Brown men/white women: Race and the sexual politics of decolonization

My dissertation investigates representations of interracial desire in South Asian British diasporic literature and film and in neo-imperial narratives of the 'war on terror'. Drawing upon theoretical insights from anti-racist feminism, decolonization and black British cultural studies, I develop a methodology for analyzing how masculinity and femininity are racially and sexually coded through images of this interracial couple, and how these images mediate discourses of identity and belonging at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class.; The first three chapters examine how this interracial couple functions as a motif through which South Asian masculinity is re-imagined against the British colonial stereotype of the 'dark rapist', and in the context of contemporary racism in Britain. Chapter One argues that representations of interracial desire in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia draw attention to sexism and interracial homosocial fear and desire in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Kureishi's novel articulates many of the complexities and ambivalences of interracial desire, and it celebrates Fanon's insights while critiquing the limits of his work for the project of psychic decolonization in the South Asian diaspora.; Chapter Two argues that Udayan Prasad's Brothers in Trouble, a film adaptation of Abdullah Hussein's novella "The Journey Back," reveals the regulative economy through which white women function as fetish-objects for Pakistani male migrants in Britain as the men strive to gain 'masculine certainty' in their new location. Chapter Three reads interraciality in Ayub Khan-Din's film East is East as a motif that enables a simultaneous critique of the liberal British state's logic of national and racial purity and British Islamic notions of religious and cultural purity.; Chapter Four analyzes how the figure of white femininity and the image of the 'dark rapist' evoke colonial memory and justify neo-imperial violence in media narratives of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I focus on representations of three white female soldiers, including Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England, to demonstrate how the media rouse deeply established fears of the racial other, expertly manipulating the intersectionalities of race, gender, sexuality and class whilst simultaneously reproducing these ambivalent categories as discrete and stable.