‘Doing Multicultural London’: the Case ofKing of the Ghetto

Abstract

Zangwill1 captures the predicament for the migrant in fin-de-siecle London, a state of flux between ‘the rose of romance’ and an ‘unlovely surface’. The city, from the migrant’s perspective, has typically involved such hopeful allure and practical realisation. The effects of multicultural urbanism on both those constructed as ‘native’ and ‘newcomer’ have historically produced a complex sense of diversity within what can be described as ‘diaspora space’. This concept, Avtar Brah suggests, ‘foregrounds the genealogies of dispersion with those of “staying put’’ ’ (1996: 16). For postcolonial British screenwriters such as Horace Ove (Pressure (1975), A Hole in Babylon (1979)), Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), The Buddha of Suburbia (1993)), Caryl Phillips (The Final Passage (1996)) and Meera Syal (Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999)), London has been a common landscape. The notion of the capital as a deconstructed site of Empire, with its residual and modernised exclusionary tactics, resonates here, deliberately remapped through the use of new images of multi-ethnicity and alternative viewpoints in order to challenge the master codes of ‘race’ and the city. King of the Ghetto (henceforth KotG), screened on BBC2 from 1 to 28 May 1986 in a late evening slot, connects precisely with these themes by representing the emergent politics of ‘diaspora space’ located within London’s East End. The series is configured very deliberately