ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩@kunley_drukpa
WHAT IS ‘PINK PANTHERESS BRITAIN’?
Becoming common online to see people sharing content featuring ‘Multicultural Britain Twee’ - broadly a kind of aesthetic that depicts a cutesy version of modern multicultural Britain ‘without the bad or weird parts’. Want to call the version of Britain this imagery depicts ‘Pink Pantheress Britain’, after popular British artist Pink Pantheress. Pink Pantheress has a fun bubblegum aesthetic and employs many established British motifs in her music, fashion, videos etc - in this way she’s quite close to a platonic ideal of multicultural Britain twee you see shared. ‘Pink Pantheress Britain’ then is ‘what if we took the cutesy parts of multicultural Britain and mixed them in with the cutesy parts of historical Britain?” This isn’t the same thing as ‘Yookay Twee’ please note because the Britain of ‘Pink Pantheress Britain’ is still importantly 1) Brit-ish and 2) absent the bad or weird parts of multicultural Britain
Video below is interesting in this way, account is a (young ?) left wing woman who makes ‘fun’ 2010 Tumblr type video edits - this particular video is a montage depicting what she imagines ‘Englishness’ to be. Lots of common tropes; Diana, James Bond, Shakespeare, ok… but notable too how readily many multicultural Britain influences have been interspersed into more classical images of ‘Englishness’. Found effect kind of mesmerising, it isn’t even necessarily an invalid interpretation of what ‘Englishness’ is in the 2020’s - interest was more that someone would consider ‘King Lear’ and ‘Benjamin Zephaniah’ or the ‘Pre-Raphaelites’ and ‘Bridgerton’ as equally valid expressions of ‘Englishness’ in first place
Think the woman who made the edit is white. Might be wrong about that but either way presumably she is not in any conflict about the blending of traditionally quite disparate influences. Occurs that the video represents something like a twenty-one year white woman’s idea of ‘What Britain Is Today’, actually not even just that demographic - more every ‘basically well-meaning but sheltered’ white Brit. I say white Brit because I am skeptical most non-white Brits would be as inclined to include, as above, ‘King Lear’, the ‘Pre-Raphaelites’, ‘Wordsworth’ and ‘Bridget Jones’ in any conception of their own identity. ‘Pink Pantheress Britain’ is distinct from the ‘Yookay’ in this way then in that it is still Brit-ish, it hasn’t begun to transmogrify into something else entirely where its peoples and cultures bear increasingly less resemblance to the historical state. ‘Pink Pantheress Britain’ is multicultural Britain in continuity with historical Britain, it is historical Britain with some fun added new twee multicultural elements (like Pink Pantheress). Migration hasn’t really resulted in any meaningful change in this version of Britain so people see no contradiction in comparing ‘King Lear’ and ‘Benjamin Zephaniah’. When a certain class of person talks about multicultural Britain this is probably something like what they imagine multicultural Britain to be
No point moralising that ‘Pink Pantheress Britain’ obfuscates the full spectrum of multicultural Britain ‘Yookay’ better captures; Dawah influencers, roadmen, the Boriswave, non-RP speaking South Asians as a larger percentage of the minority population because of a pre-occupation with black minorities etc. since much of ‘that kind of thing’ barely registers as existing for many people, let alone in its capacity as major blocs for the formation of new kinds of ‘British’ identities over coming decades. Yes obviously this part of New Britain is overlooked - it is ‘a bit too weird’ for (not to single them out) twenty-one year old white women, they aren’t as likely to encounter it directly either and it also has high assumed knowledge barrier-to-entry requirements. Who is realistically going to include Muhammad Hijab or Birmingham Central Mosque in depictions of ‘Englishness’? Well done here is a medal for spotting the hypocrisy
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