American Pop Culture and the Formation of Identity in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album
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by Laura N. Hanna
anif Kureishi’s The Black Album is an ideal novel through which to study the difficulties of finding one’s place in postcolonial Britain. This struggle to locate the central focus of identity is especially difficult for the novel’s main character, Shahid, who tries to mold his identity while living in a culturally diverse England. Other characters in Kureishi’s novel such as Chili (Shahid’s brother) and Deedee (Shahid’s teacher and lover) also struggle to define themselves in postcolonial Britain, but they ironically find the identity they are searching for not in the English culture they are surrounded by, but in American pop culture. Directly related to America’s significance in the novel is the fact that it is set in 1989—a key year in America’s presumed triumph as the world’s most powerful capitalist nation. This paper examines the key reasons for America’s position, while also illustrating how and why Chili, Shahid, and Deedee have chosen to esteem American icons and pop culture instead of looking within the space of their own socially circumscribed Asian and English cultures to help mediate their realities. Identity is a key factor and complication for each of the characters in Kureishi’s The Black Album. Indeed, the parameters of a term like “identity” must here be defined in the postcolonial sense: Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished historical fact, which the new cinematic discoursesthen represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production',which is never complete, always in process, and
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