Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film, and the Arts (review)

In 2000 the independently commissioned Parekh Report on the future of multiethnic Britain called for a new national vision and offered strategies to further the ongoing effort of the New Labour government to combat racism and promote a multiculturalist social agenda. Then the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the bombings in London on 7 July 2005 shattered much of the earlier optimism. This collection of essays presents itself as the first to look at how cultural producers of various kinds have responded to the newly polarized climate of the postmillennial decade in the United Kingdom.

Published in Rodopi's international general and comparative literary studies series, the book bases itself on a selection of papers given at a 2007 conference in Freiburg, Germany, and offers a largely non-British perspective. Its four editors begin proceedings with an overview, "A Divided Kingdom? Reflections on Multi-Ethnic Britain in the New Millennium." The phrase "divided kingdom" refers to Rupert Thomson's 2005 dystopian novel of that name, which they discuss as an exemplary literary response to anxieties about the present and future of British society. The volume's twenty-four subsequent contributions cover literature, music, and the visual arts, especially film. For reasons of space I restrict myself to a review of the pieces concerned directly with literature, which I follow with a summary of the others.

The first of the book's seven sections consists of two "writers' views," the first by Patrick Neate, who is white, and the second by Rajeev Balasubramanyam, who is of South Asian descent. These two pieces and interviews with them at the end of the book frame the volume. Neate contributes a short story spun off from his 2005 detective novel City of Tiny Lights, published one month before the London bombings, whose protagonist-narrator is a second-generation Ugandan-Indian. The novel uncannily predicts the bombings and their perpetration by disaffected native-born individuals. Balasubramanyam presents a critique of British multiculturalist rhetoric of the last two decades. In his view such rhetoric serves as "a vehicle to suppress cultural diversity" (42), while corresponding attempts at national image (re) making amount to mere propaganda.

The two sections on literature focus exclusively on fiction and related prose. The first section, "Multi-Ethnic Utopias and Dystopias," which considers the ambivalent stance of postmillennial literary production, comprises six essays, including rather surprisingly two on a single novel, Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers (2004).

Lucie Gillet contrasts the upbeat multiculturalism of Zadie Smith's celebrated novel White Teeth (2000) with the darker mood of Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore (2003). She also argues for a progressive view of multiracial Britain in works by white "New Establishment" writers such as Graham Swift and Ian McEwan, whose white male protagonists also interrogate monolithic stereotypes of Englishness. Gillet's conclusion is that the term "British literature" should now cover all existing literary traditions within the country. Sabine Nunius examines Smith's On Beauty (2005) in the light of different aspects of a single family—at home, united by race, and in its workplace relationships—that emphasize "sameness" rather than difference and the construction of stable rather than fragmented identities. She believes that such fiction, of which Smith's novel is one of a growing number, "calls for a theoretical approach which takes into account a focus on potentially uniting and binding elements" (110). Looking at short stories from two collections, Why Don't You Stop Talking (2002) and Wish I Was Here (2006), by the self-styled "black Scottish" woman writer Jackie Kay, Ulrike Zimmermann discusses the exploration of identity by three marginalized black female protagonists. These women struggle to come to terms with social inferiority, the immigrant experience, and genealogy, attempting to transcend these limiting categories in individualistic ways. Aimed at a teenage audience, Walking a Tightrope: New Writing from Asian Britain...