Hanif Kureishi’s second novel, The Black Album (1995), concerns disparate beliefs and cultures jostling with each other around a young protagonist in the late 1980s. As with The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi’s hero, Shahid Hassan, is involved in, or invited by, disparate fields—this time including creative writing, sexual hedonism, consumerism, mercantilism, and Islam fundamentalism—in an effort to redefine his identities. Paralleling Shahid’s hope to be a journalist (and a novelist), the author adopts “a much more journalistic approach” to depict the rise of Islam fundamentalism in a consumerist society (Buchanan 58). His hero straddles the fault line between consumerism and fundamentalism, finding himself an antidote to both practices in a work ethic he brings to novel writing. Rather than laying equal stress on the religious and hedonist, Kureishi details how consumption emerges omnipresently in the lives of different characters rather than the nuances of Islamic fundamentalism.
As the plot progresses, Kureishi’s own stance of secular liberalism becomes manifest, prompting some scholars to criticize his identification with the West via a negation of Islam. However, it is just this disputable stance that consumerism, as a dominating practice of late capitalism, is recorded, problematized and challenged. Also, via Shahid’s choice of novel writing, rather than any practice of Islamic fundamentalism, Kureishi explores how consumerism might be temporarily mitigated or ultimately
surpassed by strengthening individual belief. In other words, consumerism and commodification not merely articulate identities of people from different culture, ethnicity and class, those differences highlighted respectively in identity politics.
They can still be disarticulated from one’s life with productive practices, especially with reflexive productions like writing. Juxtaposing consumerism with racism, work ethic, Occidentalism and postmodernism, The Black Album is a fertile playground for exploring the possibility of overcoming consumer subjugation inherent in capitalism.
This chapter discusses how main characters in The Black Album experience and move beyond practices of consumerism and Islam fundamentalism, finding their own identities among various ethical positions in the late capitalist period. Through his characters, the author brings to light the enormous impact of consumerism, even upon fundamentalist believers who themselves are not immune from its influence.
Moreover, Kureishi insists, via the romantic ethic, literary endeavors, individualism and liberalism as articulations of consumerism, that individuals are capable of overcoming the lure of extravagant desire and achieving spiritual development.
Kureishian scholars explore consumerism and fundamentalism as two major themes in The Black Album. Kenneth C. Kaleta notes that “[a]t college, The Black Album’s Anglo-Asian Shahid confronts his father’s dreams for him and the religious traditions of his past, pitting consumerism against fundamentalism” (6). In a similar vein, Frederick M. Holmes, in his essay on The Black Album, “The Postcolonial Subject Divided between East and West,” argues that Shahid and his brother Chili hold more or less a consumerist attitude when compared to that of the Islamic community in this novel, affirming a hero struggling between a Western and an Eastern way of life.
While Kaleta and Holmes offer many insights, their criticisms do not clarify to what degree characters are exposed to consumerist and religious practices. Still, there are other problems to be solved in Holmes’ thesis. For instance, if the postcolonial subject
exemplified by Shahid is divided by West and East, what are the referents of these two frequently-used signifiers after all? Are they geographical locations, skin-colors, languages or ways of life? Is consumerism the mainstream style of living of the West, while the East is composed of anti-consumerisms, such as Islamic fundamentalism?
Other critics of The Black Album, such as John Clement Ball and Bart Moore-Gilbert, mostly discussing “relations between this book and issues like freedom of speech, race/ethnicity, or the metropolitan London related to The Rushdie Affair” (Su 102), making little investigation into the antagonistic entanglement between consumerism and Islam fundamentalism. Jung Su has pointed out that “mental purification and bodily pleasure” not only bring about Shahid’s identity crisis and in-betweenness (104), but Kureishi’s intention of liberating the “limitation/prohibition of race/gender”
(106). However, if resistance aiming to transgress racial and sexual boundaries, a politically correct in-betweenness in this novel, is observed together with consumerism as a predominant force, it resembles a desire to commodify new stuffs for the subject’s gratification. This being the case, it is important to probe how consumerism and Islamic fundamentalism influence, change, and exteriorize multiple personal identities and social values against the backdrop of the Rushdie Affair in 1989.41 Being that The Black Album explores more consumptive activities than Islamic fundamentalism, and that Kureishi admits his concern to be “about what people might do in [religion’s] name” rather than “the spiritual” (Jaggi),42 this chapter begins with a theoretical frame of consumption, and sheds light on Islam fundamentalism as the concerned characters are discussed.43
41 Deemed blasphemous by many Muslims, The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie’s novel published in 1988, was mainly criticized for its rendition of the fictitious Prophet and interrogation of God’s words.
The Rushdie Affair refers to protests and book-burning events revolving around Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, a death sentence to those related to the writing and publishing of the novel.
42 See Maya Jaggi’s “A Buddy from Suburbia.”
43 Kureishi’s familiarity with, and love for Western culture at times weakens his efforts in depicting fundamentalist and moderate Muslims in depth. However, it is because of this disposition that his
Before moving on, an exploration of consumerism will facilitate understanding of ethical choices in late capitalist society. In the 17th and 18th centuries, according to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Protestant ethic emphasized asceticism and austerity, inciting early capitalism motivated by production. “That powerful tendency toward uniformity of life, which today so immensely aids the capitalistic interest in the standardization of production, had its ideal foundations in the repudiation of all idolatry of the flesh” (Weber 169). As a result, a “productivist ethic” dominated (Ransome 24), with consumption as its subsidiary activity. This ethic aimed to either satisfy fundamental life needs of producers, or reproduce their labor power. In the early phase of industrial capitalism, the value of life lay in work and job roles provided people with their main social identity, i.e., “a relatively coherent sense of who they are, of how they think of themselves and how they wish others to perceive them” (Bocock 49).
About eighty years later, Colin Campbell’s The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of
Modern Consumerism (1987) renewed Weber’s argument in terms of consumption.
He traced the emergence of modern consumer society back to the late 18th century, claiming that romanticism, as an artistic and cultural movement responsive to the industrial revolution, played a salient role in consumption. No longer an adjunctive activity of production, consumption gained its autonomy by relating to individual characteristics of consumers. Traditional hedonism pays close attention to sensual pleasures. Since each pleasure is associated with a certain activity, such as eating, consumption in this way is standardized, and pleasure is directly allied with satisfaction. Modern consumerism is thus a result of late 18th century romanticism articulated through the Protestant work ethic of the time. While this Protestant ethic is usually understood in terms of asceticism or Puritanism, which impairs development
of consumerism, a branch of this ethic emphasizes “the charitable feelings of pity and sympathy.” This, in turn, fosters an emotionalist way of life, affirming the positive value of expressing one’s own emotions. As time went by, people experienced pleasure, no longer taking their expression of emotion as a mere virtue (Lury 72-73).
Romanticism imbued emotional pleasure with ethical value, for the pursuit of emotion rested on imagination, an indispensable condition of creativity:
Romanticism provided that philosophy of ‘recreation’ necessary for a dynamic consumerism: a philosophy which legitimates the search for pleasure as good in itself. . . . In all these ways, Romanticism has served to provide ethical support for that restless and continuous pattern of consumption which so distinguishes the behaviour of modern man [sic]. (Campbell, The Romantic Ethic 201)
From the 19th to the 20th century, cultural status of romantic and work ethic shifted as industrial capitalism transformed into late capitalism of the second half of the 20th century. When the working class joined the main consumptive population, i.e., the upper and middle classes, a society of mass consumption took shape:
By the 1950s, following a pattern already established in the United States, first in Britain, then in the rest of Western Europe, ‘mass consumption’, in a recognizably modern sense, began to develop among all but the very poorest groups. . . . That is, they [those groups]
had sufficient income to provide for their basic needs and had developed an awareness of new objects, such as television sets and cars, and experiences, such as holidays in Spain, which they could afford to buy. (Bocock 21-22)
Once consumption became popular amongst the greater part of society, the romantic ethic, foregrounding individual feelings and experiences, replaced the Protestant work
ethic. In doing so, it replaced preservation and development of families and communities with focus on the individual and critical perception of the contemporary world:
By the end of the twentieth century, it can be argued that many groups had come to attach as much significance to their roles outside of the work place – in the home, in sports and in entertainment, for instance – as earlier generations did to their work roles. People now work, in the advanced social formations, not just to stay alive, but in order to be able to afford to buy consumer products. (Bocock 49-50)
Due to maturation of transnational capitalism and the formation of media and simulacra society in the 1970s and 1980s, objects for consumption range from material commodities to include images and information. With more and more people influenced by increasingly omnipresent and all-pervasive advertisements, simulations, and messages, imaginations expanded and desires for perfect commodities and services heighted. As a result, and along with traditional determinants such as class, ethnicity and gender, consumption practices came to play a more salient role than ever in formation of one’s identity.
The domination of consumerism in the second half of the 20th century fragmented personal identity with commodities of all shapes and colors. Certain traditional values were no longer as dominant as they used to be, and were superseded by diverse attitudes resembling their commodity counterparts put on display. However, the consumer society did not merely take root on commodities and their signs. Its management relied on various ethical ideas inherent in the logic of capitalism. Colin Campbell points out that the consumer society is guided by the dual logic of
modernity,44 namely the logic of reason manifesting in calculation and experiment, and the logic of dream originating from passion and aspiration. Both the work ethic and the romantic ethic result from this dual logic. In turn, they respectively maintain the execution of capitalism from production to consumption. The usual imbalance between these two ethics is noteworthy. Directly connecting consumerism and human desire is a “‘need’ for difference (the desire for the social meaning)” as incarnated in assorted commodities (Baudrillard, The Consumer Society 78). This need, far from fulfilling the fundamental demand of everyday life, is usually expressed through fascination of objects not yet attained. For those who lack knowledge of the Protestant work ethic, desire for consumption is likely to put psychological activity into economical practice, disintegrating one’s material ground and mixing interpersonal relations with the process of commodification. No wonder consumerism became one of the major enemies of many religions, as illustrated by militant Muslims in the novel equating it with a vicious Western civilization.
According to Kureishi’s delineation of different (anti-)consumer communities, this chapter explores the ordered, disordered, and anti-consumerist identities in relation to the consumer society. First, characters overtly enjoying consumption are analyzed in terms of their adoption of the romantic or work ethic. The protagonist’s father represents a paradigmatic balance between leisure and work. Still, the well-off family under his care breeds the hero’s elder brother equipped with only the romantic ethic, exemplifying the excessive sprawl of hedonism and resulting consumerism that finally destroys an individual. On the other hand, Shahid and his lover Deedee
44 The dual logic of modernity mentioned here could be illustrated by Charles Baudelaire’s noted definition: “By modernity, I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable” (12). The work ethic accentuates the loyalty to an enterprise or an organization, asking for industriousness and stamina, and hence belongs to “the eternal and the immutable,” certainly the opposite of the romantic ethic established by imagination, desire and pleasure. In contrast with the lasting density, tedium and laboriousness frequently appearing in the working experiences, the pleasure of consumption belongs to “the ephemeral, the fugitive, [and] the contingent.”
represent certain cultural consumers moderate in their material consumption.
Rendering disputable Deedee’s pedagogies, which merely center on cultural products validated by populist postmodernism, and Shahid’s struggles between his intellectual interest and consumerist desire, Kureishi emphasizes the lasting importance of reading literary canons in a society torn apart by different ideologies. Kureishi’s choice of anti-consumerist characters brings about another concern to think through.
With reactions of a baffled Marxist and some Islamic fundamentalists toward Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Kureishi not only re-presents powerful media and semiotic practices in a consumer society, but also implies a need to reconsider liberalism, the footing on which consumerism, the romantic ethic, and modern society are at work, as a consensus for different communities.