• 1 Étienne Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton and O (...)

1What could the term “Postcolonial” mean in the context of thinking contemporary Europe? And how can cinema contribute to the meaning of the terms “Postcolonial” and “Europe”? Étienne Balibar argues, “European citizenship should be reworked as citizenship in Europe”1. If one rewrites this suggestion in terms of film, how could “cinema in Europe” rather than “European cinema” further an understanding of Postcolonial Europe? One way of answering this question is to ask what postcolonial subjectivities in Europe could mean and where they can be located. Could a postcolonial cinematic figuration in Europe provide another way of understanding the term “European” by problematizing the ways in which social space and identity are related to each other? The term “postcolonial” is not deployed in this essay as a sub-category of European identity/cinema. Rather, cinematic figurations of postcolonial subjectivity will be analyzed as aesthetic constructions which operate to reframe the meaning of European identity. At issue then is less an “addition” to the corpus of European cinema by postcolonial writers and filmmakers than a reframing of a common European identity constituted by the transformational dynamic of postcolonial subjectivities.

• 2 A.O.Scott, “‘My Son the Fanatic’/ Critics’ Picks/ New York Times”, New York Times, https://www.yout (...)

2My Son the Fanatic (Udayan Prasad, 1997) based on the short story of the same name by the British writer Hanif Kureishi (New Yorker, 1994) emerged in the context of a growing recognition of the complex realities of postcolonial identities within Britain. Kureishi, as we shall see below, explicitly problematized the categorization of immigrant cultural contributions by emphatically stating their British provenance. Further, My Son the Fanatic presciently confronted what was to become a pressing political and social issue– the rise of religion extremism by Europeans . Unlike the 2001 attacks in the U.S. which were perpetrated by non-American citizens, the July 2005 bombings in London put “home-grown” terrorism on the political agenda. Speaking more than ten years after the film’s 1997 release, New York Times critic A. O. Scott notes that while the story of a young man’s turn to fundamentalism might have sounded “strange” in 1997, today the film is “topical, prophetic and urgent”2. The simple distinction between citizen and foreigner proved fatally inadequate in foreseeing both the possibilities of and the reasons why European citizens of immigrant background were being converted to forms of religious extremism. My Son the Fanatic provides a nuanced perspective from which to counter simplistic and exclusionary understanding of “home” while sketching the social, global and national contexts within which fanaticism of all sorts arise.

• 3 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose,Minneapolis and London, (...)

3The essay will argue that the European subject needs to be thought as the effect of a transformational dynamic of postcolonial subjectivities through the terms “disidentification” and “relationality”. The cinematic construction of postcolonial subjectivities in My Son the Fanatic produces two specific forms of productive interventions in thinking Europe. Firstly, the film undermines a static and essentialist discourse of alterity which often constructs postcolonial identities as absolutely other to some fictive notion of the “European”. Postcoloniality emerges less as a condition of separation, exclusion and tradition set against a dynamic notion of European modernity. Instead, postcolonial identities emerge as part of a common understanding of what it means to be in Europe as legitimate members of a constructed community. The process of both refusing an ascribed status of the “other” and precisely asserting a commonality with a community can be named “Disidentification”. Further, disidentification is political precisely because “[P]olitics is a matter of subjects, or, rather, modes of subjectification […] the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity […] not previously identifiable within a given field of experience”3. Rather than acting as subjects imprisoned in static forms of identity alien to Europe and Europeans, postcolonials close the distance from those deemed separate from them through processes of subjectivation by enacting actions they are deemed incapable of.

• 4 Ibid., p. 36.
• 5 Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, London and New York, Routledge, 2014, (...)
• 6 Rancière (1999), p. 15.
• 7 Ibid., p. 9.

4Secondly, the process of disidentification is produced by the capacities of postcolonial subjects to establish forms of relationality which is subtly and powerfully portrayed in the film. Relationality is this “capacity not previously identifiable within a given field of experience” because a “given” field, such as Europe and those who legitimately belong in it, often relegates postcolonial subjectivities by describing them as being incapable of change. The relationality portrayed in the film is based on complex notions of intimacy which interrogate hypostasized notions of culture, religion, class, language and gender. One of the signal interventions of the film is its consistent emphasis on the forms of conviviality, intimacy and exchange between characters from very different social locations By continually exposing the capacities of very differently located social subjects (men and women, white and non-white, working class and privileged) to forms of intimacy, the fraudulent political discourse which places individuals in separate categories is exposed as ideology. Europe emerges from a postcolonial perspective as a common space “where anyone can be counted” as belonging to a community4. The film thus provides a cinematic experience where “the scale upon which sameness and difference are calculated […] are altered productively so that the strangeness of strangers goes out of focus and other dimensions of a basic sameness can be acknowledged and made significant"5. The film portrays a common capacity for overcoming distinctions by both acknowledging and undermining categories of class, gender, sexuality and religion. A postcolonial critique of Europe is fleshed out by exposing “the sheer contingency of any social order” which such distinctions seek to stabilize6. Postcolonial Europe emerges as “the setting-up of a contentious commonality” based on a broader critique of identity7.

• 8 See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, London, Chatto and Windus, 1993 and Homi Bhabha, The Loca (...)
• 9 Ania Loombia, Colonialism/Postcolonialism ,London and New York, Routledge, 1998.

5Postcolonial studies has redrawn both the cultural history and political present of Europe by insisting on colonialism beyond Europe as a founding condition for understanding it. This relational understanding of Europe’s constitution emerging from beyond its geographical and political borders resulted in a now-canonical theorization of hybrid identity as the specific form in which postcolonial subjectivity in Europe took form8. Ania Loomba succinctly summarizes the problems with invoking hybridity as the dominant form for understanding postcolonial subjectivity9. While not disavowing their specific histories, the characters in the film, Parvez (Om Puri) in particular, exemplify the capacity for anyone to enter into relations with anyone else despite the bounded categories of race, class and gender which seek to define groups and place them in specific and unmoving locations within a culture. Hybridity emerges through evolving intimacies between postcolonial subjects and those Europeans who have no ostensible postcolonial history.

• 10 Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization”, October 61, Summer 1992, p. 60.
• 11 Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life”, Ed. Sylvère Lotringer, Foucault Live: Collected Int (...)
• 12 Ibid., p. 311.

7In particular, I will argue that a politics of “the anonym” figured through the film enables an understanding of Europe where anyone can claim a legitimate place in European space10. The transformation from a given identity to the category of the “anonym” is the effect of a refusal and denudation of properties ascribed to an identity. In other words, the “anyone” in a politics of the anonym does not mean a vacant category with no substance, but a form of subjectivation based on the capacity to establish relations by refusing already-ascribed identities. The politics of resistance moves from the affirmation of difference to difference as the affirmation of relationality. Foucault exemplifies this logic of troping, of the self's potential for turning away from the social regulation of subjectivity. Speaking about homosexuality, he perceives political possibilities through the subject's dislocation of ascribed identity and the resulting derangement of social space by redrawing the psychic and social relation between intimacy and enmity, proximity and distance. He suggests “friendship as a way of life” to counter the social construction of a separate homosexual identity11. “Homosexuality” he argues “is an historic occasion to re-open affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual, but due to the biases against the position he [sic] occupies; in a certain sense, diagonal lines he [sic] can trace in the social fabric permit him [sic] to make these virtualities visible”12.

• 13 Sandra Ponzanesi, “Europe in motion: migrant cinema and the politics of Encounter”, Social Identiti (...)

8Relational virtualities, he implies, exist but cannot be acknowledged when intrinsic qualities are ascribed to an identity. The positings and positionings which map a social fabric and place the subject in it are the very conditions of possibility from which the self-separating subject can first acknowledge the power of these positionings through disengagement in order to then re-open virtualities, capacities for counter-intuitive relationalities. If one replaces “homosexuality” with “postcolonial identity”, one can understand the dynamic of disidentification and relationality as a process through which postcolonial presences in Europe redraw the social fabric of Europe by making virtual, not yet discernible affinities, visible. Instead of emphasizing separatist notions of religious fundamentalists, traditional cultures, and backward communities, the film sets “Europe in motion” as an expansive and dynamic space in which contentitious commonalities emerge13.

• 14 Ruvani Ranasinha, Hanif Kureishi. Tavistock, Northcote House, 2002, p. 6.

9“I’m not a Pakistani or an Indian writer, I’m a British writer”14. Hanif Kureishi describes here both his social location and specific profession through a series of negations and an affirmation. Not Pakistani, not Indian – these negations necessary in order to affirm he writes as a British writer suggest that there must be some relation between Pakistani, Indian and British which needs to be specified. Kureishi seems to be disidentifying from a discourse that might be emerging from the outside that frames him as some sort of outsider to Britain. Why this need for disidentification, and what does it produce as a consequence? The negations in this description do a number of things: firstly, at a surface level they seem to be simple clarifications – “I am not X, I am Y”; secondly, though, the question must arise why these negations are necessary in the first place?

• 15 Kenneth C Kaleta, Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1998 (...)

10Kureishi explicitly constructs a distance from the national origin of his father (Pakistan), refusing to be tied down to a cultural discourse of alterity based on far-off places (outside Europe) and filiations. But the consequence of this distancing move is not an erasure of his specific history. Instead, it inserts a non-European history into his construction of British identity. In other words, both his partly non-European self and his present British self are brought into a relation with each other. The effect of this relationality is to change both the meaning of the terms he negates (Pakistani, Indian) and the term he affirms (British). How? Elsewhere, he describes his situation thus: “English literature has changed enormously in the last ten years, because of writers from my background […] You know there are many, many of us, all with these strange names and some kind of colonial background. But we are part of English literature”15.

• 16 Nahem Yousef, “Hanif Kureishi and ‘the brown man’s burden’”, Critical Survey no. 8, vol. 1, 1996, p (...)

15The opening incident counters the temptation to cast immigrants as mired in a past culture of tradition (fundamentalist Islam). Neither Farid nor his parents display any already existing devotion to religion or tradition. The turn to fanaticism in Farid is a response to a humiliating experience of social exclusion, an experience which frames not just him, but also his parents, as outsiders. At the very outset then, cultural identity is not a given, but marked first as a process of separation (Farid’s alienation from Madeline and her family) and then of reinvention. Islam emerges not as Farid’s already existing foundation for self-definition but a cultural response, a reaction to the exclusion he is made to undergo. Farid’s transformation exemplifies “‘the radical negotiability of the concept of identity’ and could be read as a working through of a philosophical description of a Muslim whose Islamisation is arguably negotiated as a result of an unhappy, dissatisfying time in Britain”16. The “culture” he finds in the community of alienated young men at the mosque is a fabrication created by them as a reaction to their experience of social exclusion.

• 17 See Mireille Rosello, On Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest, Stanford University Pres (...)

17When Parvez picks Mr Schitz up at the airport and drives him around the city, the camera follows his gaze while the words which accompany it flesh out and construct both an image of what home (in Europe) can be, and begin to establish an interesting relationship of host and guest. While Parvez is clearly a sort of host in this situation, he does not embody a stereotype of Britishness or Europeanness. He emphatically marks his location as an immigrant from Pakistan who moved to England as a young man to work in a factory, now a ruin, which he takes Schitz around. The immigrant is the host here, showing England (and a very particular part of it) to another European visiting from elsewhere17. Reading the film from a European perspective, this first encounter between Parvez and Schitz deranges a normative framework from which “Europe” as an imaginary construct can be seen. The displaced immigrant welcomes the visiting European to a nation in Europe which has become his home. Europe is less the place of autochtonous belonging based on place of birth, than the space which is produced by two sets of journeys – one of permanent migration (Parvez) and the other of a temporary visit (Schitz). Europe is being sketched from the perspective of displacement rather than historical belonging.

• 18 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, London, Vintage, 1988.

20This dynamic of commonality/ specificity through which relationality works is given a more global and contentious figuration when Parvez ironically comments that the Ayatollah Khomeini (of Iran) wore cotton robes made by this mill in England. When framed through the knowing words of the immigrant ex-millworker, England’s industrial history as a manufacturing hub of textiles in the 1970s is linked to Islam and the Ayatollah. Khomeini’s fatwa in 1999 in response to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses had led to violent protests across England18. Postcolonial Europe emerges not just as the presence of formerly colonized peoples in Europe, but as a continent and culture whose very material prosperity is intimately linked with nations, cultures and a religion that xenophobic Europe today and in the past will set itself against.

• 20 “Un peuple politique, ce n’est pas un donné préexistant, c’est un résultat.” My thanks to Jacques R (...)

24As we will see, in his growing intimacy with Bettina, Parvez exhibits precisely his capacity to be like anyone at all. What does this “anyone” mean in relation to the “politics of the anonym”? The fact that Parvez forms bonds of intimacy with people whose social situations are very far indeed from his own demonstrates the illegitimacy of conferring certain forms of capacities on some and not others. As Rancière argues “A political people is not an already existing given, it is a result”20. The discursive fabulation of “a people” is not the accurate representation of an already existing reality. It is the performative construction of the common by a “people” who emerge through their capacities to establish counter-intuitive forms of relationality. Parvez becomes part of a community precisely by the way his life crosses borders drawn by culturalist discourses that distinguish a (European) self from an (immigrant) other.

• 21 “Le problème n’est pas de passer de l’individualisme à la communauté mais de passer d’une forme de (...)

25Parvez clearly embodies a class difference from the wealthy businessman Schitz, but his work as a cab driver does not prevent him from forming an ongoing bond of friendship with Schitz. Similarly, Parvez’s playing of the “host” to Schitz, the German, does not make him simply an Englishman like any other. Instead, he is the Englishman whose ethnicity includes him in a community marked by its racist attitude to him. Parvez thus does not distance himself from England, he places himself in it while explicitly acknowledging his (ethnic) difference from a white notion of Englishness. In the words of Rancière “[T]he point is not to move from individualism to community but to move from one form of community to another”21. By basing itself on the presumption of equality, the politics of the anonym gives another form to the meaning of community through a polemical being-together.

• 22 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeto (...)
• 23 See Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, especially pp: 1-16 for an (...)

26How does the film construct polemical forms of being-together? And how might such relations formed by “unlikely” kinds of people further an understanding of postcolonial Europe from the perspective of social exclusions based on gender and class? It is in the evolving relationship between Parvez and Bettina, and the effects it has on his family, that multiple forms of exclusions become the basis for forming a community. The film portrays different forms of exclusion in a politically powerful way precisely by showing how such exclusions do not divide but precisely bring together people from quite different social situations. Wendy Brown had powerfully argued against the dangers of “installing injury as identity” precisely as a way of moving out of unexamined, liberal forms of identity politics22. Firstly, if one perceives one’s injury as based solely on the basis of one facet of one’s identity, one might fail to see that unquestioningly deploying this very identity strengthens the very power one opposes. More importantly in the context of the film analysis, when injury becomes the basis for constructing a separate and individual identity, the possibility for forming relations with those who suffer other forms of injury can be foreclosed. The film powerfully portrays a process where injuries suffered through different social exclusions of class, gender, religion and ethnicity do not install separate, inter- combative identities but become the basis for forging relations of intimacy and care23.

• 24 Olivier Nakache & Éric Toledano, Dir., Intouchables. Gaumont – TF1, 2011.

28The embattled and marginalized position of Bettina and Parvez in terms of class, gender and ethnicity reframes the perspective from which Europe can be perceived. An immigrant British Pakistani cabdriver and his family, a down-at-heels English sexworker, a visiting German businessman – these characters do not occupy privileged national, gender or ethnic positions. Rather, it is from their positional relationalities that Europe is sketched as a possible community open to all. European subjectivity is filmically constructed not through clichéd encounters between benevolent white characters and their “entertaining” coloured migrant underlings, such as in the French film Intouchables24.

• 25 Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialised boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class a (...)

30Floya Antias and Nira Yuval- Davis describe the constricting discourse of alterity conferred on immigrant groups in Britain thus: the “assumption that all members of a specific cultural collectivity are equally committed to that culture […] tends to construct the members of minority collectivities as basically homogeneous, speaking with a unified cultural voice. These cultural voices have to be as distinguishable as possible from the majority culture in order to be seen as ‘different’; thus, the more traditional and distanced from the majority culture the voice of the ‘community representatives’ is the more ‘authentic’ it would be perceived to be25. My Son the Fanatic refuses this discourse of alterity, authenticity and communal homogeneity precisely by emphasizing the transformations produced by disidentification and relationality. Relations through disidentification, the transformations of personal identity and a displacing vision of postcolonial Europe combine in the travelling gaze of Parvez as he drives his cab towards the end of the film. The cab is a space where Parvez’s immigrant Englishness and Schitz’s visiting German presence are conjoined. Their double vision through the moving windows of the cab apprehend a scene in which is staged a conflictual relationality between rioting British Muslim youth who attack and set ablaze the rundown building which houses the sexworkers of the town, including Bettina. The striking thing about this second form of relationality is the excentric position from which a European space can be imagined. Neither the young Muslim youth, excluded from mainstream white English society, nor the impoverished young women escaping their shabby and dilapidated house represent a privileged class or ethnic group. The rage of the one group against the other is not based on a pre-given essential form of identity. The film has clearly tracked why and how immigrant youth from impoverished towns left in post-industrial decline turn to religion as an invented source of self-definition. Bettina’s own story of material decline earlier in the film explains her work as a sexworker but the film does not reduce her to her job. The scene is a troubling and tragic portrait of how different forms of exclusion rather than different identities turn people against each other. Put another way, it is social exclusion that brings two groups together even if in antagonism.