Ilott, Sarah
2019-01-31
<p>The essay proposes to explore the mobilisation of the figure of the black neighbour in 1970s’ comedy as a means of commenting upon and critiquing British multicultural discourse of the time through a consideration of popular and mainstream sitcoms <em>Love Thy Neighbour </em>(ITV, 1972—76) and <em>Rising Damp</em> (ITV, 1974—78). The paper argues that whilst these comedies might seem radical for their time in normalising black neighbours, poking jokes at white bigots, and engaging with social taboo head-on, they ultimately serve to confirm the status quo by appeasing mainstream audiences and letting them off the hook for ongoing racism, whilst placing the burden for the happy functioning of a culturally and ethnically diverse nation in the hands of individuals without reference to cultural, political, historical or economic contexts that have combined to disenfranchise, alienate and subordinate black Britons.</p>
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2554494
oai:zenodo.org:2554494
Zenodo
https://zenodo.org/communities/postcolonial-interventions
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2554493
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies (ISSN 2455 6564), Vol. IV, Issue 1, 14-44, (2019-01-31)
neighbour, comedy, multicultural, racism, nation
Encounter with the Neighbour in 1970's British Multicultural Comedy
info:eu-repo/semantics/article