Bidding for the Mainstream?

Book excerpt: This book looks at a sector of black and Asian British film and television as it presented itself in the 1990s and early 2000s. For this period, a ‘mainstreaming’ of black and Asian British film has been observed in criticism and theory and articulated by an increasing number of practitioners themselves, referring to changing modes of production, distribution and reception and implying a more popular and commercial orientation of certain media products. This idea is a leitmotif for the authors’ readings of recent films and examples of television drama, including such diverse products as Young Soul Rebels and Babymother, East Is East and Bend It Like Beckham, The Buddha of Suburbia and White Teeth. These analyses are supplemented with a look at earlier landmark productions (like Pressure) as well as relevant social, institutional and aesthetic frameworks. The book closes with a selection of statements by black and Asian media practitioners who operate from within Britain’s cultural industries: Mike Phillips, Horace Ové, Julian Henriques, Parminder Vir and Gurinder Chadha.