Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+ provides an encompassing survey of artistic responses to the changes in the British cultural climate in the early years of the 21st century. It traces topical reactions to new forms of racism and religious fundamentalism, to legal as well as ‘illegal’ immigration, and to the threat of global terror; yet it also highlights new forms of intercultural communication and convivial exchange. Framed by contributions from novelists Patrick Neate and Rajeev Balasubramanyam, Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+ showcases how artistic representations in literature, film, music and the visual arts reflect and respond to social and political discourses, and how they contribute to our understanding of the current (trans)cultural situation in Britain. The contributions in this volume cover a wide range of writers such as Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Jackie Kay, Nadeem Aslam, Gautam Malkani, Nirpal Dhaliwal and Monica Ali; films ranging from Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice to Michael Winterbottom’s In This World and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men; paintings and photography by innovative black and Asian British Artists; and dubstep music.

Table of Contents:
Lars ECKSTEIN, Barbara KORTE, Eva Ulrike PIRKER, Christoph REINFANDT: A Divided Kingdom? Reflections on Multi-Ethnic Britain in the New Millennium Writers’ Views Patrick NEATE: The Little Book of Tommy: Another Tommy Akhtar Investigation Rajeev BALASUBRAMANYAM: The Rhetoric of Multiculturalism Film I: Beyond the Burden of Representation? Ellen DENGEL-JANIC and Lars ECKSTEIN: Bridehood Revisited: Disarming Concepts of Gender and Culture in Recent Asian British Film Sandra HEINEN: Multi-Ethnic Britain on Screen: South Asian Diasporic Experience in Recent Feature Films Claudia STERNBERG: Babylon North: British Muslims after 9/11 in Yasmin (2004) Fiction I: Multi-Ethnic Utopias and Dystopias Lucie GILLET: Representations of Multicultural Society in Contemporary British Novels Sabine NUNIUS: ‘Sameness’ in Contemporary British Fiction: (Metaphorical) Families in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) Ulrike ZIMMERMANN: Out of the Ordinary – and Back? Jackie Kay’s Recent Short Fiction Daniel SCHÄBLER: Teenage Transformations in Multi-Ethnic Britain: Rehana Ahmed’s Walking a Tightrope (2004) Nadia BUTT: Between Orthodoxy and Modernity: Mapping the Transcultural Predicaments of Pakistani Immigrants in Multi-Ethnic Britain in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) Cordula LEMKE: Racism in the Disapora: Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) Visual Art and Music: Picturing and Sounding Identity Eva Ulrike PIRKER: Images of Muslim Britain Go Global: A Reading of the British Council’s Touring Exhibition Common Ground Ingrid VON ROSENBERG: Female Views: Cultural Identity as a Key Issue in the Work of Black and Asian British Women Artists Christoph HÄRTER: The Dub Renaissance – Reflections on the Aesthetics of Dub in Contemporary British Music Film II: Borderlines and Contested Spaces Sissy HELFF: Scapes of Refuge in Multicultural Britain: Representing Refugees in Digital Docudrama and Mockumentary Kathy-Ann TAN: ‘If you’re not on paper, you don’t exist’: Depictions of Illegal Immigration and Asylum in Film – on Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002) and Code 46 (2003) Barbara KORTE: Envisioning a Black Tomorrow? Black Mother Figures and the Issue of Representation in 28 Days Later (2003) and Children of Men (2006) Fiction II: Reading and Writing the Metropolis Michael MITCHELL: Escaping the Matrix: Illusions and Disillusions of Identity in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) Ellen DENGEL-JANIC: ‘East is East and West is West’: A Reading of Nirpal Dhaliwal’s Tourism (2006) Yvonne ROSENBERG: ‘Stop Thinking like an Englishman’ or: Writing Against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights (2005) Stephan LAQUÉ: ‘A deconstructed shrine’: Locating Absence and Relocating Identity in Rodinsky’s Room (2000) Susanne CUEVAS: ‘Societies Within’: Council Estates as Cultural Enclaves in Recent Urban Fictions Interviews Angela KURTZ: Interview with Rajeev Balasubramanyam Violeta TOPALOVA: Interview with Patrick Neate Index Acknowledgements