BHAJI ON THE BEACH: A FEMALE JOURNEY TOWARDS A NEW BRITISH IDENTITY

Authors

  • Vicky Gil

Keywords:

Bhaji on the Beach, Gurinder Chadha, women of color, British-Asian, film studies, multi-culturalism, race, gender, ethnicity

Abstract

“Bhaji on the Beach” (Gurinder Chadha, 1993) tells the story of a Group of British-Asian women on an ouling organised by a local women’s center, to Blackpool an icon pf British popular culture, to see the city Light up. This multi-positioned group, their understanding of their place within their community, and their problems, allow the film to explore the issue of changing identities in women of colour in the nineties in Britain. In this paper, I propose to show how British-Asian women are depicted in Bhaji on the beach, and how the fluidity of the film itself, in both aesthetic and generic terms, helps to defend a possibility of fluid and hybrid identities for women in Britain in the nineties. I will argue that the film’s motifs and style illustrate the views offered by identity-politics circulating in various cultural texts as unofficial knowledge in contemporary British society.

Author Biography

Vicky Gil

Universidad de Zaragoza

Issue

Section

Artículos