Racialized masculinities and postcolonial critique in contemporary British Asian male‐authored texts

Abstract

This article begins with a discussion of Hanif Kureishi’s intervention in redefining configurations of racialized masculinity in relation to queer desire and class in his path‐breaking screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette (1986), via the inter‐racial gay romance between Omar, an ambitious mixed‐race British Asian and his white, working‐class former schoolmate Johnny. My discussion then turns to the ways in which younger writers, Gautam Malkani and Nadeem Aslam, revisit and rework these earlier models of racialized masculinity. It examines a range of identity markers in British Asian fiction since Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette, focusing on the ways in which race, class, masculinity and religion intersect, and are represented through one another in selected primary texts. The article concludes that these shifting constructions of racialized masculinities suggest that religious identity cannot be subsumed under categories of gender and ethnicity and nation.

Keywords:

• masculinity
• gender
• religion
• race/ethnicity
• British Asian

Notes

1. The discursive construct of “race” operates biologically as a visible signifier of difference, however much it may be defined as, or substituted with, ethnicity. Race is deployed in terms of the various effects of this discursive formation. Ethnicity refers to the politically and culturally constructed nature of identity.

2. Critics question Kureishi’s own claim that this body of work articulates a new trend of “changing male attitude to relationships and children”. Bart Moore‐Gilbert argues that Intimacy (1998) reveals an anti‐feminist agenda wish for “a reassertion of traditional forms of patriarchal masculinity” (173–74; see also Ranasinha 111).

3. These representations led a contemporary Asian reviewer to complain that My Beautiful Laundrette portrayed Asians as “sex‐crazed” (Jamal 21).

4. See also “The whites will never promote us”, Dad said. “Not an Indian while there is a white man left on the earth. You don’t have to deal with them – they still think they have an Empire when they don’t have two pennies to rub together” (Buddha 24–27).

5. See, for example, Papa’s delight not only in hearing about Chili’s “sexual adventures” but in meeting his conquests (Album 51), his role in encouraging Shahid to take out a local girl and to “touch her down there” (52), Papa's and Chili’s nights of “terrible pleasures” and “love in uniform wager” where “the winner would be the first to fuck a nurse, traffic warden and policewoman” (156–57). Similarly, father's and son’s sexual adventures are blurred in the scenes in The Buddha of Suburbia where Haroon has sex with his white mistress Eva, while upstairs Karim experiences his first teenage homosexual experience with Eva’s son Charlie (Buddha 15–17).

6. In my book I have suggested some of ways in which Kureishi’s works structurally and thematically privilege masculinity and male–male relations and thus marginalize and define female subjectivity in problematic ways (Ranasinha 48–49).

7. The searing scenes with the sex‐workers and their white clients prevent a simplistic contrast between communities, positioning the critique of Muslim men as part of a wider indictment of patriarchal abuse.