Multiculturalism satirized in Richard Bean's England people very nice : a postmodern study

Abstract EN

Drawing on a postmodern approach, the present paper investigates Richard Bean's play England People Very Nice as a satire of multiculturalism.

Towards this end, a number of postmodern features have been utilized, viz.

intertextuality, irony, historiographic metafiction, and hyperreality.

Set in an immigration centre, Bean's state-of-the-nation play includes two prologues and an epilogue, in addition to a play-within-the-play.

The play within, made and staged by migrants (about immigration, metafiction, historiography, heterogeneity, integration, intermarriage, Islamophobia, and multiculturalism), comprises four acts spanning four centuries/waves of immigrants—the French, the Irish, the Jews, and the Bangladeshi Muslims.

The paper has reached four findings.

(1) Intertextuality has been exploited for substantiating Bean's Islamophobic language.

(2) The monolithic privileged natives keep deriding the diverse subordinated migrants as “Others” by means of the irony technique.

(3) The playwright has fulfilled his target of satirizing, but not excluding, multiculturalism by merging the framed play with his own framing one.

(4) Bean's use of historiographic metafiction enabled him to reflect hyperrealities about the migrants.