Racialized masculinities and postcolonial critique in contemporary British Asian male-authored texts

摘要

This article begins with a discussion of Hanif Kureishi's intervention in redefining configurations of racialized masculinity in relation to queer desire and class in his path-breaking screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette (1986), via the inter-racial gay romance between Omar, an ambitious mixed-race British Asian and his white, working-class former schoolmate Johnny. My discussion then turns to the ways in which younger writers, Gautam Malkani and Nadeem Aslam, revisit and rework these earlier models of racialized masculinity. It examines a range of identity markers in British Asian fiction since Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette, focusing on the ways in which race, class, masculinity and religion intersect, and are represented through one another in selected primary texts. The article concludes that these shifting constructions of racialized masculinities suggest that religious identity cannot be subsumed under categories of gender and ethnicity and nation.