Introduction

Abstract

Conflicts in terms of cultural and ethnic identities characterise the increasingly multicultural and globalised societies of our time. In the United Kingdom in particular, the so-called ‘Thatcher decade’ marked a watershed in British society, bringing about important changes in the political, economic, social and cultural reality of the country which still resonate today. During the 1980s, cultural identities were incessantly reconstructed as the terms ‘national’, ‘imperial’ and ‘postcolonial’ were questioned and redefined. The interrelated categories of gender, ethnicity and class were also transformed and adapted to the new context: old identity boundaries were eroded, new limits were built up, and unexplored hybrid spaces were unveiled. However, what does it mean to talk about ‘hybrid spaces’ — namely Homi Bhabha’s ‘third space’ or Avtar Brah’s ‘diaspora space’? The introductory quotation by Werbner succinctly expresses the main concerns that underlie the cultural and filmic study carried out in this book.

All cultures are hybrid […]. To speak of cultural ‘mixing’ makes sense only from inside a social world.

(Werbner, 1997: 15)