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Hybridity as a Cultural Strategy and a Political Ideal in Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2008, 21(3), pp.71-95
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

KIM, YOO 1

1성균관대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The idea of hybridity has been central to the recent debates on postcolonial identity. The concept that the negotiations among diverse cultural elements produce the “third space” of identity, challenges any binary opposition based on cultural purity. However, this political aspect of hybridization has been questioned since the hybridized identities have not changed the existing social hierarchies. Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette, a critical exploration of British Asian identity in the 1980s, investigates the issue of whether ‘in-betweenness’ of a Pakistani community is capable of challenging the power relations including racial, gender and class inequalities. Kureishi does not present the British Asian experience as stabilized and monolithic, disclosing the contradictory nature of cultural formations of the immigrant community. The film expresses some serious doubts about the politically subversive ability of hybridized subjects, focusing specifically on the way that the Pakistani characters discard their racial identities. The developing homosexual relationship between Omar, a hybridized subject between the British and Pakistan culture, and Johnny, an ex-racist white working-class lad, seems to subvert ethnic boundaries, rejecting essentialist identities. The reversed image of a white man working for a British Asian, however, fails to fundamentally challenge economic repression and social hierarchy, raising doubts about the subversive potential of the celebratory hybridization theory. Most of all, Omar’s ruthless exploitation of the Thatcherite ethos questions whether he arrived at the “empowering condition of hybridity” as Bhabha calls it. The laundrette itself is not presented as a Utopian space where ethnic and sexual boundaries are broken down but a strong metaphor for the difficulty in challenging the consumerism of Britain in the 1980s.

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