The postcolonial and postmodern elements in the Black Album.

Postcolonial criticism has seen Hanif Kureishi's work as fraught with racial tension, the color duo, hybrid culture, identity crisis, class segregation and gender role. In his fiction, he introduces the world of discrimination and difference, the color duo and the religious issue. The protoganist Shahid Hassan is always in search of his identity and remains in an unstable state throughout the story. He is also a hybrid character because he lives between two cultures. Author Hanif Krieshi was the victim of an identity crisis in England and saw the identity crisis dilemma with his own eyes. Within the scope of postcolonial criticism, this dilemma caused the novel to be heatedly discussed. In his novel, Kureishi represents this Islamic notion of rejection of Western imperialism, denouncing popular culture and postmodernity.

Shahid has Islamic fundamentalism and Western liberalism in mind at the same time. Concepts of both worlds coexist in his mind, but both worlds cannot be proportional and can hardly converge. Both ideologies have diametrically different social, cultural and political agendas. The novel seems ambivalent in its tone for the tension between the two competing ideologies. Although Islamist fundamentalists and postmodern theorizing seek to challenge imperialism, none of the ideologies seem to negotiate the political differences in both theoretical perspectives. So, the novel takes a different approach to the issues of gender, sexuality and religious fundamentalism.

Deedee Osgood is the main female character in the novel around which many topics such as postmodernity, sexuality, pornography, western liberalism are left open to speculation. Tahira, another female character in the novel, puts her gender identity in the background while highlighting her religious identity. Deedee's character is a fantastic mix of modern ideas, liberalism, religious devotion, postmodern extremism. She places equal emphasis on her individualism, gender identity, and religious identity.