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Introduction
IN THE REALM of contemporary British popular culture, the preoccupation with British- Asian identity undoubtedly forms one of the recurrent topics.1 While, initially, discussion was largely restricted to prose renderings of the issue - ranging from Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia to more recent titles such as Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Monica Ali' s Brick Lane - engagement with (re-)defmitions of a specifically British- Asian collective identity now also covers music and film. At the same time, one may detect a heightened interest in 'exotic'2 genres among the general (i.e. white, Western) public which has, for instance, fuelled a fashion in Bollywoodinspired films. (Cultural) difference and its marketing plays a decisive role here. To demonstrate the respective approaches in the presentation of cultural difference and to outline the processes involved in its commodification, I have chosen Gurinder Chadha's 2004 adaptation Bride & Prejudice as one of the first 'westernized' Bollywood films. Samples of songs by Apache Indian, a founding father of British bhangra, will serve to illustrate ways of exploiting commodified difference as a basis for collective identities. It is interesting to note that, despite the variations in terms of (intended) recipients and the presentation of exoticness, both cases may be considered to be instances of 'strategic exoticism, a term designating the integration of 'non-indigenous' and, for that matter, 'exotic' elements into the framework of Western popular culture. Importantly, difference is hereby turned into a commodity -
a resource that is produced for the market by wage labor. Whether it be a tangible good or an evanescent service, universally enticing or widely reviled, a consumer product or a producer's good, a commodity by definition betrays defining linkages to capitalist production and, secondarily, to market exchange.4
This feature is clearly revealed both in Bride & Prejudice and in Apache Indian's music. Yet, although difference is exploited as a selling point, this aspect is not openly acknowledged by the producers themselves. In Apache Indian's case, the tunes are even explicitly promoted as an expression of 'authentic' British-Asian culture and presented as a possible point of reference for identity-construction among second-generation immigrants. Tension therefore arises between the status of the products as consumer goods and their being staged as samples of 'authentic exoticness'. In the following,...