ABSTRACT
Pro Summer 2002, on a fl ight from London to New York. I’m returning from a conference in Finland and a few weeks of travel through Europe, and the last thing on my mind is thinking critically about anything other than a few hours sleep. Lazily fl ipping through the in-fl ight magazine (in which there is a noticeable post-9/11 focus on “travel safety” and “airport security”), I come across a listing for a fi lm billed as “a feel-good story about girls’ sports” with the catchy title of Bend it Like Beckham (an obvious reference to global sport celebrity David Beckham and his penchant for “bending” the ball around defenders on free kicks). Vaguely intrigued (Have I heard about this fi lm before? I think to myself, wondering when drinks will be served), I navigate the digital controls of Virgin Atlantic’s in-seat entertainment console and punch up the listings for the “On Demand” movie feature. Absentmindedly watching the fi lm once through-missing bits and pieces of it here or there because of the surprisingly tasty in-fl ight meal of faux chicken tikka masala and the invariable chat with the person sitting next to me about the relative merits of George Orwell’s (1933) Down and Out in Paris and London versus Anthony Bourdain’s (2001) Kitchen Confi dential-it fi nally cuts through my jet-lag addled fog that there is a major cultural intervention taking place in the fi lm with respect to “British Asian” identity politics and diasporic migration as read over and against girls’ youth sport. (I just wish it hadn’t taken me so long to “get” it.)
Th e central purpose of this chapter brings critical refl ection to bear on our present historical conjuncture characterized by emerging dynamics associated with diasporic racial formation and representation and their broader articulations to the twinned narratives of culture and identity in a globalizing world. Specifi cally, this chapter focuses to a great extent on the 2002 independent British fi lm Bend it Like Beckham, which portends to privilege the voices of “British Asians” in a narrative of girls’ sporting empowerment, participation, and multicultural inclusivity. Additionally, I discuss within and alongside the Beckham fi lm the complex, confl ictual, and continually shift ing identity performances revealed in fi lms that challenge such “easy” multicultural fare, such as England Is Mine and Dirty Pretty Th ings. Although popularly considered as a progressive, multicultural text by a vast majority of moviegoers and fi lm critics alike for its (alleged) “realistic” portrayal of Asian culture, I argue that Bend it Like Beckham revels in and reveals its liminal positioning within and against the hyphenated spatial histories of British colonialism and Asian diaspora as it remains grounded in, and privileges, the very same racial order it alleges to challenge. In this vein, I see it operating in a pedagogical sense as it works, on one level, to reinscribe and perpetuate essentialist notions of British Asian culture in Britain while, on another, it inaugurates a process of bringing a particular iteration of “Asian” (popular) culture and identity into “mainstream” (read: Western) public spaces.
