SOURCE: “‘No Secrets Were Safe from Me’: Situating Hanif Kureishi,” in Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 119-35.

In the following essay, Weber examines aspects of ethnicity, cultural identity, and literary practice in Kureishi's fiction and films, particularly in relation to American ethnic writers such as Jewish-American author Philip Roth.

I want to begin this essay, which seeks to situate the contemporary Pakistani-British novelist/filmmaker Hanif Kureishi in relation to American ethnic expression, with two striking, provocative exchanges. The first is by the distinguished socialist scholar (and editor of the important journal Race and Class), A. Sivanandan, in response to the cosmic questions, posed by Quintin Hoare and Malcolme Imrie, “Do you feel you are in a kind of exile? Where are you at home?” The second is drawn from Kureishi’s recent satirical novel, The Black Album (1995), during a tense moment when the question of “home...