Brick Lane: a materialist reading of the novel and its reception

Abstract

Monica Ali’s 2003 novel Brick Lane was feted by the literary establishment but prompted protests on Brick Lane itself. In a now familiar pattern, such protests were generally regarded as reflecting a conflict between creative freedom and religious or cultural minority rights. In this article, the underlying assumptions of such an interpretation are challenged, suggesting that, in a context of racial and religious inequality, where access to the public sphere is unevenly distributed, the protests are better understood as symptomatic of a subordinate social position. The occlusion of social and historical context in the mainstream response to the protests is mirrored in the novel’s obscuring of the power relations between the Bangladeshi community it focuses on and wider British society. It is argued that, by focusing on the patriarchy of that community in isolation, the novel fosters a culturalism that allows it to be read as an allegory of a woman’s individual liberation from community oppression and her journey into the neutral space of an ‘inclusive’ multicultural Britain. The necessity of a collective politics of self-representation is thus elided.