In The Black Album (1995), his second novel, Hanif Kureishi revisits territory familiar from his film-script, My Beautiful Laundrette, and his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia. It is another bildungsroman, following the affective and cultural-political development of a young British-Asian who has moved to London from Kent for further education. Like Laundrette, it examines the 'state of the nation' during the Thatcher years, focusing particularly on relations between the races and the predicament of British youth. More specifically, it engages with the controversies surrounding the imposition of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie in 1989. Like The Buddha, The Black Album is much preoccupied by popular culture, and pop music more specifically. Indeed, the novel takes its title from an album by Prince. Prince is a key symbol within the text of the enabling potential of cultural hybridity in expanding received models of national and ethnic identity, thus challenging the essentialism (or 'fundamentalism') of metropolitan racism and minoritarian / 'Third World' identity politics alike.

At the outset of the novel Shahid is a typically anxious young undergraduate commencing his studies. Isolated and vulnerable in his digs, the protagonist is taken up by the political activist Riaz and his circle, which mixes an admirable desire to support marginalised sections of the British-Asian Muslim community with what is represented as a coercive desire to impose a narrow conception of 'proper' Muslim cultural identity on those to whom it reaches out. Shahid is initially impressed by the group's commitments and becomes something of an acolyte; for example, he takes part in the protection of a harassed family of Bengali migrants on a local estate which is notorious for racial incidents. As the text progresses, however, Shahid is increasingly disturbed by the group's 'fundamentalism'. For example, he finds it impossible to accept that his devotion to his beloved pop music is simply a sign of spiritual enslavement to the decadent values of mainstream British society, which he must disavow if he is to belong to the group.

Shahid's loyalties are further stretched by his increasing involvement with one of his lecturers, Didi Osgood, a Left-liberal feminist, with whom he comes to have an affair. Shahid is at first an enthusiastic student of her 'progressive' cultural studies programme. However, the novel is more ambivalent about popular culture than The Buddha and Shahid increasingly questions whether her syllabus does not itself provide a covert means of excluding minority students from the 'high' cultural canon. Such scepticism is complemented by the novel's analysis of Didi's attitude towards him. Increasingly it seems that she is attracted primarily by Shahid's exotic identity; this is represented as a subtle form of racism which aligns her liberal multiculturalist attitudes.

Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Giuseppe Improta
imgiu@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press