Rehana Ahmed

Occluding Race in Selected Short Fiction by Hanif Kureishi

Critics commenting on Hanif Kureishi’s earlier fiction have rightly focused on his attempts to explode hegemonic notions of a monoracial Britain as a vital aspect of his work. In his powerful 1986 essay ‘The Rainbow Sign’, Kureishi himself overtly states the need for a redefinition of Britishness (Dreaming 55). His early screenplays and first novel must be placed within their historical moment of Margaret Thatcher’s government and the monocultural vision of Britain that underwrote her policies and rhetoric on immigration and race. My concern here is largely to explore some of Kureishi’s more recent short fiction which, I suggest, should be read in the context of the multiculturalist neo-liberalism that has come to shape Britain’s normative culture increasingly since the mid1990s. Thatcher’s much cited speech of May 1978 in which she spoke of immigrants ‘swamping’ Britain (redolent of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, a defining moment in Kureishi’s own politicisation) and the Falklands war, with its accompanying rhetoric of nostalgia for empire, helped to strengthen the identification of Britishness with an exclusionary whiteness and to construct Britain’s minorities as a threat to the cohesion and well-being of the nation (Kureishi Dreaming, 27 /9). The tightening of immigration controls, particularly through the British Nationality Act of 1981, eroded the rights of non-white Commonwealth citizens to enter Britain; and an increasingly coercive authoritarian state targeted minorities through highly repressive police tactics (Solomos 59 /60; McLeod 130). The 1990s, and particularly the election of a Labour government in 1997, saw a partial shift to a more inclusive notion of Britishness. Tony Blair’s government’s commissioning of the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence which declared Britain’s police force ‘institutionally racist’ can be seen as a significant marker of this shift (Back et al np). In cultural terms, fashion, food, film, music, fiction and visual art produced by members of Britain’s minority communities have become increasingly legitimised within the mainstream and ‘multiculturalism’ now occupies a central position in the state’s hegemonic discourse. Examples include Monica Ali’s highly successful 2003 novel Brick Lane and the music of Nitin Sawhney, featured in the BBC 2007 Proms. There is, however, a striking discrepancy between an apparent endorsement of cultural diversity and the disadvantage which disproportionate numbers of minority Britons continue to experience, such as the high proportions of long-term unemployed Black British men and of African Caribbean and mixed race children in social care; or that seventy per cent of British Pakistani and Bangladeshi children live in poverty (Modood et al 180; Alibhai-Brown 162 /63; Bunting). While Thatcher’s politics combined an exclusionary, racialised British nationalism with an economic neoliberalism, New Labour has integrated multiculturalism into a neo-liberal economy, and cultural difference and hybridity have become exploitable commodities in a globalised market. Thus British subjects can be individualised and equalised, regardless of their race, while their structural position within society, shaped partially by their race, can be occluded. The public sphere is ‘not culturally, religiously, or ethnically blind’; a liberalism that proclaims its neutrality and the equality of subjects within it can, therefore, ‘act to buttress the privileged position of the historically integrated folk cultures at the expense of the historically subordinated or newly migrated folk’ (Modood Multicultural Politics, 132 /4). Furthermore, a symbolic appreciation of cultural diversity can work to screen these inequalities. So it may be argued that the images of multi-ethnic children used to market east London as the location for the 2012 Olympic Games obscured the material realities of the working class minority communities who live in Rehana Ahmed

“I’ll explain what I can”: A conversation with Avaes Mohammad

Since the 2001 race riots in Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham and the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, British Muslims have been subjected to increased levels of suspicion and hostility. In particular, the spotlight has shone on working-class South Asian Muslim communities in the north of England, which have been accused of “self-segregation” and constructed as alienated from and posing a threat to “Britishness”. Racial divisions and tensions have been problematically blamed on the “failure” of multiculturalism; commentators from the left and right of the political spectrum have claimed multiculturalist practice and policies have encouraged too much diversity, thereby obstructing integration, while social factors such as poverty, disenfranchisement, racism, and “white flight” have been obscured or at best downplayed.1 As news stories of young British Muslim men joining extremist organizations at home or abroad continue to circulate, the communities’ male youth remain particularly susceptible to Islamophobic stereotyping and profiling. In this interview, performance poet and playwright Avaes Mohammad discusses the ways his work engages with this fraught political context. Our conversation begins by considering his experience of growing up in a racially divided northern English town in the 1980s and 1990s, before turning to the impact of the events of 2001 on his life and art. We discuss the role art can play in politics, and the part faith can play in art, before focusing on specific representations in his plays of young British Muslims held at Guantánamo Bay, divided working-class communities in the north of England, and young men — both Muslim and white — drawn to different kinds of extremism. Finally, we explore the racial and social exclusions of the creative arts, and the reception of Mohammad’s work.

South Asians Writing Resistance in Wartime London: Indian Writing (1940–1942)

The title of the magazine Indian Writing (IW), edited by four South Asian writeractivists Iqbal Singh, Ahmed Ali, Krishnarao Shelvankar and Alagu Subramaniam in wartime London suggests both its nationalist leanings and its diasporic location. Based at the Indian-run Bibliophile Bookshop at 16 Little Russell Street, just a stone’s throw from the British Museum, the magazine comprised short pieces of fiction and non-fiction and book reviews by South Asians predominantly. Among its primary aims, articulated in the editorial of its first issue, were to publish literature ‘alive with the realities of to-day’, to ‘interpret’ the ‘cultural implications’ of ‘the awakening of India’ and to bring the work of ‘significant Indian writers before a larger international audience’ (IW 1: 3 4). While it claimed to inhabit a space between ‘the rostrum and the ivory tower’ with its combination of the literary and the political, much of its content expressed the editors’ anti-colonialism (IW 2: 67). Thus, it brought South Asian literature and culture and the struggle for independence to the heart of the imperial metropolis. In this respect, Indian Writing was by no means unique. In fact, it could be seen as just one node of a literary-political network that extended across and connected British, South Asian and other colonial writers, intellectuals and activists in and around the publishing houses, public halls and student haunts in central London in the early twentieth century. Just a glance inside the covers of the five issues of this short-lived magazine, plagued by the shortage of paper and other economic constraints of wartime Britain, is suggestive of such a leftist, cosmopolitan sphere of cultural production. On display are advertisements for: the British periodical Life and Letters To-day featuring an article by the Indian film director, writer and journalist Khwaja Ahmad Abbas; renowned editor Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon; and actress and writer Beatrix Lehmann’s Our Time. Notices for publishing companies Lawrence & Wishart, Lindsay Drummond and Allen & Unwin highlight their Indian titles: Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud (which shares an advertisement with John Lehmann’s New Writing); Jawaharlal Nehru’s Glimpses of World History; and Raja Rao and Iqbal Singh’s anthology Changing India. The Charing Cross-based radical bookshop Collet’s (location of the Left Review) and New Books (‘the best left wing bookshop in London’) share the margins of the magazine with its own Bibliophile bookshop, as well as with an Indian food shop in London, Leicester Square’s Dildar Indian Restaurant, and a travel agent catering for Indian students on Bloomsbury Way. This snapshot is indicative of a significant infiltration by South Asian writers and their politics of the metropolis of Empire and, in particular, of its cultural world of books and magazines (Making Britain Database; Nasta, Home Truths Ch. 1; Ranasinha 15 39; Blair). Perhaps best known among the key South Asian figures who inhabited this sphere is the writer Mulk Raj Anand, who contributed a short story and reviews to Indian Writing. His metropolitan literary and political journey has been well documented * from his early writings on art and literature; through his establishment as a novelist with Wishart’s 1935 publication of Untouchable, and the string of novels and ardently anti-imperial writings that followed; to his role as broadcaster for the BBC Eastern Service under the directorship of George Orwell (Anand; Bluemel Ch. 2; Cowasjee; Nasta, ‘Between’ and ‘Negotiating’). Anand also worked as an editor for Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, the company that in 1940 published Twilight in Delhi, Rehana Ahmed