The Politics of Location: Ethnic Identity and Cultural Conflict in the Cinema of the South Asian Diaspora

In the past two decades of the twentieth century, a new movement began in mass media with the work of South Asian diasporic filmmakers in the West. Asian films no longer lurk outside in the periphery but have entered the mainstream, with the great success of the film by British Asian filmmaker Gurinder Chadha released in 2002, Bend It Like Beckham. Chadha is the first Asian woman to have made inroads into the mainstream public sphere of the West with her films. Her films give priority to class, race, and gender issues and focus on the position of marginalized outsiders, the working classes of the western metropolis, much of which is made up by people of color from Britain’s former colonies in Asia and Africa. This article examines the representation of female subaltern identity in Chadha’s films using the lens of cultural studies and postcolonial theory.