American Pop Culture and the Formation of Identity
not because it is free of racism (which is not the case, despite what Chili, Shahid, and Deedee may imagine), but because its civil rights movements make America a place where equality is more possible than in Britain— a nation that has experienced relatively few civil rights movements.Thus, Kureishi’s characters idealize America because its civil rights struggles have attempted to forge a particular space for a black identity—a space that seems to be lacking in British culture. Finally, the literary style of The Black Album mimics the characters’ search for identity—for identicalness. The Black Album is a traditional kunstlerroman novel. But the grand irony of this literary style begs the question: since Chili, Shahid, and Deedee are all looking outside the bounds of traditional culture to find themselves—looking toward a post imperial, post-Cold War newness—why would Kureishi write this novel in a traditional form that dates back over 200 years? Why would he choose not to write a novel like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, a novel whose whole purpose is to converge into the realm of newness, and whose disjunctive, postmodern form matches this purpose? Joseph Slaughter suggests that: As a human rights claim, [the Bildungsroman] is a narrative instrument for historically marginalized people to assert their right to be included in the franchise of the public sphere and to participate in the deliberative systems that shape social normativity itself by setting limits between the franchised and the disenfranchised. (157)
Slaughter’s wide-ranging insight about the social function of the Bildungsroman is applicable to The Black Album.With a clever sleight of hand, Kureishi has unlatched the border separating the “franchised and the disenfranchised”—the British immigrant and the Englishman. Kureishi not only makes American identity accessible to his otherwise marginalized characters, but he also makes the form of his novel itself accessible to a wide range of readers through his utilization of the easy-to-read Bil-
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