Their tales of dalliances and sneaking off to parties scandalised me. They expected me to wear skirts but having grown up with the mantra, “We don’t show our legs”, I’d apologetically pull out a suitcase full of old fashioned shalwar kameez and mismatched dupattas. They mocked my Urdu because I used words they considered obsolete and which only our elderly great aunts uttered. Cousins imagined my British upbringing would have made me much more “westernised” than they were. Thanks to jars like that, women like me grew up with values that were so out-dated that they didn’t even have much currency back in Pakistan’s cosmopolitan centres. I imagine every Pakistani family had a jar like that – the saving grace of every working class immigrant parent a device to inculcate roots and scruples, and to guard their susceptible Bradford born offspring from the intoxicating fumes of unsuitable British values which lurked beyond the threshold. In reality, that jar offered nothing more than a moment in time, a moment from 1964, three years before I was even born. Although the label had faded and the contents had curdled by the 1980s, my well-meaning parents continued to regard it as a current record of morality in their motherland. My parents had carefully filled it to the brim with religious values and cultural traditions before leaving Pakistan to start a new life in Keighley. The book closes with a selection of statements by black and Asian media practitioners who operate from within Britain’s cultural industries: Mike Phillips, Horace Ové, Julian Henriques, Parminder Vir and Gurinder Chadha.Above the flickering gas fire on the mantelpiece, a precious jar labelled 1964 took pride of place. These analyses are supplemented with a look at earlier landmark productions (like Pressure) as well as relevant social, institutional and aesthetic frameworks. This idea is a leitmotif for the authors’ readings of recent films and examples of television drama, including such diverse products as Young Soul Rebels and Babymother, East Is East and Bend It Like Beckham, The Buddha of Suburbia and White Teeth. For this period, a ‘mainstreaming’ of black and Asian British film has been observed in criticism and theory and articulated by an increasing number of practitioners themselves, referring to changing modes of production, distribution and reception and implying a more popular and commercial orientation of certain media products. This book looks at a sector of black and Asian British film and television as it presented itself in the 1990s and early 2000s.
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