Multiculturalism and the Work of Hanif Kureishi

Abstract

For more than a quarter of a century Hanif Kureishi has been one of the most prominent and most important literary commentators on contemporary London. Indeed, Kureishi’s work has focused almost exclusively on the contemporary moment — to date all of his writing has been set in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century — and almost exclusively on London; the 2013 filmscript Le Week-End, set in Paris, and 2014 novel The Last Word, set in rural Somerset, are Kureishi’s first major works not to be set primarily in London. Moreover, Kureishi’s writing has frequently sought to address the multicultural and multiethnic character of the city, and has done so with a great deal of insight; accordingly, Kureishi has rightly been identified as a key voice in debates about multiculturalism. However, critics have often attempted to emphasise his importance for such debates by endowing his work with representational status, and this has led to a failure to recognise the multiplicity of his writing and to engage fully with its complexities. Moreover, while it is fair to say that until very recently Kureishi’s work was obsessed with London, and while Kureishi has often written about the city’s multicultural character, one cannot say that Kureishi’s work is obsessed with multiculturalism; much of his writing has very little indeed to do with questions about ethnic and cultural diversity.