[In the following essay, Weber examines aspects of ethnicity, cultural identity, and literary practice in Kureishi's fiction and films, particularly in relation to American ethnic writers such as Jewish-American author Philip Roth.]

I want to begin this essay, which seeks to situate the contemporary Pakistani-British novelist/filmmaker Hanif Kureishi in relation to American ethnic expression, with two striking, provocative exchanges. The first is by the distinguished socialist scholar (and editor of the important journal Race and Class), A. Sivanandan, in response to the cosmic questions, posed by Quintin Hoare and Malcolme Imrie, “Do you feel you are in a kind of exile? Where are you at home?” The second is drawn from Kureishi’s recent satirical novel, The Black Album (1995), during a tense moment when the question of “home,” the issue of “belonging,” is engaged by Riaz, the charismatic, Islamic student leader, and Shahid, Kureishi’s young, wickedly honest—and wickedly sarcastic—hero, torn between the appeal of religious orthodoxy and the claims of personal imagination (along with, as always in Kureishi, the urges of an unbridled libido). Listen, first, to Dr. Sivanandan:

I am at home in myself; and myself is all these experiences, cultures, value-systems that I have gone through. I don’t consider myself an exile because I would have to ask myself then what am I exiled from. I may be in the literal sense exiled from my country, but today [1990], at the end of the twentieth century, when all boundaries are breaking down, we should be looking not to roots in some place but to resources within ourselves for our understanding of our place in society, our place in a particular country, our place in culture. For me to feel truly “an exile” would be to be exiled from the struggles of the black and Third World peoples I know so well and from whom I come. And the struggle is where I am, the struggle is here and now. … I am not exiled from that. I may not be in the vortex of those struggles but I am involved in them. And therefore I do not understand the question of exile. I do not understand the question of domicile. The heart is where the battle is.¹

The second exchange occurs between Shahid and Riaz as they discuss the best ways that Shahid, as an aspiring writer, might help the evangelical “cause” by exposing “this matter of blasphemy to the national newspapers”—Kureishi’s allusion is to the controversy which erupted in the wake of his friend and mentor Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the social-political-aesthetic-religious debate which provides the context for The Black Album. “‘Isn’t this the work you should be doing for your people?’” Riaz asks Shahid; “‘Do you think someone should abandon the others to whom he belongs?’” The ensuing dialogue highlights The Black Album’s core subject:

Shahid: This matter of belonging, brother. I wish I understood it. Do you, for instance, like living in England?

Riaz: This will never be my home. … I will never entirely understand it. And you?

Shahid: It suits me. There’s no where else I will feel more comfortable.²

“I do not understand the question of exile.” “This matter of belonging, brother. I wish I understood it.” Each perplexed declaration unmasks, in very different ways, the limitations of what we might call the current discourse of identity politics: to a radical intellectual like Sivanandan, organically connected, through history, with “his people” in the struggle, the question of feeling at “home,” the individual’s relation to his “roots,” is always silly, an indulgence, for personal affections for the (merely) local only distract us from a necessary, clear-eyed focus on the work of revolution, always in progress. For Kureishi’s would-be religious pilgrim, the notion of “belonging”—either to a sect or, perhaps, to any form of human solidarity—also appears mysterious; after all, Shahid is a young man who, after experiencing an epiphany while watching a production of Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba (a play Shahid discovers to be really about Pakistani family life) “never los[es] his appetite for the compelling [Western?] exhilaration” (85) or the pleasures afforded by the unfettered imagination.³ Even while praying—or trying to pray—in the mosque, Shahid summons Beethoven, humming “Ode to Joy” in his head, as an appropriate private celebration of the “awe and wonder” he feels in the midst of religious observance. But during this reverential moment Shahid is giving thanks not to Allah, but rather to what Kureishi describes as “the substantiality of the world, the fact of existence, the inexplicable phenomenon of life, art, humor, and love” (102)—Shahid’s—and no doubt Kureishi’s—own blessed sacraments.

Dr. Sivanandan would, we might expect, be troubled with the implicit bourgeois self-indulgence expressive of Shahid’s “right-on” lifestyle; in fact, Sivanandan elsewhere anticipates the stringent (left) political critique of Kureishi (as voiced by, say, bell hooks, a critic who remains vexed by Sammy and Rosie Get Laid’s “stylish nihilism,”⁴) in his tough-minded assessment of the “New Timers” [post-New Left British intellectuals] and of “identity politics” in general: “The self that New Timers make so much play about is a small, selfish, inward-looking self that finds pride in lifestyle, exuberance in consumption and commitment in pleasure—and then elevates them all into a politics of this and that, positioning itself this way and that way (with every position a politics and every politics a position).”⁵ Sivanandan’s exasperation with recent British cultural politics—and, it would seem, most post-modern discourse/theorizing in general—recalls a wicked line from Kureishi’s 1981 play Borderline: “The worst thing about being on the left,” a character observes, “is the other people you’ve got on your side.”⁶

I do not wish, in this essay, to enter the ongoing internal debates within the British Left. (Still, I detect in Sivanandan’s lament echoes of the now dying out “culture wars” in the U.S.; yet in our case it is both the cultural Right and representatives from the “old New Left”—like Todd Gitlin—whose arguments against identity politics begin to coalesce, sounding similar.) I do, however, want to explore the issues of “home,” “homelands,” and “belonging”; of deterritorialization, migration, and borders; of ethnicity, critical [or “double”] consciousness, and the cultural work of ethnic expression. I want to examine these key words and ideas in the writings of selected modern and contemporary American “ethnic” authors in order to provide a genealogy of the “new” ethnicity, or “ethnoscapes”—as theorized by scholars like Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, and Paul Gilroy. And along the way I want to relocate—really, re-situate—a figure like Hanif Kureishi from his familiar location as a cultural worker in a zone of “black British” expression and place him instead within an alternate literary-political-comedic matrix of “hyphenated” cultural expression, a position perhaps best represented for my purposes by a figure like Philip Roth.

I invoke the example of Kureishi, not to diminish his achievement, which I believe to be important and substantial, but rather to try to complicate current discussions of ethnicity and literary practice: What happens if we re-imagine Kureishi as, say, a Jewish American author despite himself? What if Kureishi’s Bromley—his middle-class hometown suburb of London—becomes recognizable as an ethnic nest similar to Roth’s mythic, home of the immigrant fathers, Newark, New Jersey?⁷ And what if, unlike Dr. Sivanandan, the committed revolutionary, oblivious to personal locale (“the question of domicile”), too engaged to worry about the deformations of exile, who finds his “identity,” his “homeland,” in collective struggle, we find Hanif Kureishi, the hyphenated, “British-Pakistani” author—even with his glorious rage and keen satiric eye—utterly at home in London, comfortable in his diasporic condition—the way, say, that the “Roth” character in Deception feels about New York.⁸ “‘There’s nothing more fashionable than outsiders’” (185), a knowing, hip, wise-ass Shahid explains to a baffled Riaz. Kureishi, in this respect, exemplifies what historian David Hollinger has recently termed, building on the early twentieth-century anti-nativist cultural critic Randolph Bourne, “rooted cosmopolitanism,” coined in Hollinger’s brief for a new vision of “postethnic America, beyond multiculturalism”—an America beyond the narrow politics of local identities, an America no longer riven by separatist claims over turf.⁹

By proposing such perverse but suggestive correspondences between cultural workers like Kureishi and Roth, I am not forgetting the important contrasting histories of British and American immigration; nor do I wish to ignore the complex structural differences between African American and black British subject formations—Paul Gilroy’s work has been crucial in this regard. There is no equivalent in British cultural history to the national debate about “Americanization” in the early twentieth century. Only by the 1950s, in light of large migrations of peoples from the Caribbean and Southern India, do questions of “amalgamation” and difference begin to be addressed. Indeed, now studies resembling American academic sociology of ethnicity and community—both in methodological and intellectual assumptions—are beginning to appear.¹⁰

In U.S. ethnic literary history, the major writers, especially in the 1930s, explored in rich and profound ways the various tensions and contradictions between the often inhospitable host culture and local immigrant worlds the artists had, organically, emerged from. “America, a nation of immigrants,” writes Salman Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands, “has created great literature out of the phenomenon of cultural transplantation, out of examining the ways in which people cope with the new world.”¹¹ These ways of coping, and the attendant contradictions which flowed from the strains of adjustment—or, more often, resistance—were often registered at the level of language itself. Think, in this respect, of the mangled street Yinglish vs. the lyrical translated Yiddish made famous in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934). Indeed, before the “border” became fashionable as a mode of cultural analysis, early immigrant fiction in the U.S. took as its subject these liminal zones of contact; the “alien” subject encountered the new world as a bizarre/bazaar carnival of voices—like the rich babel of multicultural tongues the young boy David overhears at the end of Call It Sleep: swirling thrusts of fractured English that made Henry James, in his anxious nativist desire for linguistic purity, squirm, and (perhaps) flee to England in terror. Such subversive dissonances, we might say, eventually displaced James from his homeland: both spatially, from New York, and aesthetically, at the level of speechways and language.

In the end, David’s search for a kind of urban salvation (he learns, among other things, how to negotiate life in the city) enables Roth to undermine religious orthodoxy, to overcome the wrathful power of fathers, and (like Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus) to discover the liberating powers of imagination. [Kureishi’s Shahid has far outpaced David on this score as well as on matters erotic—no terrifying images of “petzels” and “knishes” for Kureishi’s sexually adventurous heroes of late twentieth-century, swinging London.] For Roth himself, however, the achievement of Call It Sleep, as is well known, proved fatal for his own art. As he has explained on many occasions, his virtual silence for almost sixty years stemmed from his felt alienation from the very sources of his literary imagination: the world of the Lower East Side, and Jewish American life in general. Displaced—we now would call it “deterritorialized”—from his external homeland, Roth could not, it seems, invent an alternate creative landscape within the self; he could not find, either through politics or through art, an hospitable, heimisch place for his imagination.

Like Roth’s David, the young Paul in Pietro Di Donato’s great novel Christ in Concrete (1939) seeks, after the death of his father (impaled and buried in concrete, a horrific sacrifice to the new world god of “Job”), salvation in the new world; but Paul only hears in reply to his supplications before the unfeeling guardians of the dominant culture “the correct American voices,” the “passionless soaped tongues that conquered with grammatic clean-cut” of official state-speak—a language that denies the family’s request for monetary assistance as it generates self-hatred: “‘Oh God above,’” Paul cries out in despair and bewilderment, “‘what world and country are we in? We didn’t mean to be wrong.’”¹²

“British don’t make me feel at home,” a second-generation Asian declares in a recent oral history of immigration; Di Donato’s Italian Americans would surely recognize this lament.¹³ In Di Donato’s utterly bleak vision, the family finds itself unhoused in the new world, its diaspora condition temporarily softened only by ritual—through the “fiesta,” with its re-enactment of collective memory via foodways.¹⁴ Still, neither ritual celebration nor the salve of nostalgia can easily overcome abject disillusionment, or the cultural self-hatred precipitated by racism. In the end, in an act of heretical defiance, Paul breaks with the faith of his fathers (virtually killing his pious mother Annunziata) and rejects the empty (because unfulfilled) redemptive Christian vision of life after death. “‘I want justice here! I want happiness here! I want life here!’” he cries out, on the threshold of what we would call political consciousness.¹⁵ Thus Di Donato, like Roth, takes his hero to the edge—the border—of social, political, and religious demystification; yet his unhoused, outsider status remains unexplored beyond this youthful stage of rebellion.

Both Henry Roth and Di Donato exemplify what I take Rushdie to mean by his invitation, voiced in “Imaginary Homelands” (1982), that “Indian writers in England” compose fictions about “the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group.”¹⁶ Certainly the young Kureishi took Rushdie’s summons to heart in his early work Borderline. In the “Author’s Note” to that play Kureishi—age 27—speaks, despite an initial wariness about the subject matter, of “Asian immigrants I know and the way in which they have adapted to life in Britain. And I thought of their children and what their lives are like here; the ways in which some of them are beginning to organise; and the ways in which other young Asians have attempted to slough off their origins.”¹⁷

As I have tried to outline briefly here, this “matter” of adaptation, the strain of sloughing off, forms the core subject of much ethnic expression in America. Notably, it forms the overarching theme in the early fiction of the young Philip Roth, who got into deep trouble with the guardians of Jewish middle-class culture in the late fifties for writing stories felt to be informing on the Jews, exposing sensitive aspects of Jewish life before the judging eyes of WASP society (“A shanda for the goyim,” in the familiar Yinglish expression). Kureishi knows all about the charges of betrayal and infidelity first hand; Pakistani groups in the U.S. protested outside theaters screening My Beautiful Laundrette; and in harsh tones that recall Roth’s well-known feud with insider culture, Kureishi reveals that his Aunt scolded her nephew for his “complete lack of loyalty, integrity, and compassion.” [Identical charges were hurled by the literary and religious rabbis against Roth in the fifties.] Of course, Kureishi got even with his Aunt, shamelessly naming one of the lesbian agitators in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid in her honor.¹⁸

Kureishi reports all this, including his sharing what might be called his “subculture” plight with Roth himself (then married to Claire Bloom, one of the stars of Sammy and Rosie) in “Some Time with Stephen,” the rich chronicle of the writing and filming of Sammy and Rosie almost ten years ago. But in my view Kureishi’s resemblances to Roth go much deeper than a shared run-in with the policing efforts of embarrassed assimilated Jews in New York or worried Pakistani emigrants in London. What links Kureishi to Roth is the younger writer’s relentless comic-ironic disposition, his fiercely-held need to labor against all forms of orthodoxy, and his “post-modern” belief in the self as fluid, uncontained, always in the process of becoming. “There had to be innumerable ways of being in the world” (285), Shahid comes to realize at the end of The Black Album.

I recognize, of course, that the key, self-admitted influences on Kureishi are the James Baldwin of the prophetic The Fire Next Time (1963), as inscribed in Kureishi’s powerful personal narrative, “The Rainbow Sign” (1986), and popular culture in general (Kureishi recently co-edited the Faber Book of Pop). I would, to be sure, agree: Kureishi draws on Baldwin, as (less explicitly) do British theorists of the “new ethnicity,” for Baldwin’s powerfully destabilizing vision of “whiteness” as an authorizing political presence in the world. Baldwin, as historian David Roediger shows in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (1994), is perhaps the major theoretical precursor in the current work to deconstruct “whiteness as ideology” in the formation of the working class in the U.S. Stuart Hall’s recent formulation of a “new ethnicity” seeking to overturn “hegemonic conceptions of ‘Englishness’” is deeply indebted to Baldwin’s vision. Thus “ethnicity” as deployed in British cultural studies proves enabling as a mode of social critique for those marginally displaced—it opposes static, authorizing nationalisms and posits the fluid, hybrid, migrant border position as the site where the “new ethnicity” can expose, through “narratives of redemption and emancipation” (Paul Gilroy’s phrase), all forms of cultural and political absolutism.¹⁹ Again, I do not wish to diminish Kureishi’s status as a political figure (or as a “black writer,” as Stuart Hall describes him in “New Ethnicities”)²⁰ who, in the spirit of Baldwin, demands that “it is the British who have to make these adjustments”; that “there must be a fresh way of seeing Britain … and a new way of being British.”²¹ But in the case of Hanif Kureishi the overriding desire, the overarching need, is to overturn the smug pieties, the rapacious zeal, and the sad provincialities of cultural insiderism—behaviors and beliefs nurtured in the comedy and pain of ethnic striving, native to the familiar territory of “Americanization,” as well as its emergent British equivalent (can we begin to speak of the ordeal of “becoming” British, of “Britishization”?).

In this respect Kureishi is, more or less, a novelist/filmmaker of the comedy of ethnic-immigrant manners (“‘Me, I’m just a middle-class writer,’” he confessed once in an interview)²² whose liminal position betwixt and between British and Pakistani worlds enables him to see through each with dangerous clarity. And like his friend Philip Roth, Kureishi needs the challenge, the infuriating spur of uninterrogated religious and cultural pieties.²³ Speaking a year ago about his soon-to-be published new novel, Kureishi described its donée: “There were all these blokes who wanted to kill this friend of mine, and I wanted to know why, so I went and found them … Islam is rather like Thatcherism. It’s an intoxicating force to test yourself against.”²⁴ The telling phrase to my mind is “test yourself against”: the “ethnic” artist-outsider needs his “culture-grievances” (a nice term, borrowed from Philip Roth’s description of how his own work is energized)²⁵ to enrage him to speech, to his provocative art; and the literary-political aim of “hyphenated” art is (always) opposition. At the same time, the imaginative energies unleashed by culture-grievances are often directed, by the “insider,” against his own “people.” The “work you should be doing for your people” (to recall Riaz’s question to Shahid) is implicitly answered by Kureishi, as it continues to be answered by Roth, as the work of analysis, of expose, of critique [“Little things trickle through when I see the country dreaming out loud,” Roth remarks about his encounter with England]—as an expression of “the loyal opposition.”²⁶ Such “loyalty” always results in charges of ethnic betrayal and cultural self-hatred: the social and political costs which inevitably come with the territory of alienation.

Roth has explored this artistic-generational-political-ethnic dilemma since he launched the Zuckerman novels eighteen years ago with The Ghost Writer (1979) [Kureishi registers the shock of recognition in reading The Ghost Writer during the filming of Sammy and Rosie]. But it is in his “novelist’s autobiography” The Facts (1988), in the insightful voice of the novelist’s alter ago Nathan Zuckerman, that Roth most evocatively names those internal and external forces which drive a figure like Kureishi: “the things that wear you down are also the things that nurture your talent.” This is Roth’s dirty little secret. The writer “needing that battle, that attack, that kick, needing that wound, your source of invigorating anger, the energizer for the defiance”²⁷—this self-description might also explain Kureishi’s instinctive impulse to take on the poison of both Thatcherism and Islam; this complex, divided stance also marks Kureishi’s complicated relation to the displaced world of the (Pakistani) fathers—the latent, charged subject of most of his literary output.

“The Great Immigration,” Frank Kermode reports, interviewing Kureishi in 1990, is according to Kureishi “our great unexplored subject.”²⁸ For his part, Kureishi has attempted to represent that huge canvas (including the idea for a script on the epic of immigration for the BBC) in virtually all his work, both in fiction and on film. In general, the immigrant fathers in Kureishi are limned as a comical cohort; unlike the raging, bent, scalding portrait of the immigrant father Albert in Call It Sleep or the haunting figure of the martyred Geremio in Christ in Concrete, the Pakistani elders in Kureishi tend to preside over their new worlds from bed, reaping the material benefits of England while recuperating old world ways: Shahid’s father in The Black Album (like Omar’s uncle Nasser in Laundrette) “lay there [in bed] like a pasha, with a pile of comics on his bedside table. The ‘center of operations’ he called it.” “It was,” Kureishi’s narrator observes (about the gendered separation of spheres in the house) “as if they were living in Karachi” (61). In contrast, Omar’s father seems immobilized in bed, disillusioned by political despair and new world [i.e., British] barbarism. Kureishi, however, doesn’t explore his implicitly host culture-challenging story; rather, he is occupied by the romance between Johnny and Omar, and the utopian world of love and playfulness they create within the neon lights of the laundrette—even though Omar adopts capitalistic enterprising strategies to fulfill his dream of success. Perhaps the most poignant imaging of immigrant fathers in Kureishi is the figure of Amjad in the play Borderline, whose disembodied voice of sadness and regret speaks, on tape from the grave, of the hurts of British history; Amjad wishes that his daughter (“She has become English”) will repatriate with her new husband back to Pakistan.²⁹ But the most potentially interesting father is the complex figure of Rafi in Sammy and Rosie, lost and bewildered in the old England of his nostalgia and the new England of looming urban apocalypse. Again, Kureishi, it seems to me, doesn’t explore this tormented, politically-tainted, yet ambiguous figure fully enough. Why, for example, do Rafi and the street revolutionary Danny bond immediately? What are the social and psychological costs of political displacement and familial longing?

The answer may, in part, be that Kureishi is more interested in social satire than political analysis, more absorbed by the fashionable allure of the world beyond Bromley—despite the wicked satire of the trendy, liberated couple Sammy and Rosie—than in demystifying the allure itself. “Look,” Zuckerman says to Roth, talking straight, “this place you come from does not produce artists so much as it produces dentists and accountants”³⁰—or travel agents, as is the case for Shahid in The Black Album. His “ethnic” dilemma involves rejecting both the middle-class world of the family business—unlike Michael Corleone, another immigrant son who discovers his “descent” relation to family and its business—and the “brotherhood” of Islam.³¹ In the end, Shahid rejects both deadly bourgeois lifestyle and fanatic anti-intellectualism in the name of the capacious, fluid, playful imagination:

He had to find some sense in his recent experiences; he wanted to know and understand. How could anyone confine themselves to one system or creed? Why should they feel they had to? There was no fixed self; surely our several selves melted and mutated daily? There had to be innumerable ways of being in the world. He would spread himself out, in his work and in love, following his curiosity.

(285)

To be sure, neither David in Call It Sleep, blissful in overcoming the wrathful father, nor Paul in Christ in Concrete, bent by blasphemous rejection of his religious patrimony, appears to have arrived at what the cultural critic Homi Bhabha calls the “empowering condition of hybridity”; nor does either immigrant son seem to be at a transitional threshold of “an interstitial future, that emerges in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present.”³² But in the end I wonder if any of Kureishi’s characters/subjects do, either. At one point Shahid does receive an intimation of such an empowering positionality: “Lost in a room of broken mirrors, with jagged reflections backing into eternity, he felt numb. His instinct was to escape, to seek out someone to talk to” (157).³³ And at the end of The Black Album Shahid seeks out his professor-theorist lover Deedee with whom he indeed escapes, to the restoring sea, worrying only about lunch, looking forward to the upcoming Prince concert back in London (the novel’s title comes from an unreleased Prince album), following his curiosity, “until it stops being fun” (287). “He didn’t have to think about anything,” Kureishi tells us, of his hero’s fluid status. But I wonder, again, about the couple’s apolitics of pure appetite, to re-voice the crux of bell hooks’s critique, implicit in the novel’s final, self-absorbed, closing vision. In the end, I do not find realized in Kureishi the example of enabling hybridity and the fluid politics of location as I do, say, in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), a novel which also takes as its subject our “innumerable ways of being in the world.” Indeed, Mukherjee’s porous, borderline vision of the self, of the figure of Jasmine “shuttl[ing] between identities,” richly images her heroine as pure potentiality itself: “adventure, risk, transformation.”³⁴

In the end, it may be that Kureishi’s embrace of his liminal status, the creative empowerment made available by his shifting position as a writer “caught between two cultures, ideologies, colours … English and not English; middle-class but classless; outsider insider,” will, inevitably, compel him to resist both the politics of ethnic insiderism (the British-Pakistani community of London should not expect Kureishi to soften, let alone apologize for, his biting satire any time soon) and the Left critique expressed by Sivanandan and Hobsbawn (Kureishi is not likely, that is, to relinquish the imaginative freedom and subversive curiosity of the artist to join the collective struggle). Like his spiritual mentors and literary examples Philip Roth and Rushdie, Kureishi will continue to provoke, to re-invent the self, above all to resist/struggle against all forms of literary and political orthodoxy.³⁵

It remains to be seen, however, whether an exciting contemporary writer like Kureishi will move beyond the comedy of aspiring middle-class Pakistani manners in the new world of England and the wicked send-ups of fashionable London academics. I, for one, will continue to follow his already remarkable career. Yet his work to date remains, in my view, more helpfully situated as a striking variation on American “ethnic” writers, especially Philip Roth, than as an example of “black British” expression.³⁶ As an “outsider insider,” Kureishi will always be dangerously funny, always ready to expose, in the tradition of overturning, unhinged ethnic humor that a figure like Roth (and with him, Lenny Bruce and the early Woody Allen) inherits, and represents. Together with his wise-ass alter ego, Karim Amir in The Buddha of Suburbia (“My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost”³⁷), Hanif Kureishi offers, unabashedly, his creative motto: “No secrets were safe from me” (20).

Notes

1. A. Sivanandan, Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism (London: Verso, 1990), p. 16.

2. Hanif Kureishi, The Black Album (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 185. Subsequent citations given parenthetically in the text.

3. In an earlier interview Kureishi reflected on this (for him) key issue, with particular relevance for The Black Album. “The Immigrant is the characteristic figure of the 20th century. Your country must be a place where you feel comfortable. I feel things in England are mine, are part of what made me. It’s not the same as being patriotic. Is there a word for feeling a strong attachment to a place you know to be yours that’s not jingoistic?” Marcia Pally, “Kureishi Like a Fox,” Film Comment 22 (Sept. 1986), p. 53.

4. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 155–163.

5. Sivanandan, “All that Melts into Air is Solid: The Hokum of the New Times,” in Communities of Resistance, p. 49. For a discussion of the New Timers’ cultural and political positions as well as the critical reaction to their “moment” see Stuart Hall, “The Meaning of New Times,” and Angela McRobbie, “Looking Back at New Times and Its Critics,” both in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 223–37; pp. 238–61.

6. Hanif Kureishi, Borderline (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 32. Most recently, Eric Hobsbawm has joined what appears to be a backlash in British intellectual life against identity politics. Echoing Sivanandan, Hobsbawm worries that “Men and women look for groups to which they can belong, certainly and forever, in a world which all else is moving and shifting, in which nothing else is certain.” Hobsbawm, “Identity Politics and the Left,” New Left Review #217 (May/June 1996), p. 40. In many ways Hobsbawm articulates Kureishi’s continuing themes.

7. Kureishi himself invites such a comparison, for there are scattered throughout his various interviews and essays direct references to his affection for Roth. See Hanif Kureishi, London Kills Me: Three Screenplays and Four Essays (New York: Penguin, 1992), pp. 122; 150. Michael Gorra links Kureishi and Roth in his review of My Beautiful Laundrette and the Rainbow Sign. See Gorra, “He Could Never Be Like Everyone Else,” New York Times Book Review (May 4, 1986), p. 26: “Mr. Kureishi’s presentation of Pakistani businessmen has some of the same satiric vigor and sting that characterized the early Philip Roth in his treatments of American Jews.”

8. “Roth” absolutely loves his return to the Jewish world of New York City. Explaining to his lover why he fled London, “Roth” explains: “‘I understand something. I take long walks in New York, and every once in a while I stop and find I’m smiling. I hear myself saying aloud, Home.’” Philip Roth, Deception (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 204.

9. There is a huge literature emerging in the wake of the “culture wars” in the U.S. For positions that try to challenge reigning multicultural perspectives see David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995) and Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Holt, 1995).

10. An example of this mode of scholarship is Tariq Modood, Sharon Beishon and Satnam Virdee, Changing Ethnic Identities (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1994).

11. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991), p. 20.

12. Pietro Di Donato, Christ in Concrete [1939], (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 169; p. 170.

13. Changing Ethnic Identities, p. 100.

14. Although it’s a small touch, recall, in this respect, how the older Indian women in Bhaji on the Beach [1994] carry their own stash of seasonings whenever they eat out. The bland “British” fried potatoes always need “old world” spicing up. Thus portable spices function as a potent mode of social criticism in that film, as does the discourse of foodways in much “ethnic” expression in general. On this discourse in Kureishi’s and other texts see Uma Narayan, “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity, and Indian Food,” Social Identities 1 (1995), pp. 63–86 (pp. 70–71 on Kureishi).

15. Di Donato, Christ in Concrete, p. 296. For the most recent reading of Di Donato see Fred L. Gardaphe, Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996).

16. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, p. 20.

17. Kureishi, Borderline, p. 4.

18. Kureishi, London Kills Me, pp. 121–22.

19. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities” (1989), in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, p. 447; Paul Gilroy, Small Acts (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), p. 108.

20. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” p. 449.

21. Kureishi, London Kills Me, p. 36.

22. Ameena Meer, “Interview with Kureishi,” Interview 20 (April, 1990), p. 140. About The Buddha of Suburbia Kureishi observed, “The book was supposed to offend people” (p. 140).

23. “Kureishi,” observes Tom Dewe Mathews, “has turned his fluid identity to his own advantage. In his writing he can convey both sides of the racial and class divide. But success has made it that much harder for him to stay in touch with the sources that provoke his imagination. But this ‘cheeky chappie,’ as one friend calls him, thrives on challenges.” Tom Dewe Mathews, “Metropolitan Lines,” The Observer (Nov. 17, 1991), p. 73. Speaking in the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema during the filming of Sammy and Rosie, Kureishi mentions the encouragement he had received from Roth, stating, “Roth m’a ete d’un grand soutien” [Roth has given/been a great support to me]. T. Jousse and N. Saada, “Le Cinema de Tous Les Metissages: Entretien avec Hanif Kureishi,” Cahiers du Cinema #406 (April, 1988), p. 11.

24. Fernanda Eberstadt, “Rebel, Rebel,” The New Yorker (Aug 21 & 28, 1995), p. 119.

25. Philip Roth, “The Art of Fiction LXXXIV,” Paris Review #93 (1984), p. 238. Roth continues: “A writer needs his poisons. The antidote to his poisons is often a book.” The context for these observations is Roth’s reflections about living in America versus England.

26. I borrow the phrase “the loyal opposition” from the title of Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky’s forthcoming study of Philip Roth and Woody Allen. The phrase itself comes from Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980).

27. Philip Roth, The Facts (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1988), p. 184; p. 174. Emphasis in the original.

28. Frank Kermode, “Voice of the Almost English,” The Guardian (April 10, 1990), p. 42. In the same piece Kermode invites Kureishi to read Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant—he too senses Kureishi’s deep affinities with Jewish American literature. On this issue of the potential affinities between Kureishi (along with British-Indian writing in general) and Jewish American literature, James Woods’s characterization of Rushdie’s style, in his recent review of The Moor’s Last Sigh—“Indian writing in English has tended to enjoy the grind of the high against the low, particularly the swoop from high culture to lowly brand name” [James Woods, “Salaam Bombay!” The New Republic (March 18, 1996), p. 39]—directly recalls Irving Howe’s famous definition of a distinctive “Jewish American” prose style, described in the Introduction to Howe, ed., Jewish American Stories (New York: NAL, 1977), pp. 1–17. Woods’s analysis, by the way, also re-voices the standard way of explaining the satiric-parodic strategies of Woody Allen.

29. Kureishi, Borderline, p. 42.

30. Roth, The Facts, p. 168.

31. In this respect, Shahid’s older brother Chili represents the implied “sub-text” of The Black Album, the analogy between Jewish immigrants and the first-generation Pakistanis. Chili—who loves watching The Godfather movies as well as Once Upon a Time in America (an epic about Jewish gangsters in America)—wishes that his father had emigrated instead to America, passing through Ellis Island; indeed, Chili feels that “he could be someone in America” (63). More explicitly, Kureishi has Chili (who is something of a “tough Jew”—“a Jew with force,” as Roth terms it in Deception [204]—saving his brother’s ass at the end of the novel) speak of “our people, the Pakis, in their dirty shops, surly, humorless” as “the new Jews, everyone hates them” (212). The point is that Chili dreams the American immigrant success myth as an alternate imaginary homeland to his sense of local (British) despair; only in America does he feel he can fulfill his dreams of greatness.

32. Homi K. Bhabha, “How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 219.

33. Perhaps I hallucinate, but I am reminded by this passage of a key image from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)—Oedipa watching herself in an infinitely regressing hall of mirrors. My association to Pynchon is, however, ironic, in light of Kureishi’s tough thoughts on Pynchon, offered to Kermode, concerning the post-modern experiment of Vineland: “a lot of hard work went into it but ‘at the centre of it it’s not all that interesting.’” Kermode, “Voice of the Almost English,” p. 42. Kureishi’s disrespect for Pynchon, I would suggest, complicates his literary-cultural genealogy to the 1960s (a genealogy Kureishi is often linked to). Isn’t Oedipa at the threshold (a la Bhabha) of some interstitial future? Doesn’t popular culture, especially rock ’n roll, empower and inspire Pynchon?

34. Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1989), p. 70; p. 214. “In India,” Mukherjee has observed, “you can’t be a free spirit or reinvent your identity because your name gives you away. That’s why America, with its opportunity to change names and cancel one’s past and make up a new history or try out different roles, is so attractive to the character in my novel, Jasmine, and to myself.” Mukherjee, quoted in Norma Libman, “Beyond Calcutta,” Chicago Tribune (June 2, 1991), sec. 6, p. 3. Britain may have become a “comfortable” place for Kureishi, but it doesn’t seem—as yet—to invite the potentialities of mythic self-reinvention described by Mukherjee. Chili’s love affair with American pop culture suggests the self-transforming agency of America that attracts Mukherjee.

    By claiming such a mythic potential for Jasmine, I am implicitly entering a political-aesthetic debate about the novel that can only be sketched briefly here. “Jasmine,” concludes Michael Gorra in his review, “stands as one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American.” “Call It Exile, Call It Immigration,” New York Times Book Review (Sept. 10, 1989), p. 9. [Gorra’s title of course recalls Henry Roth, one of Mukherjee’s self-admitted literary antecedents.] By contrast, Sangeeta Ray argues that Jasmine, problematically, “celebrates a neoimperial space” where “becoming American demands a rejection of both community and a politics of collectivity, and a validation of the official bourgeois authorization of America as the supreme melting pot.” Sangeeta Ray, “Rethinking Migrancy: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Identity in Jasmine and The Buddha of Suburbia,” in Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies ed. Henry Schwarz and Richard Dienst (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 193. In Ray’s reading, Kureishi’s novel demonstrates “the achievements of progressive individualism” (p. 197). For her own part, Mukherjee has acknowledged the influence of Bernard Malamud (along with Isaac Babel, Conrad, and Chekhov) for her fiction: “I view myself as an American author in the tradition of other American authors whose ancestors arrived at Ellis Island.” Alison B. Carb, “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” The Massachusetts Review 29 (1988), p. 650.

35. This telling description of Kureishi is taken from an anonymous profile, “The Radical Guru of Leafy Suburbs,” The Observer (Nov. 14, 1994), p. 25. Few critics/reviewers of Kureishi have noted the embedded critique of identity politics and multiculturalism latent in his work, especially in assorted interviews.

36. In this respect, when Stuart Hall, who greatly admires My Beautiful Laundrette, describes the tone of the “bold and adventurous” Sammy and Rosie as “overdriven by an almost uncontrollable, cool anger” (“New Ethnicities,” p. 449), he is noting the “Roth-like” energies of impudence and turbulence I have tried to assign to Kureishi.

37. Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 3.