Namita Chakrabarty’s performance starts with J.G. Ballard’s introduction to Crash (1995): "Pornography is the most political form of fiction". Then over to Mohammad Siddique Khan, the identified leader of the bomb attack in London on July 7 2005, that in a video recording (made public by Al Jazeera) claimed, "Your democratically chosen governments constantly inflict, all over the world, atrocities against my people. Your support makes you directly responsible. We are at war and I’m a soldier. Now you are going to taste the reality of this situation".

In her presentation Chakrabarty uses words, pictures and music to discuss the multiculturalism in London, before and after the attacks. It is a journey of discovery through the year 2000’s race-conflicts, gender-battles and wars of terror -from J.G. Ballard to Mohammed Siddique Khan. Chakrabarty draws support from both the utopian multiculturalism that the 1960`s peace & love society heralded, as well as the contemporary contrast between multiculturalism as a media tool, and the reality of experienced mono-culturalism.

The skeletons of the past seem, from Chakrabarty’s perspective, to constitute a hindrance for future prospects. Using her personal memories from London in 1989, when Rushdie’s, The Satanic Verses were published, her thoughts point to contemporary American and British literature (DeLillo, Roth, Smith and Wolfe), trying to find a relationship between gender, race and class. The following extract from Chakrabarty’s novel, Extract from Race (2005) gives us a hint of what we can look forward to:

women in salwar kameez and chemical blondes in mini skirts and tattoos struggle past in opposite directions with the same package of kids in pushchairs and carriers from Asda all dwarfed by the spiders web of pylons gas towers and in the distance the skyscrapers being constructed in the concrete metropolis of the soon to be Canary Wharf in the background behind me just a metre away from my front door so close someone could almost touch me the traffic lights are red someone shouts through an open car window go back to where you came from paki

later

she asks where I am from I say India she tastes the word on her tongue and seems to savour me with her eyes

Namita Chakrabarty is a writer and teacher at the School of Education, University of East London.

Anders Johansson