Between here and there: Transcultural reception, diaspora identity, and the limits of hybridity in Hanif Kureishi's Black British cinema

Abstract

This article examines the transcultural reception of Hanif Kureishi's screenplays My Beautiful Laundrette (dir. Stephen Frears, UK, 1985) and My Son the Fanatic (dir. Udayan Prasad, UK, 1997), drawing on qualitative audience interviews conducted in Lahore, Pakistan, and situating them within two decades of subsequent scholarship. The original empirical findings—that Pakistani audiences resist identification with Kureishi's British-Pakistani characters—are reread in light of contemporary debates around post-9/11 Islamophobia, the post-Brexit reconstitution of British multiculturalism, queer postcolonial theory, and the limits of Bhabha's 'third space' as a framework for transcultural film reception. The article argues that the cultural separation experienced by Pakistani audiences is not a failure of aesthetic literacy but a structurally produced response rooted in colonial history and geopolitical realignments that have sharpened rather than dissolved the boundaries between British-Pakistani diasporic identity and 'home' culture. At the same time, it resists pessimistic closure by tracing the ways in which the films' concerns—neoliberal exploitation, generational conflict, queer transgression, and religious radicalisation—have acquired new urgencies forty years after Laundrette's release.