G325: COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN TELEVISION AND FILM

1. Ae Fond Kiss (Ken Loach, 2004)

British director Ken Loach said on Friday he hoped his film Ae Fond Kiss shed light on how religious pressures can hamper the assimilation of immigrants.

The film is about the Muslim son of devout Pakistani immigrants in Scotland who falls in love with an Irish Catholic teacher. Defying his family's plans for an arranged marriage with a cousin he has never met, the slick and successful Glasgow disc-jockey Casim moves in with the music teacher, causing her to lose her job at a Catholic secondary school. 

For his sister, Tahara, stereotyping Muslims ( as, say, terrorists) is as indefensible as stereotyping white people. The Pope, George Bush and Henrik Larsson are all Christians but you don't lump them together; however, the West just lumps all Muslims together as one stereotype, 'as if one billion Muslims in fifty different countries and hundreds of different languages and countless ethnic groups are all one and the same.' The film presents Tahara and her brother sympathetically.

She expresses the complexity and hybridity of her own identity: " I am a Glaswegian, Pakistani, teenager woman of Muslim descent who supports Glasgow Rangers in a Catholic school. I'm a dazzling mixture and I'm proud of it," says Tahara.
Screening here 

Director Ken Loach presents a balanced view: he said he wanted not only to expose the pressures immigrant families apply to their children but also the way the church also interferes in people's lives.

Screenplay-writer Paul Laverty, who borrowed the title from a Robert Burns film, said the idea for a film about intolerance came after some Americans were involved in wanton beatings of Muslims in the United States after the September 11 attacks: "The way Muslims were demonized after September 11 just wouldn't leave my mind," he said.





2 SECOND, BBC1 Comedy drama set in a 1960s Welsh mining village which is forever changed by the arrival of the new doctor, a high-flying Delhi graduate. Read about the TV programme here
 
3 THIRD, let us look at a newspaper article with a photo and caption that seems to set up a good/evil binary opposition 'Samantha Lewthwaite at a school prom. By 17 she was wearing a jilbab' The Times online photo and caption of suicide bomber widow
The garment seems to be constructed in a stereotyped way as as a symbol of inevitable terrorism. ALSO REFER TO the case of Bollywood superstar Khan who was detained in mid-April at Westchester Airport for nearly two hours article here despite explaining that he was en route to Yale at the invitation of the Yale South Asian Society to receive a Fellowship. Post 9/11, the media tends to stigmatize people of Asian identity, a trend that is set to continue, as the case of Samantha Lewthwaite suggests.

4 FOURTH Your prep tonight is watching the first part of two TV programmes on British collective identity. See Channel 4 here The second episode is next Thursday. For both episodes, you will make written observations about how British identity is represented by the participants and by the presenters.

5 Sathnam Sanghera (The Times 3.02.10) in an article on the closing down of the radio station Asian Network said that it didn't serve a useful purpose, that it was odd to dedicate a station to such a diverse group, one which was too diverse to share common identity. He finds "the idea of a BBC radio station dedicated to an 'Asian' community a little odd, when those Asians speak many different languages, come from vastly different socio-economic backgrounds and exhibit hugely different degrees of integration." Thus, the BBC has tried to construct an Asian audience but failed. However, others are sad at the stations closure: read forum comments here

G325 requires you to debate issues surrounding collective identity as they appear in a range of media (TV, film, internet, newspapers, magazines, radio). You have to consider future outcomes. Examples of all recent exam questions follow. You have a choice between 2 questions.

Channel 4.com/makebradfordbritish

January 2010