接合差異：庫雷西後殖民故事中的晚期資本主義文化邏輯

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(1)接合差異：庫雷西後殖民故事中的晚期資本主義文化邏輯摘要庫雷西的早期後殖民故事—《我的美麗洗衣店》、《郊區佛陀》、《黑色唱片》、《山米與蘿西上床》—同時也呈現了晚期資本主義的各個面向。這是因為在這些作品中，非白人的角色參與了二十世紀七、八零年代倫敦的文化生產與消費，證實了擁有文化資本的邊緣主體也能在不友善的英國社會中找到自己的位置。接合差異讓這樣的立足方式成為可能，因為晚期資本主義不但鼓勵族裔的差異被「表達」，也歡迎有族裔身份的個人和不同的社會團體互相「連結」，其中包含了作為東道主的英國白人社群。本論文的序論依序討論庫雷西對於資本主義的曖昧態度、評論家對於庫雷西故事中多元議題的探討、作為晚期資本主義邏輯的文化的商品化與商品的文化化、這四個故事中讓後殖民性與晚期資本主義扣連的（文化）差異的接合。第一章以《我的美麗洗衣店》中的次文化成員、亞裔企業、主流生產模式的接合來例示晚期資本主義的霸權。這個霸權確認了大英帝國光輝的消褪，以及一個新的資本主義的帝國的興起。第二章強調表演在《郊區佛陀》中的重要。這是一種讓不同階級與族裔主體展現其文化資本，並在特定的文化生產場域中相互串連的方式。第三章論述《黑色唱片》中消費主義與回教基本教義派的對立。這兩種立場的相互頡抗，促成與轉變八零年代晚期英國的各種認同。藉著小說主角在文學上的努力，庫雷西找到了逃離無深度消費主義，以及令人窒息的回教基本教義派教條的途徑。第四章分析藉著解離與反對他者，接合差異的過程在《山米與蘿西上床》所產生的排他行為。這些鬥爭在不同權力地位的主體爭奪空間時最為明顯。結論檢視了庫雷西強調接合差異是晚期資本主義中的生存策略，以及他批判接合差異過程中，意圖接合的主體忽視他者與自我間的差異性與同一性。作者認為這種忽視會造成人們和世界的複雜性相脫節。. vii.

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(3) Articulating Differences: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in Hanif Kureishi’s Postcolonial Stories Abstract Hanif Kureishi’s early postcolonial stories: My Beautiful Laundrette, The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album, and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid are also works concerning different facets of late capitalism. This is because non-white characters in these works are involved in different roles of cultural production or consumption in the ‘70s and ‘80s Britain, attesting the emergence of marginal subjects with cultural capitals to win them a place in an unfriendly host society. What makes this possible is a process of articulating differences, when in a late capitalist era, their differences of ethnicity are encouraged to be pronounced and hinged with different social formations, including the host community. The introduction of this dissertation concerns Kureishi’s ambiguous stance toward capitalism, critics’ co-presence of different issues in Kureishi’s stories, the commodification of culture and culturalization of commodities as the cultural logic of late capitalism, and finally, articulation of (cultural) differences in Kureishi’s four major stories where postcoloniality inevitably hinges late capitalism. Chapter One explores a late capitalist hegemony exemplified by an articulation of a subculturalist, an Asian enterprise, and the mainstream mode of production in My Beautiful Laundrette. This hegemony also confirms fade-out of Britain’s imperial glory and the rise of a new capitalist empire. Chapter Two highlights the idea of performance in The Buddha of Suburbia. It is a way by which individuals of different class and ethnicity enounce their cultural capitals and hook together in certain fields of cultural production. The major concern of Chapter Three lies in the antagonism between consumerism and Islamic fundamentalism in The Black Album, around which identities in the late eighties Britain are shaped and transformed. Through the hero’s literary endeavors, Kureishi seeks a way out of consumerist depthlessness and suffocating doctrines of a fundamentalist Islam. Focusing on Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Chapter Four analyzes exclusory practices that can occur when different elements are articulated together by disarticulating or opposing those labeled as others. These struggles are manifest in spatial contestation between different characters in different power positions. The concluding chapter examines both Kureishi’s emphasis of articulating difference as a survival strategy in late capitalism, and his critical stance in his stories on ignoring others’ differences from and similarities with oneself, which, as the author believes, is a human tendency that disarticulates people from the complexity of the world. ix.

(4) Acknowledgements. I would like to express my best appreciation to my advisor, Professor Yu-cheng Li, a pioneer of Kureishi studies in Taiwan. His famous paper, “Expropriating the Authentic: Cultural Politics in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia,” provoked me to explore the intimacy between commodification and Kureishi’s characters. His lectures in the class “Contemporary English Novels” at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) in 2005 enabled me to concern contemporary Britain from different perspectives. His encouragement for me to finish a dissertation that illuminates a postcolonial writer in the light of late capitalism, his stress on writing to the point, and his toil in reading my chapters along with his other PhD and MA students are unforgettable. I am also greatly indebted to Professor Jung Su, whose courses in 2003, 2004 and 2005, focusing on postwar minority British novelists and contemporary cultural studies, laid the foundation for this dissertation. Her careful reading and judicious comments on my term papers are of great value to my English writing. Professor Kun-liang Chuang, Yin-i Chen, and Shyh-jen Fu, as the other three members of the committee, pointed out key insufficiencies of my early version and helped turn the final version into an organic whole. As for teachers outside the English departments, I appreciate Professor Mau-Sheng Lee’s help in organizing the theoretical toolkit for this dissertation. Pointing out capitalism as a temporary formation of human society, he reminds me of the equal importance of ethics, and suggests me to focus on Pierre Borudieu’s exploration of cultural production. His courses in the law department at National Taiwan University (NTU), like “Introduction to Legal Science,” “Juvenile Law,” and “Sociology in Criminal Justice,” not only inspired me to finish a chapter regarding the relationship between delinquency and capitalism, but also advanced my understanding of subjectivity constructed in capitalism. Professor Yuan-ling Pei, now in the department of sociology in Soochow University, led some tough reading groups of sociological canons in my undergraduate years. I thank him for having equipped me a capability of surveying heavy documents in an early period of my academic journey, as well as his excellent paper concerning globalization and hegemony of the United States. His emphasis on globalization as “reference without a center” and his methodology of “relational thinking” supports my explanation of Kureishi’s Britain as a process of (dis-)articulating differences. Many friends of mine provided intellectual and spiritual supports for completing this dissertation. Nawit Chiu, my undergraduate classmate and now a successful entrepreneur applying Foucault’s disciplinary skill as his governmentality in China, x.

(5) helped me find late capitalism as the organizing principle in Chapter One, originally a term paper and becoming the starting point of the whole dissertation. His insights on how power and discourse join the formation of Johnny’s subjectivity pushed me forward to anatomize Kureishi’s texts in a Foucauldian style, which certainly took me a lot of time, yet also led me to new terrains and understanding of Kureishi’s world. Smayson Yu (a dried fish), Yun-wen Yu (a fish still alive), Kunchou Tsai (a golden bachelor lawyer hence no more an underdog), Jia-jun Fang, and Yi-Chou Lin (the bear and a lawyer), as my friends in the law department of NTU, provided much emotional support for toughest days in my PhD program. I pay my special thanks to Ni-luo Guo, Yun-wen’s girlfriend, whose kindness of borrowing books from NTU’s library for me is indispensable for this dissertation. My Junior High classmates Jim Hu and Vincent Wu’s contribution are formidable. Jim’s mental supports are always workable (like his basketball jumpers), while Vincent is the most reliable engineer to solve problems of my psyche and computer equipments. With his MA degree from Britain, Vincent also brought me his first-hand observation of the British society, confirming my speculation of some negative effects of Britain’s social welfare system. Friends in NTNU provide timely helps. Chih-liang Hsu’s cheers during my PhD program are heart-warming. Yi-rong and Yu-qui’s kindly help of borrowing book from Providence University is much appreciated. I cannot express enough appreciation to the Fulbright Foundation, which gave me a ten-month visiting opportunity in the theatre department of Louisiana State University (LSU). During this year I learned much from my Fulbright advisor— Professor Les Wade—not only from his class on contemporary dramatic theory, but also in his careful reading and criticism on my dissertation, which cannot reach its current standard without his conscientious clarification and stimulation of my main arguments. I thank him for spending so much time in discussing each chapter with me, trying to find a major focus in my multiple concerns and keep the complexity of this dissertation. His consideration of my life as a non-resident in Baton Rouge, and his writing of reference letters many times for me without reservation deeply moved me. I thank Michelle for her encouragement of my academic work, as well as her proof writing of this dissertation. Her modification let my idea shine out from a second language barrier. As a local friend in Baton Rouge, she provided me an insider’s view of the American society, and shared me some of the happiest days with me and my girlfriend Joy. I am also grateful to Professor Michael Tick. As the chair in the theatre department, he allowed me to auditing his class of directing. By doing so Joy (as a PhD student in theatre at LSU) and I directed David Henry Hwang’s The Sound of a Voice. This experience is priceless for it help me venture into Kureishi’ representation of Fringe theatre in Chapter Two. Many LSU students from Taiwan loosened my xi.

(6) stress during my dissertation writing. I cannot forget those enjoyable potlucks, outings, travels with Pin-chuan, Chien-Pu, Fannie, Jennie, Edith, Kenny and Joy. I also felt an immense gratitude to their comfort in the energy-consuming process of dissertation writing and participation in my debut clarinet recital (Fannie as the piano accompanist and Jennie as the Double-bass guest musician). Finally, I owe an enormous debt to my parents and my girlfriend Joy (born in the same day with Hanif Kureishi). Supporting me financially and spiritually, my parents are the most solid base of this dissertation. Joy’s pioneering adventure to the theatre department in the States, which makes my one-year study there possible, her wisdom in solving my mental and health problems, her resolution of facing square to any tough realities and positiveness of problem solving, her philosophical mentality that brought me into a basic understanding of Levinas and ethics, her perseverance in body training requisite to academic works, her efficiency and excellence in cooking, her visions and ingenuous ideas in co-directing the play The Sound of a Voice, her critical insights that anatomize literature, politics, medical science, academia, gender, class, ethnicity, (post-)coloniality, creative writing, film, drama, TV series, cultures of Japan, Taiwan, China and the United States, her daily practices according to her ethic ideals, her philosophical yet poignant writing style in novel, prose essays, poems, and criticisms, and her creativity as a person at large, propel and upgrade this dissertation and myself to the present level.. xii.

(7) Contents. 1. Introduction. Chapter One Subculture, Ideology, and Modes of Production in Late Capitalism: My Beautiful Laundrette. 30. Chapter Two Performance, Cultural Capital and Social Mobility: The Buddha of Suburbia. 72. Chapter Three Between Consumerism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Black Album. 128. Chapter Four Contesting Spaces: Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. 186. Conclusion. 234. Works Cited. 246. xiii.

(8) Introduction. [T]hey were liberal. And they needed an Asian, and I was the Asian. (Kureishi, “Interview: Hanif Kureishi on London” 40) If Blair’s ‘third way’ implies consensus and the end of antagonism, our literature will sharpen and map differences. ‘Over-integration’, the erasing of racial and religious differences, can become coercive or even fascistic. It can give rise to more racism, anger and resentment. (Kureishi, “The Word and the Bomb” 9) After the age had caught up with Gramsci’s Leninist analysis of hegemony, the whole cultural area was now being seen as political, as presenting values, assumptions, practices, all seemingly invisible, but which kept late capitalism intact. Part of the state’s use of force was the coercive nature of implicit ideas, which were, partly, disseminated by the state’s media. Naturally, as the media multiplied, its influence was grasped as being politically significant in many ways, as was, therefore, the analysis of its workings and cultural defiance of its paradigms. (Kureishi, Plays One xiv) Despite Hanif Kureishi’s interest in easily-swallowed pop culture, realism as his major literary style, and a concern for ethnic minorities in Britain as conspicuous as his own light brown skin-color among whites, the author is difficult to be tackled in any single theoretical formation. While most of his early works published no later than 1995 either came up with non-white protagonists or tackled racism and conflicts between civilizations,1 critics cannot help but primarily consider Kureishi’s work 1. These works include plays like Outskirts (1981), Borderline (1981), Birds of Passage (1983), novels like The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), The Black Album (1995), and screenplays like My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988), and My Son the Fanatic (1997). Though premiered at the Cannes Film festival in 1997, My Son the Fanatic is originally a short story first.

(9) “through the lens of postcolonial theory” (Thomas 5). This approach seems to be tailor-made, for Kureishi’s most salient essays such as “The Rainbow Sign,” “Bradford,” and “The Word and the Bomb,” usually foreground the salience of “race, immigration, identity, Islam” in his literary and a contemporary Britain (Kureishi, “The Word and the Bomb” 3). Through such postcolonial lenses, however, rich implications of the above quotations are easily ignored, and seeming contradictions among them, namely between Kureishi’s recognition of his non-white identity as a means to sell to white liberals, and his critique against racism, a homogenizing nationalism, and late capitalist hegemony, are liable to be bypassed. Are Kureishi himself and his works, in so doing, co-opted into a cultural field where racialization and commodification are rampant? How does his anti-racism, based upon his awareness of new market logic of Orientalism, works with or against hegemony of late capitalism? If Kureishi believes himself or ethnic minorities representing a difference different from Blair’s third way, a hybrid political position aims to transcend right and left, how different are they in British life, and how homogenizing is Blair’s third way that is supposed to threaten the co-existence of differences? Must all differences, legal or not in the British context, be permitted, as Kureishi himself asks “how do you live with people who are so different that—among other things—they lock up their wives” (“The Word and the Bomb” 8)? All these puzzles of difference are more complicated in regard to my final quotations. 2 If Gramsci’s idea of hegemony in late capitalism is articulated by different social sections, in which ways does different voice and representation. appeared in the New Yorker in 1994. 2 In cultural studies, the idea of difference is most notably considered in the vein of structuralism and post-structuralism, respectively represented by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and philosopher Jacques Derrida, to explain how meaning is made possible by differences between signs. Just like Kureishi, I use this term in its habitual sense, and especially focus on how certain activity, phenomenon, and social formation is regarded as culturally different. 2.

(10) articulate or disarticulate in relation to late capitalism, where, as Kureishi points out, “coercive nature of implicit ideas . . . disseminated by the state’s media” coexists with “cultural defiance of its paradigms” in a “multiplied” mediascape/society (Kureishi, Plays One xiv)? To answer these questions, some concepts and premises concerning a heterogeneous late capitalism, racial discrimination and minority resistance must be taken into account. We have to clarify whether Kureishi is a marginal subject against a British cultural hegemony entirely different from his position. Except for nationalists, racists, and a complicit government in the backdrop of Kureishi’s early works, there are frequently social, economic and cultural forces beyond the author and his characters, which not only shape, connect and homogenize the daily similarity among different coordinates, but also diversify, identify, and encourage their distinctiveness. In Kureishi’s works, these forces might be most adequately explained by the function of late capitalism, as a social, cultural and economic system burgeoning after late 1960s and still remaining intact in the early 21st century. Under such circumstances, consumerist and productive creativity related to his main characters is no less common than post-sixties advertisements that call their consumers to break the rule (Frank 24). In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank claims a Western cultural revolution after 1960s as hegemony of hip, or hip capitalism rebellious against dull and conformist consumer capitalism. We may also term hip capitalism, with its central idea “[c]ool” as “an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals or small groups to express defiance to authority” (Pountain and Robins 19), as late capitalism, capable of involving rebels against itself to reflect, renew, fluidize, and transform itself. Capitalism in this phase has been capable of joining and empowering resistant movements and minority discourses Kureishi belongs to. This accounts for the author’s acknowledgement that “technology and consumerism became our gods” 3.

(11) (“The Word and the Bomb” 6). Many counter-hegemonic discourses have been produced, transmitted, and consumed in Kureishi’s realistic representation of a mediatized society. Therefore discussions of late capitalism can be a methodology not only shedding new light on postcolonial criticism revolving around Kureishi’s notable early works, but also revealing and articulating his concern of lives of different ethnicity, gender, class, age group in a postmodern time. Here I seek to explore the logic of late capitalism in Hanif Kureishi’s four early postcolonial stories. While many critics tend to shed light on postcoloniality, racism, and nationalism in Kureishi’s early works, I discover that late capitalism as a motive frequent-appeared is sometimes mentioned but not thoroughly delved through. Kureishi’s major minority characters are not only discriminated or exoticized, hence related to a postcolonial and post-imperial Britain whose ethnic relations are characterized by victimization and rebellion of the racialized groups. In public or private sphere, work or leisure, their ethnic backgrounds and different specialties are processed into cultural capitals or economic drives that diversify cultural outputs in British society. Constantly crossing traditional borders of race, class, gender, sexuality, high and pop culture related to their productive or consumptive activities, Kureishian characters, white or not, have raised important issues of postmodernity, consumerism and cultural production. As a result, Kureishi’s representation of British society around 1970s and 1980s can be termed, for theoretical expediency, as postmodern and late-capitalistic, the exact keywords by which cultural studies try to characterize a western world after the peak of capitalism and modernism. In a late phase of the ever-evolving capitalism, boundaries between the center and margin are constantly blurred, so as to release more productive and consumptive power of individuals from different groups. Space of the globe, nation, city, family and individual are also involved in a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, constituting and 4.

(12) constituted by new forms of capital. To deal with Kureishi’s concern of a late capitalist society that joins the becoming of postcolonial subjects, I focus on its four facets, namely incorporation of the margin into a mainstream mode of production, cultural production, consumerism, and finally the contestation of space, by exploring Kureishi’s four major postcolonial stories—his first two novels, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, and first two screenplays, My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. In so doing, I explore different types, mechanisms, and results of articulation of differences in Kureishi’s works. Such articulation can not only be the logic of late capitalism, which helps a subject selling himself or herself in a market always looking for the cool, but also a first step that the author brings his heroes out of postcolonial restriction, capitalistic oppression and postmodern superficialization. When different individuals are united as a group, and their distinctiveness are ensured, there can be, however, a process of excluding other differences that inevitably victimizes the presumed incommensurable. Tracking Hanif Kureishi Born with a Pakistani father and British mother in Bromley, December 5, 1954, Hanif Kureishi has first hand experiences of cultural and ethnic clashes in the postwar England. His hybrid identity makes himself not quite a representative member of the host or diaspora culture. In the course of his maturity, Kureishi is mostly irritated by discriminative practices from the host, for whom he can only be a Paki. On the other hand, Kureishi is a typical second generation “immigrant” writer, a monolingual, native Briton never feels himself a Pakistani. As a minority within minority, Kureishi explores a wide range of peripheral issues, such as homosexuality, subculture, diasporas of different generations, and suburbanites. However, most of his early works concern ethnic main characters living in the 1970s and 1980s Britain, two 5.

(13) decades in which racism against Commonwealth immigrants reaches its peak. The author’s own ethnicity and his heroes’, in this social milieu, soon wins him labels such as a “postcolonial storyteller” (Kenneth C. Kaleta)3 and a “black British writer” (Bronwyn T. Williams).4 This postcolonial reading on Kureishi is critical and indispensable, as either in the historical background of these postcolonial stories, or since their publication, race and racism are always enormous issues in contemporary Britain. Enoch Powell, the Tory MP in 1968, made a representative and most notorious racist speech in the face of heating debates on the Commonwealth immigration into Britain: As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. (qtd. in Hebdige, “Digging for Britain” 135) Having little sympathy for citizens of lower class and weak communities, some Conservatives expressed their racist remarks more overtly than the Labours,5 and Mrs. Thatcher “[f]rom the late 1970s . . . increasingly associated herself with the issue of immigration:” In January 1978 she appeared on a World in Action programme on immigration and stated that ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’ She then went on to promise a clear prospect of an end to immigration. (Hudson and Williams 127) 3. See his Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller. See his “‘A State of Perpetual Wandering:’ Diaspora and Black British Writers.” 5 It is noteworthy that some leading Conservatives then in the Shadow Cabinet were infuriated by the speech. Edward Heath, the Conservative leader dismissed Powell from his position as Shadow Defence Secretary, while Margaret Thatcher is more sympathetic to Powell’s stance. 4. 6.

(14) These speeches reflect a strong involuntariness to face the multicultural reality of Britain. An old form of British culture, now severely redefined by a world of postcolonial literary outputs and theoretical formations, seems to be the rationale that justifies racist practices against ex-colonial immigrants from the third world. Kureishi’s emergence as a literary figure, on the other hand, represents an culturally hybrid identity preceded by V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, his two novelist mentors, and a group of immigrant writers arriving at postwar Britain from former colonies. Being a colored immigrant’s son and writing about diasporic lives threatened by nationalism and Thatcherism in his early works, Kureishi is provided with a hyphenated identity, and capable of voicing the postcolonial dimension of contemporary Britain that some “host” citizens still refuse to accept. As a result, he soon turns to be literary critics’ fancied writer, fitting in with postcolonial concepts such as hybridity (Homi Bhabha), black Britishness (Paul Gilroy), and new ethnicity (Stuart Hall). Such stress on ethnic difference, or on minority as a hybrid existence against a homogeneous mainstream, leads some literary critics to polarize cultural differences between East and West in Kureishi’s stories. Frederic Holmes, for example, claims a consumerist protagonist split by the East in The Black Album, just because he partakes in activities of an Islamic fundamentalist group.6 Kureishi’s negative representations of Islam draw attacks in a similar logic, for some Muslim characters in The Black Album and My Son the Fanatic are with fanatic dimensions that reinscribe stereotyping from the host society. Even labeling Kureishi as a writer of Black British Literature (Mark Stein), “The ‘other’ in multicultural London” (Lars Ole Sauerberg),7 a resistant colonized Using 6. I would discuss Holmes’ “The Postcolonial Subject Divided between East and West: Kureishi’s The Black Album as an Intertext of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses” more in Chapter Three. 7 See his Intercultural Voices in Contemporary British Literature, p.128. 7.

(15) the Master’s Tools (Anuradha Dingwaney Needham), or as one of the writers writing Postcolonial London (John McLeod), critics come up with analysis of multiple identities of Kureishi’s different characters, far more kaleidoscopic than their titles suggest. On the other hand, ethnicity as the most powerful means of marketing Kureishi as a celebrated writer, is oftentimes ridiculed in his works. 8 Bradley Buchanan in his Hanif Kureishi (2007) has pointed out that, “[b]ecause of the increasingly obvious uniqueness of Kureishi’s cultural and political position as a fully Westernized child of an immigrant father, recent critics have turned away from viewing Kureishi in terms of postcolonialism” (13). Kureishi’s father Rafiushan was once an upper class in India, capable of fleeing the subcontinent upheavals that led to the partition of India and Pakistan. With economic safety and ambition to be a writer, Rafiushan has fashioned himself and Hanif with a great range of European literary legacies.9 These cultural capitals not only support Kureishi’s faith to become a professional writer, an occupation originated in the West together with the rise of capitalism, but also differentiate himself from many ethnic working class or underclass. Paternal culture is not Kureishi’s only advantage. According to Kureishi’s mother, his literary translation of his maternal family into working class is misleading,10 as she relates in an interview: “I suppose it’s trendy nowadays for an author to pretend they had a working-class background, but Hanif had everything he wanted as a child” (Johnston 9). To avoid the danger of flatting a diverse range of distinctions by pitting the ethnic/colored against the host/white communities in Britain, critics examine Kureishi’s ethnic characters portrayed as miscellaneous individuals, with different 8. See Mark Stein, Black British Literature, p. 115. In Buddha, Haroon’s family background is an interesting parallel to Kureishi’s own father, and the protagonist Karim comes from a liberalist, lower middle class family just as his. For more discussions, please refer to Chapter Two in this dissertation. 10 This mainly indicates Karim’s British mother in Buddha, characterized as a worker in a shoe store. 9. 8.

(16) political faiths, social identities, and life philosophies. Themes other than racism and cultural conflicts are also explored as Kureishi’s fundamental concerns in his early works, such as gender issues, class formations, consumerism, high/low culture disputes, and Americanization in Britain. Some telling examples are as follows. Despite its handy subtitle to highlight Kureishi’s ethnicity as an outstanding difference from other British writers, Kenneth Kaleta’s Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller marks out “universal truths” as the hidden tone “underlying the idiosyncratic activities of his unconventional characters” (16).11 This universality is also made possible, paradoxically, by “contradictions of a pluralistic society within England” (3), when people find cultural specificity of different groups coexists with a lingering British tradition, and a new born, multicultural national identity is still discernable as British. Kaleta also notices the importance of globalization, as “today’s mass-communication empire” (7), fashion “style” (8), “[m]usical trends” (8), American “pop culture” (10), and cinema as “the passport to a global community” (11), all contribute in Kureishi’s world of “fin-de-siecle global community” in Britain (12). Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Hanif Kureishi,12 a comprehensive study in a series called “Contemporary World Writers,” concerns the author in relation to a global as well as a postcolonial context. “[D]ecolonisation,” “political re-alignments and economic restructuring on a global scale in a period since 1945” are contexts for him to understand Kureishi as a world writer, whose representation of Marxists, 11. As Kaleta claims, “[t]here are no easy divisions in Kureishi’s writing, in which non-exclusive groups may one time divide by culture, another time metamorphose by race, split according to gender the next time, and still another time divide by class or generation. In Kureishi’s fiction, characters unable to let go of the traditions of the past attempt to live in present-day London” (6). This depiction of complex identity formation reflects universal humanity in two dimensions. While no category can ultimate defines an individual’s identity, he or she cannot let go a personal or collective history, those “traditions of the past” that determines a “present-day” character. By “universal identity,” a concept so fiercely debased as Eurocentrism by postcolonial studies or as a “grand narrative” by postmodernists, Kaleta probably connotes that the “particular” or “individual” identity is universal, and those universal distinctions are always under structuring forces beyond an individual, those “universal” categories such as gender, race, class, nation, and history. 12 If not specifically noted, all of my citations from Moore-Gilbert’s work are from his Hanif Kureishi. 9.

(17) fundamentalism, Americanisation (Moore-Gilbert 5), pop music, and oppositional politics of gender, sexuality and ethnicity (Moore-Gilbert 9-10) are usually orchestrated in London as a world city. Knowing this city is “semi-detached . . . from the nation and its ideas of Britishness, and from the lobal space beyond” (Ball 227), John Clement Ball notices that Kureishi’s British-born identity facilitates his understanding of a glocalized London,. a site compatible with some influential concepts of postmodernity: Jean Baudrillard’s ‘simulacrum’ as the replica of the vanishing ‘real’; Fredric Jameson’s ‘depthlessness’ as an aesthetic consequence of late capitalist commodification; David Harvey’s ‘time-space compression’ as the annihilation of boundaries that technology and multinational capital can accomplish. (233). Ball’s highlight of Kureishi’s deftness in portraying London as a postmodern city brings into sight Kureishi’s authenticity as a Londoner, with an insider’s view with which first generation immigrant writers in Britain rarely equip. Acknowledging that Kureishi “writes from the centre” (Thomas 1), Buchanan claims: “Kureishi has to some degree been forced into the role of commentator on the phenomenon of immigration . . . and readily admits that his initial willingness to play this role meant that he profited from being a member of visible minority” (13). That said,. central features of Kureishi’s depiction of English life are arguably not based on stable racial or ethnic identities but instead on the blurring of class boundaries, the rise of feminism, the rise of gay and lesbian movements, and the institutionalization and commercialization of youth culture and popular music, as well as increased postmodern awareness of the arbitrariness and contingency of identity (be it racial, religious, or cultural). (Buchanan 14). 10.

(18) This English life, characterized by so many dimensions of postmodernity (minority movements, boundary crossing, rise of the youth and pop, and contingent identity), also witnesses an era where capital is no more merely related to economy and the bourgeois. As petit narratives gain importance so are cultural, symbolic, and discursive capital related to individuals and subordinate groups. With his recognition of humanity as a complicated, self-conflicting, and decisive determinant, Buchanan handles Kureishi’s concern of right and left politics, 13 (anti-)Thatcherism, class antagonism, and hedonism, all salient components buttressing the working of late capitalism, without bypassing issues of race. Seeing that dissemination and variegation of capital have led capitalism from an industrial stage to intervene in, meditate between and interweave different coordinates of identity, many Kureishian characters seize the opportunity to develop their possibilities, among racialization, exploitation, or other forms of inequality, by crossing a boundary loosened for flexible modes of production and consumption. In fact, Kureishi’s most noted postcolonial stories usually include middle-class, young ethnic protagonists eager for social climbing or a hedonistic lifestyle. Owing to this trait, Bruce King argues that “it is difficult to understand why postcolonialism should be applied to . . . someone writing about . . . life in England and the difficulties of accepting life’s limitations” (“Abdurazak Gurnah and Hanif Kureishi” 93).14 13. Prime Minister Thatcher remains a powerful image as a New Right representative in Laundrette, Sammy, and Album, while leftist characters, from Terry in Buddha, Hussein in Laundrette to Brownlow in Album look as criticizable as Thatcher regarding their moral consistency. Perhaps Kureishi’s (re-)creation of the Right and Left figures aims to show how capitalism remains intact through the antagonism of different ideologies. As John Storey has noticed, “throughout most of the course of the twentieth century, General Elections in Britain were contested by what are now the two main political parties, Labour and Conservative. On each occasion the contest circled around the question, who best can administer capitalism (usually referred to by the less politically charged term ‘the economy’)—less nationalization, more nationalization; less taxation, more taxation, etc. And on each occasion, the mainstream media concurred. In this sense, the parameters of the election debate are ultimately dictated by the needs and interests of capitalism, manifested as the interests and needs of society in general” (Cultural Theory 104). 14 Even in “Abdurazak Gurnah and Hanif Kureishi: Failed Revolutions,” an essay collected in The Contemporary British Novel Since 1980, Bruce King claims that to group Kureishi and Gurnah under 11.

(19) Since critics have made comprehensive endeavors in a wide span of different problematics, to what extent and in which way does late capitalism coordinate and redefine the interrelations of different categories are not fully fathomed. Kureishi’s works illuminate a changing Britain, where white English men no longer speak for the whole domestic middle class, while no major characters serve in manufacturing industry, a representative form of production in British industrial capitalism. Either soaking themselves in cultural production or consumption, many Kureishian characters rarely “accept life’s limitations.” Their pursuits of individual lifestyles in work and leisure time, however, are not all positively rendered, just as Kureishi’s ambiguous stance toward capitalism in his non-fictional writing. His “moral distrust of capitalism” (Buchanan 24) pushes him to claim “businessmen as semi-criminals” (Kureishi, “Some Time” 136). Translated in his fictional texts, an extreme hedonist like Chili in The Black Album is just the victim of a consumerism mainly instigated by capitalist producers. Debuted as early as in 1980, Kureishi’s early play The King and Me also exposes the narcotic effect of Pop, this time through Marie’s escapist indulgence in Elvis Presley’s world. On the other hand, the self-empowering creativity of cultural production and entrepreneurship as Asian immigrants’ survival strategy lead the author to fabricate numerous enlightening characters, echoing Thatcher’s principle of self reliance and economic liberalism. Nasser and his cousin Omar in My Beautiful Laundrette, Papa in The Black Album all witness the importance of working ethic and creativity in small business, which help them support their family members as outsiders in a hostile host society. Inspired by Bohemian lifestyle of hippy after 1960s, Haroon and his son Karim respectively sell their spiritual and entertaining cultural products in The Buddha of Suburbia, while the subculturalists in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid articulate their anarchist community in the ‘postcolonial’ headline in this book is misleading (Buchanan 166). 12.

(20) terms of music and costume innovation. Creativity of the youth culture is with little doubt Kureishi’s core value that can stride across political, sexual and class border to liberate individuals from collective restraints. As the author claims, “[f]or a lot of kids, Pop was the only hope for a creative, unpredictable life” (My Ear 130), and therefore shall not be degraded as “capitalism in disguise” by “the old Left” (“Requiem” 11). When youth culture and capitalism are reinventing each other since the second half of the twentieth century, Kureishi’s alliance with capitalism, despite his subjective reluctance, is inevitable. Kureishi’s intimacy with capitalism accounts for his unavoidable articulation with some aspects of Thatcherism. Overtly criticizing Thatcher’s cut of welfare expenditure by Rosie as a frustrating social worker in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and the Conservative’s homophobia and racism via Omar and Johnny’s cross-racial gay love, Kureishi has made Thatcher’s promotion of economic liberalism and entrepreneurism creeds for some characters as (would-be) social climbers. He has noticed that Those Pakistanis who have worked hard to establish businesses, now vote Tory and give money to the Conservative Party. Their interests are the same as those of middle-class business people everywhere, though they are subject to more jealousy and violence. They have wanted to elevate themselves out of the maelstrom and by gaining economic power and the opportunity and dignity it brings, they have made themselves safe—safer. They have taken advantage of England. (“Rainbow” 30). As Thatcherism to a large degree reflected a global restructuring of capitalism in a local frame, Kureishi’s articulation between the economic and ethnic raises several important questions. If capitalism is deemed as an exploitative system originated in the West, for what reason does the author have his heroes, more often than not with 13.

(21) autobiographical allusions, accumulate their cultural/economic capital and finally transform into yuppies, the hero of postmodern cities? Are not the postcolonial subjects, through such representations, incorporated into the mainstream society and losing their idiosyncrasies? Similar puzzles occur in other characters from the periphery, be they feminists, subculturists, or immigrants of different generation. While most of them enjoy a hedonistic way of life in consumer society, others who insist a different way of life usually do not look attractive, if not promising, in Kureishi’s representation. To understand Kureishi’s British society as a distinct configuration, it will be helpful to consult theories of postmodernity and late capitalism that aim to illuminate a sea change of Western society in the same era of Kureishi’s postcolonial stories. Below I will appropriate and develop David Harvey’s illustration of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson’s logic of late capitalism, and Stuart Hall’s conception of articulation to analyze how different cultural categories in Kureishi’s works, such as race, class, gender, and subculture, are articulated in a flexible mode of production and consumption. In the following chapters, I will further explore about whether this logic only flattens one’s identity, or empowers individuals and communities at certain moments. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism The postwar Britain witnessed a great cultural and economic change. Its demand of cheap labor right after the war brought non-white immigrants from former colonies, mainly the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent. As many host Britons hardly let go of past imperial glories, tensions of cultural conflicts never subside, and are usually heightened by economic recessions and nationalistic stirrings. Through seventies to eighties, ethnic immigrants were accused of stealing “host” Briton’s jobs. Despite 14.

(22) racist and national practices in immigration law, people from the former Empire stay, and heterogeneous cultures they brought in ripen into essential parts of Britain now. Immigration from the Commonwealth is just one of the most conspicuous changes in the British culture, while other changes came in the 1960s are everywhere in Kureishi’s novels and scripts. [F]ed by new injections of American culture, the easy availability of birth control, and concerns about social and political problems, young people adopted new attitudes, reflected in their love of rock-and-roll, new fashions, the sexual revolution, and support for mass movements. . . . (McCormick 23) These cultural revolts initiated by the youths are no more simply youth subcultures as they have greatly change the mental and material practices of British citizens, especially when youths in the 1960s finally turn to middles-agers capable of mastering their country. “A self-styled child of the Sixties” (Ramesh), Kureishi comes up with characters appropriating and developing the “uninhibited culture” burgeoning in his childhood (Kaleta 83). Haroon and Eva’s hippy hedonism in Buddha, Chili and Deedee’s pop consumerism in Album, and Sammy and Rosie’s “[f]reedom plus commitment” as their philosophy of love (Sammy 208) are just Kureishi’s understanding of stylistic identities as the mature fruit of the cultural revolution. Even in the nineties Kureishi cannot let go this legacy. Buchanan finds ex-rockstar “Rex still idealizes the sixties” (27) in Gabriel’s Gift (2001), having illusion of the “revolutionary struggle of making the world a better place, with free food and marijuana all round” (Kureishi, Gabriel 41). In a more reflexive tone, Jay observes his whole generation in Intimacy (1998): “we were the children of innocent consumerism and the inheritors of freedoms won by our seditious elders in the late sixties. . . . We weren’t much restrained by morality or religion. Music, dancing and conscienceless 15.

(23) fucking were our totems” (58-59). The freedom bequeathed by 1960s also welcomes multicultural elements across the globe to hybridize in a local span. A locale-bound list of British culture provided by T.S. Eliot is no longer sufficient, and is added by many globalized and popularized items by Kureishi, including “yoga exercises, going to Indian restaurants, the music of Bob Marley, the novels of Salman Rushdie, Zen Buddhism, the Hare Krishna Temple, as well as the films of Sylvester Stallone, therapy, hamburgers, visits to gay bars, the dole office and the taking of drugs” (“Bradford” 78). Kureishi’s 1970s and 1980s London reflects a maturation of revolution in 1960s. Traditionalism and nationalism preached by the Conservative since Thatcher’s elective win in 1979 never single-handedly decided the trend of a globalized British culture, which always transgress the boundaries between local and global, low and high culture, so as to fulfill a diverse appetite of post-sixties consumers. With the emergence of musical revolution led by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, and fashion revolution that absorbs cultural elements from the bottom and abroad, Kureishi’s Britain witnesses the new empire of “global popular culture” in replace of an Imperial old one. (McCormick 23). The blurring of national and hierarchical boundaries, as well as the emergence of bottom or peripheral voices such as the female, the lower class or ethnic communities are characterized by theorists as “the condition of postmodernity.” In his classic book of the same name, David Harvey finds that the new condition is closely related to shifts in the organization of capitalism and a new experience of time-space relation. Before 1973 Fordism is the representative mode of production, designed by Henry Ford to pay workers with sufficient salary for consuming goods they produce. In other words, it is a producer-oriented pattern of capitalism, aiming to create stable labor and foreseeable consumers. As Harvey claims, Fordism was too rigid to organize and 16.

(24) accumulate capital, and finally transformed into “flexible accumulation” with respect to the labor process and consumption patterns in 1970s. On the other hand, new media and transportation technologies in the postwar era intensify the former process by what Harvey sees as “time-space compression,” a postmodern condition that articulates different objects, images, information and people in a simultaneous experience. Since cultural differences across the globe are easier to access, consumers expect to experience more, which further bring about a need to produce daily commodities in various styles, or cultural products with certain distinctiveness to satisfy users with picky appetite. In view of the restructuring of cultural and economic production on the global span, cultural difference is highlighted as a salient parameter to sell goods, services and accumulate capital, while cost control is as indispensable in late capitalism as its predecessor. Immigrant entrepreneurs and cultural workers in Kureishi’s stories reflect a postmodern or late capitalist turn in comparison with a relative stable mass production/consumption in the modernity. Time-space compression brings these ex-colonized immigrants in London, either as fortune seekers or cheap labor, while their cultural outputs reflect a de-centered capitalism incessantly absorbs multicultural elements to diversify its production and consumption. That is how postmodernism, a cultural idea turns to be Fredric Jameson’s logic of late capitalism. Harvey’s main depiction of postmodernity is mirrored in Jameson’s definition of late capitalism. Following Ernst Mandel’s periodization of capitalism, Jameson periodizes three phases of capitalism since industrial revolution. Market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and finally, multinational or late capitalism, parallel his “own cultural periodization of the stages of realism, modernism, and postmodernism” (“Postmodernism” 78). In the first phase, markets competed with one another within a country, while the second phase was 17.

(25) characterized by Imperialism, where Western countries expanded and formed Empire by exploiting oversea colonies. “[L]ate or multinational or consumer capitalism, far from being inconsistent with Marx’s great nineteenth-century analysis, constitutes, on the contrary, the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas” (“Postmodernism” 78). Not all countries in the world have gone through these three phases or have them in the same historic period, yet Jameson’s model may account for the historic background of Kureishi’s postcolonial stories in Britain, a country as the cradle of industrial revolution, the representative of Imperialism, and an example recording the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism in 1970s. Culture, with its higher form formerly reserved for non-profitable mental activities, is now the raw material for late capitalistic production as well as commodity for consumption. In other words, culture is one of the most conspicuous areas for the expansion of capital. Few writers in contemporary Britain have come up with so many main characters producing, selling and consuming cultures. Featured by a profitable religious guru, an actor, a rock roll star, an interior designer, a entrepreneur who selling his service by aesthetics, an accountant with strong cultural consumerism, and a would-be young novelist hoping to find a work as a reporter, Kureishi’s literary world echoes the late capitalist cultural logic, claiming “a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life—from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself—can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorised sense” (Jameson, “Postmodernism” 87). The culture logic of late capitalism not merely indicates that everything becomes culture. It reveals a more shocked reality that every culture can be either a commodity or resource for production. Jameson’s demarcation of a late capitalist era is not without challengers. Mike 18.

(26) Featherstone claims that “Jameson is guilty of overgeneralization,” and in this way, “differentiation of culture within pre-capitalist societies” can be underestimated in his “well-defined epochs” (58). To evade such defects, Featherstone asks for shifting our focus from “the higher-level relatively abstract systems theorization of capital,” to “the way capitalism has been practiced by specific groups, classes, and class fractions” (53). For Steven Connor, Jameson’s totalizing periodization of late capitalism “makes no distinction between dominant and oppositional” (47). Furthermore, in Jameson’s model of cultural expansion, “there is greatly reduced scope for claiming that within culture there may be ways of thwarting the inexorable rhythms of appropriation and alienation of consumer capitalism” (47). As if he has predicted such oppositions, Jameson explains his stance towards “objection to periodisation, a concern about its possible obliteration of heterogeneity” (Postmodernism 5):. I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and assessed. I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is postmodern in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term. The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses— what Raymond Williams has usefully termed “residual” and “emergent” forms of cultural production—must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. (Postmodernism 6). In Kureishi’s works, we can see how pre-capitalist and early capitalist residual keeps shaping daily experiences of his characters, while a late capitalist turn in 1960s, as I have mentioned above, marked an emergent epoch. Kureishi’s orchestration of 19.

(27) characters as part of various social formations also helps exemplify and develop Jameson’s relatively abstract theorization. “Distinction between dominant and oppositional,” as Connor has asked Jameson to foreground, is vividly and dynamically represented in Kureishi’s stories, which at times criticize, and attempt to find ways out of “the inexorable rhythms of appropriation and alienation of consumer capitalism” (Connor 47). That is why I argue, with late capitalism as “a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm,” the “genuine difference” or distinctiveness of Kureishi’s stories “could be measured and assessed.” What Jameson characterizes as expansion of culture is simultaneously the emergence of different cultures originally unseen, oppressed, or marginalized across the globe. Still, when the very idea of culture is revealed in a postmodern proliferation of discourses, simulacra, and commodities, it soon gains its distinctiveness in these miraculous mergers with different materials. An attractive difference in commodities creates the need for consumption, and a difference between identities, social groups or cultures provides reasons for resistance and identification. This is because without difference/differentiation, there can be no referential system of significance and the world turns to be a random play of signifiers resultantly. Antagonism and agreeability between the self and other is a process of articulation and disarticulation, which can never be single-handedly determined by the intention or desire of the concerned subjects. As Stuart Hall maintains, “what we call ‘the self’ is constituted out of and by difference, and remains contradictory, and that culture forms are, similarly, in that way, never whole, never fully closed or ‘sutured’” (145). “Others” are innate in the self, which is therefore an articulation of differences. To understand how different social categories interplay with each other, crosscut each subject positions, and welcome the participation of late capitalism, we have to understand the idea of articulation, which is “not just a thing (not just a connection) but a process of creating connections, much 20.

(28) in the same way that hegemony is not domination but the process of creating and maintaining conensus or of co-ordinating interests” (Slack 114). While articulation “can be understood as a way of characterizing a social formation without falling into the twin traps of reductionism and essentialism” (Slack 112), it helps understand how Kureishi’s semi-autonomous characters gains subjectivity and are still subjected to the formation of late capitalism. Stuart Hall’s illustration of articulation might be the most noted and succinct in explaining how unity and difference work together in discursive and social fields. As Hall puts it, “articulate” can on the one hand means to “utter, to speak forth, to be articulate,” carrying a sense of “language-ing” and “expressing,” and on the other is related to “an ‘articulated’ lorry (truck): a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another” (141). Concerning one’s expression the first meaning highlights the difference of a subject position, while the second meaning implies those differences or subjects can be connected in unity. Claiming that “[a]n articulation is . . . the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions,” Hall highlights the contingency of and heterogeneity within this unity, and asks for a theory of articulation as “both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects. (141). Hall’s theory of articulation also explains a process where a subject is born from articulation between unity and difference within ideological practices. Paradoxically, different subjects find their subjectivity by articulating themselves with a relatively unified social position or ground, for no one makes their “original” identity out of nothing. Discourses, ideologies, political regime and socio-economic practices 21.

(29) pre-exist the birth of any subjects, articulate them with these givens, and therefore they have some source materials to enounce their distinctiveness. For Hall, this process of subjectification via articulation can be illustrated in an Althusserian way: “the theory of articulation asks how an ideology discovers its subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it; it enables us to think how an ideology empowers people”15 (142). Regarding the ideological effect of articulating people within late capitalism, Storey uses music of the American counterculture as an illuminating example:. It inspired people to resist the draft and to organize against Americka’s war in Vietnam; yet, at the same time, its music made profits (over which it had no control) that could be used to support the war effort in Vietnam. The more Jefferson Airplane sang ‘All our private property/Is target for your enemy/And your enemy/Is We’, the more money RCA Records made. The proliferation of Jefferson Airplane’s anti-capitalist politics increased the profits of their capitalist company. . . . The music of the counter culture was not denied expression (ant there can be little doubt that this music produced particular cultural and political effects), but what is also true is that this music was ‘articulated’ in the economic interests of the war-supporting capitalist music industry. (Culture Theory 107). Insightfully pointing out articulation between counterculture and capitalism, and showing the irony that sales of anti-capitalist albums will be translated into taxes in support of war expenditure, Storey’s understanding of “the war-supporting capitalist music industry” is by no means a reductive equation between capitalism and politics. The anti-war movement where Jefferson Airplane is a part helps end the war, while capitalism keeps its evolution, encouraging hegemonic and counter-hegemonic. 15. This remark surely echoes one of Althusser’s famous explanatory definitions of ideology: “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects” (Lenin 115). 22.

(30) practices once they ignite production and consumption. As Hall has mentioned above, we have to understand in which “conditions” and “conjunctures” certain ideological elements are articulated to “certain political subjects” (141). It is no coincidence that Kureishi’s non-white subjects take advantage of their cultural or economic power to fight back racism under Thatcher’s reign, with her economic liberalism and nationalism not so friendly to Commonwealth immigrants. This means in anatomizing Kureishi’s postcolonial stories, we have to pay heed to why individuals of similar and different social formations are articulated together, why one is drawn to a certain productive position, why consumption is so pervasive a practice that different subject positions hardly get rid of, and how space serves to be a mechanism of articulation and disarticulation. Kureishi’s rendition of articulation can be concerned in two levels. First, by characterizing internal discrepancies within any social categories, as well as certain similarities among different communities, Kureishi delineated misunderstandings, stereotyping, commodification, conflicts and violence resulting from homogenizing the differences and ignoring the similarities. This is because the process of articulating differences into a social formation, be it race, gender, class, or nation, “requires the establishment of limits, and no limit can be drawn without, simultaneously, positing what is beyond it” (Selg and Ventsel 174). Antagonistic exclusion of the Other is what follows when different selves are articulated to reach their goal. To put it in simple terms, to cohere “us” you have to exclude “them” either as rivals or not-us (Selg and Ventsel 174). Racism in Kureishi’s postcolonial stories is the most conspicuous example, when South Asian immigrants or their descents are named as wogs or Pakis, accused of stealing jobs of the “natives” and disturbed by verbal or physical violence. However, there are more episodes where Kureishi shows exclusion can work in more latent way. In Buddha Karim and his father are welcomed by liberal whites because of 23.

(31) their physical differentiation. Hence, despite of their westernized lifestyle, they just cannot be “us” in many occasions and are “consumed,” regarding the exotic service they provided, within Orientalist imaginations. While in postmodern or postcolonial theories the excluded other usually refers to ethnic or sexual minorities, Sammy shows an ex-dictator, no matter how powerful he used to be in a newly decolonized nation, can be excluded in the postmodern London owing to his different value system. Kureishi also considers irreducible differences within an articulated unity. In opposition to far right practices of racism, there are so many white characters who not only befriend minorities in Kureishi’s stories, but also support anti-racist activities. A homologous concept such as “black” is also regarded as dubious, when the Anglo-Pakistani Karim in Buddha rejects it provided by a black actress. Cross-racial similarities are omnipresent in Kureishi’s plots to challenge the border erected for different unities, when his readers/audiences find inner city residents of different skin colors loot together in a riot in Sammy, and yuppies of different generation and ethnicity are busy dressing themselves up with costumes provided by western fashion industry. At the second level of Kureishian articulation, the author takes articulating differences as a survival strategy especially for his ethnic characters in late capitalism. Here the verb articulate still means to “enunciate” and to “hinge” at once. Late capitalism needs differences enounced in both end of production and consumption, for manufacturers and service providers nowadays are busy differentiating their products from others to attract the eyesight of picky consumers. To achieve this goal, different parts of a producing unit needs to be hinged to reach a flexible mode of accumulation, as well as to provide differentiated goods and services for heterogeneous consumers. Paralleling this economic process is how social agents produce their identities, cultural belongings and social positions by hinging on the logic of late capitalism. To 24.

(32) enounce their difference, Kureishi’s young ethnic heroes usually succeed the economic and cultural capital from their fathers or elder relatives, hence capable of translating postcolonial experiences into distinguished cultural outputs (like the actor Karim in Buddha and the novelist Shahid in Album). To join the mainstream mode of economic production (like the entrepreneur Omar in Laundrette and the accountant Sammy in Sammy), these heroes turn to their peer groups, unified either against the cultural barrenness of middle-class Philistines, or to find a way out of an ethnically hostile environment. Readers usually find ethnic protagonists in Kureishi’s postcolonial stories deeply involved in postwar British subcultural practices, befriending host whites and minorities with similar fringe lifestyle, and in a Bildungsroman-like process discovering their direction of life. This process of growth is also an adoption of the logic of late capitalism: to know how to pronounce one’s difference in a fragmented postmodern society and to connect oneself with different social/human capitals. All these efforts more or less enable heroes to locate their cultural identities in these stories. Articulating Differences in Kureishi’s Postcolonial Stories Shadows of late capitalism and racism in a postcolonial Britain frequently appear in Kureishi’s writings. However, not all his stories explore the articulation of both themes specifically, especially in regard to the productive and consumptive role of ethnic characters. Some early plays are led by white characters: The King and Me is a critique of the narcotic cultural industry, while Outskirts explores attitudes toward racism varied with social mobility of its characters. Though Borderline and Birds of Passage involve anti-racist strategies and activities of non-white characters, their touch of late capitalism, in terms of its commodification of culture and human relationship, is relatively light. Accentuation either on white (sub-)culture or 25.

(33) resistance from diasporic communities can be found in screenplays like London Kills Me (1991) and My Son the Fanatic (1997). In his middle works such as Love in a Blue Time (1997), Midnight All Day (1999), and the novella Intimacy (1998), Kureishi reduces his representation of racial politics and immerses himself largely in midlife crisis, including a retrospect to hedonist consumerism forged in his early life and still dominant in the end of twentieth century. Thus said, the reason why I choose My Beautiful Laundrette, The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album, and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid to discuss here is about their articulation of postcolonial protagonists with an emerging logic of late capitalism, where they are consumerized yet paradoxically gain subjectivity, about how the young author try to find his voice out in the British literary circle, and about how he finally succeeds, as his young ethnic heroes, through putting that logic into practice. Despite of highlighting traumas of racism on his ethnic characters, the author shows how they have been products of contemporary English lives, and how identity of different communities comes from articulation of different, even conflicting components in a late capitalistic society. Theories related to late capitalism are not to controvert the vast contributions of postcolonial or diasporic readings on Kureishi’s works, as the author himself oftentimes interpreted his stories in this way. Related with postmodernity and postmodernism, analytical works of late capitalism are to deal with economic, as well as cultural structure through which Kureishi, his characters and critics (including myself) are mediated. Instead of placing these four stories chronically in this dissertation, I will explore them in a sequence for analytical expediency. My Beautiful Laundrette will be first investigated, for it foregrounds Thatcherism as ideological practices through which social, cultural and economic forces are channeled and articulated. The beautiful launderette in this screenplay is in the mean time a small business encouraged by 26.

(34) Thatcher’s economic liberalism, and an evidence of a late capitalist expansion of culture into a relatively traditional form of service industry. To elucidate this change in Britain, I take the transition of identity of the white protagonist Johnny as a vantage point. In each period of his transition into a good laborer, prevailing ideologies, working ethic, mainstream values and dominant modes of production help fabricate his identities into the tapestry of late capitalism, transforming his racist past, homosexuality and working class background into magnifiers of productivity. After going through the renowned enterprise culture run by the Subcontinent immigrants in Laundrette, I investigate articulations of difference in the realm of cultural production by The Buddha of Suburbia’s four main characters. I argue that the main characters’ cultural practices from the margin meet the changing productive logic of 1970s Britain. Different careers of the main characters, such as marketing of Buddhism, performance of rock music, acting of ethnic characters, and interior design, are not only means to produce sensibilities for consumers seeking distinct commodities, but also cultural capital through which they approach identities as cultural celebrities. This sort of cultural accumulation in private and public lives has witnessed how production and consumption entangle and articulate different cultural practices still prevalent in our era. Recent cultural studies have argued that consumption helps articulate personal and group identities. Consumerism as the defining trait of postmodernity and late capitalism is one of the most important themes in The Black Album. In a wide spectrum of ethnic and white characters, Kureishi places fundamentalism and consumerism at each end, presenting a late 1980s London where the formation of identities heavily relies on different attitudes toward consumption. Consumerism does not merely lies upon the symbolic exchange of commodities. Its mechanism depends on the ethic of the (late) capitalism, a dual logic that includes reason/calculation and 27.

(35) emotion/dream. In Colin Campbell’s terms, these two logics respectively refer to the working and romantic ethic, maintaining the function of a capitalistic society on the end of production and consumption. Not all subjects are willing to accept the allurement of consumerism. In fear of being articulated into a western culture that inclines to treat them as second-rate citizens, a group of Islamic fundamentalists re-articulates themselves against a demonized West with an ancient belief to eliminate their internal discrepancies. After examining the identity formation of a group of Muslim fundamentalist and destructive effects brought about by addictive consumerism, Kureishi suggests the important balance between working and romantic ethic in the consumer society. While the previous chapters aim to elucidate articulating differences as a must for survival, chapter four about Sammy and Rosie Get Laid is mainly about the exclusive effects in practices of articulation, whether what is articulated is labeled as a nation, a family, or a minority group. Space, therefore, becomes a contested terrain where different subjects hook together to obviate others, and incommensurable differences innate within an individual or group are revealed. Moreover, this story attests a continuity lies between capitalism and late capitalism, like the overlap between modernity and postmodernity. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s triad of conceptualized spaces and David Harvey’s dissection of the postmodern condition, I consider spatial contestations of modern subjects represented by characters in this work. Following the route of Baudelaire, Harvey centralizes the experience of modernity as the basis of the contemporary cultural reactions, with various strategies set to orient the ephemeral while secure the immutable at the same time. Juxtaposing this insight with Lefebvre’s poignant dissection of different moments of space formation, I try to anatomize how individuals in this screenplay, whether as oppressive governors, the economic-political powerless or the defiant middle class, 28.

(36) contest spaces to ensure a demarcated identity against all the mutability and uncertainty in the post/modern condition. In an analysis conducted by a duet between theoretical and literary discourses, this chapter also renders the dichotomization of the officials and citizens as the spatial oppressors and oppressed dubious. Since in various forms of articulation, different groups find their power in excluding antagonistic others. Lumping together Pakistan and Britain in 1980s as two nationalistic regimes, unjustifiable violence of the oppressed rioters, and exclusive desire of the leftist bourgeois together in terms of their usage of space, I argue that contestation for space in Kureishi’s screenplay has exposed how commonly oppressions occur in the private and public realm, and hinted how difficult a utopian solution for space usage is achieved. Difficulties of disarticulation from late capitalism is manifested by a utopian subcultural group in this screenplay, while pronouncing/ensuring one’s difference in terms of individuality, community, nationality, or other forms of beliefs usually brings about demarcation and exclusion still rampant in a postmodern society.. 29.