Word: britishism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Back in the early 1990s, when Kureishi first started going to extremist London mosques for research for The Black Album, scribbling down notes at Friday sermons was weirdo stuff indeed. Today, with London still scarred from the 2005 bombings by British-born terrorists and the far-right British National Party winning seats in recent European parliamentary elections, the novel seems spookily prescient. Though its themes of radical faith and alienation endure, Kureishi's mosque visits didn't. One Friday, he recalls, the mullah at a mosque in London's East End warned that "there are spies and journalists...
Kureishi has been attracting controversy since his Oscar-nominated screenplay for 1985's My Beautiful Laundrette, about a young, gay British-Pakistani making it - and making out - in Thatcherite London. The discovery that he could shake things up was wonderfully liberating, particularly for the son of a Bombay intellectual stuck commuting from a dreary London suburb to work as a civil servant in the Pakistani embassy. "My parents' generation were immigrants, who nobody noticed, and who didn't want to be noticed," he says. "Then came my generation." The boy who was called "Pakistani Pete" by a teacher for whom...
...second-generation kids ... we weren't planning on becoming accountants. We wanted to get stoned, get laid and be cool, like everyone else. When I was 15, Kureishi was the only writer I'd ever read who seemed to be aware of this huge British demographic. He wrote about us not as if we were exotica, but simply as a self-evident part of British life...
...people when I was a kid - a quarter of their lives," he says. "You're a soccer fan, you go shopping, watch TV and you're a Muslim." The England Kureishi chronicles - indeed, helped create - is a country where Islam, curries and brown skin have become as British as Earl Grey tea and rain...
...Kokang originally came from China, first arriving in Burma in the 17th century. Supporters of the Ming emperors, they fled for exile as that Chinese dynasty disintegrated in 1644. After Burma gained independence from the colonial British, Kokang territory was under the control of Burmese communists, who for decades waged an insurgency against the central government and were among the military regime's most persistent foes. "The [Burmese army] hates many ethnic minorities very much," says Aung Kyaw Zaw, a former anti-junta rebel who now lives in exile in Yunnan province. "But they especially hate the Kokang because they...