The Articulation of Migrant Spatiality in Kureishi’s Cinema: Revisiting My Beautiful Launderette

Abstract

As a legacy of colonization, the Third World’s fantasy of the West as a utopia of welcoming melting pot with innumerable wealth had nurtured identifications of drastic immigrant influx to metropolitan centers. But their quest for unique spatiality in the Centre was often challenged by catastrophic ordeals that expatriates happened to undergo there. In this context, this paper argues that Hanif Kureishi as a Pakistani cinematographer with tangible experiences has been able to successfully depict the migrants’ quest of a new spatiality in ‘My Beautiful Launderette’ (1989). This literary analysis is qualitative in nature and it deploys theoretical interpretations of Mitchel Foucault and Henry Lefebvre to discover the nature of that spatiality. According to findings of the study, immigrants’ quest of spatiality with their geographical dislocation from the periphery to the Centre had been challenged by their fluctuation in between the native territory and the host locale. The dual existence amidst the migrant turbulence upsized multiple spatiality that immigrants have entrapped within varied trajectories of the ideological shift of Pakistani expatriates within the socio – cultural transition. The controversial socio-political upheavals under Margret Thatcher had not only undermined immigrants’ inclinations to find a unique identity and space with wealth accumulation and embracing western notions but greatly disturbed their fantasy of progress. Expatriates’ incapability to locate themselves in the center owing to prevalent racial polarizations had intensely traumatized their psychology to embrace traditional values. Similarly, such psychological dislocation can be ubiquitously relatable to the Sri Lankan sphere.