Speaker’s Corner: Fatima Begum Rajina on “The aesthetic challenge to Britishness: Nadiya’s victory on Great British Bake Off 2015”
The aesthetic challenge to Britishness: Nadiya’s victory on Great British Bake Off 2015
by Fatima Begum Rajina, SOAS-Nohoudh PhD candidate
Above: Nadiya Hussain winner of this year’s Great British Bake Off
Where do I start with this? She started off the show on shaky grounds and was certainly not one I thought would win the show but it is through her dedication and perseverance that she won the minds and hearts of the British people. Throughout the show, there have been numerous discussions on Twitter and Facebook regarding her very visible Muslimness, which slowly shifted to discussions about her facial expressions, her witty one-liners and beautiful smile. What’s not to love about her, right?
The exchanges on social media, following her victory, have been insightful enough to give one an idea of how Britishness is perceived, conceptualized and consumed by the British society at large. The following observations I make are mere speculations but I hope they create a debate on what it means to be British and how the attempts to (re)-define it through active, visible participation does not seem to bode well with all. The hyper-visibility of Nadiya’s Muslimness, and other contestants’ non-white backgrounds seemed to provoke a rather frivolous critique by the Daily Mail columnist Amanda Platell. She suggested that BBC’s ‘PC attitude’ prevented Flora, one of the other contestants, to not make it to the final. To make matters worse, Platell implied that had Flora baked a chocolate mosque, instead of a chocolate carousel, ‘she’d have stood a better chance’ and her journey would not have been short-lived. Her comment regarding a chocolate mosque is not only irrelevant when one considers the multiple trials and tribulations the contestants face during the application process itself, which is an indicator of the importance of merit and talent; however, it further demonstrates journalists’ ease with which they resort to Islamophobic rhetoric in order to make a point.
Her comment raises a much needed conversation about Britishness and who falls under its purview. To bring in a chocolate mosque showcases the othering of those Platell deemed as not ‘British’ enough. Nadiya’s Britishness, which was so obvious with her self-deprecating humour very well known to Brits, was reduced to her obvious aesthetics thus relegating her away from creating a more inclusive, diverse conceptualisation of Britishness. Currently, it seems that Britishness is still very much produced and reproduced as including those who are white, and those who are non-white are somewhere on the periphery, not fully included but yet somehow not fully excluded. The non-whites are not excluded fully because of the hyphenated nature of expressing our Britishness, which is only exclusively used for brown/black Britons. Salman Sayyid addresses the relationship between Britishness and whiteness and the hyphenation culture imposed on brown/black Britons in the book A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain, which also illustrates the point raised above in relation to Platell’s remark, in which he states: ‘Attempts to re-define Britishness away from whiteness have run into resistance from the usual suspects of xenophobic columnist-provocateurs and right-wing elements. … Thus the use of British as prefix or suffix establishes a superficial relationship between Asian and British. The identity of British or Asian is not radically transformed by being conjoined-thus allowing for the possibility of disaggregating the British from the Asian’ (2006: 6-7). The disaggregation of one’s British identity was most visible after the murder of Lee Rigby when Michael Adebolajo, overnight, went from being British Nigerian to just Nigerian. This erasure creates an instant distance and quickly transforms the Briton to an ‘other’ who never belonged in the first place.
Going back to Nadiya’s victory, just a few days before the GBBO final was aired, Theresa May made an odd declaration that ‘migrants pose a threat to national cohesion’ which consequently led to a flood of tweets using Nadiya’s win to troll Theresa May. The tweets were used to indicate the success of Nadiya’s integration into British society because she is, after all, viewed as an immigrant. Though these tweets are filled with what I call ‘good intentions’, I nevertheless have a problem with this narrative. This narrative negates the role of coloniality and that many Bangladeshis who came to Britain were subjects of the British Empire thus were never NOT British. Being a subject of the Queen made you a naturalised citizen of ‘Her Majesty’, which was the reason why, post-WWII, many from Britain’s colonies were able to come to Britain, promoted as the motherland, and work without the need for visas. Once their presence was deemed as a threat various laws were passed to tighten immigration control.
Essentially what I am arguing for is the absolute need to address the (re)definition of Britishness, away from whiteness and which incorporates and prompts ‘the recognition that such a transformation would entail a major debate about the nature of British identity in relation to its imperial past and its post-colonial future’ (Sayyid 2006: 6). With the current hysteria surrounding British Muslims, this debate, this conversation is needed more than ever before, especially when Nadiya is uttering the words that she is ‘as British as anyone else and hope’ she’s proved it. The fact that she felt she had to prove herself demonstrates how Britishness is very much bound by or confined to racial connotations. We need to move away from this linear definition and dismantle it in order to create a new conceptualisation of Britishness.
N. Ali, V.S. Kalra and S. Sayyid (eds). 2006. A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain. C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd