Black British celebrants can appropriate royal pageantry into a sardonic spectacle of multicultural defiance.

Evidence

In probing further the anti-communitarian textures which multiculture engenders, another implication of the aforementioned Royal Wedding celebrations becomes apposite. It being the Royal Wedding does of course enjoy some totemic signifi­ cance concerning racialized ambivalence. The manner in which the occasion was commemorated (those responsible did have to obtain clearance from the council to arrange a ‘street party’, and leaflets were distributed designating the occasion as wedding-pertinent) can appear amusing, given the understated acknowledgement of the wedding during the party itself. It is, however, also evocative of the ‘unruly’, ‘unkempt’ practice of race which Gilroy (2004: xiv) places at the centre of convivial culture. The scene is replete with cultural symbols and expressions best character­ ized as black. For instance, given the Ghanaian and Jamaican flags (and lack of Union Jacks) and ‘inappropriate’ selection of music (grime, more grime followed by deep, rumbling reggae), the party seems to flirt sardonically with a narrative of imperial Britain. And in the process, the scene effortlessly reroutes the celebration towards an aesthetic of a contemporary, multi-ethnic London. It revels in only being a partially familiar evocation of Britain. From the external, ‘melancholic’ (Gilroy, 2004) gaze which fixes the occasion’s pomp and pageantry as redolent of a lost Britain, this celebration is rendered incoherent, insomuch as it trades on the same patriotic moment and yet distorts it in favour of pleasures symbolically irreconcil­ able with that hegemonic narration of Britain. … In short, the scene does not chime with a reading of racialized ethnicity as hermetically sealed, absolutist difference. Instead, the celebration can be read as a spectacle of Black Britain, a multicultural Britain, which courts a certain element of intentional bastardization vis-à-vis domi­ nant discourses of race and nation. — Sivamohan Valluvan, Conviviality and Multiculture, 51

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gilroy’s work on postcolonial melancholia and convivial culture; also resonates with the ‘immodesty’ article theme of subaltern groups weaponizing symbols of the dominant culture.
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallel to the grafting/bastardization motif — here a state ceremony is ‘bastardized’ by being grafted onto Black British pleasures; useful illustration of hybrid cultural infrastructure.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Sivamohan Valluvan, Conviviality and Multiculture: A…, 51