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Abstract
Gurinder Chadha inaugurated her career in 1989 with the documentary film I’m British But … celebrating the South Asian music and dance form of bhangra as symptomatic of a new generation in the wake of the anti‐racist politics and cultural innovation of 1980s Thatcherite Britain. This article suggests that the film’s possibilities go beyond mapping out the reinventions of Asian British youth culture, as it offers more than an archive of the “politics of visibility”. Its aesthetic choices, the dialogue between interviews and bhangra music, and articulation of a historically weighted diasporic consciousness produce meaning that exceed Chadha’s stated intentions. Weaving together personal stories of displacement, love, family and kinship, labor, and hardship, I’m British But … presents the Asian British experience as a melancholic one, where history, memories, and hybridity are imbricated.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Joann Martin and Seema Prabhu for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. They would also like to thank the students in the Fall 2006 first‐year seminar on Black British Literature at Earlham College.
Notes
1. On Black and Asian British films, see Akomfrah; Sawhney; Cieko; Givanni. See also Korte and Sternberg; Bailey et al.
2. Chadha’s films also include A Nice Arrangement (1991), Acting our Age (1991), What Do You Call an Indian Woman Who’s Funny? (1994), What’s Cooking (2000) and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (2010).
3. For a critical look at “Black British”, see Hall, “New Ethnicities” and Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle.
4. “Funky Asian” is the title of a track by the band “Joi Bangla”. For the recent Asian British music scene, see Vivek Renjen‐Bald’s 2003 documentary, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music.
5. See Eng and Han; Cheng; Chang.
6. See also Dudrah; Zuberi.
7. On the British Asian music scene, see Sharma et al.; Hyder.
8. The Inheritance of Loss is the title of a 2006 novel by Kiran Desai. We borrow the term “ghostly presence” from Cheng.
9. For an analysis of the complexity of British Muslim identity, see Werbner.
10. For instance, Chadha surprisingly glosses over the intersection of gender, race, and class in the diasporic experience. Southall was also the site of the feminist organization Southall Black Sisters – a history at odds with one the two Bhangra beat DJs’ description of “our Asian girls’” re‐appropriation of “traditional Asian clothing”. Nor is the gendering of bhangra – a traditional masculine form of dancing – mentioned. Moreover, bhangra is specific to a particular region and community, not a “pan‐Asian” cultural form. See also Zuberi 250; Bakrania 215–43.