darkmatter

Back in the day (well, the seventies and eighties at least), one of
the more puzzling aspects of the 36 bus ride from Lewisham to
Paddington was the nature and frequency of the sectarian banter
aboard. ‘Blubber mout’, ‘Picky head’, ‘Bubu lips’ were the main
offenders but the usual suspects, far from being the expected BOM
(British Movement - the ‘O’ was a target, decades before Public Enemy)
skin candidates from Bermondsey, were almost always British Caribbean
youths. The object of their derision: Africans. The journey, from
south to west London, could take upwards of an hour, and the abuse
would intensify in those areas, like the Queens Road, Peckham, where
there were large African and Caribbean communities living cheek by
jowl.

Courting angst is always an unsettling business but rarely more so than when the flirtation is a salve for other types of meaning. In an age of short termism, where the quick fix is king, there’s something almost quaint about the notion that life can be an artistic process, in motion, incomplete and crucially, imperfect; an apprenticeship to be served whatever the cost. Of course this is pure anachronism when set against the contemporary backdrop of machine tooled MOR pop records and a cast of millions for whom the ultimate act of pop rebellion is to challenge the omniscient X Factor judging panel. And even that small gesture only seems notable through its absence. Hard to imagine a Leona Lewis or Will Young or let’s face it any other aspiring contestant walking up to Simon Cowell, calling him a cunt and then hovering menacingly in his grill until he’s agreed to their demands. Yet that’s precisely what Ian Curtis achieves in a now legendary encounter with Tony Wilson - founder of Factory Records, the kingmaker at Granada TV and therefore Simon Cowell-esque figure bestriding the late 70s Manchester music and cultural scene like a lank haired colossus . It’s also a vignette that’s lovingly recreated in the Anton Corbijn biopic of the life and death of Ian Curtis, ‘Control’, currently on nationwide release.

Review of: Kester Aspden (2007) Nationality: Wog - The Hounding of David Oluwale, London: Jonathan Cape

This is an important, even ‘must-read’ book for anyone interested in the history of crime in the UK, especially if that crime has racial horror hovering all over it. ‘Race’ was ‘hovering’ because, during the trial of the two Leeds’ police officers accused of abusing and killing the Nigerian vagrant David Oluwale in April 1969, ‘race’ was never an explicit issue.

Review of: Tejaswini Niranjana (2006) Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. London: Duke University Press.

Review can be read at anti-babel. (Due to copyright restrictions, this article can only appear on the reviewer’s own website).

Review of: Infidel: My Life (2007), Free Press.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has hurled herself violently into the eye of the storm with her polemical pronouncements on the threat of political Islam, the dangers of multi-culturalism and the need for tight immigration control. She came to international prominence in 2004 after the murder of Theo van Gogh, her collaborator on a short film about Islam, was murdered by a religious extremist. Her memoir, Infidel, covers her upbringing as the daughter of a rebel leader during Siad Barre’s regime in Somalia, the family’s moves to Saudi Arabia and Kenya amid civil war and her ruthless self-reinvention from bogus asylum-seeker and devout Muslim to Dutch MP and Infidel.

A Review of: N. Ali, V. Kalra & S. Sayyid (eds) (2005) A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain. London: Hurst.

In Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, the last sentence of the book urges that we must seek “a reconciliation between reality and men [sic], between description and explanation, between object and knowledge”.1 I feel this fitting of A Postcolonial People, a narrative which fulfils Barthes very objective; this volume of essays challenges the myths about South Asians which have prevailed and become internalised within a racialized discourse.

Review of: Gautam Malkani (2007) Londonstani, HarperPerennial; and Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal (2006) Tourism, Vintage.

With last year’s protests surrounding the filming of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane the debate on authenticity and representation yet again reared its head. It seems a shame that novels produced by anyone of ‘ethnic’ descent are reduced to these racialised discussions but sometimes framing texts within such discourses is unavoidable. This is particularly the case with two debut novels published by British Asian authors over the past year: Londonstani by Gautam Malkani and Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once wrote that “the American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies” by which he meant that the experience of visiting a U.S. city itself is one that is produced directly by experiencing it at the cinema first. Any tourist who has seen the steam rising from manhole covers in new York as yellow cabs roll over them or have dared to negotiate Los Angeles freeways or have even stood by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco will know the feelings to which Baudrillard is referring - a confusing mixture of stored memory-images and bodily affect that can leave the tourist reeling, such is the intoxicating power of celluloid America

I blame Yinka Shonibare MBE. I would never have got into a row with the director of the Musee de Quai Branly over ‘the colour’ of his workforce if it hadn’t been for the British Nigerian artist. In fact I probably would never have set foot in a French cultural institution housing non-western ethnographic collections, if I hadn’t been lured there by an new installation by an artist of Shonibare’s stature.

Review of Gayatri Gopinath (2005) Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public, Duke Unvirsity Press.
Welcome to Gayatri World, a place of many myriad shining surfaces in which the globe is shrunk wrap into theoretically dazzling snippets of books, films and music. Like the infamous, ‘Its a Small World Ride’ at Disney World, Gopinath’s book collapses all geography under the guise of public culture.

This is a review of Matt Wray (2006) Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, Duke University Press.

Coming to prominence over the last decade, the critical study of whiteness has proven a welcome addition to the interdisciplinary study of race and racism. Aimed at identifying and decentring the hitherto unnamed axis of racial normativity, the field of whiteness studies has helped to construct interpretations of race that highlight its equal significance to both the racialized and racializing. While, as Matt Wray rightly argues, scholars of whiteness have been adept at dealing with questions of white power and privilege, they have been less successful when tackling ideas of whiteness defined not by supremacy, but relative disadvantage. It is in his desire to explore such non-dominant conceptions of white identity that Wray has written this historical sociology of ‘poor white trash’.

Review of Anthony C. Alessandrini (ed) (1998) Franz Fanon - Critical Perspectives, Routledge.1

Since his untimely death at the age of 36 in 1961, the Martinician-born psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon has become something of a looming spectre in radical Black politics. From Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power militancy to Homi Bhaba’s postcolonial poetics, Fanon’s name has been constantly invoked in charged debates or to animate wider political and intellectual concerns. Unsurprisingly, his writings still stir antagonisms but with a recent collection of essays on Fanon, the metropolitan academia in the US and to a lesser extent, Britain, exhume a contentious legacy.

East is East has been hailed the British comedy hit of 1999. If the media response is anything to go by, this film has been a run away success:1

A clear audience favorite with the kind of audience reaction which hasn’t been seen since The Full Monty (The Guardian).

Fresh, frank, impudent and self-mocking, it marks a giant leap over the threshold of multicultural casting and ethnic British cinema (Evening Standard).

…but make no mistake, this very English comedy is rooted in snobbery, hypocrisy, dogma, poverty and racism … when it’s hurting, you can only laugh (Time Out).