Hanif Kureishi (Writers and Their Work)

This study evaluates Kureishi’s contribution to contemporary British fiction; his screen plays, novels and plays evoke a multicultural London peopled by sexually liberated protagonists. In chronicling Britain’s shifting racialised boundaries during the late seventies and eighties, Kureishi disrupts simple, monolithic notions of identity. His works show how constructs of generation, class, sexuality and gender impinge on the contested issue of what it means to be of Asian origin in Britain. Whatever genre he employs, Kureish’s work is characterised by his ironic distance. Both white and immigrant communities are portrayed with dry, detached humour and depicted in farcical and satiric terms. Recently, Kureishi’s focus on race has shifted in his novels of new masculinity. This book suggests that this shift from race to
explorations of masculinity does not mark a new direction in Kureishi’s work, but reinforces one of his central preoccupations.