Queering Home: Neoliberal nationalism and diasporic genealogies in Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

Gairola, R.K.ORCID: 0000-0002-1826-6339 (2010) Queering Home: Neoliberal nationalism and diasporic genealogies in Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. In: The CUNY Graduate Center Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2009-2010, 19 March 2010, New York.

Abstract

This talk critically examines Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, an acclaimed film written by Hanif Kureishi, in order to track post-colonial perceptions of “home” to the ways in which “home” becomes a place of strife and struggle for queer people of color trying to make the UK “feel at home.” I demonstrate how queer South Asian diasporic agents resist the interpellative practices of the British nation-state during the years of Margaret Thatcher. She echoed Ronald Reagan’s neo-liberalism by issuing an invitation to diasporic South Asians to join the nation by hailing them as the country’s new “meritocrats” – a notion clearly dependant on the official tenets of neoliberal multiculturalism and predicated on their utility as profit-making cogs in the British economy. That is, she invited them to belong even as she dismantled a number of aspects of the Welfare State. I argue that Kureishi visually marks the very disparate “home” spaces whose privileges in Thatcherite England can be directly tracked to various histories of marginalization including legacies of colonialism, racism, classism, sexism, and heteronormativity.

Item Type:	Conference Item
URI:	http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/52351

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