Abstract
It has b een three decades since the release of My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, a financially modest film written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears , whose international box-office success took its own makers by surprise. Set in economically challenged and racially restless London during the peak of the Thatcher era, with a young British Asian man as its main protagonist, the film came out only a few years before the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and all its attendant controversies. These polemical events, now commonly known as the ‘Rushdie affair’ , have constituted the foundational moment of British Muslim identity as a political category. Pitted against such a dire watershed, I propose My Beautiful Laundrette (henceforth Laundrette) as a more invigorating seminal representation of the subcontinental Muslim diaspora’s fortunes in Britain. The film has gradually achieved iconic status as a galvanising representation of diasporic experience in the UK, and, specifically, of British national identity and its tensions with issues of class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Tellingly, Gayatri Gopinath opens her study Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures with an analysis of Laundrette, and, most recently, Sadia Abbas examines Laundrette in the initial chapter of At Freedom’s Limit : Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament, focusing on Islam’s role in British race relations. Both texts help to confirm the film’s iconic status as a foundational narrative of South Asian diasporic and queer experience. In their book Framing Muslims : Stereotyping and Representation Since 9/11, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin urgently prompt: ‘The crucial question being asked is whether cultural difference can be harmonized and a multicultural society created or sustained, or whether the experiment of respecting and attempting politically to include identity positions with values that may jar with those of the majority is a doomed enterprise’. As I argue here, Laundrette attempts to answer this question in an affirmative manner, paving the way towards a more multicultural understanding of Britain as a nation by pushing against socially enforced ethnic boundaries and through the strategic deployment of queerness.
This research has been undertaken with the sponsorship of a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (Ref. No. ECF-2014-067).
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Notes
- 1.
The polemic surrounding The Satanic Verses ha s left a clear imprint on Kureishi’s work. In ‘The Word and the Bomb ’, Kureishi asserts that ‘[t]he Rushdie case remains instructive. In the end it is Islam itself which suffers from the repudiation of more sensual and dissident ideas of itself’ (Kureishi 2005: 11). Kureishi ’s second novel, The Black Album , set in London in 1989, follows the movements of the diffident British Muslim Shahid Hasan , who becomes involved, and eventually disenchanted, with a group of politically active Muslims who condemn the publication of Rushdie’s novel. Kureishi ’s narrative features its own book-burning scene mirroring similar historical events involving The Satanic Verses. ‘Bradford’ (Kureishi 2005: 75–80) features Kureishi’s visit to the Northern British city, and what he perceived as a hub of Islamist sentiment subsequently informed his post-Rushdie and post-Gulf War short story ‘My Son the Fanatic’ (Kureishi 2010: 116–127) and his eponymous adaptation of it to film released in 1997. As a self-declared atheist of Muslim ethnic heritage, Kureishi’s relationship with Islam remains ambivalent: he can passionately defend freedom of speech against Islamic offence and condemn Islamic fundamentalism, whilst castigating racial profiling of Muslims and Western interventionism in Muslim-majority countries. Due to his British upbringing and his distance from Muslim ideologies, Kureishi ’s cultural position can be a double-edged sword most sharply deployed in his creative work, while his essays betray a not too sophisticated understanding of Islam and an eagerness to embrace the legacies of Enlightenment.
- 2.
These include David Lean ’s remarkably free adaptation of E. M. Forster ’s A Passage to India , the film version of M. M. Kaye ’s The Fa r Pavilions, and ITV’s grand adaptation of Paul Scott ’s The Raj Quartet , The Jewel in the Crown . Rushdie’s astringent reservations about films and TV series produced in the 1980s and set in the Indian colonial past are articulated in his famous essay ‘Outside the Whale ’, collected in Imaginary Homelands , where he observes that ‘the British Raj, after three and a half decades in retirement, has been making a sort of comeback’ (Rushdie 1992: 87). Bart Moore-Gilbert offers a perceptive reading of Laundrette as a response to this Raj-Revivalist cultural trend and to the popular genre of ‘heritage film’, although such analysis is sometimes undertaken at the expense of oversimplifying the work of other independent production companies, such as Merchant-Ivory . The equally independently produced and class conscious A Room with a View , produced by the postcolonial team of Ismail Merchant , James Ivory , and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala , released in 1985, also features Daniel Day-Lewis , in a critique of the biases and exclusions of the British class system during the Edwardian period.
- 3.
According to Moore-Gilbert , Kureishi ’s films aim to ‘counter a more specific manifestation of the New Right’s assault on “permissiveness”, its desire to curb homosexuality’ (Moore-Gilbert 2001: 87), and he lists Thatcher’s failure, fuelled by the AIDS crisis, to bring homosexual age of consent in par with its heterosexual counterpart and the discouragement of discussions of homosexuality enforced through the gagging Section 28, part of the Local Governments Act of 1988, which forbade the public ‘promotion’ of homosexuality.
- 4.
Kureishi ’s use of irony ensures that his critique is neither too acerbic nor victimising. His most salient use of irony in Laundrette involves an inversion of imperialism. John Hill argues that ‘a part of the film’s strategy is to use the business success of the Asian characters to invert old imperial power relations’ (1999: 210). In addition, Bradley Buchanan suggests that ‘[i]rony is Kureishi ’s most reliable trope, and he evinces scepticism about the capacity of any group or ideology to effect lasting or meaningful change’ (Buchanan 2007: 14).
- 5.
One of the film’s original American reviewers, Rita Kempley , concurs with those critics who question the film’s veracity, when she observes that ‘[t]he two men fall in love in this heady atmosphere of suds and soap; their heads spin like the clothes in a tub. It all seems to come out of nowhere’ (Kempley 1986: 25; my italics). According to Kempley and other like-minded commentators, the relationship between Omar, a mixed-race British man, and Johnny, a white Briton who formerly supported the National Front, would seem, at best, unexpected, and, at worst, improbable. However, their liaison mirrors that of Kureishi himself with one of his friends earlier in life, ‘who became Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette’ (Kureishi 2002: 26), with an added element of ‘wishing’. In an interview with Susie Thomas , Kureishi declares: ‘You might say that one of the most important parts of you is your wishing, your desire, and in your writing there might be a lot of wishing’ (Thomas 2007: 11). However, as I propose earlier, the film’s intentions reach beyond mimesis and social realism.
- 6.
Rahul. K. Gairo la’s analysis of this scene is particularly insightful: ‘This scene is especially significant if we consider its framing. Frears situates the two men in the foreground of a one-way mirror looking out into the laundrette, where Nasser and his mistress Rachel are dancing to a waltz. Behind Rachel and Nasser, a crowd of working class locals eagerly awaits the laundrette’s grand opening. Frears maps out the boys in the foreground having sex in the backroom upon the image of Nasser and Rachel kissing on the other side of the one-way mirror. This shooting technique not only humanises both couples using close-ups and soft colours but suggests that both modes of eroticism are equally transgressive in the face of the heteronormativity that drives Thatcher’s economic liberalism’ (Gairola 2009: 45).
- 7.
Gairola usefully notes that ‘[i]n South Asian culture, the term “aunty” does not literally denote one’s blood-aunt. Rather, it is a gentile colloquialism used to address elder women who are family friends or to express a respectful familiarity’ (Gairola 2009: 53n).
- 8.
Paul Gilro y’s seminal study There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack draws critical attention to Powell ’s highly polarising political rhetoric. Gilroy has stated that Powell’s ethnocentric position constructs ‘black presence […] as a problem or threat against which a homogenous, white, national “we” could be unified’ (Gilroy 1987: 48). In ‘The Rainbow Sign’ , Kureishi himself confesses the negative effect that Powell ’s speeches had on him as a teenager, which made him feel ashamed of his South Asian heritage, since ‘[t]he word “Pakistani” had been made into an insult. It was a word I didn’t want to be used about myself. I couldn’t tolerate being myself’ (Kureishi 2002: 28).
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Fernández Carbajal, A. (2018). Powders Revisited: Queer Micropolitical Disorientation, Phenomenology, and Multicultural Trust in Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette . In: Yaqin, A., Morey, P., Soliman, A. (eds) Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71309-0_10
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