in French, derived from the Latin foris (“outside, outdoors”), is an archaic preposition meaning “except for, barring, save”. In addition, fors is the plural of the word for, which, in the French expression le for intérieur, designates the inner heart, “the tribunal of conscience”, subjective interiority’. Derrida, ‘Fors’, p.xi-xii. Ibid., p.xiii. Miller, p.304. Derrida, ‘Fors’, p.xxvi.


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Rodinsky becomes a haunting presence, both as a ‘Thing’ and as the object of narration. He has been turned into narrative both in the imagination of the people visiting his garret and, quite literally, in print, when Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair published Rodinsky’s Room, a co-authored book which is part detective story, part historiography, part Bildungsroman, part archaeological report. 15 The book is written in alternating chapters, with both authors abiding by their own style and personal objectives while a substantial part of their writing is taken up by commentaries on the strategies of their respective co-author. Rachel Lichtenstein’s narrative tells of her quest for her Jewish identity. She was born in Essex as Rachel Laurence after her father, a second-generation immigrant from Poland, had decided to anglicise his surname. When Rachel’s grandfather dies, she feels an impending loss of her own unreclaimed Jewish identity. When he died I panicked, realizing that with him was buried the key to my heritage. I became determined not to let it die with him. A week after his death I took the first step towards a reconnection between my past and my present and reclaimed by deed poll the surname Lichtenstein. (p.19)

Retracing her grandfather’s life she comes to Princelet Street and straight away accepts the old synagogue as her destiny: ‘[t]he moment I entered 19 Princelet Street I knew I was meant to be there’. (p.22) She hears of Rodinsky and is fascinated by the figure of a man who disappeared from the street where her grandparents used to live and from the very building where they got married. Obsessed with the idea of solving the mystery surrounding Rodinsky, she sets out to accumulate and archive every scrap of information on his life that she can lay her hands on. Throughout the book, Lichtenstein uses highly emotional rhetoric to convey her somewhat naive sense of a mission which sometimes inadvertently borders on the comic. On a trip to Poland, on which she hopes to visit the place Rodinsky’s family had left for Britain, she is shown a cluttered room, dusty and undisturbed, which the last orthodox Jew of a small village had inhabited up to his death. She stands enraptured: It takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the dim light and to register where we are standing. I stop breathing, turn very slowly, trying to seal the image in front of me in my mind. My heart misses a beat. [...] I am deeply involved in my fantasy, urgently taking photographs of every corner, anxious we will be quickly ushered out of here. I want to stay here: nothing is catalogued, there is much to do. (p.240)

15

Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room (London: Granta, 2000). All further references parenthetically in the text.

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Lichtenstein’s desire to collect and catalogue is obsessive and mechanical. As Sinclair remarks: ‘She was as much a curator as an artist. Her instincts were forensic, archival’ (p.178). Derrida has described this obsession in pathological terms as ‘Mal d’archive’, ‘Archive Fever’: It is to burn with a a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. [...] It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. 16

The figure of Rodinsky is one of the places where the archive ‘slips away’. In succumbing to the fever which Derrida describes, Rachel unwittingly exposes herself to an unruly specter and becomes herself ‘haunted’, since ‘the structure of the archive is spectral. It is spectral a priori: neither present nor absent “in the flesh”, neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met’ 17 . Like the crypt, an archive can never be domesticated but keeps evading semantic closure. Right on the very first page of the book, and before Rachel Lichtenstein has even entered the scene, Iain Sinclair’s fine cynicism dismantles her ambitions: Rodinsky was a shape whose only definition was its shapelessness, the lack of a firm outline. The more documentation Rachel could file, the more artifacts she could photograph and label, the more elusive this fiction, David Rodinsky, became. (p.3f.)

While Rodinsky’s room is under attack from Lichtenstein’s investigations which desperately try to reduce its cryptic potential, Iain Sinclair’s chapters make sure it remains ‘empty’ and unfixed. For Sinclair’s narrative, Rodinsky’s room is a metaphor to work upon, it is ‘a symbol of transition’ (p.255). As in his other books on London, he constructs a ‘psychogeography’ combining investigation, imagination and topography. Consequently, his focus differs significantly from that of Lichtenstein: I wasn’t qualified to hunt down the human story, that would be the task of someone even crazier than I was [...]. Someone who could read the history of the room as an analogue of their own undisclosed heritage. It was the room, the set, that obsessed me. (p.256)

While Sinclair decides to disregard the human aspect of the narrative, Lichtenstein turns out to be ‘even crazier’ than him as she sets out to travel around Eastern Europe and all the way to Israel in order to report the story of David Rodinsky and of her own undisclosed heritage with as much precision as possible. Sinclair decides to focus on the room whose very emptiness renders its former inhabitant tangible: 16 17

Derrida, Archive Fever, p.91. Ibid., p.84.


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Invisible? Rodinsky is only invisible in the sense that he is absorbed by the room in which he was last tenant. The Golem is closer to that room than to Rodinsky the man. [...] And the abandoned room in the Princelet Street synagogue shares this characteristic: it is a dressed set, it solicits narrative. (p.187)

Sinclair looks at Rodinsky through the topography and history of the room, through the structural implications of the crypt-like attic. And he realises that exposure to the complex structure of the crypt can jeopardise the sanity of the researcher who embarks on a search for the encrypted personality: ‘The search for Rodinsky is as driven and as dangerous as the forensic excavations carried out in the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields’. (p.185) Lichtenstein’s research takes her to the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys where she discovers that David Rodinsky had died an unremarkable death of pneumonia in a psychiatric hospital in Surrey on 4 March 1969 (p. 103). At first, she feels that the evidence of the death certificate is inconclusive, but soon she comes to see the details it offers as a new promise, as more grist to her egocentric mill: Not only did David Rodinsky die in the year of my birth, but he died a matter of days before I’d been born. Dates of birth and death have great significance in cabbalistic thought, and I made a mental note to explore this during my forthcoming trip to Israel. (p.114)

Lichtenstein has only the vaguest of notions that the date might hold some arcane, cabbalistic mystery. But, whatever its significance, she is confident that the fixity of documented dates and their neat correspondence will help her find a pattern that will give substance and reliability to her own Jewish identity which she is trying to reconstruct. When some time after the discovery of the place and time of Rodinsky’s death she is travelling through Poland visiting unused synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, she recognises the cause for her unrest and realises what it is she has been looking for: I had discovered Rodinsky’s place of death but I did not know where he was buried. I had traced all known relatives and realized that no one had been to his grave and said Kaddish for him. This was what I now had to do. This was the purpose of my quest. (p.245)

Knowing all there is to know about the story of Rodinsky’s life is not enough. His death has to be given an incontrovertible topographical fixture. His grave has to be found, so that the file can be closed. In his work on hospitality and mourning, Derrida has discussed this form of grief which seeks to fix and pin down the other by firmly locating the corpse. The example he adduces in his essay Of Hospitality is that of Oedipus who – in Sophocles’s play Oedipus at Colonos – shrouds the circumstances of his death along with the place of his burial in secrecy. Oedipus disappears into a crypt: ‘He directs his steps toward a final dwelling place to pass away there,

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to be encrypted there, crypt in the crypt’. 18 Without knowledge of or access to the place of Oedipus’s burial, his daughters find it impossible to mourn him and their grief turns towards their own mourning: rather than mourn the loss of her father, Antigone mourns the loss of her mourning. As Derrida explains: without a determinable place, without monument, without a localizable and circumscribed place of mourning, without a stopping point [arrêt]. Without a fixed [arrêté] place, without a determinable topos, mourning is not allowd. Or, what comes down to the same thing, it is promised without taking place, a determinable place [...]. The only possible mourning is the impossible mourning. 19

What Derrida calls ‘possible mourning’ as opposed to ‘impossible mourning’, with the latter renouncing control – topographical and otherwise – over the deceased, is tantamount to an act of disobedience towards the dead. ‘Possible mourning’ is a narcissistic appropriation of the dead person, an appropriation which fails to respect the otherness of the dead by reducing him to a mere tool for establishing and consolidating the identity of the mourner. Lichtenstein’s search for Rodinsky’s grave marks her quest as an act of possible mourning which egotistically disregards the alterity of the dead. In an obvious attempt to consolidate her interpretation of Rodinsky as a misunderstood Jewish intellectual, she commissions a hand-carved marble book as a tombstone for Rodinsky’s grave. As Sinclair comments: ‘Find a grave. And then it would be right, a proper gravestone, some kind of ceremony. The room would be properly sealed’ (p.268). At last, one might add, Rodinsky would be properly dead. In her desire to mourn the man whose life she felt can vindicate her entire heritage and identity, Lichtenstein is not prepared to appreciate the ineluctable structure of the crypt that surrounds Rodinsky. The grave which Lichtenstein looks for and finds – the site of her ‘possible mourning’ – is diametrically opposed to the structure of the crypt. According to Derrida, ‘the cryptic incorporation always marks an effect of impossible or refused mourning [...]. It never finishes anything off’. 20 The crypt resists possible mourning by hiding the other in an inaccesssible reserve and Iain Sinclair is prepared to respect this cryptic non-space. Rather than seeking out the location or space of a tomb, Sinclair considers the way in which the room at hand, the garret of Rodinsky, works as a tomb or shrine: ‘The room emerges as a deconstructed shrine, sucking in the unwary, tying them by their hair to 18

19 20

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitaliy (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000), p.105. For Derrida’s distinction between ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ mourning see also Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul De Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Derrida, Of Hospitaliy, p.111. Derrida, ‘Fors’, p.xxi.


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the weighted furniture’ (p.68, my emphasis). The sentence is characteristic of Sinclair’s style of pompous imagery and non-sequiturs. But even though he lets himself get carried away in the two relative clauses, the image he uses is extremely appropriate. ‘A deconstructed shrine’ is a perfect nutshell-definition for the crypt, for the non-space that is Rodinsky’s room. It deconstructs the sense of fixity and delimitation we normally attribute to a ‘shrine’ and disperses all claims of holiness and transcendental closure its worshippers might hold.

4. The Challenge of the Crypt: Rodinsky’s Room Rachel Lichtenstein’s quest for her lost Jewish identity culminates in her decision to become orthodox. She felt ‘duty-bound to continue to be a link in a chain that had existed for four thousand years before [her] birth’ (p.282). She has to acknowledge, though, that since her mother is not Jewish, it would be well-nigh impossible for her to be recognised as a member of the orthodox community. 21 However, it is only when she meets her husband Adam that she gives up the ambitious plan to follow through with the full process of conversion. In the history of Adam, the fluid plurality of postcolonial society is driven home rather forcefully. Adam, the son of an Irish Catholic mother and a Pakistani Muslim father, grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood in Leeds and, along with his siblings, must have been the first Muslim ever to join the Jewish youth organisation Habonim (p.282). Her relationship with Adam and the exposure to life in London reintroduce Rachel to a culture of multiplicity: ‘I chose a different path, came back to London, the city of a thousand cultures, and eventually it was this world that I embraced’ (p.283). Apart from Lichtenstein’s investigative breach, the crypt of Rodinsky’s Room has to face the danger of urban developers who see in Rodinsky nothing more than welcome publicity: Those with a vested interest in defining Spitalfields as a zone of peculiar and privileged resonance needed a mythology to underwrite the property value. Rodinsky, one erased life, one blank biography among so many, was elected. Essentially the trick of the thing was to strip him of his history and to translate him directly into the substance of the room that had housed him. (p.66f., my emphasis)

21

Ruth Gilbert sees this state of not-belonging as the salient motivation behind Lichtenstein’s search for Rodinsky: ‘Technically, then, Lichtenstein is not Jewish. This crucial detail is the unspoken fact that haunts the text’. Ruth Gilbert, ‘The Frummer in the Attic: Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair’s Rodinsky’s Room and Jewish Memory’, Atlantic Scholarly Communication Initiative 33, I and II (2006). (31 February 07).

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Sinclair’s angle, too, reduces the relevance of the man in favour of the room. For him, Rodinsky is ‘a man who had become a room’ (p.67). But this room is a crypt, a dynamic non-space where the other can come into its own, a space that is not reducible to a ‘substance’. Sinclair is driven by his ‘obsession with mythical geography, with potential energies locked in blighted ghettos, transitional end zones’ (p.61). The new money flowing into Spitalfields, however, has a different agenda: These coiffured Huguenot wannabes were essentially trawling for pedigree. They’d laid out heavy equity for properties in Elder Street or Fournier Street and they wanted the photograph, the certificate saying ‘100 per cent kosher Georgian’. (p.274)

Even though Sinclair does not make the analogy explicit, this longing for the substance of a certified pedigree is strongly reminiscent of Rachel Lichtenstein’s pursuit. As he observes: ‘Rachel Lichtenstein, to achieve balance in her own life, had to secure her past with documentation, hard evidence’. (p.178) Lichtenstein, too, is exploiting the room, appropriating it in order to consolidate her own ‘100 per cent kosher’ identity, seeking a documented pedigree for her own gratification. Unlike the museum at 19 Princelet Street, a whole range of places dedicated to the preservation and conjuring of the past have succumbed to this kind of appropriation. Places like the lovingly restored shophouse of the Chinese Heritage Centre in Singapore come to mind. Iain Sinclair looks at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam or at number 18 Folgate Street, just around the corner form the old synagogue. This house has been turned into a Georgian theme park by the Southern Californian amateur historian Dennis Severs. Filled with staged Victorian life and fabricated clichés, it conveys clear contents and references, it imparts knowledge. 18 Folgate Street is ‘educational’ in this specific and somewhat limited way and Iain Sinclair does not stint his cynicism in describing the experience of being treated to the Severs show. In its quaint attempt to reveal and to exhibit, Severs’s displays fall woefully short of the power of the haunted house next door: The stinks and the tapes condition you. They tell you how you are supposed to read the scene. It’s very different in Princelet Street. Nothing is known about Rodinsky, much is rumoured. [...] A retrospective vanishing. That was its power. (p.11)

Places like the Anne Frank house rely on certified information, on charted space rather than on crypts, on colonisation and appropriation rather than on respect for the other. As Sinclair notes, this could have been the fate of Rodinsky and his room. [Rodinsky was] someone whose identity was in danger of being colonized by the imaginations of the lowlife artists who were beginning to creep into the Spitalfields fringes.


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This was the first stage in the room’s progress towards museum status. The man would be quietly marginalized as the set was restored and given a respectable context. (p.261)

19 Princelet Street resists this pull. It is careful to preserve its unique structure which highlights the challenge posed to visitors and readers alike by the crypt of Rodinsky’s Room.

5. Conclusion The ‘presence’ of this crypt above the synagogue, the ghost-like non-space which is at the same time both elusive and intrusive, sets 19 Princelet Street apart from other buildings in the area and makes it an even more appropriate site for a ‘Museum of Immigration and Diversity’ than the Jamme Masjid mosque mentioned above, ‘the building always used as a symbol of cultural adaptability: the Huguenot chapel taken over by the Methodists, before becoming the spitalfields Great Synagogue and, most recently, a mosque’ (p.266). 19 Princelet Street is precisely not a symbol of cultural adaptability, but an architectural model for the negotiation between cultures. Its crypt above the synagogue illustrates a way of dealing with the other, it is a symbol for a dynamics which renders boundaries and identities indeterminable by preserving the alterity of the other within the self. The sealed non-space of the crypt keeps identity and cultural closure suspended. In the two entangled but strikingly idiosyncratic narratives which form Rodinsky’s Room, Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair follow separate paths that negotiate between respect for the irreducible alterity of the other and a longing for origins and identity. In their respective accounts, they develop different, and in many ways, conflicting approaches towards the abandoned room above the old synagogue and towards the crypt as a general structure of societies and cultures.

Works Cited Derrida, Jacques, Memoires for Paul De Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). ——. ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, transl. by Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, transl. by Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). ——. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, transl. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). ——. Of Hospitaliy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

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Dragon, Zoltán, ‘Derrida’s Specter, Abraham’s Phantom: Psychoanalysis as the Uncanny Kernel of Deconstruction’, The AnaChronisT 11 (2005), 253269. Gilbert, Ruth, ‘The Frummer in the Attic: Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair’s Rodinsky’s Room and Jewish Memory’, Atlantic Scholarly Communication Initiative 33, I and II, (2006) [accessed on 31 July 2007]. Lichtenstein, Rachel and Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky’s Room (London: Granta Books, 2000). Miller, J. Hillis, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Thomas, Chris, Life and Death in London’s East End: 2000 Years at Spitalfields (London: Museum of London, 2004). Wigley, Mark, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). Wright, Patrick, ‘Rodinsky’s Place’, London Review of Books, 29 October 1987, 3-5.

Susanne Cuevas

‘Societies Within’: Council Estates as Cultural Enclaves in Recent Urban Fictions This essay examines Courttia Newland’s The Scholar (1997) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), two recent ‘council estate novels’ and literary representations of two of Britain’s most underprivileged and highly stigmatised communities which are segregated along class, ethnic and religious lines. The former is an exploration into the vicious circle of violence and crime that thwarts the young Afro-Caribbean protagonists’ ambition to leave the estate behind – very much in the tradition of 19th-century ‘slum fiction’ by Arthur Morrison or Emile Zola. The latter closely follows the process of emancipation of a Muslim woman from the Bangladeshi society recreated on the estate and is more optimistic about her chances to permeate the estate boundaries. Finally, this paper explores how both Newland and Ali have had to position themselves in terms of the ‘authenticity’ of their experience and have had to re-address the ‘burden of representation’. 1

After having been long forgotten and neglected, council estates in Britain have recently moved back into the media spotlight and onto the political agenda in the context of concerns about the rise of an underclass, increasing violent crime and ethnic segregation. The New Labour government, who had made tackling social exclusion one of its priorities in the 1997 election, has recently admitted its failure to deliver on parts of this promise. In February 2006, Tony Blair identified the plight of children ‘brought up in workless households in poor estates […] who are the clients of many agencies of government but the charges of no-one, prey to drugs, into crime and antisocial behaviour, lacking in self-belief, lacking a basic stake in the society into which they are born’ 2 as an urgent problem in his speech to the Scottish Labour Party conference. As one measure, Hilary Armstrong was appointed as Minister for Social Exclusion in May 2006, a new post created to coordinate government initiatives in this field. In February 2007, a governmentcommissioned report into the future of council housing found that half of all social housing is concentrated in the poorest 20 per cent of neighbourhoods in Britain and that more than 50 per cent of social housing tenants of working age are without paid work. The author of the report, Professor John Hills of the London School of Economics, put forward plans to break up council

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2

This article is an abridged version of a chapter called ‘Return of Realism’ of my dissertation Babylon and Golden City: Representations of London in Black and Asian British Novels Since the 1990s (Heidelberg: Winter 2008). Tony Blair, ‘Big challenges need big changes’, speech to the Scottish Labour Party Conference, 24/02/2006 <www.scottishlabour.org.uk/pmconfspeech2006/>.

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estates through a targeted mixing of private and public housing in order to reverse the geographical polarisation of social disadvantage. 3 The review coincided with debates about social disintegration in Britain, which have also been fed by a recent series of fatal stabbings and shootings among black teenagers in London that have shocked the British and international public. 4 A large part of Britain’s six million council home tenants 5 is recruited from unskilled, unemployed, poor and marginalised groups. The sale of better council housing under Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ scheme which left behind a body of unattractive high-rise flats and poor housing on marginal estates further contributed to the allocation of poor council housing to ethnic minorities 6 such as Afro-Caribbeans, who (initially ineligible for council housing) moved in great numbers into council sector flats in the 1970s. Especially young people and single parents remain overrepresented among occupants of council housing. Though early migrant fictions, such as Buchi Emecheta’s In the Ditch (1972) are sometimes set on council estates, it was not until the success of Victor Headley’s Yardie (1993), and the discovery of the marketability of popular literature to a black working-class readership in the 1990s, that these settings were developed into portraits of a micro-society within society, sometimes undeservedly labelled ‘ghetto fiction’. 7 Among the number of young authors who are or have been working in this genre are Courttia Newland, whose novel The Scholar and short story collection Society Within are set on a fictitious West London inner city housing estate, Alex Wheatle writing about South London in Brixton Rock and East of Acre Lane and Stephen Thompson with Toy Soldiers about North East London. Benjamin Zephaniah’s latest novel Rap Culture also falls into this category, its protagonists are from East London. Beyond the metropolis, Karline Smith’s novels Moss Side Massive and Full Crew are set in Manchester. Though the protagonists in all of these novels are Afro-Caribbeans, the field has recently expanded to examine other ethnic groups, such as Bangladeshis in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), and 3

4

5

6

7

John Hills, Ends and Means: The Future Roles of Social Housing in England. ESRC Research Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, February 2007. Since the end of January 2007, seven young black boys have died in violent attacks. The attackers and their victims were typically aged between 13 and 16 and of Afro-Caribbean descent, although Asians have also been involved. Data taken from: Amelia Hill ‘Council Estate Decline Spawns New Underclass’, The Observer, 30 November 2003. However, available data on the number of council homes varies greatly (between 2.9 million and 5.3 million). A possible reason for this may be the ongoing transfer of council housing stock to housing associations. Cf. J. Parker and K. Dugmore, Colour and the Allocation of GLC Housing, Research Report 21, Greater London Council, 1976. Andy Wood, ‘Contemporary Black British Urban Fiction: A “Ghetto Perspective”?’, Wasafiri 36 (2002), 18-22.

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no doubt representatives of other groups will soon follow suit. Such fictions, which focus on characters whose destinies are shaped by the social milieu of the council estate and are set in and around the streets of council estates can be regarded as a distinctive genre, albeit one which academic criticism has so far taken very little notice of. A worthwhile approach to ‘council estate novels’ produced by writers of black or Asian British descent is to understand them as part of a literary tradition of fictions written by and about the urban lower classes. Thus, close connections can be identified for instance with 19th-century portrayals of the urban working classes but also with contemporary literary analyses of white urban subcultures such as Irvine Welsh’s portrait of drug addicts who live in a housing scheme in the Edinburgh borough of Leith in Trainspotting. The social world of recently published ‘council estate novels’ by black British novelists is characterised by drug abuse, deprivation, violence and teenage pregnancies. Despite their flaws, characters are usually drawn sympathetically and ways of escape are examined. The novels’ spectrum ranges from pulp, as in the Headley trilogy Yardie, Yush and Excess, to more serious attempts which often draw on some autobiographical experience. There appear to be two literary influences: 19th-century London ‘slum novels’ and 20th-century US-American ‘street lit’, also called ‘ghetto novels’ or ‘hip hop fiction’. With classic naturalist fictions such as George Gissing’s The Nether World or Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago, contemporary British ‘council estate fictions’ share the attention to a specific, closed social environment, a frank treatment of sordid subject matter and – usually – a pessimistic outlook. With the latter, they share an action-packed, fast-paced plot featuring fast cars and designer wear, an abundance of drugs, sex, and (rap) music, as well as varying degrees of crime, violence and retaliation presented with the help of an ‘in-your-face’ style, straightforward sentences, and slang. In the United States, the ‘street lit’ genre was started by autobiographically-inspired writing about ghetto life by former dealers and pimps like Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines in the late 1960s and 70s and is presently enjoying renewed popularity. These crime memoirs and their pulp successors like Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever lack the literary ambition of early African-American urban writers such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin and they are controversial because of their one-dimensional portrayal of African-American urban life and their graphic portrayal of violence and sex. However, they have also been defended by literary critics and publishers on the grounds that ‘many of the novels have a moral’ or present protagonists who make the wrong choices 8 or simply because they 8

Cf. Linton Weeks, ‘New Books in the Hood: Street Lit Makes Inroads with Readers and Publishers’, The Washington Post, 31 July 2004, C01.

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attract otherwise reluctant (young) readers. Undoubtedly one of the reasons for the popularity of such urban fictions on both sides of the Atlantic is the fact that they address the experience of young people from underprivileged backgrounds in a language which they can recognise. In the following, Courttia Newland’s The Scholar and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, two very different, but in many ways complementary, portraits of life on two London inner city housing estates, will be examined as literary representations of two of Britain’s most underprivileged and highly stigmatised communities which are segregated along class, ethnic and religious lines.

1. Black British Youngsters on the Streets of West London Courttia Newland’s The Scholar: A West Side Story 9 was published in 1997 and can be regarded as a showcase of the genre because it explores in depth how the social milieu of the council estate has an impact on the lives of two black teenage boys, Sean and Cory. They are cousins and drawn as alter egos: Sean dedicates all his time to his studies and keeps away from drugs and crime, which has earned him the nickname ‘the scholar’. Cory, by contrast, is hot-headed, easily tempted by girls, money, drugs and designer clothes, and dreams of a career as a professional footballer. Over the course of the novel and the period of one summer their destinies become increasingly interlocked in a fateful chain of events. When Cory stabs another boy in self-defence, he comes under pressure from Levi, a local gangster, for thwarting his plans to ‘pull off’ an armed robbery with Roger, the injured boy. Cory reluctantly agrees to help Levi out, but before he can do so he is hospitalised himself – the result of a vicious act of revenge on him by Roger’s friends. Unable to find a replacement for his cousin and despite his previously ‘clean’ record, Sean steps in for Cory and finds himself drawn ever deeper into Levi’s world of drugs, gun-violence and easy money. When the police come looking for the perpetrators of a bloody attack on a jeweller’s shop and the cunning Levi sets Sean a trap to save himself, Cory takes justice into his own hands. Furiously, he kills Levi and thereby seals his own and his cousin’s fate: Sean is arrested by the police and will have to serve a long prison sentence for armed robbery, while Cory is forced to go into hiding from Levi’s gang and the police – possibly for the rest of his life. The setting of this sinister tale of violence and brotherhood is a fictitious West London council estate called Greenside. Textual references to the surrounding vicinities of Shepherd’s Bush, Acton and the wider borough of Hammersmith allow a more specific localisation of the area as White City, 9

Courttia Newland, The Scholar: A West Side Story (London: Abacus, 1997). All further references appear parenthetically in the text.


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where the author himself grew up. The estate is introduced by authorial comment as a typical example of an English housing estate, built in the early 1950s to meet the post-war housing shortages and to absorb the newly arriving West Indian immigrants: ‘Many black families found themselves housed in Greensides all over England, tucked away with the lower-class whites, where the middle and upper classes didn’t have to see them’ (TS, p.37). More than forty years later Greenside residents are still segregated from the rest of British society, but the situation has deteriorated. The biographies of Sean, Cory and their friends are instructive because they represent the third generation of blacks in Britain, and – being born in 1978 – they are both the products and victims of Thatcherist politics. There is an overpowering correspondence between the inhospitable, run-down material environment and the stagnant lives and the threadbare economic situation of people on the estate. At one point Sean compares the estate to ‘a tired old clock that had been overwound, its springs slowly uncoiling, until they could do so no more […]’ (TS, p.180). As a result of the lack of funding and general neglect of the estate and the needs of its inhabitants by local and national government (the youth club is closed and there is not even a supermarket), a society within British society with its own rules and culture has been created. Teenage mothers, absent fathers, drug abuse, dealing, petty crime, mugging, gun crime and unemployment dominate the social world the boys have grown up in. This microcosm is segregated from mainstream society primarily along the lines of social class rather than race. The population on the estate is ethnically mixed, and the novel draws most of its optimism and energy from the interethnic friendships between young black, Asian and white Londoners. Though racial differences exist, they are apparently diminished in the face of a shared lack of opportunities, an absence of public facilities and stereotypical biographies and they are never the cause of any of the actual violence among Greensiders in the novel, which is most often black-on-black violence. Outward marker of the young people’s identification with their black-inflected native London environment is their use of language: a mix of Jamaican Patois with a London accent and Cockney slang. At the same time, however, the novel shows that Sean, Cory and in fact everybody growing up on an estate, can only lay claim to a part of London for identification, and they feel dislocated in places beyond their West London environment. The novel’s subtitle is not so much an allusion to the musical West Side Story (with which it does not share much thematic ground) but refers to its ‘West Side’ setting – and to the phenomenon of young (black) people’s identification with their North, South East or West London area – also nicknamed ‘sides’. 10 In addition to stressing this sense of 10

Personal email correspondence with the author, 12 July 2005. In this context, Courttia Newland pointed out that the British use of ‘sides’ historically preceded the US-American

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locality, the novel makes an effort to dissociate the experience of British inner city youth from that of their US equivalents (in downtown L.A. or the New York ‘projects’). The young people may refer to the estate Jamaicanstyle as ‘the manor’ and to their homes as their ‘drum’ or ‘yard’, but never as ‘ghetto’. This is part of the novel’s intention to de-glamorise the ‘gangsta’ culture celebrated widely by rap and hip-hop lyrics and emulated uncritically by many inner city youths. 11 In the absence of alternative leisure spaces, the teenagers meet on the streets and in the parks for socialising. The novel shows how easily this ‘street culture’ breeds violence. In the absence of other positive models of identification there exists a strong sense of territoriality and the boys are fiercely defensive about their sense of self. Any deliberate or perceived trespassing on a person’s ‘respect’ or possessions (this includes their girlfriends) tempts them into violence. Although the novel depicts young people involved in such diverse criminal activities as drug-dealing, drugconsumption, burglary, trading fake designer clothes, an armed hold-up, and finally even a murder, it takes care not to glamorise them but to transmit the repulsiveness and serious consequences of acts of violence or drug abuse. Feeling alienated from their immediate environment and the biographies that await them there the protagonists’ and their girlfriends’ aspirations are directed beyond the limits of the estate as they hope to finish sixth-form college successfully and eventually settle in a more positive environment, such as nearby multicultural Queensway. Such an escape is made difficult both by the self-contained nature of the estate and the socio-cultural distance between Greenside residents and British mainstream society. The fleeting contacts which exist between the two worlds expose the latter’s indifference, fear and racial stereotyping. Even to the boys’ college teacher, a West Indian, who represents the only person outside the family who encourages and supports Sean’s and Cory’s ambition to leave the estate, Greenside remains a terra incognita. What is more, the boys’ own mental map of London is strikingly restricted, their everyday movements taking place between their own and their friends’ flats on the estate, and between the estate and college. When Sean seeks out some of Cory’s friends who ‘owe him a favour’ in North Acton, Hammersmith and Ladbroke Grove – places which are no further than one or two miles or two tube stations away, he has to consult an A to Z guide first. This phenomenon is only partly due to a limited access to means of transport – rather, most of London, and suburbia in particular, is marked as white

11

use of the term in rap and hip-hop lyrics, etc. This topic features prominently in articles published about black youth culture, street crime and gun violence by Andrew Smith (2001), Burhan Wazir (2003) and Diran Adebayo (2003) among others.


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middle-class territory and each visit there by Cory or Sean is a conscious trespassing on white property, possessions and privilege. Of course, whenever they do seek out such places (e.g. on their burglary tours), their intentions only confirm white fears and suspicions. Given this great social distance to mainstream British society and the strong influence of street culture, the Greensiders’ prospects for leading a self-determined and independent life outside the estate are portrayed in bleak colours. There is one single example of a former drug dealer who has renounced crime, returned to college and now works as a Studio Engineer recording and producing music. Drug-dealing careers, on the other hand, though promising a faster way to wealth, fail to lead out of the estate, thus driving home the novel’s message that there is no alternative to an education.

2. Inside Muslim Tower Hamlets My second example, Brick Lane, 12 was published in 2003 and can be considered the first in-depth literary portrait of Bangladeshi life in Britain, an ethnic group much less familiar to the British public than other Asian groups such as Indians and Pakistanis. The plot focuses on the development of a young Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen, from the age of eighteen, when she comes from rural Bangladesh to Tower Hamlets by arranged marriage, to the age of thirty-four, when her husband decides to return to Bangladesh with the family. For Nazneen, the main obstacle to negotiating a self-determined life as a Muslim woman in Britain, between Bangladeshi and British culture, are the restrictions and expectations placed on her by her traditionalist husband and the Bangladeshi Muslim community. In accordance with the socio-economic profile of Britain’s Bangladeshi population the majority of the immigrants on Monica Ali’s fictional Dogwood estate are peasants from the rural Sylhet region. They are either unemployed or employed in unskilled and badly-paid jobs. As they regard their stay as temporary they do not integrate culturally but create a cultural enclave with the help of religion and language and facilitated by council housing allocation, in which at least the female characters remain virtually segregated – both from their white working-class neighbours on the estate and wider British society. Furthermore, the cultural segregation of women is upheld by the community through the fear of gossip and social stigmatisation of those who dare to transgress the bounds of their designated role as a housewife and mother. The novel suggests that the confinement of women to the private realm serves a second, non-religious function within 12

Monica Ali, Brick Lane (London: Doubleday, 2003). All further references appear parenthetically in the text.

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the migrant community, namely a male fetishisation of female ‘authenticity’. The reason why Chanu chooses Nazneen for his bride and why the British-born Karim is attracted to Nazneen fifteen years later is not love but her village background, which apparently bestows on her an ‘authentic’, ‘un-spoiled’ nature. By trying to minimise their wives’ contact with British society, Chanu and other Bangladeshi men in the novel are under the delusion that this can somehow preserve their own ‘authenticity’ – even decades after migration – something they do not find inconsistent with the assimilated life they lead themselves. Cultural contacts between the British and Bangladeshi immigrants are shown to differ greatly according to their gender. Throughout the novel, Chanu’s hope of succeeding in Britain is thwarted by his experience of open and subtle forms of racism at work. By contrast and presumably because they do not compete for jobs, female characters in the novel only start to encounter racist hostility after the events of 9/11. One central issue which the novel explores is how control over territory is linked with power. The territorial claims on the estate articulated by the Bengal Tigers (the local Muslim group) and the Lion Hearts (a racist section of the white working class) which are conducted first through an exchange of leaflets and later through an open confrontation during a march which turns into a riot, are the most obvious example. Even more importantly, Nazneen’s coming of age is bound to an increasingly active and extensive use of space in the novel. Initially alienated from her bleak surroundings and by her lack of contact with other people, she gradually manages to carve out a space for herself within the bounds of the flat. One important step is her taking up paid work which compromises the domestic sphere. Another is her affair with Karim which also takes place inside Ahmed’s flat. What is more, during Chanu’s absence, Nazneen and her daughters change the rules of domestic life towards a more relaxed and Western lifestyle, speaking English, eating English food and watching English television. The flat is also the place from where Nazneen will start to redesign her new life after separation from Chanu. Of equal importance are her rare explorations of urban spaces beyond the estate. They not only forcefully draw the reader’s attention to the limits of Nazneen’s mental map of the metropolis but also provide some encounters with white British people, in which stereotypical perceptions of Muslim women are challenged. In one scene, a photographer takes a photo of her as she goes shopping with Chanu. Outwardly, she meets the criteria of the obedient Muslim wife by ‘following her husband, head bowed, hair covered’ (BL, p.210) and this is the stereotype which the photographer’s gaze seeks and apparently confirms with her photo of the couple. Inwardly, however, Nazneen is embroiled in the moral dilemma of her imminent adultery with Karim. A little later this disruption of stereotypical perceptions is made even


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more explicit when a blond woman in a funeral car looks at Nazneen with ‘the way she might look at a familiar object […], a blankness reserved for known quantities, like pieces of furniture or brown women in saris who cooked rice and raised children and obeyed their husbands’ (BL, p.325). By unexpectedly lifting her hand and waving at the woman, Nazneen reclaims her individuality and invites communication across the supposed ethnic divide with a single gesture. As in more recent contemporary productions which deal with race relations after the 9/11 attacks, such as the feature film Yasmin (2004, dir. Kenny Glenaan; see Claudia Sternberg’s article in this volume), it is the Muslim woman who is charged with bridging the cultural gap. In Monica Ali’s novel, Brick Lane is a metonymy for the changing fate of Bangladeshis in Britain. From a rather grubby Bangladeshi shopping street in the late 1970s it evolves at the turn of the millennium into a trendy place to eat and shop for ‘ethnic souvenirs’ for a British and touristy clientele whose interest in Bangladeshi culture remains superficial, however. As a result of gentrification Bangladeshi residents and well-off English people may share the same street, but they continue to shop, work and live in separate social worlds. Early in the novel, Mrs Azad, the doctor’s wife, self-confidently challenges Chanu when he describes the ‘clash between Western values and our own’ (BL, p.92) as the immigrant’s ‘tragedy’: ‘Listen, when I’m in Bangladesh I put on a sari and cover my head and all that. But here I go out to work. I work with white girls and I’m just one of them. If I want to come home and eat curry, that’s my business. Some women spend ten, twenty years here and they sit in the kitchen grinding spices all day and learn only two words of English.’ She looked at Nazneen who focused on Raqib. ‘They go around covered from head to toe, in their little walking prisons and when someone calls to them in the street they are upset. The society is racist. The society is all wrong. Everything should change for them. They don’t have to change one thing. That,’ she said, stabbing the air, ‘is the tragedy’. (BL, p.93)

Although she obviously serves as the author’s mouthpiece for this programmatic speech Mrs Azad, who is physically unattractive, a slovenly pub-goer, unable to cook and to create an affectionate home, cannot be intended as a role model. Nazneen’s friend Razia is a more credible model of strong womanhood. She manages to be a self-confident and hard-working woman and a caring mother at the same time. Always sceptical of ethnic fundamentalism and hypocrisy, she decides to settle permanently in Britain after her husband’s death, her British passport and her Union Jack sweatshirt being the outward signs of her new identity. In keeping with its message of emancipated femininity, the novel advocates a combination of female solidarity and cultural integration. While at the end none of the central male characters manages to settle in – they either succumb to the ‘Going Home Syndrome’ (Chanu), seek elsewhere for their ‘roots’

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(Karim) or die (Razia’s husband), Nazneen, Razia and other women unite to work for an employer with the symbolic name ‘Fusion Fashions’. Their new employer is British, selling Asian-inspired clothes to an upmarket British clientele, and with their designs the women will engage creatively and artistically with the British public despite working within a traditional female profession. It is such entrepreneurialism which the novel proposes as a possibility for integration, which is in line with New Labour social and economic politics. The novel is not clear, however, on how Nazneen’s and the other women’s tentative homemaking on the estate can be reconciled with the prevailing wider notion of the estate as a social trap. Despite their different scope and perspectives, ‘council estate novels’ like The Scholar and Brick Lane suggest a revival of social realist modes of writing and show parallels to late 19th-century naturalist accounts of the life of the poorest in the city slums by authors like George Gissing and Arthur Morrison. It is certainly no coincidence that both examples analysed here also take in the Thatcher years, the period which most closely resembles Victorian Liberalism, for enquiring into the condition of those parts of society which are the victims of a free market economy and a greatly reduced welfare state. Similar to their 19th-century predecessors, both Newland and Ali strive to inform and enlighten an audience which is largely ignorant of the life of these groups, through including statistical data (e.g. on family sizes and rates of overcrowding) into their fictions and through the creation of detailed character portraits. Piece-working, drug or alcohol abuse, gang violence and violent crimes such as robbery are equally familiar topics in those earlier novels.

3. The Burden of ‘Authenticity’ Novels not only enter into a dialogue with each other, but also with other genres. Thus, some ‘council estate novels’ draw strongly on popular music shows as well as hip hop and rap lyrics, which are renowned for their glamorising of gangster culture and often misogynist messages. Others, however, aim at countering stereotypical depictions of blacks in the mainstream media. As Sean, the protagonist of The Scholar, puts it: And did [white people] care that they offended him every time their newspapers blamed his people for their moral decline? Did they care if every black man in most TV police dramas was a criminal, insane, a drug pusher and that this negative image was put into homes the length and breadth of the country? (TS, p.170)

In this context, the adaptation of council estate fictions for television or cinema plays an important role in redressing the absence or misrepresentation of black and Asians. Thus, BBC 4 has bought the rights to East of Acre Lane and Society Within, while The Scholar is scheduled to be filmed at the time of


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writing by Newland’s own production company ‘Cofe’. Newland’s bestselling first novel coincided with a number of portraits of estate life in black film productions, some of them very celebratory, like Julian Henriques’s musical Babymother (1998), others from a realist angle. Three recent examples of the latter must suffice here. Rage (1999, dir. Newton Aduaka), set in Brixton, is an exploration into the nature of the friendship between three teenagers when a joint burglary fails and their ambition to produce a hip hop record is thwarted. Bullet Boy (2004, dir. Saul Dibb), set on a Hackney housing estate, focuses on the tragic fate of a young man just released from prison who is drawn back into violence and threatens to become a role model for his younger brother. Most recently, Kidulthood (2006, dir. Menhaj Huda) depicts a day in the life of a group of West London 15-year-olds from the teenagers’ point of view, which is dominated by violence and arguing, sex, alcohol and drug-taking. All stories focus on the apparent inevitability of the fate of young people – mainly young men – who live on such council estates given their limited opportunities to escape the vicious circle of violence and crime that surrounds them. With their novels exploring marginal spaces of the British capital, authors of social realist fictions are often faced with a problem that their white colleagues do not have: ‘The persistent assumption that black authors writing about gangsters have lived the experience while white writers have done some research’. 13 The ‘authenticity’ discourse continues to play an important role in the marketing of both novels and films set in social environments which are prone to clichéd representation. 14 Thus Courttia Newland’s fictional debut was partly sold on the premise of being a ‘truthful’, and ‘more exact’ depiction of urban black British youth than his predecessor Victor Headley had created in Yardie. While Newland could capitalise on this ‘street credibility’ with his first two novels, it has also worked against him in that it threatened to place him firmly into a thematic niche with publishers. The author has since turned to detective fiction and theatre plays. Monica Ali, by contrast, has been attacked for her lack of ‘authenticity’. Unlike Newland, she could not draw on direct autobiographical experience for her novel, but has had to rely on family, field observations, and sociological texts as sources for her research. Parts of Ali’s Bangladeshi audiences have challenged her right to write about Bangladeshi experiences on the grounds that she does not speak Bengali fluently. 15 Furthermore, she has been accused of 13 14

15

Maya Jaggi, ‘Dubious Divisions’, The Guardian, 11 November 2000, xi. The main character in the film Bullet Boy, Ricky, is played by Ashley Walters aka Asher D, formerly a prominent member of the UK garage and grime act So Solid Crew from Peckham. Walters himself served a prison sentence in 2002 for possession of a handgun. Cf. Monica Ali, ‘Where I Come From’, The Guardian, 17 June 2003.

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enforcing stereotypes and insulting residents of Brick Lane by portraying Sylheti Bangladeshis as backward and unsophisticated.16 Protests about supposed misrepresentations came to a head during the filming of the novel by Ruby Films in the Brick Lane area when a small number of activists (mainly residents and traders), who threatened to block the road and to publicly burn the book, were powerful enough to stop on-site filming of the novel. As Newland’s and Ali’s experiences with the demands for ‘authenticity’ and its limiting effects show, ethnic minority artists 17 continue to struggle with ‘the burden of racial representation’, i.e. the assumption that they should produce both accurate and uplifting portraits of black and Asian British experience. This phenomenon is seemingly in conflict with the state of the academic debate. By the turn of the 1990s, Stuart Hall had declared ‘the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject’ 18 and strategies of ‘representation as depiction’ and ‘representation as an act of delegation’19 had been criticised as both disabling and lacking in explanatory force for current artistic work. By casting authors like Newland and Ali in the role of a community spokesperson, publishers and the media disregard the heterogeneity of experiences which exist within such ethnic communities – which is exactly one of the points made by the authors in their ‘council estate fictions’ – and thereby provoke protests by those who feel misrepresented. What is worse, perhaps, the confusion of authors and their characters threatens to eclipse the fictionality of the texts and thus impedes an evaluation of their literary merits as works of fiction with important moral or emancipatory messages.

16

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18

19

Cf. Richard Lea and Paul Lewis, ‘“Insulted” residents and traders threaten to halt filming of bestselling novel Brick Lane’, The Guardian, 18 July 2006. In fact very few writers, such as Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith, have managed to transcend this burden completely and can now be said to be writing from a ‘post-ethnic’ perspective. Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’ in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.163-172 (p.164). Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien, ‘De Margin and de Centre’ in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.194-210.


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Works Cited Adebayo, Diran, ‘The Prized Possession’, New Statesman, 13 January 2003. Ali, Monica, Brick Lane (London: Doubleday, 2003). ——. ‘Where I Come From’, The Guardian, 17 June 2003. Blair, Tony, ‘Big Challenges Need Big Changes’, 24 February 2006, <www. scottishlabour.org.uk/pmconfspeech2006> Hall, Stuart, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.163-172. Hill, Amelia, ‘Council Estate Decline Spawns New Underclass’, The Observer, 30 November 2003. Jaggi, Maya, ‘Dubious Divisions’, The Guardian, 11 November 2000, xi. Lea, Richard and Paul Lewis, ‘“Insulted” Residents and Traders Threaten to Halt Filming of Bestselling Novel Brick Lane’, The Guardian, 18 July 2006. Mercer, Kobena and Isaac Julien, ‘De Margin and de Centre’, in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.194-210. Newland, Courttia, The Scholar: A West Side Story (London: Abacus, 1997). Parker, J. and K. Dugmore, Colour and the Allocation of GLC Housing, Research Report 21, Greater London Council, 1976. Hills, John, Ends and Means: The Future Roles of Social Housing in England, ESRC Research Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, February 2007, . Smith, Andrew, ‘Ghetto Blasters’, The Observer Magazine, 25 November 2001. Wazir, Burhan, ‘The Path from Gang Rule to Self-Respect’. The Observer, 12 January 2003. <www. observer.guardian.co.uk>. Weeks, Linton, ‘New Books in the Hood: Street Lit Makes Inroads with Readers and Publishers’, The Washington Post, 31 July 2004, C01. Wood, Andy, ‘Contemporary Black British Urban Fiction: A “Ghetto Perspective”?’ Wasafiri 36 (2002), pp.18-22.

Interviews

Angela Kurtz

Interview with Rajeev Balasubramanyam Rajeev Balasubramanyam was born in 1974 in Lancashire and studied in Oxford and Cambridge. He has had short stories published in a variety of anthologies, including New Writing. His first novel, In Beautiful Disguises (2000), won a Betty Trask Award in 1999. His second novel, The Dreamer, based on a short story with the same title, is scheduled for publication in 2008. He is the editor of Tell Tales Vol 2, an anthology of short stories, and teaches creative writing at school and university. He lives in Manchester.

AK: Rajeev, tell me a bit about growing up in Lancashire as the son of Indian migrants. RB: It was hard. We lived in quite a racist area. It was a white working-class area for a while, then we moved to a more middle-class area, but there is a belt that goes from Lancashire across towards Yorkshire in which the National Front was very, very powerful in the seventies and eighties, and that was basically where we were. And I think South Indians tend to be quite isolated as opposed to North Indians and Pakistanis, so we were quite isolated as a family within a very racist white community. So it was pretty hard. AK: How did your family cope with this situation? RB: I think there’s a tremendous difference between my generation and that of my parents. In my generation, many of us grew up with the fairly naïve idea that we are entitled to equal rights and that anything that doesn’t live up to that should be looked at as an injustice whereas, I think, my parents had no such concept. With them, it was purely about the practical and what’s different, they didn’t expect to be treated equally. I don’t know if it was an issue for them. They didn’t come to the country with any expectation of being treated equally, they came to the country with certain practical intentions, so I think that’s the difference in our attitudes. They had a much more functional attitude whereas I had a more idealistic attitude. It’s difficult for me to say if things have changed in my area since my youth because I’m older now. I don’t know what a young person would encounter growing up in the same way. I don’t see the presence of skinheads around, which I did then – everywhere, they were everywhere then. But these things are going underground, still being in existence.

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AK: In an interview for Kala Kahania in 2001, you said that you ‘feel kind of constructed by British imperialism’. 1 Could you explain this statement? RB: There’s a case for arguing that most of the world is constructed by British imperialism, and certainly these days, I would never say that an Indian or an African or a Jamaican is more constructed by imperialism than a white English person. That’s history and it has formed the present, very much so. I think to argue that anyone’s not constructed by British imperialism would be ludicrous. Perhaps that’s the difference between me now and what I would have said then, which is that I think now it’s very important to recognise that it is all of us, that race and ethnicity do not only affect people with colour and that imperialism does not only affect people with colour. It has had a transforming and a constructive effect on all of us, that’s a really important thing to bear in mind. AK: In what way did you face racism in Britain? RB: When I was younger, it was the threat of violent racism. Just very overt physical racism. The more middle-class an environment, the higher up the class ladder you go, the more subtle racism becomes. Maybe once you get to a certain height, then it becomes obvious again. Perhaps middle-class racism is the most subtle form of racism. Because, in a way, the middle class is the most insecure class, they have the most to lose. AK: What can you say about places like Oxford and Cambridge in this respect? RB: Those were extremely racist environments, extremely. And unapologetically. The middle classes are much more apologetic. Because when you are getting close to a centre of power, then things become more urgent. It really matters then. The establishment is a powerful and a dangerous thing, I don’t think it should ever be underestimated. As soon as you genuinely threaten the establishment, you’ll know about it. You know it’s not a game… I’ve no real way of genuinely threatening it. But Oxford and Cambridge are centres of tremendous power. They have multiple functions, but I found these environments very racist. Not progressive institutions, let me just put it that way. There are some progressive individuals, of course.

1

J. Ryatt and K. Ryan, Rajeev Balasubramanyam in an interview with Jagdeep Ryatt and Kevin Ryan for Kala Kahania in 2001 (20 June 2007).

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AK: You deconstruct the term ‘multiculturalism’. Is there another concept you would suggest? RB: To me, the alternative simply is a non-racist society, that’s it. I think moving the conversation away from culture and all of these words simply to a discussion about racism is the way forward. From then on, you can start thinking about details. But the first thing is eliminating racism, which is the backbone of the world, really, in terms of power, or a backbone of the world and of Britain. So once that is eliminated, then we can talk about culture and about what is desirable, what is less desirable, but that, to me, is for another time. AK: How do you feel about the academic debate on multiculturalism? RB: I found what Paul Gilroy has been saying recently very interesting. 2 The academic debate about multiculturalism doesn’t interest me that much, to be honest. It is interesting, but I think it’s not the battleground. I just think there’s an exceptional amount of bullshit talked about it because we are a society which is sort of falling asleep at its own weight and which is approaching a kind of Italian style of fascism, and I think that when that happens, critical analysis, critical thought becomes slowly extinguished and people become like children, and I think that’s what’s happening in Britain today. Actually it’s very obvious once you step outside the discourse. But once you are embedded in that discourse, then you can only think one way. And if everybody is using that discourse, that’s the end of politics, it’s the end of everything really, that’s the danger, becoming like a Soviet Bloc country in terms of the way that politics function. AK: Do you think there’s any use in the academic discussion? RB: I think academics have a role (generally it is in order to talk to other academics [laughing]). I heard someone say the other day that academics are not activists, and I feel that if academics are not activists, what is their function? Because people have stopped listening to them. Academic talk only is useful if it’s actually put to some function, otherwise it becomes pretty meaningless. It’s just, people have conferences and discuss and write their books and get their salaries and teach…it doesn’t really go anywhere. Perhaps students learn things, and that’s good, but I feel that if people are gonna write about subjects like this, it ought to have some sort of a social function. It should somehow enter social discourse.

2

Cf. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004).

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Angela Kurtz

AK: Let’s talk about your novels now. The heroine of In Beautiful Disguises is a young girl. Was it difficult to take this perspective? RB: No, it was really easy! To me, writing is like acting. Almost like method acting, a combination of method and character acting. 3 You have to get the voice and get inside the person. There are some writers who can only write from things that they directly experienced and who tend to write about their biography all the time. Not very many writers are like that, but there are a few who constantly only write about their own direct experience. But for me, it was like acting. You get the voice, and then you maintain the voice and you become that voice for the period that you are writing a novel. And then, afterwards, you move on to the next narrator, the next project. AK: In some reviews, you are criticised for not conveying a realistic picture of India in the novel. What can you reply to these reproaches? RB: That’s true! There are two reviews which were quite critical of that. My suspicion is that they are reacting more to the language than to the actual facts of the novel and that the response is very emotional. But I think that’s a perfectly reasonable criticism. I certainly wouldn’t attempt to write a novel set in India now. But at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do and I didn’t question it. AK: Why did you choose India as a setting at that time? RB: I was told by a publisher that if you write a novel from a British-Asian perspective, nobody will buy it, there’s no market for it. I had no idea – he said, set it in India, and I said OK. I had been spending a lot of time in India. And I think it would have been hard for me to have written from a perspective closer to my own. I can do it now because I’ve spent all these years. I spent the first four years after writing In Beautiful Disguises just dealing with the stuff that has affected me personally, and I feel that you can’t write from a stable, self-aware platform until you’ve dealt with the – whatever it is – that has affected you or hurt you in your life, and I think that goes for all writers. You have to go through that process before you can write conscious fiction, basically. And I don’t think I could have done that at 22. There’s a certain distance in the novel, a distance to myself. But you make up that ground through empathy. My second novel, The Dreamer, is a completely different novel. You’d have to read quite carefully to recognise that it’s written by the same person. 3

In method acting, actors attempt to recreate a character’s emotional framework in real life in order to create a realistic performance. This technique is supposed to refine acting practice by enabling the actors to draw on their own experience and emotions.

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AK: Could you quickly summarise what The Dreamer is about? RB: It is about a British-Asian actor who grows up in the Northwest of England. He’s in love with someone there, then he leaves, and she dies. He becomes quite a famous actor in London, and he has a nervous breakdown for various reasons, partly because he had to play a lot of negative roles and partly from not having dealt with the past trauma. He becomes obsessed with the dead girl when he’s in his early thirties, and – it’s called The Dreamer – he becomes a lucid dreamer. He acquires certain supernatural powers through dreaming, and he tries to use these to recreate her, or to bring her back to life. The novel has got a split narrative in terms of time, partly it’s set in ’86, partly in 2002. AK: Can you say something about the tone of the novel, maybe in comparison with In Beautiful Disguises? RB: It’s non-satirical, that’s the main difference. I’m actually quite opposed – that’s maybe a too strong word – but I’m just not very fond of satire now. And it’s too easy as well, it’s very easy to make fun of people. The Dreamer probably is more lyrical, and it’s less sanitised, I mean, In Beautiful Disguises is quite sanitised. You could argue that stylistically it approaches some kind of a counter-realism. It’s certainly not magic realism, but it approaches some form of a counter-realism in terms of the supernatural. But you could argue that it’s a more realist novel as well because it has more social reality, specific social reality, which In Beautiful Disguises didn’t. AK: Do you consider your writing to be political? RB: When I’m giving talks like the one I gave yesterday, it seems that my interests are primarily political, but I think I probably privilege aesthetics over politics at the end. Politics are important, but I don’t see it as being more important than aesthetics. I tend to see aesthetics as having a prior importance, but certainly, I’m not in favour of apolitical arts, I think that’s quite boring. AK: As a creative writing teacher, is there anything particular you are trying to teach your students? RB: To me, it’s just understanding how a novel functions technically. It’s about the technical aspects of writing, that’s what you can really teach. The rest is a very dangerous area, it’s like teaching somebody what personality they ought to have, but if you can make it as objective as possible and let them handle the subjectivity, that’s the way I try and teach.

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AK: You are writing fiction and working on a PhD thesis. Is it difficult to unite the two forms of writing? RB: Yes, to me they are different parts of the brain and I just try and keep them separate. I think if you start mixing them, terrible things will result. AK: So how do you divide your time? RB: I’ve just finished the novel, I thought if I do a few months hard work on the thesis, then I can get back to being a human being again [laughing]. I’m a little prejudiced against academia because I find that it isolates certain parts of the psyche, of the whole, and I don’t like that. I don’t like emotional disengagement or detachment, I don’t like spiritual disengagement or detachment, and I find academia does that. It attempts to answer important questions purely through rationality, which I just do not think is possible, and that makes me frustrated.

Violeta Topalova

Interview with Patrick Neate Patrick Neate was born in 1970 in London and studied anthropology in Cambridge and journalism in London where he lives. His first novel, Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko (2000), won a Betty Trask Award in 2001, and his second novel, Twelve Bar Blues (2001), won the Whitbread Novel Prize of that year. He has since published The London Pigeon Wars (2003) and City of Tiny Lights (2005), a detective novel in which Ugandan-Indian, Cricket loving, ExMujaheddin private investigator, Tommy Akhtar, takes on the job of finding a missing Russian prostitute, but soon finds himself on a quest for bigger answers that leads him right into the seedy underbelly of today’s multi-ethnic London, where he has to prevent an act of terrorism, namely the bombing of London public transport. Incidentally, the book appeared before the London Bombings of 7 September 2005.

VT: Patrick, what actually prompted you to take part in this conference? What made you decide you wanted to attend? PN: Ah … Well, I was approached by the organisers of the conference. But, it had previously been mentioned to me by someone from the British Council. I’ve done a couple of things with the British Council before, so I thought it would probably be pretty good. I haven’t done anything like this before. I mean, I’ve been sent things in the past – academic criticism of my work – and I’ve always found that quite interesting. Actually, it’s mostly hugely flattering, even if I don’t necessarily agree with the findings. Just the fact that your work is a source of interest to someone and they write about it is flattering. Also, I suppose I think that in my experiences in Germany in the past, I’ve found that people have intelligent things to say. Multi-ethnic Britain is something that I’m wheeled out to comment on a quite regular basis, so I was quite intrigued by what the view might be from somewhere else. VT: And in which respect did you find it different from the view at home, and are there similarities? PN: Oh, that’s hard to say. At home I’m not engaged in academic debate. I do see myself discussed in academic circles, but it’s a different kind of discussion, focusing more on the literary aspects, so I don’t know really. I sometimes get the feeling that in the UK we can’t see the wood for the trees, really. Multiculturalism is so much part of everyday discourse, with people address it without even realising. There’s a set of accepted rules and regulations for the way you can talk about Britain that people obey without knowing they’re obeying them.

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I couldn’t say for sure where a difference lies, because I don’t move in a British academic world. But, to venture a guess, I suppose there’s a degree of freedom here because the debate is outside its context. Certainly it’s felt interesting to deal with the subject matter like a scientist – just look at it, dissect it and look at the individual parts. Because in the UK I find that you always tend to talk about… well, other things. You can’t really pull your own culture apart in such a detached way. Of course there are advantages to both levels of discourse. I think some stuff I’ve heard in the panels … well, it’s interesting as far as it goes. But you can’t actually enter into a discussion with the breadth of understanding that a British subject might have. Nonetheless, the view from the outside definitely does have a clarity and highlights certain parts of the discussion in a way that is hard to achieve from within. Yeah. VT: This feeds into the discussions on authenticity and difference here at Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+. Here it’s academic discourse, but the issue’s the same for fiction writers, I guess. What are you allowed to write about? If you’re not personally a victim or an integral part of what you’re writing about, what are you qualified to say and what can you possibly know about it? PN: The victim – now that’s an interesting word. Well. Of course my response to this issue is totally mitigated by my personal experience of what I’ve written about and the reactions to it. And it’s not something I’d ever thought about when I started writing. I was really quite naïve and just went ahead and wrote about whatever I wanted to. So, suddenly, I found myself engaged in this weird retrospective justification and had to tell people: ‘Oh I chose this for this reason and this reason.’ In the first two novels I certainly didn’t choose the subject matter for any reason other than they were stories I wanted to tell; and that’s still always my prime consideration. I think you’re allowed to write about whatever the hell you want. But it’s also important to consider that people are allowed to think it’s bad, and to take objection to it for all sorts of reason that you can agree with or not. I write about otherness and alienation, so that’s what I’m talking about here. There is a politics to writing about this subject matter and I didn’t necessarily realise this at first. I have had to accept that it’s not quite good enough anymore to say: ‘Well I’ll just write what I want without accepting the political ramifications of my writing’ I don’t mean that you should limit what you want to write about, but you should at least accept the political consequences of what you’re saying. All that said … if I want to write about something, I’ll write about it. And I believe I can. For example, I have written extensively about racial alienation. I

Interview with Patrick Neate

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have never really experience that myself, but I have of course experienced other kinds of alienation. And I use my imagination to try and hit a truth of what racial alienation might feel like. Do I think that’s possible? Definitely. VT: This awareness is probably growing amongst the public, the people who read these books, and it’s probably also growing amongst other writers. Basically every young British writer who chooses to write about multiethnic issues is aware of the political ramifications his or her work is going to have. Do you think this limits the literary output, influences it negatively, or is there rather a positive effect? Is there a more receptive audience, or does this self-awareness lead to a limitation of the writer’s freedom of expression, a sort of self-censorship? PN: I don’t know the answer to that question. Personally, my motivations change all the time, and my capacity to write about certain subject matters changes all the time. I think that it varies from book to book. At the moment I’m writing something that has turned into a struggle, and I think part of me wants to blame it on questions of the political ramifications of what I’m writing. But that’s sort of a disingenuous excuse for that kind of struggle. Politics can, of course, be a motor. That was certainly the case with City of Tiny Lights. Writing that book was a reaction to all sorts of things, and one of these things certainly was the criticism I received about what I was ‘allowed’ to write about and what I was not. Choosing to write in genre was partly a reaction to that … creating a character to challenge the criticism that said, ‘your voices are not authentic’. So I went over the top. I mean, Tommy’s a bloody Ugandan-Indian Private Eye in Chiswick who thinks he’s Phillip Marlowe – how should he authentically sound? VT: In other words: could he be any more of a construct? PN: Exactly. This is a heightened reality. And this sort of criticism makes me laugh on the one hand, and on the other despair. But that was only part of the motivation for writing it. All my novels are about the quest for identity; the search to ‘fit’. In fact, I sometimes worry that I’m a bit like Status Quo – you know, that crap rock band whose songs all sound the same? I sometimes worry I’m a three chord writer. That said, all these novels were very much led by character and story. That’s what was in my head: an interest in stories. But with City of Tiny Lights it was different. Writing that book was very much a question of: ‘I’m going to address these issues with a specific political intention and I’m choosing to do so in genre.’ So, I made all these very deliberate of decisions. Now, what I’m writing at the moment, I’m not sure. And maybe that’s a little bit why I’m sort of struggling. Not because of fear of criticism, but because I want to understand my political intentions and make sure I serve

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them correctly. And, you know, more than correctly, but entertainingly, and make it a good read, that’s funny and engaging. VT: So when you chose to written in genre, why did you choose crime fiction? Do you read a lot of crime fiction or are your influences more in the movies, because City of Tiny Lights definitely has a very cinematic feel to it? PN: I think all my books have a cinematic feel to them, and I think that’s a very strong characteristic for young writers who were brought up with a sort of literary eye for film. Perhaps this is particularly true for male writers, at least I’d expect that, because most of them start out with films and not books. For a lot of them reading comes later. Certainly, I was much more literate in film than in books, and that remained so until, well, actually until I started writing. VT: Really? PN: Well, I read, probably more than most, most boys don’t read at all in the UK. But, if anybody could be asked to closely look at the way my writing is structured, it’s sort of written in an episodic way with a director’s eye: scene by scene, and I think you can even see the cuts and edits. But that wasn’t specifically deliberate with City of Tiny Lights, and I hope that as I progress as a writer, I won’t turn into some kind of one trick pony. Obviously, I want to grow and develop as a writer. In terms of the fiction… I actually did read a lot of crime fiction. When I was writing London Pigeon Wars I had a phase… I actually hadn’t read a lot of Chandler before, but someone gave me a collection. You have to know that I’m not usually polluted by other people’s writing, but Chandler’s style is so specific that I had to stop reading it, because I literally started writing four-word sentences, like: ‘The night was dark. So was the broad.’ And that was not appropriate for London Pigeon Wars at all. But I found an affinity to that. I found writing in that style very easy, and something about the rhythm of Chandler’s language fits me quite naturally. Actually, I think that might be because he was an Englishman, and he was raised in South London, and he was sort of a middle-class public schoolboy, and that fits. And I also think that the sort of staccato language that he uses fits very well with current London slang. So Tommy Akhtar is a creation with a very specific way of speaking, but I don’t actually find it implausible. In fact, I think it’s virtually impossible to write the way London speaks, and that intrigues me of course. VT: It sounded quite convincing and the language fit the topic, the characters and the setting quite snugly. And it conveys the humour quite nicely. Although for a non-Londoner it is probably hard to grasp every nuance. Or for a cricket-layman. Why did you choose cricket as the deliberate


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metaphor for life in general? Didn’t that drastically limit the number of persons who’d be able to grasp all the details? PN: I don’t think you necessarily have to get all the details. I really, as a rule, don’t think about the reader too much. And you just don’t think about the fact that it’s maybe going to be translated into, for example, German. Actually, it’s been nominated for a couple of big prizes in the States and I suspect they didn’t understand the cricket thing at all. I guess it gave the book a sort of cryptic otherness, that they rather liked. Perhaps they thought it was a lot cleverer than it actually is. But, for me, cricket has always been a sort of athletic construct of colonialism. Plus, the relationship that Tommy has with his father, is in some ways based on the relationship between me and my Dad. We have a very good relationship, but at times it’s been difficult and cricket has always been our common ground. It was my dad who said: ‘You can learn everything you need to know about life from the game of cricket.’ That’s a direct quote from my father. And I think he’s right. I have learned a lot of things about life – that haven’t come from Hip-Hop – from cricket. I don’t dare to claim originality in many respects, but being primarily influenced by Hip-Hop and cricket is probably quite unusual. VT: To return to the theme of genre. As far as I’m informed, there are not that many genre novels about multi-ethnic Britain 2000+ that fit the conference topics nicely. Most of the books we discussed at the conference were definitely not genre novels, at least. Do you think people do not like to play with the discourse? But I actually know a German cousin of Tommy Akhtar’s: a character named Kemal Kayankayar, a private Investigator in the novel Happy Birthday, Türke, by Dorris Dörrie. Kayankayar – this is also a hardboiled-novel, so he’s the same exaggerated character – is actually a second-generation Turk living in Frankfurt. There are quite a few similarities between him and Tommy. It’s a book about the search for identity. And although the context is completely different – it was pre-9/11 and there is no mention of terrorism anywhere in the book – it made me think about the hardboiled novel as a genre. And I thought this genre really lends itself to fiction about alienation. Would you agree? PN: I guess, because a PI, no matter where he’s from and what he’s done, is by definition alienated and broken; a necessarily divided figure. And although you have to take anything he says with a grain of salt, he is allowed to say anything – this character, this figure, this type. I think someone told me about this book you mentioned before. Let me start with something about genre in general: I think writing in genre does free you; that’s definitely true. With City of Tiny Lights there was a very specific intention which was to write something that was very much

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supposed to be entertaining, but then there’s other stuff going on, and you don’t even have to see what’s beneath the surface. I mean, personally I think it’s pretty unmissable, but you don’t have to engage with the problems. You don’t have to agree with anything, just enjoy the story if that’s what you want. But you can also dig deeper if you want to. And genre allows you to do that – to do something at one level, and something else on another. Not so much Chandler, but Ellroy is a very interesting example of that. And also, I suppose when I was a kid I really did read an awful lot of crap, and it’s a struggle to remember now. Have you ever read Dick Francis? Awful stuff. But he sets everything in a horse-racing context and that allows him to tell all kinds of other stories. And I wouldn’t say that I’ve been hugely influenced by Dick Francis, but nonetheless in books like these there is a huge element of: ‘Let me tell this story which is in genre and works within the rules of the genre, and simultaneously allows me to talk about some other interesting stuff on the side.’ So the rules for a hardboiled novel, which are probably among the strictest in genre, paradoxically give you freedom. Absolutely. And I have to say that I am very intrigued by that aspect of literature in general. I mean that’s true of Shakespeare and Greek tragedy. And music. Absolutely. VT: I would like to talk about the strong humorous element in City of Tiny Lights. I suspect some people would say that it’s not appropriate to be funny about issues like terrorism. Would you – well obviously you wouldn’t agree. Why is that? Do you think humour is an acceptable and good strategy to deal with serious problems like these? PN: Oh shit. I really don’t think I have an opinion about that. I’m just naturally hilarious. You know, I just wanted it to be an entertaining book. I don’t think I was consciously employing it for other reasons at first. But certainly humour undercuts things, and it certainly allowed Tommy to pass these huge, sweeping judgements about the people he comes across, because he does so in a funny way. And anyways most of the time that humour is his only defence. For example in the opening, where he meets Melody the prostitute. And you know their exchange is sexist and racist, all sorts of things. It’s vicious but I think it’s fun. And I think that definitely is an element in my writing. I know I said that with Musungu Jim and Twelve Bar Blues I didn’t have a fixed literary intention, but I do think that there is an element of the provocateur in me. I mean I like poking fun at things and being provocative. But I have been criticised for it, not the humour as such, but for the theme, for the way I address the subject matter, certainly. VT: So one’s not allowed to joke about everything.


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PN: Well, I think you’re allowed to joke about anything. But you have to be funny. Have you seen Borat – Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Great Nation of Kasakhstan? Well, there were some reviews in Britain by a big film critic in the UK, and the one bit that he thought was interesting was the running of the Jew. He said it was extremely offensive but actually kind of brilliant in its conception. And then the rest, poking fun at gullible Americans, was like shooting fish in a barrel. I know what he means. But my problem with Borat was not the offensiveness. My problem with it, frankly, was that the movie didn’t make me laugh. If you’re going to be funny you have to be funny. I think it’s okay to laugh at most things, but you have to be funny. VT: So for you quality is the defining criteria? You are allowed to do anything, but you have to do it well? Maybe Borat was too much produced for mass consumption, then? PN: I’m not sure about that. Thing is, he is a direct contemporary of mine from Cambridge and I vaguely know that … gang, the guy he writes with. And I think there is something very uncomfortably white middle class, be he Jewish or not, something white middle class about the way he pokes fun at people that I’m not quite comfortable with. And I just don’t think it’s that clever. It’s rather sort of smug. VT: Let’s go to another aspect of City of Tiny Lights, its connection to reality, the times we live in. What reactions did you receive about the ‘eerie prophecy’ – as it’s been called –, at the end of City of Tiny Lights, about the bombings? I mean, it was published before 7/7, right? But did that seep into the public consciousness? PN: Yes, two days before. I got a lot of individual comments from people who read it. I’ve got a website, where people can write to me, and a lot of people wrote to me saying: ‘Fuck! That’s quite weird.’ And someone wrote to me about three weeks after publication, a couple of weeks after the bombing, and said that he was reading City of Tiny Lights on the tube and that he felt really quite uneasy. At the time, before the bombings, there had been one very critical review that said it seemed very unlikely. And I thought: ‘Well, okay, let’s hope so.’ And a few days later that was proved to be wrong. I don’t know if it was because of the bombings, or because of some trouble I had with publishers or that sort of thing, but City of Tiny Lights really hasn’t done any business in the UK, in the way Twelve Bar Blues, for example, did. And it’s actually done much better in the States. I don’t know why, but I think that there is an element of being, and I don’t want to give the impression that I have

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a too inflated view of my own importance, which I genuinely don’t, but there’s a little bit of the problem of being a prophet in your own town. VT: Does it strike you as strange that this story, which is – and I would assume intentionally and willingly so – utterly constructed and exaggerated, with elements of conspiracy theory thrown in and the joyous heaping of one stereotype and cliché upon another, that such a story actually reflects reality quite as – or maybe even more – accurately than literary fiction which is more realistic, or let’s say mimetic? PN: I don’t know if it’s strange, but I think it is true. I am not particularly afraid of clichés, I think they come about with a certain element of truth, and it often isn’t the cliché as such that is trivial. We’ve been talking a lot, and very critically about multicultural Britain ultimately being an illusion. But actually I think one should not forget that Britain is a multicultural society and it works, more or less. It works because it exists, and it carries on, and we don’t get trouble that often. I mean, there are riots but they’re not that frequent, and I don’t mean to say that there aren’t problems, of course there are problems. That said, all that stereotyping comes from the profound belief that British society is deeply, intrinsically racist. And the cliché’s value is that it allows you to just confront that, and go: ‘Well, you know, let’s address this in an open way.’ And then, the other clichés are sort of political clichés. You know, without always trying to refer to criticism, one thing that was said was the point in the book where Farzad, Tommy’s father, says: ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ And one critic picked up on that and sort of sneered and said: ‘What do you think this is, A-level politics?’ And I actually thought: ‘Well, fuck you.’ In the climate of fear that is being created by our government it is actually fundamentally important that we acknowledge this and that we understand these things, you know, and as Rajeev [Balasubramanyam] was saying yesterday, the most vital and essential part of this climate of fear that is being created by the Blair government is that evil is totally evil. But that means the creation of this idea of a terrorist being someone’s freedom fighter, which seems like a truism out of elementary school politics, is actually totally lost and has to be reengaged with. And again, the very important idea of the book is that what transpires as a series of terrorist attacks is carried out by opportunists and kids and by people who have been led the wrong way. Just human beings. And that doesn’t mean that I condone or excuse their actions, but I do try to highlight this very black and white, racist way of thinking that is becoming all pervasive in my society and frightens the living daylights out of me. VT: So you are trying to point out the risk this society is running when it decides to take refuge in dualism again, for example good vs. evil?


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PN: Absolutely. Dualism, fear of the nuance. Because everything in a contemporary multi-ethnic society is necessarily so nuanced and fragmented that people are taking refuge in black and white again. And this is dangerous of course. And the liberal debate doesn’t help. It’s all about: ‘Oh we all know that Nelson Mandela was called a terrorist when in fact he was a freedom fighter, you don’t have to point that out.’ But sorry, fuck off. Because once you are neglecting the implications of this, you are actually totally disengaging yourself from the capacity to fight, to actually engage in this debate. There is a tendency to simply say: ‘No, no, no, we can’t have this in our country.’ And you know, perhaps unfortunately, everyone has been doing that 9/11 novel or film, and City of Tiny Lights is probably mine. But everybody, or at least a lot of the artists I know have been doing it because you cannot afford not to be political any more. This is the world in which we live now. And politicians aren’t engaging honestly with the issues, so someone has to. So I try to. And what I do, I write books. What else am I supposed to do? VT: Patrick, thank you very much for this conversation.

Index

14-5, 238, 274, 329, 336, 355, 411 9/11 10-1, 13-7, 19, 40, 50, 61, 72, 79-95, 155, 187, 189, 227, 238, 302, 317, 355, 390-1, 409, 413 Abu Ghraib 322 academic, -s 14, 34, 60, 81, 1134, 119-20, 232, 236, 263, 394, 401, 405-6 Aduaka, Newton 393 aesthetics 54, 65-6, 71, 91, 26380, 284, 287-8, 291, 312, 3201, 403 Africa, -an 10, 93, 100, 103, 1156, 188-9, 191, 202, 229, 232, 235, 237, 240, 265, 267-8, 276, 278, 324, 400 Afro-Caribbean, -s 38, 41, 116, 383-4, 386-9 Ahmad, Rukhsana 149 Ahmed, Rehana 139-52 Akin, Fatih 93 Akofa, Henriette 295 Al-Ani, Jananne 236, 238 alienation 69, 75, 81, 113-4, 159, 166, 276, 278, 310, 406-7, 409 Ali G 40 Ali, Monica 341, 347, 350, 383, 385-6, 389-92 allegory 171, 301, 304, 312 alterity 18, 356, 358-9, 364-5, 367, 369, 378, 381 alternative voices 70 Amyandtanveer 201-2 7/7

aniconism 191-2 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 41, 84, 302 apocalyptic 16, 92, 315-7, 323 appropriation 41, 195, 369, 378, 380 Arau, Alfonso 59 arbitrary closures 135 art, -ist 147, 156, 175, 181, 1904, 196, 202-3, 227-44, 265, 268-9, 272, 276, 284, 286-9, 315, 330-2, 339, 380 Asian 14-5, 37-40, 45-63, 65-83, 89-90, 93, 139, 144, 149, 151, 153-169, 171-83, 189, 202, 227-44, 296, 315, 330-1, 346, 349, 352, 385, 387, 389, 3924, 402-3 Asante, Amma 80 Aslam, Nadeen 153-69, 171-83, 198-9 assimilation 37-9, 46, 86, 141, 162 asylum seekers 141, 189, 202, 289-90, 294-5, 301-14 Atlantic Ocean, also: Black Atlantic 291-2 Attwood, David 46 Austen, Jane 45-53, 55-6, 58 authentic, -ity 19, 60, 89, 91, 116-7, 119-21, 124, 156-7, 161, 275, 286-8, 291, 295-6, 311, 329-30, 332-3, 341, 3478, 351, 364, 383, 390, 392-4, 406-7

416 autoethnography 283 autonomy 73, 89, 358, 365 Bah, Alpha 285, 290-6 Balasubramanyam, Rajeev 14-5, 33-42, 46, 57, 61, 76, 316, 399-404, 412 Bangladesh, -i 82, 85, 100, 383, 385, 389-94 Barjatya, Sooraj 51 Baron Cohen, Sacha 411 Baser, Tevfik 93 Baum, Frank 339 BBC 20, 283-5, 287, 293-4, 296, 393 Beaufoy, Simon 79-95 belonging 13, 109-10, 115-6, 120, 132, 172, 174, 178, 195, 197, 200, 233, 238, 296, 345, 350, 379 Bhimjih, Zarinah 241 Bird, Antonia 80 Biswas, Neil 16, 45, 55, 58, 61 Biswas, Sutapa 15, 229-30, 238-9 black, -ness 10-1, 16, 33-7, 3942, 46, 60, 93, 99, 101-2, 1057, 111-20, 124-9, 132, 135, 139, 142, 147-8, 151, 153, 227-43, 267, 275, 278, 31525, 330, 384-9, 392-4 Black Art Movement 229 Black Atlantic 276 Blair, Tony 34, 45-6, 61, 77, 317, 383, 412 Blake, William 320 bling 18, 329, 331, 336 body 113, 115, 131, 140, 227-44, 331, 334 Bohm, Hark 93 Bok, Francis 295 Bollywood, -style 46-7, 50-6, 6671, 76, 241, 279

Index

bomb, -ing, -ers 25-32, 50, 161, 273, 274, 275, 288, 334, 337, 355, 405-12 Boyce, Sonia 227, 229, 232-5, 242 Boyle, Danny 315-25 Bradbury, Ray 307 brand, -ing 34, 42, 46, 48, 317 Brick Lane 26, 28, 369-71, 373, 394 British-Asian 352, 402-3 British institutions 283, 285, 287 Britishness 10, 74, 296, 317, 329, 337, 357, 361, 363 brother- or sisterhood 82, 92, 111, 114-20, 386 browning up 37 burden of representation 13, 15, 45, 60-1, 92, 312, 315, 317, 324, 383 Burgess, Anthony 333 Burman, Chila Kumari 19, 227, 229, 231, 234, 237, 241-2 call and response 270, 277 Calypso 264 Cambridge 400 Camus, Albert 345 capitalism, -ist 34, 69, 278 caricature, -ed 36-8, 54, 165 Carroll, Lewis 339 Caspa 264, 267-9, 272 caste 33-42, 54, 337 Catholicism 73 Cattaneo, Peter 80 censorship 42, 407 Chadha, Gurinder 14, 16, 36-9, 45-7, 50, 52, 54-8, 60-1, 65-6, 74-6, 79 Chambers, Eddie 229 Chandler, Raymond 355, 367, 408, 410

Index

Charles II 188, 369 Chatterjee, Debjana 149 Chaucer, Geoffrey 188 Chopra, Aditya 51 Christian, -ity 91, 179, 232, 272, 322 cinema, -tic, s. also film 16, 40, 45-7, 50-1, 60, 65-7, 69, 71, 76, 79-80, 93, 129, 284, 287, 293-4, 315-6, 320, 392-4, 408 class 11-2, 20, 28-9, 35, 37, 40, 47-9, 51-4, 75, 85, 103-4, 106, 109, 112, 114, 116-20, 142, 177, 196, 228, 264, 267, 285, 290, 341-2, 344-7, 349-50, 352, 383-7, 389, 390, 399400, 408, 411 cliché, éd 18, 50, 54, 58, 87, 113, 115, 134, 147, 269, 322-3, 341-2, 380, 393, 412 Clinton, George 276 colonial, -ism 155, 188, 227-8, 232-3, 236, 238, 278, 283, 330-1, 344-5, 360, 409 colonisers, -ised 25, 50, 344, 380 comedy, -ies 36-7, 46, 48, 54, 578, 66, 75, 79, 303, 342 community, -ies 17-8, 60-1, 67-8, 72, 74, 79-90, 92-4, 110-11, 115-21, 148-9, 153-69, 17181, 187, 189, 196-7, 199-202, 204, 302, 315, 317, 319, 324, 335, 341, 344-5, 349-51, 356, 358, 362, 365, 367, 374, 383, 386, 389-90, 394, 400 consumer, -ism 68-9, 193, 343 Cool Britannia 34, 42, 46, 61, 346 Cooper, Clement 200-1 cosmopolitan 55, 72, 356-7, 364 council estate 343, 383-95

417 cricket 25-32, 36, 38, 57, 356-57, 361-2, 401, 409 crime 11, 127-9, 179, 308, 356, 358, 383, 385-9, 392-3, 408 Cromwell, Richard 188 crypt, -ic 19, 369-81 Cuarón, Alfonso 315-25 cultural and arts industries 42 cultural diversity 42, 46, 200, 296, 317, 374 cultural heritage 100, 114, 131, 143, 370 dance, -hall 263-80 Dardenne, Jean-Pierre 303 Dardienne, Luc 303 Dayma, Sanjay 66 Dehlavi, Jamil 80 dehumanisation 41 demonise, -isation 39-41, 81, 187 Dhaliwal, Nirpal Singh 18, 34154 Dhanda, Suki 194-6, 200, 202 Dhondy, Farrukh 149 diaspora 47, 50-2, 56, 58, 65-78, 171-83, 227, 276 Dibb, Saul 393 difference 17, 36-8, 54-5, 76, 94, 106, 109-11, 114, 121, 132, 141, 143, 150, 156, 162, 173, 196, 204, 227, 234, 238, 269, 304, 311, 313, 341-2, 344, 346-7, 352-3, 358, 361, 363, 367, 406 digital life narratives 284, 293, 295-6 digital storytelling 283-5, 292 Din, Sokphal 285, 290, 292-6 discourse, -s 18, 49, 56, 66, 71, 79, 85, 121, 153, 188, 190-1, 270, 279, 283, 285, 301-3,

418 311-2, 341, 356, 358-9, 362-6, 393, 401, 406, 409 discrimination, -ory 85, 123, 127, 135, 228, 296, 324, 355, 35960 dislocation, -ed 148, 156, 162, 297, 306-7, 310-11, 387 divorce, -ed 53, 86-8, 159, 165 DJ 73, 263-80 docudrama 16, 283-99 documentary 89, 193, 197, 200, 237, 283-4, 287-91, 294, 297, 301, 303-4, 312-3, 321 Dörrie, Dorris 409 domestic 56-7, 155, 163, 166, 227, 230, 232, 234, 236, 390 Doyle, Arthur Conan 355 drug, -s 83, 85, 268, 330, 383, 385-9, 392-3 dub, -step 19, 56, 263-80 dystopia, -ian 11, 15-6, 18, 172, 317 East End 200, 369-70 education, -al 35, 76, 112-4, 177, 337, 349, 380, 389 Elizabeth I 188 Ellroy, James 410 emancipation 60, 384, 391 Emecheta, Buchi 384 Eminem 142-3 Emmerich, Roland 323 Empire 50, 99, 199, 229, 330, 361 Empire Windrush 129-31 Englishness 16-7, 99-100, 102-5, 107, 150, 320-1, 364 essentialism 132, 341-54, 362, 365 ethnic autobiographies, life writing 283, 286, 290

Index

ethnicity 16, 49, 66, 74, 106, 123, 127, 132, 139, 147-51, 228, 285, 296, 316, 319, 331, 3478, 352, 355, 357, 400 ethnography, -ic, -er 16, 79, 8894, 289, 345-6 European 47, 75, 80, 90, 177, 188, 190, 204, 229, 232, 2356, 240, 278, 294, 321, 324 Evaristo, Bernadine 240, 342 evil 53, 230, 355, 412-3 exile 58, 70, 104, 157, 162-3, 301, 357, 360 exotic, -ism, -ist 45, 50, 53-5, 59, 67-8, 71, 75, 133, 156, 285-6, 341 family, -ies 17, 47-9, 51-8, 68, 71-4, 76, 79, 82-5, 87-8, 100, 104, 109-22, 126, 133, 135, 139-41, 147-8, 150, 154, 156, 159-60, 176-8, 181-2, 188, 197-8, 233, 236-8, 290-1, 293, 295, 320, 334-6, 346, 348-9 fanatic, -al, -ism 40, 335, 363 Faucon, Philippe 93 female, feminine, -ininity 17, 19, 35, 38, 45, 47-9, 51-2, 55, 59, 75, 83, 85, 92-3, 114-5, 123, 127, 131, 134, 149, 227-44, 274, 277-8, 309, 311, 313, 315, 317, 320, 323-4, 348-50, 389-92 feminism, -ist 19, 45, 47-9, 56, 59, 75, 227, 230, 234-6, 238, 241, 275, 323 film, s. also cinema 14-7, 20, 34, 36-40, 45-63, 65-78, 79-95, 301-25, 332, 337-9, 367, 391, 393-4, 408 flaneur 343-8 Francis, Dick 410

Index

Frears, Stephen 46, 93, 303 fundamentalism 153-69, 362-3, 391 gang, gang culture 118, 139-52, 329-40, 386, 392, gangsta, -er 112, 116, 143, 2679, 272, 334, 386, 388, 392-3 Gavin, Jamila 139-40, 144-5, 148 Gee, Maggie 317 gender 16, 18, 35, 45-63, 75, 858, 106, 109, 114, 119, 123, 127, 177, 200, 227-44, 285, 311, 323, 331, 339, 341-2, 344, 348-50 genre 14, 66, 75, 80, 151, 187, 191-4, 263-4, 266, 268, 295, 297, 301, 303, 312, 323, 343, 348, 356, 364, 367, 384-6, 392, 407-10 ghetto 85, 157, 166, 264, 330, 335, 347, 380, 384-5, 388 Gibran, Khalil 171-2 Gilliam, Terry 307-8 Glenaan, Kenneth 14, 16, 61, 712, 79-95, 391 global, -isation 15, 18, 34, 45, 47, 50-1, 53-5, 57-60, 68, 79, 82-5, 109-11, 116, 119, 122, 153, 155-7, 166, 174, 187206, 234, 269, 279, 285-6, 297, 302, 311-3, 321, 323, 336, 350-1, 353, 361 Golding, William 333 Goodness Gracious Me 37 government 12-3, 31, 81, 203, 301, 303, 308, 317-8, 321, 359-60, 383, 387, 412 Gregory, Joy 19, 227, 229, 234-6, 238, 242 Guantanamo 322 Gunesekera, Romesh 149

419 hard-boiled 355-6, 367 Headley, Victor 384-5, 393 hegemony 46, 70, 107 Henriques, Julian 393 hijab 85-8, 91, 195, 200 Himid, Lubaina 19, 227, 229, 232, 237, 239-41 Hindi, -u 51, 67, 69, 72, 154, 157, 159-64, 171, 174, 176, 230, 238, 331 hiphop, -pish 268-9, 279, 385, 388, 392-3, 409 history, -ical, -icity 9, 13, 19-20, 36, 41, 48, 50, 59, 71, 81-2, 93-4, 116, 122, 124, 131, 156, 164, 181-2, 191-2, 197-8, 233, 236-40, 242, 263-5, 267, 275, 278, 288, 310-1, 313, 351, 359, 364, 373, 377, 400 Hitchcock, Alfred 307 Home Office 303 homogeneity 110, 121, 294, 363 homophobia, -bic 334 homosexual, -ity 40, 123, 334, 344, 350 honour killings 17, 153-4, 15861, 163, 165-6 Huda, Menhaj 393 Hughes, Langston 265 human rights 84, 91, 283, 301 humour 79, 84, 144, 346, 409-10 Hussein, Aamer 149 hybridity 110, 130, 132-3, 148, 158, 166, 181, 341-2, 374 identity, -ies 17-9, 33, 49-50, 56, 66-7, 70, 72-5, 79, 83, 85-8, 91, 102, 109-11, 116-7, 11925, 131-5, 139, 141, 147-8, 154, 156-7, 171, 173, 177-82, 187-280, 283, 286, 296, 315, 329-40, 342-5, 347, 349, 351,

420 355, 358-66, 369-82, 391, 407, 409 ideology, -ical 10, 16-7, 19, 34, 42, 46-9, 51, 54, 61, 67-8, 73, 76-7, 103, 110, 140, 175, 177, 188-9, 343-5, 348, 352, 356, 359-60, 363-4, 367 image, -s 53-4, 66, 70, 84, 103-4, 109, 111-2, 115-7, 120, 129, 133, 146, 151, 166, 172, 176, 187-206, 230-4, 236-7, 23941, 243, 269, 271, 284-6, 2926, 315, 317-8, 320, 322, 324, 331-3, 339, 343, 348, 350, 355, 361, 364, 367, 375, 379, 392 immigrant, -s, -ation 11, 13, 55, 68-9, 72-4, 87, 92, 104, 12932, 141, 143, 147, 153-69, 171-6, 181-2, 189, 198-9, 203, 237, 239, 301-14, 321, 330, 335, 341-2, 346-8, 351, 355, 357-60, 363, 365, 369-71, 374-5, 381, 387, 389-91 Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 203, 302, imperialism 115, 400 India, -nness, -n 37-9, 45-63, 6578, 132, 141-2, 149-50, 153-4, 161, 174, 176, 197-8, 230-1, 237, 239, 241, 243, 330-1, 335, 348, 350-1, 355-7, 364, 387-9, 399-400, 402, 405-6 independent, -ce 9, 56, 73, 88, 106, 189, 195, 345, 364, 389 interethnic 73, 79, 387 internationalisation 109-11, 122 inter-racial 37, 55 Iraq 34, 42, 81, 86, 104, 236 Islam,-ic, s. also Muslim 10, 178, 34-5, 40, 73, 81, 85-7, 92,

Index

153-69, 171-2, 176, 178-80, 182, 187-9, 191-2, 195-6, 201, 270, 272, 275, 337 Islamism, -ist 79, 85, 92, 160-1, 164, 166 Islamophobia 20, 72, 79, 81, 91, 187, 272 Ismail, Mohammed 303 Jah Shaka 266 Jamaica, -n 100, 130, 135, 26370, 272-4, 279, 336, 387-8, 400 Jamal, Ahmed 93 James, P.D. 322 Jamil, Rehan 196-7, 199-200, 202 Jewish, -ness 14, 100, 369-82, 411 Johar, Karan 16, 51, 65-6, 75 Johnson, Claudette 229 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, LKJ 265, 270, 273 Kay, Jackie 17, 123-37 Ketchum, John 303 Khan-Din, Ayub 46 kinship 56, 87, 350 Kode 9 & The Spaceape 264, 272-3, 275-9 Kureishi, Hanif 46, 329, 336-7, 345, 347, 394 Lake District 233, 319-20 Lam, Anthony 202 language 33, 103, 113, 125-9, 133-5, 149, 271, 293, 332-3, 335, 359, 362-4, 366, 372, 387, 389, 402, 408-9 Lawrence, Stephen 35, 41 Lee, Ang 59 liberalism 42, 53, 352, 392 Lichtenstein, Rachel 15, 369-82

Index

lifestyle 55, 79, 83, 88, 92-93, 141-2, 149, 180, 195, 199, 331, 335, 347, 356, 390 Loach, Ken 16, 61, 65-6, 71-6, 79-80, 89, 316 Locke, Hew 242 London 12, 14, 18, 25, 31-2, 68, 70, 100, 149, 196-7, 199-200, 202, 263, 269, 279, 318, 3201, 342, 345, 351, 355-95, 408 MacInnes, Colinn 333 Madonna 201, 309, 311, 321, 323 mainstream, -ing 14-6, 20, 36, 39-40, 45-7, 50, 54-5, 60-1, 65-6, 75, 79, 88, 90-1, 107, 125, 135, 228, 276, 283, 2856, 296, 309, 312-3, 316, 331, 357-8, 387-9, 392 Malkani, Gautam 329-41, 343 Mandela, Nelson 413 map, -ping 94, 153-69, 172-4, 178, 287, 289-90, 294-5, 351, 388, 390 margin, -alisation 20, 60, 85, 105, 107, 127, 154, 172, 228, 263, 279, 303, 315, 324, 3412, 356, 362, 381, 384, 393 market, -s, -ing, -ability 34-5, 457, 50, 54-7, 60, 67-8, 71, 76, 80, 93, 107, 118, 151, 234, 241, 269, 283, 285-6, 324, 348, 384, 392-3, 402 Marley, Bob 278 marriage, -ship 17, 40, 47-8, 513, 57-8, 73, 75, 83, 86-7, 141, 143, 153-4, 158-61, 163, 1656, 178-9, 358, 389 masculine, -ity 103, 145, 319, 331, 348-50 masquerade, -s 40, 42, 339 McEwan, Ian 14, 17, 99-108

421 media, -tise, -tising 9, 18-9, 34, 36, 42, 47, 49, 55, 65, 76, 81, 84, 133, 139, 142, 187, 190, 192, 234, 242, 263, 268, 272, 276, 283-5, 289-90, 294-6, 301-3, 309, 312, 315-6, 318, 341-2, 346, 357-60, 362, 383, 392, 394 melancholia 47, 50 Mencherini, Stefano 303 metaphor, -ical 53, 74, 111, 117, 120-1, 134, 142, 166, 271-2, 289, 292, 363-4, 366, 371-2, 376, 409 metonymy 134, 391 migrant, -s, -tion 10, 15-6, 79, 82-3, 87, 93, 153-69, 176-7, 189, 197-8, 202-3, 287-8, 293, 301-14, 317, 321-4, 350, 358, 384, 390, 399 mimicry 365 minority, -ies 13-5, 25, 38, 45, 60, 65-6, 71, 76, 81-2, 85, 88, 90, 93-4, 121, 125, 142, 165, 178-80, 189, 202, 230, 296, 315-6, 324, 330, 384, 394 minstrel, -sy 40-1 miscegenation 142 misogyny, -ist 18, 176, 180, 182, 334, 392 misrepresentation 190, 316, 3934 mockumentary 16, 283-99 mugging 387 multiculturalism, -ist 11, 14, 168, 33-42, 46-7, 76-7, 79, 84, 86, 99-108, 110, 155, 283, 297, 319, 329, 336, 341, 3513, 357, 401, 405, 412 murder detection story 356

422 Museum of Immigration and Diversity 18, 369-82 music, -al 15, 19, 54, 74, 76, 1434, 146, 148, 176, 201-2, 26380, 320, 330, 349, 385, 387, 389, 392-3, 410 musician, -s 15, 176, 202, 346 Muslim, -s, s. also Islam 10, 35, 39-40, 72-74, 79-95, 153-69, 172, 174, 176, 178-80, 187206, 236, 238, 322, 336-7, 357-8, 360, 379, 383, 389-92 Mutabaruka 15, 273, 275 Nair, Preethi 140 National Front 92, 399 narrator 12, 18, 71, 103, 118-9, 121, 125-6, 129, 132, 149-50, 171-2, 179-80, 182, 273, 288, 290-1, 293-4, 296, 329-30, 332-3, 335-7, 342-5, 347-8, 351, 356, 364, 367, 402 nation, -al, –ality, –state, -alism 13, 15, 33, 49, 53-4, 70, 76-7, 84, 87, 102, 105, 109-11, 130, 154, 156-8, 161, 171-2, 177, 188-90, 201, 204, 233, 283, 285-6, 289, 302, 339, 353, 356-8, 360-1, 387 Nazaer, Mende 295 Nazi concentration camps 322 Neate, Patrick 14, 25-32, 356-68, 405-13 neo-colonialism 53 New Labour 42, 46, 61, 189, 3012, 352, 383, 392 Newland, Courttia 384, 386-9 normality 319 North of England 72, 82, 100 nostalgia 45-63, 163, 335, 351, 376 Occidentalism 181

Index

O’Donnell, Damien 39-40, 46, 79 origin, -s, al 19, 26, 41, 55, 80, 82-3, 100-1, 115, 124, 134, 153, 162, 178, 189, 199, 230, 232, 237, 265-6, 269, 272-3, 329, 335, 350, 364, 376, 381 Orwell, George 307 other, -ness 18, 54, 71, 76, 99106, 148, 150, 156, 161-4, 174, 188-9, 228, 276, 324, 333, 342, 344, 358-60, 363-4, 367, 369, 372-3, 377, 380-1, 406, 409 Ové, Horace 93 Ovid 127 Oxford 400 painting 227-44 Paki, -stan, -stani 17-8, 25, 3840, 71-3, 79-83, 85-6, 88, 90, 140-1, 143, 153-69, 171-6, 178-82, 198, 200, 287-8, 295, 301, 304-7, 312, 329-31, 334, 355, 357, 361, 364-5, 379, 389, 399 palimpsest 172, 266, 343, 370 Panopticon 308-9 patriarchal 48, 52, 55-7, 75, 86, 103, 143, 149, 179-80, 350 patriotism 49, 361 Parmar, Bharti 237-8, 242-3 Parmar, Prathiba 16, 45, 55, 58-9, 67, 79 peer pressure 329-40 Perera, Shyama 149 performativity 329-40 Perrier, Eileen 235, 237, 242 Perry, Lee 273 Phillips, Caryl 17, 99-108 photograph, -y, -ic 19, 181, 187206, 227-44, 288, 291, 293, 295, 319, 375, 380, 390

Index

Piper, Keith 229 Piyasena, Sam 201 political correctness, politically correct 143, 324, 346, 352-3, politics 15, 20, 36, 45-6, 50, 59, 76-7, 124, 143, 149, 190, 232, 279, 283, 285, 287, 293-4, 296-7, 311, 313, 315-6, 318, 346, 351-3, 356, 361, 364, 366, 387, 392, 401, 403, 4067, 412 Pollard, Ingrid 15, 19, 227, 233, 238-9, 242 postcolonial 25, 47, 50, 55, 94, 109, 130, 231, 286, 297, 342, 351, 356, 364, 367, 379 postmodern 17, 69, 109-11, 114, 121-2, 172, 187, 234, 329, 339, 341, 343-4, 347-8, 364 Powell, Enoch 40 Prasad, Udayan 46, 79 public space 70, 90, 195, 202, 373-4 race 10-1, 14, 18, 37, 41, 79, 93, 99, 109, 112, 114, 116, 124, 132, 161-2, 228-9, 235, 285, 315, 317, 320, 331, 341-2, 344-5, 348, 350, 352, 361, 365, 387, 391, 400 racism, -ist 9, 12, 14, 16-8, 20, 25-32, 34, 37-8, 40, 42, 49-50, 57, 70, 72-3, 79-81, 84, 86, 91, 93, 130, 161-4, 171-83, 227, 267, 296, 330, 339, 344, 348, 353, 358, 361, 390-1, 399-401, 410, 412 Radford, Michael 307 Rai, Bali 149 rap, -per 143, 201, 330, 333, 336, 349, 388, 392

423 Rasta, -farian 116, 236, 264, 266-7, 269-70, 275, 358 Razzaque, Russell 79 reader response 11, 295 refugee, -s 16, 100-1, 103-4, 106, 189, 283-99, 301, 304-7, 3101, 321-4 reggae 263-5, 267-8, 277-9 religion 14, 35, 38, 74, 81, 85, 88, 154-6, 158-62, 164-6, 177, 179, 182, 188, 192, 196, 201, 232, 275-6, 357, 389 representation 14, 16-7, 19, 41, 65-6, 71-7, 80, 88-94, 99-108, 111, 114, 122, 135, 188, 190, 192, 203-4, 228, 236, 283, 286-7, 289, 294-5, 297, 301, 304, 308-9, 311, 313, 315-25, 332, 342, 345, 359, 361, 383, 386, 393-4 Riley, John 303 riots 41-2, 80-1, 189, 229, 390, 412 Rodney, Donald 229 Rosso, Franco 93 Rudeboy 264, 269, 330-1, 334, 336 Rushdie, Salman 81, 106, 153, 227, 345 Salgado, Sebastio 288 Salinger, J.D. 333 Salisbury 320 sameness 109-122, 141 satire 36, 241, 341-54, 403 Savage, Dominic 67, 71, 79 science fiction 16, 276, 279, 301, 304, 308, 311, 317 Scott, Ridley 307 sea, s. also water 195, 233, 292

424 second generation 14, 69, 73, 79, 181, 189, 330, 341-2, 348, 351, 375, 409 Sellers, Peter 37 Selvon, Sam 333, 367 Semplay, Jagtar 199 sexism, -ist 274, 348-9, 410 sexuality 55, 69, 115, 232, 349 Shackleton, Sam 264, 269, 271-2 Shakespeare, William 55, 127, 410 Shabazz, Menelik 93 Sharia 87, 157-8, 163-4, 178 Shelley, Mary 317 Shiel, M.P. 317 Shonibare, Yinka 242 Sikh, -s 38, 154, 157, 161-2, 165, 172, 176, 179, 330-1, 335, 342 Sinclair, Iain 19, 343, 369-82 skinhead, -s 161, 399 Skream 277-9 slavery 124, 240, 278, 330 slum 301, 310, 346, 383, 385, 392 Smith, Karline 384 Smith, Mikey 265 Smith, Tim 197 Smith, Zadie 15, 17, 20, 99-122, 319, 341-2, 345, 347, 394 social control 35, 42, 46, 83, 356 social realism 53, 59-61, 71, 7980, 88 sound system culture 263-80, 330 stereotype, -ical, -ing 36, 41, 48, 54, 56, 58, 69, 74, 76, 81, 113, 115, 139-40, 148, 157, 171, 176, 180, 187-8, 195, 233-6, 241, 286, 294, 309, 311, 313, 315-6, 318, 341-2, 346, 34950, 355, 357, 359, 365, 367, 387-8, 390-2, 394, 412

Index

Stewart, George R. 317 street culture 40, 116, 388-9 street lit 385 subaltern 303-4, 312-3 subjectivity 130, 195, 203, 345, 403 Sulter, Maud 241 Sun Ra 276 Surrey 321 Swift, Graham 14, 17, 99-108 Syal, Meera 347 symbol, –ic, -ism, -ise 33, 46, 55, 65, 70-1, 75, 79, 103-5, 115-7, 130, 134-5, 145-6, 150, 157, 171, 177, 197, 200, 227, 22930, 232, 236, 242, 312, 318, 322, 341, 356, 376, 381, 392 talaq 85-88 teen, -ager 17, 35, 52, 58, 72, 101, 118, 139-52, 194, 330, 333-5, 384-8, 393 television 19-20, 41-2, 80, 83, 88, 99, 283-4, 294, 315-6, 319, 338, 343, 390, 392-4 terror, -ism, -ist 12, 14, 18, 31, 41, 72, 79-95, 104, 161, 23841, 269, 272, 274, 279, 290, 321, 339, 352, 355-68, 405, 409-10, 412-3 Thatcher, Margaret 92, 336, 384, 387, 392 The Specials 278 third space 74 Thompson, Stephen 384 tourism, -ist, -isty 156, 236, 3447, 351, 365, 391 tradition, -al, -alism 18-9, 41, 48, 51, 53, 55, 60, 65, 69-71, 756, 79-80, 86, 88, 92-3, 99, 103, 107, 111-2, 140-1, 143, 146-8, 153, 157-60, 166, 172,

Index

174-6, 178, 182, 190, 194-5, 200, 230, 234, 241-3, 263, 265, 267-8, 270, 272-3, 275, 277-9, 283, 288, 310, 315, 317, 321, 323, 338, 341, 3456, 348-9, 351, 355, 366, 367, 383, 385, 389, 392 transcultural, -ity 16, 18, 45, 47, 54, 58-9, 109-10, 153-69, 234, 293, 296, 342, 353 transdifference 109-10 transgression 45, 47-8, 50-9, 144, 157, 361 travel 11, 35, 104, 130, 149, 153, 156-7, 199, 236, 289, 292, 295, 297, 301, 304, 306-9, 311, 317, 344, 348, 350-1, 376-7 Truffaut, Francois 307 unemployment 82, 85, 199, 387 unity 109, 116, 176, 267, 331, 364 universal values 73 user, -s 34, 284, 295, 363, 366 utopia, -ian 15, 17-8, 75, 163, 173, 267, 317, 324, 358 violence 11, 15, 25-32, 56, 74, 80, 94, 127, 132, 144-5, 14750, 161, 163, 175, 177-80, 182, 267, 269, 271, 318-9, 323, 333, 356, 363, 383, 3858, 392-3 visibility 41, 106-7, 309 visuality 129, 134 voice, -s 19, 35, 39-42, 54, 70-1, 92, 100-1, 103, 107, 121, 131, 135, 151, 178-9, 201, 240, 270-3, 276-7, 286, 291-2, 303, 341-2, 347-8, 402, 407 Walker, Maxine 234

425 Walker, Tony 198 war on terror 84, 352 Warrior Queen 273-5 Warsaw Ghetto 322 water, s. also sea 292 wedding, -s, -day 54, 57-8, 74, 76 Welsh, Irvine 385 Wheatle, Alex 384 white, -ness 10, 14, 16-7, 20, 345, 37-41, 46, 52, 55, 57-8, 61, 68, 70, 72-6, 79-80, 83, 85-6, 88, 91-3, 99-101, 103, 105-7, 112-6, 123, 125, 132, 142, 144-6, 148, 159, 161-2, 165, 171, 174-6, 178, 180, 189, 228, 232, 234-5, 315-6, 31820, 322-4, 330-1, 333-4, 3434, 346, 348-9, 352, 355, 357, 385, 387, 389-90, 393, 399400, 411-3 White, Tony 341 Winterbottom, Michael 16, 2834, 287-90, 295-6, 301-14 Wollstonecraft, Mary 48 woman, -hood 48, 69, 180, 227244, 390-1 Wooding, Jeremy 79 Wordsworth, William 233 Wright, Ronald 317 writing 50, 133, 135, 153, 193, 286, 290, 345, 348, 352, 3628, 392, 394, 402-4, 406-8, 410 Wyndham, John 317, Young, Will 140 youth culture 18, 268, 329-340, 343, 388 Zakharia, Camille 189 Zameenzad, Ali 149 Zephaniah, Benjamin 384

Acknowledgements

This volume emerges from a conference held in Freiburg im Breisgau in February 2007. The symposium and the events by which it was framed were generously supported. The British Council’s Common Ground exhibition was on display in Freiburg for six weeks, and a film series titled Asian British Identities was screened by the Kommunales Kino. Our special thanks go to Sean Williams of The British Council UK, Michael Bird, OBE, and Marijke Brouwer of The British Council Germany, Hans Steiner and Remziye Sahin of the Büro für Migration und Integration Freiburg, Stefanie Stegmann of the Literaturbüro Freiburg, Neriman Bayram and the crew of the freiburger film forum, the Haus für Film und Literatur im Alten Wiehrebahnhof, and the Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung in Freiburg. None of these events would have run as smoothly as they did without the active help of Katja Bay, Ann-Marie Einhaus, Sandra Schaur, Thorsten Leiendecker and Nikolaus Reusch. The completion of this volume was coordinated in Tübingen. Our thanks go, first and foremost, to Claudia Schubert who did much of the technical editing; we are grateful, also, to Courtnay Konshuh and Joseph Twomey for their patient proofreading, and to Lisa Peter for the compilation of the index. The Editors

Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Postcolonial Postmortems (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft S.)

Reading Song Lyrics. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Transcultural Graffiti: Diasporic Writing and the Teaching of Literary Studies (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Stories and Portraits of the Self. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Exiles, Emigres and Intermediaries: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 91)

Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 103)

Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History Literature Debate (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Heroism and Passion in Literature: Studies in Honour of Moya Longstaffe (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 77)

Translation Practices: Through Language to Culture (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

One Less Hope: Essays on Twentieth-Century Russian Poets (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 101) (Internationale ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Remapping Reality: Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature (Goethe - Nietzsche - Grass) (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft) (v. 92)

The Singer and the Scribe: European Ballad Traditions and European Ballad Cultures (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 75)

Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

This Anguish, Like a Kind of Intimate Song: Resistance in Women's Literature of World War II (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Europa in Grande Sertão: Veredas Grande Sertão: Veredas in Europa (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 85)

Neue Sachlichkeit 1918-33: Unity and Diversity of an Art Movement (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 104)

Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790-1805. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Cultural Transfer through Translation. The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Multiethnic Literature And Canon Debates

Einladung zur Literaturwissenschaft

Einladung zur Literaturwissenschaft

Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Postcolonial Postmortems (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft S.)

Reading Song Lyrics. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Transcultural Graffiti: Diasporic Writing and the Teaching of Literary Studies (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Stories and Portraits of the Self. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Exiles, Emigres and Intermediaries: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 91)

Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 103)

Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History Literature Debate (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Heroism and Passion in Literature: Studies in Honour of Moya Longstaffe (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 77)

Translation Practices: Through Language to Culture (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

One Less Hope: Essays on Twentieth-Century Russian Poets (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 101) (Internationale ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Remapping Reality: Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature (Goethe - Nietzsche - Grass) (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft) (v. 92)

The Singer and the Scribe: European Ballad Traditions and European Ballad Cultures (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 75)

Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

This Anguish, Like a Kind of Intimate Song: Resistance in Women's Literature of World War II (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Europa in Grande Sertão: Veredas Grande Sertão: Veredas in Europa (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 85)

Neue Sachlichkeit 1918-33: Unity and Diversity of an Art Movement (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 104)

Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790-1805. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Cultural Transfer through Translation. The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Multiethnic Literature And Canon Debates

Einladung zur Literaturwissenschaft

Einladung zur Literaturwissenschaft

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