Encounters with the Neighbour in 1970s’ British Multicultural Comedy

The essay proposes to explore the mobilisation of the figure of the black neighbour in 1970s’ comedy as a means of commenting upon and critiquing British multicultural discourse of the time through a consideration of popular and mainstream sitcoms Love Thy Neighbour (ITV, 1972—76) and Rising Damp (ITV, 1974—78). The paper argues that whilst these comedies might seem radical for their time in normalising black neighbours, poking jokes at white bigots, and engaging with social taboo head-on, they ultimately serve to confirm the status quo by appeasing mainstream audiences and letting them off the hook for ongoing racism, whilst placing the burden for the happy functioning of a culturally and ethnically diverse nation in the hands of individuals without reference to cultural, political, historical or economic contexts that have combined to disenfranchise, alienate and subordinate black Britons

“How is these kids meant to make it out the ghetto now?” Community cohesion and communities of laughter in British multicultural comedy

This article uses readings of Mark Mylod’s Ali G Indahouse, Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block, and Chris Morris’s Four Lions to argue against a political trend for laying the blame for the purported failure of British multiculturalism at the hands of individual communities. Through my readings of these comic films, I suggest that popular constructions of “community” based on assumptions about cultural and religious homogeneity are rightly challenged, and new communities are created through shared laughter. Comedy’s structural engagement with taboo means that stereotypes which have gained currency through media and political discourse that seeks to demonize particular groups of young men (Muslims and gang members, for example) are foregrounded. By being brought to the forefront and exposed, these stereotypes can be engaged with and challenged through ridicule and demonstrations of incongruity. Furthermore, I suggest that power relations are made explicit through joking structures that work to include or exclude, meaning that the comedies can draw and redraw communities of laughter in a manner that effectively challenges notions of communities as discrete, homogeneous, and closely connected to cultural heritage. The article works against constructions of British Muslims as the problem community par excellence by using multicultural discourse to contextualize the representation of British Muslims and demonstrate how the discourse has repressed the role of political, social, and economic structures in a focus on “self-segregating” communities

Fragmenting and becoming double": Supplementary twins and abject bodies in Helen Oyeyemi's the Icarus Girl

© 2016 SAGE Publications. This article uses readings of the abject body and writing as supplement in Helen Oyeyemi's novel, The Icarus Girl (2005) to argue against a critical trend that reads the postcolonial Bildungsroman as promising a positively transformed postcolonial identity. Through our reading of Oyeyemi's novel, we suggest that locating the debates and tropes conventionally mobilized within postcolonial gothic in the former colonial centre complicates subject formations and constructions of alterity. The Icarus Girl weaves together a Western literary tradition of gothic with the postcolonial Bildungsroman and we suggest that the interaction of these forms produces a reading focused on the abject, both in terms of physical abjection mapped onto bodies and places, and in the way writing functions as abject supplement. When bodies, borders, and writing disintegrate, the reading of the novel becomes a difficult process, one not easily co-opted into a critical discourse that tends to value a psycho-symbolic reading of the postcolonial gothic Bildungsroman and to promise a positively transformed postcolonial identity. Accordingly, we argue that The Icarus Girl is unable to find comforting resolutions, disrupt oppositional structures, and create a utopian hybrid space or to bring about a unified sense of self, meaning that it resists a redemptive or cathartic ending. We draw upon Kristeva's theories of the abject and Derrida's notion of the supplement in order to establish how Oyeyemi's novel resists the construction of a stable identity through its emphasis upon expulsion and disintegration. Unlike the majority of criticism on postcolonial gothic, which focuses on texts emanating from formerly colonized countries, this article considers what happens to postcolonial gothic when it is written within and about the former colonial centre. In The Icarus Girl the repercussions of the colonial period are experienced in the present day through experiences of racism, dislocation, and alienation within Britain

Reading ‘Fundamental British Values’ Through Children’s Gothic: Imperialism, History, Pedagogy

This paper reads the U.K. Government’s “fundamental British values” project alongside two children’s Gothic novels, Coram Boy (2000) by Jamila Gavin and City of Ghosts (2009) by Bali Rai. In 2011 the U.K. Government outlined what it described as “fundamental British values” (FBV), making it a requirement for U.K. schools to promote these values. Many critics have shown that the root of FBV lies in Islamophobia and imperialist nostalgia and suggested that the promotion of “British” values in school will exclude minority groups already under siege from racist elements in contemporary Britain. Other critics argue that the promotion of FBV reduces opportunities to explore issues of belonging, belief, and nationhood in the classroom. This article argues that the Gothic fictions of Jamila Gavin and Bali Rai offer a space in which to critically examine British history (and so, its values) in a way that is acutely relevant to these education contexts. Coram Boy and City of Ghosts use the Gothic to interrogate aspects of British history elided by the FBV project. That is, they point to Britain’s imperial and colonial history and offer a rejoinder to the Government’s insistence that “British Values” equate to democracy, respect for the rule of law and mutual respect and tolerance of those from different faiths and religions. Furthermore, Gavin’s and Rai’s use of the Gothic creates a space in which the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in FBV can be explored. However, their “gothicized” histories of Britain do not render the idea of shared values invalid. The diversity and interconnectedness of the characters offer an alternative version of identity to the patronising and arrogant FBV project, which is aimed at promoting a national identity based on sameness and assimilation. Rai and Gavin look to Britain’s past through the lens of the Gothic not only to refute nationalism and racism, but also to offer a productive alternative that gestures towards a more cosmopolitan vision of identity

'We are here to speak the unspeakable':voicing abjection in Raj Kamal Jha's Fireproof

This article considers Raj Kamal Jha’s Fireproof (2007), a novel that received an immediate flurry of attention in newspaper reviews but has eluded critical attention since. The article argues that Jha’s novel, set in Gujarat in the wake of the 2002 communal violence, mobilizes tropes of abjection to a number of ends, using them explicitly to convey personal disgust and self-differentiation and analogously to suggest the political processes of national abjection evident in contemporary India. It then goes on to complicate the way that abjection is presented not only as a dangerous political weapon, but also as a critically productive fictional tool for ensuring that characters are understood in bodily terms, rather than as symbols of religious affiliation. It contends that by portraying characters as abject Jha at once indicates their subalternity and opens up a space to critique the violence of silencing, thereby offering a new way of representing voices locked out of hegemonic discourse. Using Jha’s novel as a fictional example, this article offers new ways into thinking through the associated concerns of postcolonial studies, subalternity, national identification and abjection

Generic frameworks and active readership in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

This article considers the role of the reader-as-judge in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It builds upon and extends the idea of the cathartic function of authorship as a response to trauma by alternatively considering the activation and empowerment of the reader that is enabled by the dramatic monologue style of Hamid’s novella. Indications that the reader is called upon to make active decisions can be found in the second-person address that is directed beyond the pages. The layering of different genres also means that readers have to choose what they believe to be the most suitable generic framework for understanding the novella. Marking a new intervention into the study of this novella, the article argues that The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an example of a contemporary dramatic monologue that encourages a more active way of reading by calling for readers’ discernment and judgement, while resisting comfortable closure. The article considers how and why the novella functions as a dramatic monologue, before moving on to those matters that the reader is being called upon to judge, and the wider implications of this readerly positioning in relation to the politics of mourning

'We are the martyrs, you're just squashed tomatoes!':laughing through the fears in postcolonial British comedy: Chris Morris's Four Lions and Joe Cornish's Attack the Block

This article analyses the latest wave of postcolonial British comedy in film. The most recent generation of comedy has turned away from the mild and inclusive comedy of its predecessors that was often structured around benign representations of multicultural Britain. In Four Lions and Attack the Block comedy is employed alternatively to reveal social fears exacerbated by the media hype surrounding particular figures often excluded from banal multicultural discourse. This work asserts that the films encourage laughter as an alternative response to fear, and in doing so attempt to break a cycle in which fear creates its object. This is a genre-defining moment for postcolonial British comedy, as the recent films depart from the convention of happily restoring deviant characters to society, a convention that has the tendency to offer comedy as an unrealistic solution to social problems and validates a mainstream society

Introduction: New Directions, New Approaches

The study of diaspora, as both a migratory experience and a theoretical concept associated with unfixity and in-betweenness, liminality and hybridity, travel and displacement, nomadism and touring, has gone through a number of transformations since its intellectual heyday in the 1990s. Much of the first decade of diaspora scholarship set out to define, and (very often, even if unwittingly) police the boundaries of the term. Whereas diaspora studies has grown exponentially in the last decades, there is still an untapped critical potential related to new forms of movement across the globe and new experiences of “diaspora space” (Brah 1996). Disrupted by war, conflict and poverty, populations continue to be on the move. This volume does not intend to rehearse what is by now familiar territory in diaspora studies, but is rather interested in opening up new lines of inquiry by placing diaspora in dialogue with other fields and approaches and reassessing its usefulness in light of the pressing issues of the twenty-first century. Therefore, as well as exploring the new ways that diaspora can be deployed to make sense of our contemporary moment, this book also considers some of the limitations of the term and its potential alternatives. Indeed, many of our contributors employ a number of formulations, including transculturalism and interculturalism (Flockemann), transnationalism (Waegner, D’Souza), globalization (Deandrea), cosmopolitanism (Steckenbiller) and planetarity (Steckenbiller, Rochester) as both complements to and critical interlocutors with “diaspora”.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio