Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory

CHAPTER 6. Narrating Multiculturalism in British Media: Voice and Cultural Identity in Television Documentary and Comedy

The slow rise to visibility of ethnic minorities in British culture has been well documented, both in secondary texts (Bourne; Daniels and Gerson; Gillespie; Malik; Pines) and in fictional autobiographical narratives such as Meera Syal’s Anita and Me. In one key passage of Syal’s text, Meena, the protagonist, describes the virtual absence of Asian and black faces in British media, as well as their distortion as a result of Orientalist stereotyping , during the 1960s: According to the newspapers and television, we simply did not exist. If a brown or black face ever did appear on TV, it stopped us all in our tracks [. . .] and we would crowd round and coo over the walk-on in some detective series, some long-suffering actor [. . .] with a goodness-graciousme accent. [. . .] But these occasional minor celebrities never struck us as real; they were someone else’s version of Indian, far too exaggerated and exotic to be believable. (165) Although the British media were slow to reflect Britain’s true multiethnic nature during the second half of the twentieth century, programming designed to produce images of multiethnic, multicultural British society has increased markedly over the past decade. Whether by chance or design, this change occurred subsequent to a landmark in the historical development of multicultural Britain: the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1993 and the resultant Macpherson Report, which indicted the British police with institutional racism.1 This trend has been noticeably stronger in programming by the BBC and Channel Four, media institutions whose public-service remit obliges them to program for the whole community rather than operate on an exclusively commercial basis; here the multicultural programming goes across the generic board, including a CHAPTER 6 Narrating Multiculturalism in British Media: Voice and Cultural Identity in Television Documentary and Comedy hilary p. dannenberg 76 Hilary P. Dannenberg variety of entertainment genres as well as the documentary format. On all channels, however, Britain’s changing multicultural climate can be gauged in the field of news programming through the increase in the number of black and Asian anchors and journalists. British television is therefore a key public arena in which images and narratives of British multiculturalism are constructed. Yet this increasing media presence is only one facet of the more complex constellation of narratives and identities that make up contemporary Britain. The realities in the world and on television are parts of a more complex equation: they both complement and contradict each other. Writing at the turn of the millennium, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown summed up this ambivalence in her comments on the gradual emergence of black and Asian political representation in tandem with a paradox surrounding Trevor McDonald, the longstanding anchorman of Independent Television News (ITN): The number of black and Asian MPs in parliament has increased to nine, slow but real change. The House of Lords has had an impressive injection of black and Asian peers since Labour won the election in 1997 and we have, for the first time ever, a Muslim Baroness, Pola Uddin, who has spent most of her life on housing estates in the East End of London . [. . .] The nation’s favourite newsreader is Trevor McDonald, but in recent times there have been up to 250,000 racially motivated incidents every year in this country on black people, many of whom look just like him. (3) The ambivalent nature of Britain’s multicultural society is thus reflected in the differing realities in the media and on Britain’s streets, but it can also be gauged through a critical investigation of media texts. In analyzing a selection of texts that either focus on or were made by black and Asian Britons, I will show how these texts tell stories of British multiculturalism from different positions and perspectives and with differing voices. These texts show the absence of any single version or narrative of British multiculturalism, for each reflects a different constellation of the complex relations of identity and power in contemporary Britain. In investigating the question, “Who needs ‘Identity,’?” Stuart Hall emphasizes the fact that “identities are constructed through, not outside , difference”: Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse , we need to understand them as produced in specific historical Narrating Multiculturalism in British Media 77 and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus...