Representing hybridity as the bridge between cultures in Ivory's 1982 film "Heat and Dust"

Abstract

In 1980s Britain, during the Thatcher decade, a cycle of cinematographic productions called "Raj films", which included titles such as Gandhi (Attenborough, 1982), Heat and Dust (Ivory, 1982), A Passage to India (Lean, 1984), Kim (1984), The Far Pavilions (1984) and The Jewel in the Crown (1984), tackled the issue of the representation of historical and cultural relationships between centre and margins. On the one hand, these films seem to build a portrayal of the British identity through a nostalgic approach to the imperial past in which whiteness and patriarchy were the key elements that set the basis for the social norm while relegating "other" identities to the periphery. On the other hand, a close analysis of these productions reveals that special attention is also paid precisely to those characters inhabiting marginal spaces. This is the case of Ivory's Heat and Dust (1982), which focuses on the problematic relationships between characters belonging to East and West, past and present, centre and periphery. Basing my analysis on the theories by Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha and Richard Dyer among others, I will try to demonstrate how Heat and Dust proposes hybridity as the bridge that brings the gap between centre and periphery.