ABSTRACT
The masks of the clown grant the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking, the right not to be taken literally, not "to be oneself ... " the right to rip off masks . . . 1
The mask represents the absent one. It brings the unknown to recognition, the unrepresentable to representation. The mask itself is an object, it is abstract; yet it indicates that the content is present in abstraction-where the known becomes the unknown, the identical becomes different. The unrepresentable and unknowable is always "the missing content," that the mask recovers and brings forth. The mask puts the world upside down-it is a masquerade. 2
. . . If we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge-which gives rise to profound uncertainties-that our physical alienation ... almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands. . . 3
Hanif Kureishi's films My Beautljul Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid construct varying positions of postcoloniality by displaying and displacing a wide range of discourses that intersect, reformulate, and revolve around the axis of race, class, and sexuality set against the decay of Margaret Thatcher's England. Kureishi's films also function as theoretical and social texts where questions of postcoloniality and migrancy are interrupted by the chaotic existence of other subclasses and the movement from the one to the other makes clear that "questions of race and postcoloniality are not identical. "4
