Situating Citizen Khan: Shifting representations of Asians onscreen and the outrage industry in the social media age

Abstract

This article looks at the way that British Asians have been portrayed in UK postwar popular culture historically concentrating on onscreen representations and considers these alongside academic analyses coming up to date with the much remarked on BBC1 television situation comedy Citizen Khan of Autumn 2012. It is argued that whilst we have witnessed a shift from popular cultural examples that construct Asians by substituting them within pre-existing broadcasting formats to what could be termed self-depictions by Asian writers themselves, the word “Asian” has itself unravelled under the weight of heightened religious and national assertiveness. More profound still has been the growth in scale and extent of new media allowing a new cultural politics of representation which now empowers the (mis)represented to respond to their portrayal in mainstream media in a way that the consumers and producers of earlier cultural products could not have imagined was possible.

Notes

1. Deepak Verma who played one half of the Asian Kapoor couple in East Enders from 1988–1991 condemned the Masoods as a ‘two-dimensional, ill-conceived Asian family’ with ‘stupid clothes and stupid accents’ in a 2009 Evening Standard article: see ‘Ex-EastEnder blasts soap's portrayal of Asian characters’, 20 July 2009, http://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/exeastender-blasts-soaps-portrayal-of-asian-characters-6792766.html.

2. See http://www.facebook.com/CitizenKhan1?ref = ts&fref = ts (Pro CK) and http://www.facebook.com/CitizenKhanIsMakingAMockeryOfPakistanAndIslam/info for the anti-CK group