Black British/ British Asian diaspora screen media

This special focus of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing explores the impact of the digital revolution that increasingly defines the current global era. As was claimed recently in The Guardian in a comment on “the fractured ecosystem” caused by high competition: “We’re in a media consumption age” (Cragg 2024, 42–43). More specifically, this focus enquires into the effects of the virtual technologies on the production, reception, and dissemination of contemporary Black British/British Asian diaspora visual culture, while also tracing the ways that diaspora communities are able to release new cultural energies and empower minority positions by utilizing global processes to mobilize creative practices across national borders. The work represented here emerges from questions about how the new types of virtual connectivity and exchange implemented by the new technologies have affected TV and film-making practices as well as audience reception and what the implications might be for changing patterns of consumption.

The six articles gathered in this issue have their origins in the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded Diaspora Screen Media Network, a project designed, coordinated, and managed by myself, Professor Rajinder Dudrah (Birmingham City University), and Dr David Simmons (University of Northampton) that aimed to study the impact of the changes in provision of access to media screen culture enabled by the electronic technologies. The field of exemplification was the cultural production of the Black British/British Asian diasporas both in their present moment and in their historical underpinnings. The project was hosted by the University of Northampton and Birmingham City University, and its activities and outcomes are recorded on the network’s website which also includes a bibliography, an exhibition of memorabilia, and a series of blogs on a wide range of topics relevant to the network (https://www.bcu.ac.uk/media/research/research-groups/creative-industries/research-projects/diaspora-screen-media-network).

The research enquiry coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, a time when the use of virtual technology expanded exponentially to meet the demands of lockdowns, university closures, and working from home; communication and connectivity were sustained, overcoming isolation, through a multiplication of online platforms like Zoom and Skype and the increased use of the new social media. The technological advances brought about by Covid-19 had the effect of increasing virtual spaces and communities of participation worldwide, giving greater voice to minority groups and diasporic populations. These impacts reinforced the “digital turn” (Stierstorfer and Wilson 2017, 244) of the contemporary media environment which is responsible for “the fundamentally changing landscape of today’s social interactions, citizenship, power, control, culture and eventually, life” (Westera 2013, 6), and has ushered in digital nomadism (Alonso and Oiarzabal [2010] 2017, 250), and the “online migrant”, a figure of mobility (Nedelcu 2019, 241).

The project foregrounded this interest in the changing cycles of production, dissemination, and reception effected by the new mechanisms: the social networks and apps such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and online delivery platforms of Web 2.0 websites for streaming services like Netflix, BritBox, BBC iPlayer, and spuul.com. The individual enquiries can be read through the multiple genealogies of the postcolonial digital humanities, a field that exists “in the flexible spaces between ‘digital’ and ‘humanities’” (Risam 2019, 15) where the relationship between postcolonial studies and the electronic media can be explored (10). In the articles in this special focus, familiar postcolonial issues of representation, race, and power are applied to contemporary media texts through the disciplinary frameworks of gender, film, and cultural studies. The critics respond to the digital transformation by discussing changing film-making practices, such as the visual aesthetics enabled by digitization, extended actor participation, new working practices such as blind colour casting, and heightened audience interaction.

A significant framework of interpretation has been the visual awareness of a “glocal imaginary” emerging from the dialectic between local communities and the global media. Glocalization, along with the transnationalization and cosmopolitanization of social structures, helps to define the new phase of global change that is transforming cultural production according to Mihaela Nedelcu (2019). This stage is mobilized by the enhanced use of information communication technologies (ICT) to enter various transnational dynamics and develop “consciousness of a global feeling” (247). Muzna Rahman in her article identifies this in terms of the local/global, sometimes volatile aspects of Muslim belief that exist in tension with and disturb the unchanging principles of a global Islamic discourse. Complementing the glocal imaginary and of relevance for relocated communities is the concept of “digital diasporas” (Alonso and Oiarzabal [2010] 2017, 250–251); that is, the electronic pathways that enable the creation and linking up of online communities in space that nevertheless retain strong ties to their nations of origin. In visual terms the digital diaspora is identified with the “accented cinema” (Naficy 2001) of the diasporic film-maker, in which homelands are re-imagined in the deterritorialized space alongside narratives of the society of relocation. These influences on the glocal imaginary of the Black British/British Asian dispersed communities, reinforced by their increased visibility in virtual space, can be seen in the TV miniseries Next of Kin (Chadwick and Childs 2018) and the crime drama series directed by Euros Lyn (2018), Kiri.

The cultural production of diaspora communities everywhere, and especially in the west, has benefitted from the dynamic movement and exchanges in cyberspace enabled by the new technologies. Diaspora cinema, according to Daniela Berghann (2019), can be seen as a type of transnational cinema, because it offers a global perspective on the varied dissemination methods that cross national borders. The visual texts used as case studies in these articles are also read in terms of the historical positioning of Black British/British Asian visual cultural production within the British context. At first appearing as marginal or tangential to the mainstream of the anglosphere, by the 1980s this visual culture was beginning to challenge the equation of Englishness with whiteness through the structures of hybridity, multiplicity, and plurality. The contemporary changes in media culture introduced by virtual technologies can be read retrospectively in relation to the contestatory Black film-making that marked the avant-garde Black cinema of the mid-1980s. Films like John Akomfrah’s (1986) Handsworth Songs, and Isaac Julien’s (1986) Passion of Remembrance and documentary Territories (Julien 1984) appeared at a time when “Black” emerged as a political term of approbation (as in the slogan “Black is Beautiful”), defining a more assertive political voice. This rhetorical, political upsurge was driven by the experience of the second and third generations of diaspora writers and film-makers, children of migrants, who had little first-hand experience of their parents’ country of origin, but for whom “the memory of migrant and dispersal is mediated through oral history, family photos and home videos” (Berghann 2019, 80). From this dual habitation of an imaginary homeland and real-life experiences in the country of residence they began to create their own discourse by appropriating and creolizing the dominant referential codes: film critic Kobena Mercer ([1988] 2017) at the end of the decade defined a dialogic tendency in articulating the complexity and heterogeneity of Black Britishness.

Many of the presentations in the Diaspora Screen Media project referred to this defining period when the film and media industries established a hybrid diasporic presence, promoted a difference of representation, and created new audiences. The popular successes of landmark films such as Stephen Frears’s (1985) My Beautiful Laundrette from the script by second-generation British Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi, Damien O’Donnell’s (1999) film East is East, Sharat Sardana’s (2001–2006) comic TV series The Kumars at No 42, and Gurinder Chadha’s (2002) film Bend It Like Beckham found a distinctive subject matter in the migrant family and their experiences; collectively, the marginalized voice evolved into one more inflected by humour, irony, and an ability to intersect with the mainstream. The legacy of the work on critical race theory of cultural theorist Stuart Hall in articulating this sea change is acknowledged in different ways throughout this special focus. Hall recognized the crucial importance of visual culture for representation, saying that since identity is constructed “not outside but within representation”, so cinema is therefore “able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects (Hall 2003, 245, cited by Berghann 2019, 83). Indeed, in the opening article Anamik Saha reassesses Hall’s claim, made in his key essay “New Ethnicities”, that the pioneering era of the 1980s was an end of innocence, arguing that, despite the gains in media technology that are transforming this century’s media landscape, the “politics of representation”, as Hall defined it then, still remain key to film-making when it comes to considering race relations. The diaspora perspective with its vibrant affirmation of difference and minoritarianism through pluralism and contradiction was at that time valued for sustaining a separatist oppositional position, according to Mercer (2017), and its “potential to expose and illuminate the sheer heterogeneity of the diverse social forces always repressed into the margin by the monologism of dominant discourses” (207). Yet as Elvan Zabunyan (2005) points out, it can be seen that Mercer’s model still situates identity and difference within the binary of mainstream and margins (220). This political position has also been deconstructed: from the perspective of the contemporary globalized screen media, the deterritorialized world of cyberspace, and multi-axial movements that traverse national borders.

Yet this resistant dimension of Black British and British Asian visual culture, by which it defined itself in relation to the mainstream, provided “places from which to speak” (Hall 2003, 245, cited by Berghann 2019, 83), even as global transcultural perspectives began to open up a more comic, allusively ironic, anti-realist, self-reflective mode. This shift within diaspora cultural production has been concurrent with expanded access to mass media enabled by the new digital compression technologies and Ku band satellites that allow for greater synchronization between the country of habitation and that of origin (Nedelcu 2019, 244), and manifests in heightened synergies within the local/global marketplace with innovative forms of cultural exchange, such as crowdsourcing, social networking, and the digitization of media texts. Through the new techniques of digitization in film-making, monolithic and stereotypical representations of national identity are renegotiated, as Damini Kulkarni shows in her article on Indian American films. She points out that the familiar song-and-dance routines of Bollywood become strategic ways of resisting and interrupting the films’ dominant American narrative, so shifting the burden of difference by hyperlinking elements of western culture into Indianness.

The digital revolution has highlighted diaspora as a field which traditionally stands to gain from the new technologies that have enabled community formations across national and political boundaries to the point where the Internet diaspora exists on a global scale (Stierstorfer and Wilson 2017, 245). Alonso and Oiarzabal define the Web 2.0 world of the Internet as the “info-sphere” functioning as “a postnational or global media” configuration beyond national boundaries that creates “a deterritorialized space or cyberspace” ([2010] 2017, 249) allowing diasporas (and their cultural production) to function as “globally imagined communities”, or even glocal ones, as the “constraints on synchronicity or locality” disappear in the digital world (250). A key text for discussion in the course of the network’s life was Michaela Coel’s (2020) dark comedy drama series for BBC1, I May Destroy You, in which the question of sexual consent is triggered by a rape scenario and smartphones link up the participants of ethnically mixed communities. The success of the series shows how the entertainment industries of the Black British and British Asian cultures are exploiting these new spaces by challenging the binary positioning of indigenous/native and diaspora/stranger, and allowing a move away from confrontation and resistance to a mainstream norm, by mingling tropes, accents, and voices of their own diction in assimilation from the mainstream to the “Other”, rather than rehearsing confrontation between the mainstream and margins.

Anamik Saha opens this special focus with “Return to Innocence? Diaspora Screen Media and ‘New Ethnicities’ in the Moment of Diversity”, an article that returns to a key moment in the struggle for recognition by the Black British diaspora. He turns to Stuart Hall’s essay “New Ethnicities” published in 1988. Hall’s term “politics of representation”, and advocacy of a new “critical politics, politics of criticism” (1988, 28) in race relations that signalled the end of “inocence”, Saha claims, was in fact premature. He sees that the project has stalled, for despite widened access to representation enabled by new technologies, the movement has been impeded by racial neo-liberalism and the ascendancy of diversity values in the media industries. Pointing out that the essay is important for Hall’s methodology in textual analyses of race relations and diaspora screen media, Saha argues that the current climate of neo-liberal assent is in fact a regression to the pre-New Ethnicities mode of representation.

Rajinder Dudrah, by contrast, in “Live and Let Live: The Black 007 in No Time To Die”, focuses on the gains made in representation of racial difference and the much debated and controversial possibility of a Black James Bond. His subject is the 25th Bond film, No Time To Die, which features a Black 007, Nomi, played by Black British actress Lashana Lynch. Dudrah refers to another landmark essay by Hall (1996), in which Hall asks about the kinds of colonizer/colonized difference that might occur in terms of politics and subject formation In his review of the chequered representation of race relations in the Bond franchise from its beginnings in 1964, Dudrah points out that Bond’s essentialist white male “Britishness dominates the franchise’s relationship to the ‘other’”; but Nomi’s (the Black 007’s) “no nonsense” anti-romanticism is relatable to the movie’s post-Me Too and Time’s Up on-screen moment and so confirms the franchise’s malleability in adopting to “continuously changing norms, values, ideologies, and practices”. No Time to Die, Dudrah concludes, represents a new beginning, because Bond’s death allows “for the resurrection of a new kind of 007”, one that might shape meaningful representations of race, gender, and Black Britishness appropriate to late-modern Britain as a potential answer to Hall’s questions about difference.

In the third article, Keisha Bruce considers widening representation from the point of view of Black (British) girlhood, a somewhat neglected category in Black feminist scholarship, which to date has largely been concerned with Black women. Using an intersectional approach to exploring Black girlhood experiences of childhood, and drawing on media representations of Black girls as well as their use of the media strategically for self-definition and resilience, she examines depictions of their interiority through world building and care practices in Sarah Gavron’s 2019 film Rocks. Bruce explores how Black (British) girlhood is implicated in the film’s creation, through open casting and contributions of the girls’ own practice, platforming their experience of an affective, embodied system of relationality. Her political intervention includes bracketing the word “British” to signal their problematic national belonging and diasporic connection to other heritages and cultures, and the use of media reviews and interviews with actors, writers, and audiences. Like Saha, Bruce questions the diversity policies of the media/creative industries which have not supported Black girls who need to see themselves and their stories on screen.

Debashrita Dey and Priyanka Tripathi, like Saha and Dudrah, return to the Black British/British Asian diaspora visual culture of the late 1980s and 1990s, in writing on the empowering cinematic portrayals in British Indian films of the Indian actress Zohra Sehgal. Like Keisha Bruce, identifying a gap in screen representation of women, they focus on the concept of ageing, a category which in South Asian culture is constructed in terms of age-specific family roles (such as looking after grandchildren) or types of self-abgenation. Sehgal’s remarkable performances in films directed by Gurinder Chadha, such as Bend it Like Beckham and Bhaji on the Beach, overturn earlier stereotypes of submission and repression through images of positive ageing in performances that exude desire, autonomy, and choice. Dey and Tripathi locate the diaspora as a “space for optimal aging”, when women can adjust to change and strengthen their sense of self by navigating their lives in culturally diverse settings. This paradigm of successful ageing through self-actualization dismantles sexageist norms and centres the older woman as a force in her own right, so recontextualizing the politics of gendered representation and ageing

Intersecting with Bruce’ s work on girlhood, and Dey and Tripathi’s on changing images of the ageing woman, in considering visual culture’s capacity to represent issues of female identity and belonging, is Muzna Rahman’s writing on Muslim punk feminism, “Indigestible Performances: Women, Punk, and the Limits of British Multiculturalism in Nida Mazoor’s We Are Lady Parts” (2021). Rahman focuses on representations of the incompatibility of the religious and cultural beliefs of Muslim communities and contemporary British values in this Channel 4 dramedy TV show. She argues that the glocal, British-inflected Muslim punk feminism of We Are Lady Parts subversively negotiates between sayability and silence in matters of Muslim identity and assimilation to British multiculturalism. Punk is restricted in the show by the religious, national, and political discourses it draws from and its diverse audiences, but punk tactics are analysed by Rahman in four songs of resistance to Muslim codes of behaviour and British overdeterminations of Muslims. While the show challenges orientalist stereotypes of the Muslim female as submissive and oppressed, she concludes, it also questions the possibility of establishing a stable female Muslim identity in British assimilationist, multicultural society.

In the final article, Damini Kulkarni, like Rahman, draws attention to the power of song and musical interludes in film and television, and their expanded representational presence in diasporic narratives, by globalizing particular local, national issues such as those associated with religion, nationality, or romance. Kulkarni turns to the mediation of Bollywood aesthetics in hybridized American Indian films, that are often released on digital platforms and which use techniques of modularity and a digital logics to negotiate ideas of Indianness in order to reduce the burden of cultural difference and reach global audiences. Such modulations of hegemonic ideas of national identity, ofter creating hyphenated identities, are analysed in the song picturizations associated with Bollywood in the Indian American films Spin (2021) and Wedding Season (2022). Referring to these films, Kulkarni claims that diasporic cinema is a significant site for renegotiating national identity.

One new perspective emerging from this special focus is that the glocal imaginary of contemporary Black British/British Asian cultures is increasingly assimilating the local into the global and so resisting a global hegemony. It reflects new ideas of nationhood and citizenship as being unbounded, because diasporas are recreated as “globally imagined communities” (Alonso and Oiarzabal [2010] 2017, 250) with the consequence that key community features – transnationalism, hybridized identities, and cultural exchange – are reinterpreted in their occupancy of the global space of interaction. From another angle, the global presence of the virtual media can be seen as responding more to diasporas both within and beyond national borders and their complex, multi-axial, cross-cultural positioning, as visual culture articulates shared community experiences while communicating and connecting linguistically and thematically beyond its own formal specificities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/S004165/1].

Notes on contributors

Janet M. Wilson

Janet M. Wilson is professor emeritus of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. Her research focuses on the diaspora and postcolonial writing of the settler colonies of Australasia, as well as refugee writing, the global novel, transnationalism, and transculturalism. She recently co-edited New Zealand Medievalism: Reframing the medieval (2024). She is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, co-edits the series Studies in World Literature (Ibidem-Verlag), and is chair of Challenging Precarity: A Global Network. Wilson was Principal Investigator and then Co-Investigator of the AHRC-funded Diaspora Screen Media Network (2019–22).