Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+

Friday, 16 February 2007

Student Papers and Workshop
Chairs: Christoph Reinfandt, Lars Eckstein

Registration

Welcome Reception
Opening of the Exhibition Common Ground
Welcoming Adresses
Keynote Lecture
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, London
After Multiculturalism: The Struggle for Equality and Commonalities
Keynote Lecture
Rajeev Balasubramanyam, Manchester
The Rhetoric of Multiculturalism

Saturday, 17 February 2007

Paper Session
Roy Sommer, Wuppertal
Corporate Multiculturalism, Identity Games and Post-Ethnic Poetics in Contemporary Black and Asian British Fiction
Rainer Emig, Regensburg
Missing in Act(i)on: Asian British Pop between Commodification and Resistance
Stefan Laqué, München
Rodinsky’s Room: Locating Absence and Relocating Identity

Paper Session
Ingrid von Rosenberg , Berlin
Female Views: Cultural Identity as a Key Issue in the Work of Black and Asian British Women Artists
Ulrike Zimmermann, Freiburg
Out of the Ordinary – and Back? Jackie Kay’s Recent Short Fiction
Lucie Gillet, Liège
Representations of Multicultural Society in Some Contemporary British Novels

Paper Session
Claudia Sternberg, Leeds
Babylon North: The Year 2001 and Asian Britons in Yasmin (UK/Germany 2004) and Bradford Riots
(UK, Channel Four 2006)
Barbara Korte, Freiburg
A Black Tomorrow? Black Characters in 28 Days Later (2002) and Children of Men (2006)

Paper Session
Ellen Dengel-Janic, Tübingen
“East is East and West is West”: A Reading of Nirpal Dhaliwal’s Tourism (2006)
Susanne Cuevas, Dresden
Council Estates as Cultural Enclaves in Recent Fictions
Susanne Pichler, Innsbruck
Charting Routes – L'Histoire à Faire: Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon

Paper Session
Michael Mitchell, Warwick
Illusions and Disillusions of Identity in Gautam Malkani's Londonstani
Yvonne Rosenberg, Kiel
“Stop Thinking like an Englishman” or: Writing against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights

Reception and Readings **
Patrick Neate
Rajeev Balasubramanyam

Sunday, 18 February 2007y

Paper Session

Nadia Butt, Frankfurt
Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam (2004): Struggle between Islam and Modernity: Mapping the Transcultural Predicaments of Pakistani Immigrants in Britain
Cordula Lemke, München
Racist Mazes in Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers

Fewzia Bedjaoui, Sidi Bel Abbes
Trying to Belong: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
Virginia Richter, München
The Enigma of Departure: Transcultural Exchanges in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea

Paper Session
Sissy Helff, Frankfurt
Scapes of Refuge in Britain : Representing Refugees in Cinematic Life Narratives
Kathy-Ann Tan, Tübingen
“If you’re not on paper, you don’t exist”: Depictions of ‘Illegal’ Immigration in Film (on Michael Winterbottom’s In This World and Code 46)
Sandra Heinen, Wuppertal
Multi-Cultural Britain on Screen: South Asian Diasporic Experience in Recent Feature Films

FINAL DISCUSSION

Fewzia Bedjaoui (Sidi Bel Abbes)
Trying to Belong: Monica Ali's Brick Lane

Monica Ali explores the themes of hybridity and metamorphosis in Brick Lane. She argues that the obsession with boundary crossing and otherness was an effort to delineate human nature’s regularities and to establish a strong sense of personal woman identity. Brick Lane is an example of the answer to the perennial question of how the individual can both remain constant and change. As a woman, Nazneen’s metamorphosis supposes possibilities of new cultural affiliations and therefore new opportunities, which takes place in cross-breeding of cultures in terms of hybridity involving the rejection of past and assimilation of new values.
In Brick Lane, Ali shapes a female character who transgresses boundaries fixed on her by her gender, culture, caste and economic status. Nazneen is determined by strategies of resistance, escaping from traditional space, using sexuality in order to move beyond restrictions imposed on her and thus renegotiating the space in which she actually resides. The gendered space underlines the idea of home which remains problematic. The conflation of home, as both security and prison, evokes therefore one’s limited identity. Such a division of geographical space would refer to divisions of psychic space including self against non-self.The diasporic experience can challenge existing identity and femininity, within traditional Indian discourse. Indian double marginalization, which means being both a woman and a member of an ethnic group, conflicts between the homogeneization by patriarchal and post-colonial ideologiesof Indian women and representation of new Indian women and their sense of belongingness to their original culture.

Nadia Butt (Frankfurt)
Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam (2004): Struggle between Islam and Modernity - Mapping the Transcultural Predicaments of Pakistani Immigrants in Britain

This paper attempts to address the struggle between Islam and modernity among the people of Pakistani ethnic community in Britain in order to map their transcultural predicaments with reference to Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers (2004). In the development of the argument, it is postulated that the strife of orthodox Islam with modernity in the novel not only reflects an increase in religious fanaticism in the wake of modernity, but 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.” Set in a Pakistani community in an English town, renamed by the Pakistani migrants themselves as “Dashte-e-Tanhaii,” translated from Urdu as The Desert of Loneliness, the novel revolves around Shamas, and his ultra religious wife, Kaukab. When Shamas’ brother Jugnu move together with his beloved Chanda, they are found murdered by Chanda’s brothers to protect the family honour because they were living in sin. Maps for Lost Lovers takes place in the next twelve months after the murders, highlighting the claustrophobic society which is at the crossroads of culture, nationality and religion. In an interview with a British newspaper, Aslam said that Maps for Lost Lovers is, in part, a response to the events of Sept, 11, and that he was inspired to “condemn the smaller-scale Sept.11’s that go on every day.” In light of the author’s statement, the dilemma of a liberal English society is discussed in dealing with the issues of immigration and integration as they surface in the broader framework of the novel.
By focusing on the attachment with radical Islam among the Pakistani immigrants as the only way to adhere staunchly to their native cultural mores, traditions and taboos, the aim is to reveal their transcultural predicaments in our rapidly changing world. Since an obsession with religion not only isolates these immigrants from the white society but also from one another, their plight reflects a torn culture and a torn society they have created for themselves in their adopted homeland. Additionally, in tracing ethnic tensions as an outcome of religious fanaticism in the face of globalised modernity, special emphasis is laid on the dislocation and self-imposed exile, and the clash between Islamic fundamentalism and the values of the secular West.

Susanne Cuevas (Dresden)
Council Estates as Cultural Enclaves in Recent Fictions

Featuring merely as a backdrop in earlier migrant fiction, inner city council estate settings were developed into portraits of micro-societies within British society in novels published from the early 1990s on. The spectrum of these popular novels ranges from pulp (e.g. Victor Headley’s Yardie) to more serious attempts which often draw on some autobiographical experience. Though typically featuring young black male protagonists and a social world dominated by drug abuse, deprivation, violence and teenage pregnancies, this focus has recently expanded to examine non-Afro-Caribbean ethnic groups, such as Bangladeshis.
In this paper, Courttia Newland’s The Scholar and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane will be examined as very different, in many ways complementary, literary representations of two of Britain’s most underprivileged and highly stigmatized 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 will turn to explore 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”.

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

Through the voice of his protagonist Bhupinder, a young Sikh writer, Nirpal Dhaliwal in his first novel Tourism (2006) uncompromisingly dissects the relations between race, sex, and class in his portrayal of 21st-century multicultural London. At first glance, the novel seems to move 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 celebrating the unstable, shifting and hybrid identities as in Zadie Smith’s work, 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. 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 depiction of exaggerated essentialism and disturbing generalisations are part of a destabilising discourse. In my paper, I will furthermore discuss how through Bhupinder, the antagonising narrator, Dhaliwal deliberately provokes 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).

Rainer Emig (Regensburg)
Missing in Act(i)on: Asian British Pop between Commodification and Resistance

For decades, Black and Asian artists have contributed immensely to the worldwide success of British pop music and thus helped to create the image of Britain as a multi-ethnic society. They have also developed a remarkable range of expressions, from user-friendly pop to the aggressive stances of Asian Dub Foundation and the female London Sri-Lankan rapper M.I.A. In the images, music and lyrics of these two examples, there is, however, also an obvious collision between commodification and resistance. While pop relies on reaching an audience and market through record and concert sales, Asian British pop is constantly in danger of losing its cutting edge and becoming part of a globalised pop business when it abandons attempts at resistance. One can see such a globalising attitude in successful “multi-ethnic” bands such as the Sugababes (an early example would be UB40), and a slightly different blurring of borders in the attempt to connect U.S.-style Hip Hop with British attitudes in the Cookie Crew or Ms Dynamite. In all these cases, image is of the essence, and it is the relation of such images – in the above mentioned forms of record covers and advertising campaigns – with the lyrics and music of songs that the proposed paper wishes to investigate. It will implicitly or explicitly use a range of ideological and also more specifically postcolonial theories – among them those of Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, Butler, Spivak and Bhabha – together with imagological approaches for its inquiry.

Lucie Gillet (Liège)
Representation of Multicultural Society in Some Contemporary British Novels

Multi-ethnic societies are very complex communities, which renders their representation in literature all the more intricate. When one thinks about a literary tradition that depicts the multicultural state of British society, the first – and generally the only – writers that come to mind are British post-colonial authors, and thus mostly ‘black’ artists. However, it is also really interesting – and relevant – to include the ‘white’ British writers in an examination of multi-ethnic Britain, since they stand for one of the ethnic groups that make up British society. Of course, these writers are very different from those of the post-colonial group: while most ‘black’ authors write novels that introduce characters issued from different ethnic groups living in Great Britain, more mainstream writers do not usually directly treat the problem of multiculturalism.
But by examining a small sample of novels by both groups of writers – Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth on the one hand, Graham Swift’s The Light of Day and Ian McEwan’s Saturday on the other hand –, I would like to show that, like post-colonial writers, many ‘white’ British artists feel concerned about the changes that have affected Britain for several decades. The novels by both groups are indeed characterised by what Andrzej Gasiorek calls ‘experimental realism’: all provide an apparently faithful depiction of reality accompanied, in different degrees, by narrative techniques that are associated with post-modernism (fragmentation, the use of unreliable narrators, the blend of literary genres). The use of such post-modernist strategies thus also enables the ‘white’ writers to express their doubts and helplessness concerning their changing society, even though they do it from another point of view than most post-colonial novelists. With the comparison of the different literary responses to Britain’s multiculturalism, I hope to bring a deeper and maybe more complete insight into the reality and complexity of such societies, but I would also like to try to make out whether literary representation of multicultural Britain depends on the writers’ position, history and background within their society, whether ‘white’ writers choose not to represent other ethnic groups or whether they are unable to do so – and more importantly, whether they have to do so.

Sandra Heinen (Wuppertal)
Multi-Cultural Britain on Screen: South Asian Diasporic Experience in Recent Feature Films

Multi-cultural Britain is to be found everywhere in contemporary cultural productions: in books and papers, on television and radio – and to an increasing degree also in the cinema. Despite the fact that several recent feature films on Indian and Pakistani people living in today’s Britain deal with the same topic of diasporic experience, they adopt different attitudes largely depending on the filmmaker’s background and the film’s addressee.
Indian Bollywood films like Karan Johar’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) or Akshay Bajaj’s Ramji. Londonwaley (2005) tend to build up a stark contrast between Western material wealth and Eastern moral values. These mainstream films perpetuate cultural stereotypes about life in Britain, but also about India and Indian culture. They address Indian audiences both at home and abroad by constructing an ideal of Indian identity independent of – if not immune to – Western influences.
Not surprisingly filmmakers actually living in the UK and familiar with diasporic reality take a different stand, even if they draw heavily on Bollywood conventions. The films of Gurinder Chadha for example, a London and L.A. based director of Indian descent, stress the similarities rather than the differences between the two cultures (e.g. in Bend it Like Beckham, 2002).
A third position is taken up by English filmmakers without Indian or Pakistani background like Ken Loach (Ae fond Kiss, 2004) or Dominic Savage (Love and Hate, 2005). In their films the specific conflicts arising from mixed-race relationships become metaphors for intercultural prejudices and the nevertheless existing possibility of intercultural dialogue.

Sissy Helff (Frankfurt)
Scapes of Refuge in Britain: Representing Refugees in Cinematic Life Narratives

The recent boom of narratives that tell the stories of modern refugees feeds the global appetite of contemporary consumers who long for dramatic life stories connecting various continents, cultures, and time spans. The popularity of this genre may be based on the slick combination of a popular format namely the autobiographical/biographical life narrative and an authentically dramatized life story that provides an emotional plane on which readers can connect to the narrated life on a personal level. While in the reception of these life stories increased attention is paid to social, ethnic and cultural parameters, the imaginary act of narrating these life stories is often paid too little attention and thus remains almost critically unexamined.
In order to tackle the complex connection between fact and fiction, reality and imaginary, social life and life story this presentation examines the following questions: What is so crucial about the visual representation of place and locality in a refugee story? Is an authentic voice important for the reliability of a story? And finally, what makes a life story a cinematic Refugee Life Narrative?
I seek to answer these and other questions in a comparative close reading of Michael Winterbottom's fictional documentary In this World and a short digital movie(cinematic life narrative)that is set in UK.

Barbara Korte (Freiburg)
A Black Tomorrow? Black Characters in 28 Days Later (2002) and Children of Men (2006)

The representation of the Black British subject has long been a prime area of concern in Black British studies and in Britain's Black artistic community, especially in relation to film and television. 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, as for instance in Ken Loach's Æ Fond Kiss (2003). 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 that followed the Millennium and 9/11, but they have distinctly British settings and themes and evoke British traditions of fiction about the end of the world. I would therefore suggest that the portrayal in both films of black (female) characters as bearers of hope in the midst of apocalypse is a statement on Britain's current ethnic composition and the consequences it will have for the country's further development.

Stephan Laqué (Munich)
Rodinsky’s Room: Locating absence and relocating identity

My paper will consider the spatial frame of the construction of hybrid identity in both fictional representation and architecture: in both Iain Sinclair’s and Rachel Lichtenstein’s Rodinsky’s Room (2000) and in the Museum of Immigration and Diversity at 19 Princelet Street in Spitalfields. Rodinky's Room is a narrative based on the disapperance of the historical David Rodinsky, the last caretaker of the synagogue in the garden of the formerly Huguenot and later Irish brick house at 19 Princelet Street. When Rodinsky’s room in the attic was discovered, its inhabitant had long disappeared, leaving a bewildering array of books and notes from different cultural backgrounds. As Lichtenstein’s narrator sets out to probe into the past of this elusive character, Rodinsky remains an absence. The room is at the centre of her quest, but Sinclair’s chapters make sure it remains 'empty' and unfixed. It is an instance of third space, where identities are constructed and questioned. But it is a third space that is more than a cognitive pattern: this space also has a physical reality. Both texts – book and building – are dense webs of quotations left by immigrants looking for identity in the diaspora. The house is a place de passage, where a rich cultural palimpsest accumulates to permit relocation and reinscription.
Marked both by an absence of fixed identity and an excess of cultural contact, the museum has yet to find a major funder: it seems that a space of cultural transition and exchange is not attractive to potential donors who in Britain today appear to be looking for clearly delimited cultural and ethnic frames.

Cordula Lemke (Munich)
Racist Mazes in Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers

In this paper I want to show how the language of racism seeps into the performative acting out of identity in Nadeem Aslam's novel Maps for Lost Lovers, where both the narrative perspective and the plot fuel racist responses. However, this dynamics is self-reflexively anticipated in the novel and I will look at how this treatment of racism is connected to the notions of nation and diaspora.
According to Etienne Balibar (Nous, citoyen d'Europe?), national borders within the European Union are no longer defined by spatial frontiers but by the subtle lines of cultural differences, which are acted out on a daily basis in every European city. With the struggle for national identity becoming an issue in European politics, there is an increasing tendency for racist acts of violence which resort to cultural stereotypes to veil a more overt racism.
Nous, citoyen d'Europe? – a question that is also at the centre of Nadeem Aslam's novel, but it is looked at from a different angle. Who is allowed to become a European citizen, what cultural tightrope acts does this entail, and what is the role played by diasporas? Different answers to these questions are explored, ranging from simplistic racism to an almost aggressive embracing of new cultures, in which racist responses are not confined to the dominant white European society, but are also strong in the diaspora. However, the 'Maps for Lost Lovers' Aslam's novel draws do not provide an exit from this labyrinth of racism, leaving both lovers and readers still more entangled.

Michael Mitchell (Warwick)
Illusions and Disillusions of Identity in Gautam Malkani's Londonstani

While ethnic and geopolitical concepts of identity still dominate much discourse on the organization and adaptation of societies like the UK, in which words like 'multiculturalism' and 'Britishness' remain current, the attacks of 7/7, involving as they did 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 paper will seek 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.

Susanne Pichler (Innsbruck)
Charting Routes – L'Histoire à Faire: Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon

"'Identity! Sometimes it makes my head hurt – sometimes my heart! So what am I? Where do we fit into Britain, 2000 and beyond?'" (Levy: 2000). Andrea Levy's statement in "This is my England" published in The Guardian Weekend on February, 19, 2000, not only sheds light on her specific situation as a British born writer of Jamaican parents, as well as on those of a non-exclusively 'white' British background but also on post-imperial, multiethnic Britain. By exposing the fallacy of perpetual whiteness through their focus on peoples who juggle multiple ethniticities and histories, authors like Andrea Levy have begun to effect changes in the perception of English national identity. In Levy's oft quoted "[I]f Englishness doesn't define me, then define Englishness" (qtd. in: Jaggi: 1996, 64) there is not only a strong and clear element of rejection - the rejection of a traditional, an exclusive and unattainable 'Englishness' - but concurrently one of attachment. In this paper the focus will be on how Faith Jackson, the female protagonist of Levy's 1999 novel Fruit of the Lemon, through charting routes rather than (re)establishing roots, questions the very ground on which she stands, the very structures that fail to reflect and symbolically house her identity. Faith's travels, her (re)turning to familial homelands, reinterpret the borders drawn for her and constitute an inquiry into 'Englishess' as much as into her own identity – for the two are inextricably intertwined. In turning to her familial homelands, in being plunged into her relatives' memories, in participating in processes of cultural excavation and recreation, Faith positions herself in narratives of the past without being overdetermined by them. She exposes herself to the play of history, culture, and power and learns to use these discourses productively. In the end, Faith's travels have changed her perception of London and via acts of literary estrangement, possibly the readers' perception as well. Faith has sharpened, to borrow Stuart Hall's words, her "awareness of the black experience as a diaspora experience" (1988: 29). This empowers her – and by extension us - to establish a "global 'we'" (Metha qtd. in: Dallmayr: 1996, xxii-xxiii), to "speak[ing] a common language" (Metha, xxii-xxiii) that would enable us to transcend boundaries and envisage a "nonassimilative dialogical engagement" (Dallmayr, 32) in which "neither voice is reduced to the status of a simple object" (Todorov: 1984, 68). Future history is to be made, "l'histoire à faire" (Webb: 1992, 7).

References:

Dallmayr, Fred. Beyond Orientalism. Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter. State University of New York: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Hall, Stuart. "New Ethnicities." Ed. Kobena Mercer. Black Film, British Cinema: ICA Documents 7. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988. 27-31.
Jaggi, Maya. "Redefining Englishness." Waterstone's Magazine 6 (Summer 1996): 63-69.
Levy, Andrea. Fruit of the Lemon. London: Headline Review, 1999.
---. "This is my England." The Guardian Weekend. February, 19, 2000. http://elt.britcoun.org.pl/elt/i_engl.htm
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

Virginia Richter (Munich)
The Enigma of Departure: Transcultural Exchanges in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea

No man is an island – John Donne’s verse was never truer than in the globalized, transcultural world after the millennium. The identity of any individual is the result of multifarious dynamic processes operating not only across different cultural spaces, but also across time. Our – often fractured and precarious – sense of self is constituted through exchanges across cultures as well as through our engagement with history. Gurnah explores in his novel By the Sea (2001) both the present-day predicament of an asylum seeker arriving in Britain from an unnamed Islamic country and his continuing negotiation of a past that reaches back to a different transcultural society, the world of African-Pacific Oriental trade in conflict with Western imperialist powers. The story of the novel’s protagonists, Saleh Omar and Latif Mahmud, is the result of conflict-laden departures and exchanges between and across cultures. – In my paper, I would like to address the network of synchronic and diachronic relations opened up in the novel within a framework of recent theoretical concepts on cross-cultural dynamics and identity-formation, such as ‘migratory aesthetics’ (Mieke Bal), ‘transpositional identities’ (Rosi Braidotti) and ‘cosmopolitan conviviality’ (Paul Gilroy).

Yvonne Rosenberg (Kiel)
“Stop Thinking Like an Englishman”or Writing against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neates’s City of Tiny Lights

In a post-9/11 geopolitical climate, Tommy Akhtar, the protagonist of Patrick Neate’s novel City of Tiny Lights, published in 2005, is performing his identity:: a Ugandan-Indian, a Paki, an ex-mujahideen, Marlowe-wannabe, cosmopolitan, Londoner, and an Englishman. Yet, he always stays in the position of the immigrant as we live in a time where our view of the other has led to the perception of internally homogeneous groups and a ‘master analogy of immigration as a form of warfare’ (Gilroy).
Tommy Akhtar’s “strange affection for the truth” doesn’t help him to act out for what he would like to consider ‘the right side’. He has to recognize that in an age of terrorism there aren’t two oppositional poles –“friend or foe”. Instead, he is caught in a free-floating system where no argument can be made and no clear position can be taken because nobody sticks to self-imposed rules and definitions: Anxiety is creating a time of euphemisms, incongruity, and contradictions in terms, where freedom and democracy exist only relatively and the so- called fundamentalists are nothing but opportunists.
In the course of the novel, it becomes clear how central the issue of fixed labels is to a society characterized by the linguistic and cultural need to taxonomise and where people, captured in the ‘metaphysics of Britishness’ (Gilroy), have lost their ability to think for themselves. I shall, therefore, look at the connection between the construction of meaning, the linguistic games and the cultural codes in Neate’s novel in order to analyse if there is more to Tommy Akhtar’s immigrant life than his depiction of himself as “Frankenstein’s monster dreaming of humanity rebuilt from its constituent parts”. Therefore I will analyze the depiction of “cartoon life” and Neate’s playful use of metaphors to see in what way they may overcome ‘a language that admits its powerlessness’ (Derrida) in a climate of fear.

Roy Sommer (Wuppertal)
Corporate Multiculturalism, Identity Games and Post-Ethnic Poetics in Contemporary Black and Asian British fiction

The host of multicultural novels, short stories, plays and poems published in the last 20 years has begun to change the face of British literature as a whole. With the benefit of hindsight, 1956 is now widely regarded as a turning point in British literary history as well as in Anglo-Caribbean literary relations: Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners paved the way for novels such as Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen (1973), Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985) and the novels of second-generation Black writers in Britain.
In recent years, the commercial success of international bestsellers such as Smith’s White Teeth (2000) or Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), to name but two prominent examples, has given rise to growing criticism of the ways in which questions of identity, ethnicity, belonging, and growing up in a multiethnic society have been appropriated by leading publishers cashing in on a trend that has been described as “corporate multiculturalism” or the “commodification of alterity”. On the other hand, novels such as Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) or Smith’s On Beauty (2005) arguably contribute what might be called a multicultural aesthetics and poetics.
The paper investigates the significance of these current developments: Are we really witnessing the emergence of a new, post-ethnic, multicultural poetics in which the literary documentation and transformation of lived experience are replaced by identity games? Does the successful marketing of ethnic identities signal that the traditional division of ‘Black and Asian fiction’ and “British literature A-Z” in leading bookstores is finally overcome? And finally, how ‘black’ is contemporary ‘black’ British literature?

Claudia Sternberg (Leeds)
Babylon North: The Year 2001 and Asian Britons in Yasmin (UK/Germany 2004)and Bradford Riots (UK, Channel Four 2006)

The main objective of this contribution is to provide background information and an analytical framework for a reading of the feature film Yasmin (2004,dir. Kenneth Glenaan, scr. Simon Beaufoy), which will be screened during the Freiburg Symposium. The film focuses on a British-Pakistani family and relates how their precariously negotiated balance between tradition and modernity, first and second generation, men and women, multicultural urbanity and life in the ethnic ghetto is affected by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, their media representations, mainstream US-American and British reactions and radical Islamist responses. The paper discusses the film’s representational strategies and some aspects of its production and reception history. It argues that while in Yasmin the September events are constructed both as a cinematic plot point and caesura in British ‘race relations’, the film at the same time relies on, continues and recodes a previously established narrative tradition of social exclusion and racist policing. Finally, the presentation comments on the television play Bradford Riots (2006, written and directed by Neil Biswas). The Channel Four drama also presents a family story and refers to the (locally specific) riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford, which took place only a few months before 9/11 and the beginning of the (global) ‘war on terror’. Allusions to the recent riots are notably absent from the Northern tale of Yasmin, but both the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ events of 2001 have had a considerable impact on Muslim communities in the North of England and Britain as a whole and the productions of 2004 and 2006 bring some of their traumatic legacies to the fore.

(NB: The paper will give away plot details and the conclusions of Yasmin and Bradford Riots.)

Kathy-Ann Tan (Tübingen)
“If You’re Not on Paper, You Don’t Exist” – Depictions of ‘Illegal’ Immigration in Film (on Michael Winterbottom’s In This World and Code 46.)

In this paper I intend to compare and contrast two films by Michael Winterbottom (b.1961), a British director well-known for his unflinching and provocative films that tackle the issues of illegal immigration, political and economic asylum and, in his most recent film, The Road to Guantanamo (2006), the ‘war on terror’. The two films I will be looking at, In This World (2002) and Code 46 (2003), warrant an interesting comparison because they both deal with the idea of, put simply in Winterbottom’s own words, “people having no papers and trying to travel from one place to another and the problems that creates” – a reflection of the reality of the twenty thousand asylum seekers entering the UK annually. Yet, the films are shot in two very different genres – the former is a pared-down documentary drama shot on digital video (DV) that chronicles the desperate journey undertaken by two Afghan refugees, Jamal, an orphaned teenager, and Enayat, his older cousin, from the Peshawar refugee camp in Pakistan to London, whereas the latter is a US$ 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 and where Code 46 is enforced by the government’s law to prevent genetically incompatible humans from becoming lovers. This paper will thus look at the depiction of the issues of ‘illegal’ immigration, political and economic asylum, exile and displacement in two provocative films by Michael Winterbottom and how they challenge, and offer alternative narratives to, the media coverage of these issues.

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

Cultural identity has always been a prominent issue in the work of black and Asian British artists, both male and female, ever since they began exhibiting in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. While most techniques from painting to photography, printing processes, collage and video installations are used by both men and women, gendered differences occur not only in the thematic approaches of women (e.g. a preference for the use of family portraits, the absence of images of violence) and signifying objects presented (e.g. handbags and long gloves as signifiers of South-Africa’s colonial rule in Joy Gregory’s work; the play with hairstyles in Sonya Boyce’s work), but also sometimes in the materials used (e.g. hair stitching in Bharti Parma’s work). In my paper I would like to investigate exemplary works of some women artists (the Asian British artists Bharti Parma, Chila Kumar Burman, Jannine Al-Ani, the black artists Joy Gregory, Sonya Boyce, Ingrid Pollard). Attention would be given to the aspects of cultural identity focused (history, family connections, the body, clothes, etc.) as well as the attitude expressed, i.e. the wish for integration or pride in cultural separateness (as in Al-Ani’s images of veiled women). Techniques used will also play a part in the analysis.

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

The sense of alienation is a burden that the characters in Jackie Kay’s fiction frequently carry. Living in a deceptively normal environment, with an unspectacular lifestyle, they are occupied with the experience of not quite fitting in with society, even with their own lives. Race, body issues, sexual orientation, the confrontation with loss and old age – all these lead to boundaries and rifts in the protagonists’ reality. Sometimes quite suddenly, sometimes at the end of a slow process, reality as it was becomes unfamiliar and threatening, and the idea of a stable identity blatantly untenable. Principles governing the local community, the family, one’s own body, are analysed to the point when they seem uncannily strange and meaningless.
An apparently normal day for the narrator of “Why Don’t You Stop Talking” gets out of hand, as she has to face reactions to her self-assertive behaviour, and ends in self-mutilation. Melanie of “Trout Friday”, with an Irish mother and a Trinidadian father, muses, “[...] people with her colour of skin were now called beige. Somehow she didn’t like beige [...]. It made her ask questions like: does beige go with khaki? Beige Britain.” (Both stories: Jackie Kay, 2002, Why Don’t You Stop Talking, Basingstoke: Picador)
This paper proposes to look at several short stories (taken from Kay, 2002, and Kay, 2006, Wish I Was Here, Basingstoke: Picador) which explore the feeling of alienation of protagonists participating in modern British society. Kay’s experimentation with various manifestations of alterity and the effect of defamiliarisation as a narrative strategy will also be investigated.

ASIAN BRITISH IDENTITIES ON THE SCREEN

Kommunales Kino, Urachstr. 40, Tel: 0761-70 90 33
In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Englischen Seminar
der Universität Freiburg

Britische KünstlerInnen südasiatischer Herkunft prägen seit geraumer Zeit globale Entwicklungen in den Bereichen Musik, Tanz, Bildende Kunst, Film und Literatur. Insbesondere im zeitgenössischen Kino ist eine zunehmende Präsenz von MigrantInnen zu beobachten, deren Filme eindrucksvoll vom Leben in mehreren Kulturen erzählen.
Wir zeigen sowohl aktuelle als auch ältere Filme aus Großbritannien, die humorvoll-ironisch Schnittstellen von ‚race’, ‚class’ und ‚gender’ thematisieren und das Bild der jeweiligen Kultur satirisch überzeichnen. Im Mittelpunkt der Reihe steht die bekannte Regisseurin Gurinder Chadha, die mit Ihren Filmen BHAJI ON THE BEACH und KICK IT LIKE BECKHAM weibliche Heldinnen in den Vordergrund rückt. Eine Filmreihe zur Ausstellung COMMON GROUND vom 17.2. bis 31.3.2007 in der Galerie im Alten Wiehrebahnhof 31.3.2007. In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Englischen Seminar der Universität Freiburg und dem British Council.

Kick it like Beckham
Großbritannien | Deutschland 2002 | OmU | 112 Min. |
Regie: Gurinder Chadha
Fußball ist das Größte für die 17jährige Jess Bhamra. Die talentierte Fußballspielerin lebt in einem Vorort von London und träumt davon, für die englische Nationalmannschaft zu spielen.
Ihre aus Indien stammenden Eltern wollen ihr „ausgefallenes“ Hobby nicht länger tolerieren und sähen sie lieber mit einem ordentlichen indischen Mann verheiratet. Durch Jules kommt Jess in das örtliche Frauenfußballteam, verheimlicht es jedoch ihrer Familie ...
Leichtfüßig entwickelt die Regisseurin Gurinder Chadha die Geschichte der spielbegeisterten Jess, die sich Schritt für Schritt gegen den Widerstand ihrer indischen Eltern durchsetzen muss, und mischt dabei erzählerische und musikalische Elemente aus der englischen und indischen Kultur.
Mi 7.2., 19:30 | Sa 10.2., 21:30 | So 11.2., 17:30 |

Kurzfilmprogramm: We’re British, But ...
Kurzfilme zur kulturellen Identität (in Originalfassung English)
Auf die frühe Arbeit “I’m British But” (1989) der gefeierten Filmemacherin Gurinder Chadha anspielend, präsentiert diese Auswahl 7 Kurzfilme junger britischer Regisseurinnen und Regisseure, die ihre Stimme in der breiten Diskussion um kulturelle Identität erheben.
Fr 9.2., 19:30

Yasmin
Regie: Kenny Glenaan
Großbritannien 2004 | OmU | 87 Min. |
Yasmin, eine pakistanische Immigrantin der zweiten Generation, lebt in der Spannung zwischen ihrem westlichen Lebensstil und den Forderungen ihrer Familie. Sie arbeitet als Sozialarbeiterin mit Kindern in Nordengland und wird von ihren Kollegen sehr geschätzt. Der 11. September 2001 wird für Yasmin zum Wendepunkt. Arbeitskollegen meiden sie plötzlich, die britischen Muslime geraten unter Generalverdacht. Der Film zeichnet ein lebendiges und berührendes Porträt der pakistanischen Community in Großbritannien unter den Auswirkungen des 11. Septembers und ist trotz der schweren Themen voller Witz und Ironie.
Mi 14.2., 19:30 | So 18.2., 17:30

Bhaji on the Beach
Großbritannien 1993 | engl. OF | 101 Min.
Regie: Gurinder Chadha
Mit der Empfehlung, „sich gut zu amüsieren“, kommt ein Reisebus mit einer Gruppe asiatischer Frauen im nordenglischen Badeort Blackpool an. Ein ungewöhnlicher Tag steht ihnen bevor. Bevor die Sonne untergeht, entdeckt Gurinder Chadhas warmherziges Ensemble die Liebe, findet Zeit für erhellende Gedanken und macht eine Reihe wichtiger persönlicher Entdeckungen.
Doch die Reise beginnt problematisch. Hashida hat gerade erfahren, dass sie schwanger ist. Ihr Freund Oliver ist ein farbiger Jamaikaner, der von ihren traditionsbewussten Eltern nicht akzeptiert wird. Die Frauengruppe reagiert gespalten; Simi versucht die Gruppe zusammenzuhalten, doch ihre feministische Einstellung stößt zusehends auf die Kritik der älteren Frauen.
Mi 21.2., 19:30

East is East
Großbritannien 1999 | OmU | 96 Min.
Regie: Damien O’Donnell; Drehbuch: Ayub Khan-Din
Drunter und drüber geht es in der britisch-pakistanischen Familie von George und Ella Kahn. Sechs Söhne zwischen 12 und 20 und die Fußball spielende Meenah suchen ihren eigenen Weg im nordenglischen Provinzstädtchen Salford. Der aus Pakistan eingewanderter George Khan ist stolzer Besitzer eines Fish’n Chips-Ladens und noch stolzerer Pakistani. Seine sieben Kinder nennen ihn "Dschingis", was durchaus nicht immer liebevoll gemeint ist. Denn George stellt sich hilflos und aggressiv gegen den selbstgewählten Lebensstil seiner Kinder. Der Konflikt kulminiert in den Versuchen des Vaters, seine Söhne nach traditionellem Ritus zu verheiraten. Der älteste Sohn Nadir ist bereits im Zorn von zu Hause ausgezogen, die Doppelhochzeit für Tariq und Abdul platzt und Sajid, der Jüngste, verkriecht sich in seinem Parka, den er nie auszieht. Lediglich bei Maneer scheint die väterliche Immigrantenreligiosität und seine Traditionsverliebtheit auf fruchtbaren Boden gefallen zu sein. Ruhender Pol in diesem interkulturellen Schlagabtausch ist Georges englische Ehefrau.
Der britische Erfolgsfilm des Jahres 1999, der mit viel Humor und Wärme das konfliktreiche Dasein der zweiten Generation von MigrantInnen anschaulich macht, basiert auf dem gleichnamigen Bühnenstück von Ayub Khan-Din.
Sa 24.2., 21:30 | Mi 28.2., 19:30