Stretching the Necklace
When Michael Winterbottom’s The Road To Guantanamo (2006) won critical accolades and the prestigious Silver Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival, leading actor Riz Ahmed was euphoric. The film recounted the true story of three friends from Tipton, England who were held in extrajudicial detention by the United States government for two years in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. Finally it seemed as though, in the eyes of those who saw the film, the Tipton Three transformed from undifferentiated orange jumpsuits to human beings. However, reality soon dampened Ahmed’s hopeful spirits.
Upon returning to Luton airport, he and his fellow actors were illegally detained for nearly two hours by Special Branch under the Terrorism Act. British intelligence officers marched Ahmed to an unmarked room where they reportedly interrogated him about his political views, one officer screaming, “What kinda film you making? Did you become an actor to further the Muslim struggle?” as she twisted his arm to the point of snapping. Somewhat farcically, the same officer later attempted to recruit him as an informant, asking whether he “would mind officers contacting [him] regularly in the future, in case [he] might be in a cafe and overhear someone discussing illegal activities.” This reductive encounter with state-sanctioned discrimination—and his decision to publicize the ironic story rather than to sue—sheds some light on the subversive construction of Riz Ahmed’s star image as a politically conscious rebel straddling the liminal spaces of diasporic Muslim identity.
Riz Ahmed is a personification of the post-9/11 world, embodying the paradoxical situation of young Muslim men who consider themselves acculturated to American or European society, but are constantly racially profiled and Othered as a terroristic threat to the West (Puar 2008). Often seen as the most difficult of all foreigners to assimilate due to their allegedly “alien values,” Muslims have been caricatured and stereotyped by the West for centuries (Kundnani 126). Long before 9/11, Edward Said theorized the common frame used by the West—a category used here in acknowledgement of its problematic nature—to represent Islam as regressive, dangerous, and hostile to democratic ideals. Following the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, this framing became the norm in hegemonic Western political and cultural discourses, which affix Muslims into a homogenous category and obscure the multicultural diversity of people who share an Islamic background. In an era of intense jingoism and Islamophobia on both sides of the Atlantic, the representation of hyphenated, diasporic identities on screen exposes the contradictions in “clash of civilizations” narratives of ethnicity, religion, and national identity.
Stars, Richard Dyer’s seminal study of stardom as a social phenomenon, can function as a useful framework to analyze Riz Ahmed’s ascendant celebrity status. For Dyer, stars frequently speak to dominant contradictions in social life—experienced as conflicting demands, cognitive dissonance, irreconcilable but equally held values—in such a way as to appear to reconcile them. He argues that, in part by being one unified entity in the real world and yet displaying contradictory traits, “star images function crucially in relation to contradiction within and between ideologies, which they seek various to 'manage' and resolve" (34). In the case of Ahmed, this centers on his exhibiting strong, politicized affiliation with his ethnic roots, but also patriotic pride in his national identity. By combining these traits into a single persona, his star-image exposes incongruities in the xenophobic ideologies gaining traction across the Western world. It's no coincidence that his star turn comes at a moment when debates about immigration and Islam have roiled the U.S. election, when questions of belonging have polarized his native Europe, and when celebrities’ political outspokenness has reached a crescendo.
In his book The Question of Cultural Identity, Stuart Hall claims that diasporic individuals “must learn to inhabit two identities, to speak two cultural languages, to translate and negotiate between them” (310). Riz Ahmed has perfected this art of contextual code-switching—from working-class Pakistani household to upper-crust Oxford education, underground rapping to Hollywood acting—in order to flip the script on Hollywood stereotypes and maintain his agency as a politically conscious artist. He specializes in playing, and being, the insider-outsider.
