empire nostalgia and media narratives
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Hutnyeck defines "empire nostalgia" as the phenomenon where culture is celebrated as unchanging and static, casting immigrants "as they are, and forever were." This external imposition of labels locks identity into a narrow frame, stripping agency and ignoring the complex social, racial, and cultural nuances of individuals and communities.
Fun^da^mental challenged this neo-orientalist tendency by asserting their own agency through Asian defense groups and music videos. Instead of receiving the notoriety often extended to mainstream acts—punk or hip-hop, where the social critique and cultural elements integral to the art are commodified for profit—their art was simply censored, based on the stupid assumption that it promoted Islamic extremism. This suppression underscored the lack of intellectual discourse around their work, a gap Hutnyeck seeks to address by situating their music within its rightful political and cultural context, essential for informed social critique.
Fun^da^mental's message called for solidarity among Black and Brown communities, speaking out against Skinhead violence and the state's criminalization of minorities. Their resistance is given heightened urgency against the backdrop of the 1990s CJA, which outwardly targeted ravers and squatters and insidiously advanced the surveillance of racialized bodies, particularly Muslims. Fun^da^mental's video, with its unflinching portray of violence, demanded recognition of these issues as urgent realities affecting communities. They called for action against hate crimes and condemned the imperial and colonial forces underpinning systemic racism, pointing out the hypocrisy of free speech advocates who ignore deeper structures of oppression.
Despite their attempt to make a political and cultural statement, Fun^da^mental and other South Asian artists/activists faced similar "empire nostaliga" through media misrepresentation. Their video was dismissed as a stereotypical portrayal of Islamic masculinity fueled by notions of jihad. Madan's on-air interview as shortened to a superficial two minutes, erasing the substance of his message and leaving him with the realization: "you will be misrepresented." This media approach highlights a racial and gendered intersectionality that both tokenizes and fetishizes, similar to how women are often objectified in media narratives.
This distortion operates within a broader nationalist agenda, as Kundnani demonstrates, where Britishness is utilized as a tool to neutralize "violent" Muslim identities. There is a growing state imperative to replace multiculturalism with a nationhood that forces minorities to integrate on poorly-defined terms of Britishness. Initially championed by the left, multiculturalism appears to have fallen out of favor across the political spectrum. The left criticizes it for supposedly allowing segregation through over-tolerance and thus enabling violence. This ridiculous logic fails to acknowledge the historical roots of segregation in industrial decline, white flight, and institutional racism. This motive to erase diversity, with nationalist myths as substitute, makes the acceptance of immigrants contingent on a vague idea of Britishness—an identity historically defined by conquest, violence, and exclusion, embodied today in the resurgence of Skinhead aggression.