“You Got a Thing about Prince?”: Worlding Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album

Abstract

While critics largely attribute the value of Hanif Kureishi's novel The Black Album to its message about the nation, this essay reconsiders the novel's transatlantic structure and depiction of Prince to understand its relevance for contemporary global cultural politics. Specifically, the essay adopts the capacious reading praxis of worlding to explain the racial and cultural logic that makes an American pop icon a necessary metaphor for South Asian Muslims' sense of belonging in Britain. Worlding defamiliarizes Prince as commodity and an embodiment of transcendent hybridity, morality, solidarity, or alterity and instead suggests his capacity to consolidate cultural capital, bourgeois class status, and heteronormativity for British Muslim fans. As such, Prince fandom recuperates the novel's Bildungsroman form by showcasing the possibilities for British Asian Muslim men to carve out a fragile sense of belonging in the nation. The essay's delineation of British Asia's imaginative and affective relationship with America charts new connections between postcolonial studies and American studies.