Streaming video and diasporic worldmaking: Race,ethnicity,and religion in the Anglophone West

Abstract

Given the continual and savvy recognition by the state and the media industries of social and cultural difference, how should we approach breakthroughs in media representation? This article addresses this question by examining how Muslimness in Western television entertainment is being reimagined in the context of new industrial logics and techno-cultural possibilities enabled by streaming video services. Focusing on Ms Marvel (Disney+), Ramy (Hulu), Man Like Mobeen (BBC/Netflix) and We Are Lady Parts (Channel 4/Peacock), we analyze how media industry professionals are capitalizing on long-standing networks of trans-Atlantic television production and distribution, social media influence and the dynamics of creator cultures, and media industries’ quest for ‘diverse’ programming to engage in a worldmaking exercise that repositions Muslims and Muslimness in Western contexts defined by post-9/11 Islamophobia and resurgent xenophobia.

Introduction: a test for representation

On 3 March 2017, the day after delivering Channel 4’s annual diversity lecture in the British parliament, Riz Ahmed tweeted: ‘Here’s the speech I gave @HouseofCommons in full. Forget “diversity” we need REPRESENTATION. Or things fall apart’ (original emphasis) (Ahmed, 2017: n.p.). Acknowledging that things had improved, albeit in an incremental fashion, Ahmed sounded a warning about a new ‘national story being written’ and whether that story would be one that ‘looks inwards and backwards’ or one that looks ‘outwards and ahead to the future’ (Ahmed, 2017: n.p.). Reflecting on his own trajectory in the media world, Ahmed ended with a forceful argument that the need of the hour was not diversity, understood as something that merely adds ‘a little bit of flavour, some spice, and something you can live without’ but rather, meaningful representation.

Ahmed’s speech struck a chord and resonated in particular with the Muslim diaspora in the Anglophone West, with Sadia Habib and Shaf Choudhry in the United States launching the ‘Riz Test’ in 2018. Alongside the Bechdel test that tracks representations of women in screen media, the DuVernay Test that evaluates racial diversity and the Russo Test that assesses LGBTQ+ representations, the Riz test offered a set of criteria that could ‘measure the depiction of Muslims in films and TV shows’. This was soon followed by the Obeidi-Alsultany Test (August 2020), which sought to ‘raise the bar further’ and work toward supporting ‘Hollywood in its efforts to improve representations of Muslims in the era of diversity’.

Muslimness in Western television entertainment is indeed being reimagined, driven in significant ways by new industrial logics and techno-cultural possibilities enabled by streaming video services. Taking stock of a series of groundbreaking programs such as Ramy (Hulu) and We Are Lady Parts (Channel 4), critics and scholars have drawn attention to the pleasures of watching striking new characters grappling with the ordinariness and challenges of daily life – family obligations, the demands and pressures of work, and the promises and pitfalls of friendships and romances (Bakaari, 2023). Of course, the task of ‘representing the complexities and idiosyncrasies of Muslim life while navigating the demands of non-Muslim audiences’ is a daunting one (Bakaari, 2023: n.p.). After all, media programs involving minorities continue to be channeled and positioned in relation to market logics of cultural diversity and inclusivity. As Herman Gray has argued, the emergence of a more complex field of narratives and representations of Muslim communities can be seen as part and parcel of a broader change wherein ‘representations of abject and marginal groups have moved from outright invisibility, exclusion, and exaggeration to proliferation and hypervisibility’ (Gray, 2013: 772).

At the heart of Gray’s (2013) critique of the limits of the politics of visibility and recognition, and one that scholars including Saha (2012, 2013), Banet-Weiser (2018), Warner (2017), Nwonka (2022), Martin (2021) and Mallapragada (2015) have developed further in recent years, lies a challenging set of questions: what alternative approaches might we adopt given the analytical and theoretical impasse we find ourselves in when it comes to the presumed link between media representation and social change? How do we rethink our frameworks and assumptions given that racism and Islamophobia – figured differently, of course, in the United States and Britain – operate in the context of increased, not less, visibility? Given the continual and savvy recognition by the state and the media industries of various kinds of social and cultural difference, how should we approach breakthroughs in media representation? How might we grasp the significance of ‘the repair staged and insisted upon by this era of Muslim American’ and British Muslim television (Bakaari, 2023: n.p.)? How do we make representation matter, anew?

With these broad questions in mind, this article draws on scholarship on worldmaking to carve out a different problem space for analyzing the dynamics of media and cultural change in an era shaped by digital platforms and in particular, storytelling practices enabled by streaming video services (Lotz and Lobato, 2023). Coined by philosopher Nelson Goodman (1978: 102), worldmaking describes the (de-)composing, weighting, ordering, deletion, supplementation and deformation of existing worlds through literal, denotational and verbal means but often also using image, sound, music, gestures or other symbols of non-linguistic systems. Building on critical adaptations of Goodman’s work in literary studies, diaspora studies, queer theory, as well as critical analyses of the production of race and ethnicity by the media industries (Cheah, 2012; Corinealdi, 2022; Gopinath, 2005; Kondo, 2018; Muñoz, 1999; Ramachandran, 2015; Saha, 2017), we conceptualize worldmaking in the media industries as a form of collective labor that moves beyond compensatory representation toward a reparative re-reimagination of social, cultural and political worlds. Beginning with the premise that media production is a worldmaking force, we develop an account of diasporic worldmaking that captures marginalized communities’ deeply felt desires for being seen and heard, the representational moves that media workers are crafting in response to these desires, and the translocal networks that diasporic media professionals are forging in order to imagine and produce new cultural worlds.

Focusing on Ms Marvel (Disney+), Ramy (Hulu), Man Like Mobeen (BBC/Netflix) and We Are Lady Parts (Channel 4/Peacock), we analyze how diasporic media professionals are capitalizing on long-standing networks of trans-Atlantic television production and distribution (Hilmes, 2012), social media influence and the dynamics of creator cultures, and media industries’ demand for ‘diverse’ programming to create new cultural worlds that reposition Muslims and Muslimness in British and American discourses of race, religion and citizenship. Embedded as they are in commercial media systems, these shows do raise the question of the extent to which media companies fold such narratives into corporate diversity agendas. Ramy stands as a powerful illustration of this. Conceived by Ramy Youssef in 2012, the series premiered 7 years later, seemingly just in time for Hulu’s Arab American Heritage Month celebration. The use of Heritage Months is part of Hulu’s diversity initiative, which seeks to highlight and promote the visibility of underrepresented voices. Similarly, Ms. Marvel’s growing popularity among comic book fans ultimately led to her inclusion in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Four plan. This intentional integration of a Pakistani American teenage superhero within one of the world’s most influential and visible franchises redefined the genre while remaining within Disney’s boundaries and backdrop. Meanwhile, Man Like Mobeen carves a slightly different path by merging Guz Khan’s grassroots success with institutional recognition. His viral YouTube video Pakisaurus, which gained nearly 15 million views, brought his distinctive comedic voice to the BBC’s attention. And finally, We Are Lady Parts illustrates how alternative platforms like Channel 4’s Comedy Blaps foster innovation and experimentation. Taken together, we focus on these shows because even as they align neatly with corporate diversity agendas and finding what sells, they also transcend tokenism or corporate box-ticking exercises. They are cultural touchstones. By weaving deeply specific cultural narratives within genres that resonate widely, these shows open up new cultural terrains wherein inclusion is not a secondary consideration but rather, part of a recalibration of nationalist imaginations in ways that can expand notions of belonging and citizenship.

We begin by working through recent critiques of the potential for media representation to shape social and political change in postcolonial Britain and the post-civil rights era in the United States. Drawing on shifts toward analyzing the work of media production and representation as ‘race making practices’ (Gray, 2021; Saha, 2020), we then turn our attention to two distinct contexts – public service television in Britain and commercial television in the United States – in which media professionals are contending with the promises and limits of worldmaking via streaming video. This leads into a close analysis of the four shows mentioned above, with a focus on a range of visual and sonic elements that come together to create a distinctly diasporic Muslim world in the Anglophone West.

Identity at the limits of representation

In the late 1980s, a different moment of new-ness in British media culture, Stuart Hall (1992) reflected on the formation of new ethnicities sparked by the emergence of a generation of Black British filmmakers who were raising critical questions about media representation and formations of cultural identity. Hall focused on a two-part problem confronting artists and media producers: the first was access to the means and right to media production and representation, and the second, and in some ways the more intractable problem, had to do with shifting the terms and politics of representation. In becoming subjects of their own cultural and political imaginaries, desires and anxieties, would Black cultural producers be able to give shape to identities – new ethnicities – that could hold together, no matter how contingent and contradictory it would seem, multiple vectors of difference including race, nationality, gender, class and sexual orientation? While recognizing the powerful nature of shifts in representation in films like Passion of Remembrance and My Beautiful Laundrette, Hall’s answer was laced with caution. He argued that recognition of the ‘extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose the category “black”’ meant that there could no longer be a return to a ‘set of fixed transcultural or transcendental racial categories’ (p. 225). The terms of the struggle had altered and filmmakers like Hanif Kureishi had imagined ‘forms of solidarity and identification’ that worked through the ‘heterogeneity of interests and identities’ (p. 225). At the same time, there was a risk of slipping ‘into a sort of endlessly sliding discursive liberal pluralism’ (1989: 225). Indeed, by the late 1990s, within a decade of Hall and other scholars contending with this new phase of Black cultural politics in Britain, the absolute neglect and marginality of ethnic communities in mainstream media was no longer the case. And as Malik’s (2008, 2010) pioneering analyses have shown, the 1990s were defined by the production of race and ethnicity as a viable mode of managing multiculturalism for the state as well as the media and cultural industries.

It is precisely these media, cultural and political-economic dynamics that Herman Gray (2013) traces in the US context to develop a critique of ‘representation as an end in itself’ and what a ‘demand for media visibility by subordinate and marginalized communities can deliver in terms of social justice when the legal capacities, cultural assumptions, and social circumstances that produced the necessity for this recognition in the first place have changed’ (p. 774). Outlining changes in the mediascape through the 1990s – the transition to a post-network, multi-channel system defined by careful segmentations of audiences by race and ethnicity among other vectors of difference – Gray points out that any analysis of the link between media representation and cultural marginalization has to account for increased visibility and not lack. Indeed, scholars who explored the production of other ethnic niches when advertising/PR and marketing companies realized the financial potential in the rapid growth of Hispanic and Asian American communities (revealed in the 2000 US Census Report) and arrived at a similar conclusion (Davila, 2012; Mallapragada, 2015; Wolock, 2020). Liberal desires for reform through media representation were condemned to fail given that the very notion of cultural politics upon which they relied had come to align so well with ‘the logic of market choice, consumer sovereignty, self-reliance, and cultural diversity’ (Gray, 2013: 784). How, then, do we recast the connection between media visibility and cultural recognition when what is produced is easily understood, subsumed and regulated under the banner of ‘diversity’? If the production of race and ethnicity has become ordinary and routinized within media industry logics, how do we recalibrate deeply felt desires for nuanced representations among marginalized communities?

Representation, affect and worldmaking

Recent critical responses to these questions return us in interesting ways to Stuart Hall’s cautionary take on new ethnicities. Clive Nwonka (2020), for instance, argues that the best course of action is to adopt a position of radical skepticism (original emphasis). In Nwonka’s view, given the apolitical nature of diversity discourse, the emphasis on skepticism as a starting point for assessing any breakthrough in media representation helps us keep an eye on ‘its susceptibility to neoliberal incorporation’ while opening up opportunities to situate the media object in question in varied contexts – finance, policy, the lifeworlds of minority audiences and so on – and trace how ‘Blackness’ becomes ‘a new point of fixity’ (p. 852). The concern, in other words, is about the easy positioning of Black film and television within ‘a language of cultural plurality’ (Nwonka and Malik, 2018: 1118) and the ability of cultural policy to stabilize and fix racial and ethnic identities at different conjunctures.

Analyzing responses to the ‘demand for more representative visual imagery from the entertainment industries’ in the United States, Kristen Warner (2017) argues that the results often feel, ‘in an affective sense – artificial, or more to the point, like plastic’ (p. 32). Teasing out different valences of the term plastic, Warner directs her critique both at what we see on screen and behind-the-screen practices of hiring, writing, casting and so on. When industry and public discourse continually focus on the ‘racially visible difference of above-and-below-the-line talent’, Warner (2017) argues, ‘it means that for industry gatekeepers and executives, less time has to be devoted to developing and appreciating the meaningful cultural and historical differences of those bodies’ (p. 36). Building on this work, Christian and White (2020) offer ‘organic representation’ as a framework for assessing not just what appears as ‘diverse’ on screen, but as a way to work in a reparative mode, one in which ‘systems and institutions empower those who have been historically marginalized not only to appear in their stories but also to own and fine-tune narratives, marketing, and distribution’ (p. 144). In offering vital critiques and modes of assessing breakthroughs in Black representation, these scholars do move us out of the frame set up by industry and policy discourse. However, they all insist on working in and through the problem space of representation. Echoing Riz Ahmed’s impassioned plea, Warner says: ‘plastic is not enough; demand more’ (p. 37).

Herman Gray (2021), on the other hand, encourages us to move out of the social and political scene that equated ‘diversity and social equality with access and representational parity’ (p. 250). In addition to exploring what representations might mean, he advocates for a focus on issues of resonance, sentiment and affect. Without abandoning an emphasis on the legibility and authenticity of representations, such an approach would involve detailing ‘exactly how and where media organized and circulated affectively compelling sentiment, attachment, and (dis)identification to public policies, bodies, histories, and cultures’ (2013: 793). In a similar vein, Purnima Mankekar has argued that we need to move past ‘dichotomies of resistance versus compliance’ and instead explore how the transnational production and circulation of media texts and objects create ‘affective and sensorial ecologies’ that, in turn, ‘undergird processes of inhabitation, being moved, feeling attached, and feeling in or out of place’ (2015: 6).

Gray and Mankekar were writing in the late 2000s, a conjuncture marked by brand cultures, reality TV, post-racial discourses and new modes of circulation enabled by digital media infrastructures and platforms that, taken together, laid bare the limits of critique focused on media representations. Across varied contexts, scholars were coming to grips with how to deal with new modes of media circulation enabled by digital networks and platforms and finding ways to analyze affective intensities and feelings coursing through public cultures that were not adequately addressed by a focus on representation (Mankekar, 2015; Mukherjee et al., 2019). Building on these insights, we turn to ‘worldmaking’ as an analytic and conceptual terrain that takes seriously the constitutive dimensions of media practice and in this particular instance, opens up modes of engagement and critique that include, but go beyond, questions of representation and affect.

There are many different registers and disciplinary trajectories for thinking about worldmaking, but a starting point is to recognize that a deep-seated belief in the possibility of re-making a world is what drives a diasporic subject. As Ayesha Ramachandran (2015) puts it, at the heart of the idea of worldmaking lies the ‘idea of creation – the belief that a world can be made and transformed, rather than being a pre-established entity awaiting discovery’ (p. 8). Thinking along these lines helps us see that this is what Asian and Black British artists, activists and media makers were trying to do through the 1980s, that is, the articulation of political blackness was in the first instance, as Hall recognized, an attempt at re-imagining and remaking a world in the face of state-sponsored racial violence and subjection. Re-casting this history of minority and diasporic media production as attempts at worldmaking might be an important way to rethink our investments in media representations, their affective potentials as grounds for social and political change, and the promise they hold in shaping more expansive understandings of citizenship (Corinealdi, 2022; Mankekar, 2015).

A second set of coordinates for thinking about worldmaking comes from scholars who have long argued that queer imaginations and performances of diasporic life reveal the making of worlds in which ideas of home, family, nation and citizenship are not bound by heteronormative principles (Gopinath, 2005). Muñoz (1999) has also argued that performances that work ‘on, with, and against a cultural form’ (p. 12) instead of merely opposing or working within a pre-given structure are ‘disidentificatory’, that is, they open the door for minoritarian subjects to articulate their disenchantment with the existing world and will a new one into being. Such acts of worldmaking require, Muñoz argues, ‘an active kernel of utopian possibility’ (p. 25) and often emerge in moments when minorities are able to conjure a world via ‘spectacles, performances, and willful enactments of the self for others’ (p. 200). This is not to ignore the many savvy representational moves that are made by the writers, actors, directors, graphic design artists, sound designers and others who worked on shows like We Are Lady Parts or Ms Marvel. Rather, it is to approach these shows as attempts at reimagining Muslim and Asian worlds that have been at the receiving end of Western state violence (from outright state surveillance to the more routinized digital surveillance and data capture) and cultural marginalization. By broadening our focus beyond visual representation and factoring in the non-representational modes including sound and music, we see their attempts at worldmaking as a form of multimodal engagement with the problematic of representation, evoked in multisensory, affective ways. Moreover, in framing worldmaking as a form of creative, reparative labor (Kondo, 2018), we link on-screen media representations to the behind-the-screen processes of networked production that involve diasporic minority producers forming working communities and forging tentative alliances across economic, sociocultural, political and technological barriers. What this might open up for us is a better route to understanding the heterogeneity of diasporic imaginaries at play in our world today and critically evaluate the promise of cross-generational, multilingual, cross-racial and transnational diasporic communities that are coming into view on British and US television and streaming video networks.

From viral hits to streaming shows: Man Like Mobeen and We Are Lady Parts

Entertainment television, particularly after 9/11, has been a crucial cultural arena for negotiating and legitimizing US domestic and foreign policy in relation to Arabs and Muslims. As Alsultany (2012, 2023) has argued, this was worked out in narratives that were, contrary to what one might expect given the history of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia in American popular culture, deeply sympathetic portrays of Arab and Muslim figures. Closer reading reveals, however, that the ambivalence that structures television narratives – that ‘racism is bad in general but legitimate when it comes to Arabs and Muslims’ (p. 207) in this exceptional moment for the nation-state – is crucial. For what these stories did successfully was frame the United States as a diverse nation united in the ‘war on terror’ – everyone could be part of this new national imaginary except for Arabs and Muslims. In the British media context, one in which Muslimness was already abject, Saha (2012) explains how deregulation, increasing corporatization and the move toward a marketized-diversity policy also had the effect of pushing Asian Muslim producers to ‘make noise’ to ‘reinforce rather than challenge a post-9/11 racialized agenda’ (p. 435). While there is no denying the impact that these television narratives had in a moment when Muslimness was thoroughly racialized, there were attempts at conjuring other worlds.

One early example of Muslim media producers trying to conjure a multicultural world that could accommodate Muslimness was the award-winning Canadian production, Little Mosque on the Prairie (CBC, 2007-2012). Zarqa Nawaz, a Pakistani Canadian journalist and media producer, conceived the show as a reaction to the Danish cartoon controversy and went on to attribute the program’s high ratings and resonance with audiences across Canada as evidence of the success of multicultural policies (Adair, 2011). The United Kingdom also had a similar success story with the BBC’s Citizen Khan (2012-2016), a show created by Adil Ray (Ahmed, 2013). Attracting close to 5 million viewers per episode, Citizen Khan was regarded as an unprecedented success in the early phase of television’s intersection with digital platforms and the BBC’s iPlayer portal in particular (Abbas, 2013: 89). These programs remained exceptions, however, and it would take the combined impact of influencer/creator cultures and streaming video beginning in the late 2000s to open the door to a broader range of diasporic voices in the mediascape.

Since its beginnings in 2005, YouTube has offered amateur video makers a chance to participate in the televisual media landscape and has been a vital cultural space for diasporic communities (Burgess and Green, 2018; Mallapragada, 2015). The British-Pakistan comedian, actor and writer Guz Khan’s trajectory is a telling instance of YouTube-driven social media fame leading to broader media production opportunities. A former schoolteacher, Guz Khan achieved a breakthrough of sorts after releasing a video titled Pakisaurus (2016), in which he offered a humorous take on the dinosaur Pachysaurus, or Pachi for short as referred to in the film Jurassic World (2015), and its phonetic similarities with the racially derogatory term ‘Paki’ that has historically been directed toward people of South Asian descent in the United Kingdom. This YouTube video set the tone for his future work and positioned him squarely in a cultural terrain focused on the politics of ethnicity, religion and cultural citizenship in Britain.

Guz Khan’s success on YouTube and other social media platforms coincided with a broader shift unfolding in the British mediascape – public broadcasting companies challenged by the spectacular growth of streaming videos services including Netflix and Amazon Prime. The arrival of Netflix in the United Kingdom in 2012 accelerated mainstream television’s digital make-over and the launch of a series of digital platforms including the BBC’s new iPlayer in 2014, ITV’s Hub in 2015 and Channel 4’s All 4. As Grainge and Johnson (2018) note, this change in public service broadcasters’ strategy was most visible in the BBC’s decision in 2014 to transform its youth-oriented channel BBC Three into an online-only channel, ending all linear broadcasting, and making programs available only through the corporation’s website and via iPlayer (p. 74). It was against this backdrop of industrial shifts and in particular, BBC Three and iPlayer’s call for original content that Guz Khan consolidated his early success on YouTube and forged ties with the BBC, most notably in the form of his own program, Man Like Mobeen.

A comedy-drama, Man Like Mobeen dwells on Muslim life in Small Heath, Birmingham through its protagonist Mobeen, his younger sister Aqsa whom he cares for, as well as his two best friends – Nate, of Nigerian origin, and Eight, of Pakistani origin. Khan’s decision to set the show in Birmingham was no accident – the city had been the target of right-wing news and featured in Islamophobic stories about ‘no go areas’ for non-Muslims (DATE/Citation). In 20-minute episodes, several of which center on Khan’s home, the show harkens back to African American sitcoms of the 1990s and draws on their style to explore different facets of everyday life for Muslims from various nationalities and ethnicities who have made their home in Birmingham. An eclectic soundscape featuring artists like Cypress Hill and Run DMC but also contemporaries like Skepta forms the soundtrack to Mobeen’s attempts to live as a good Muslim and escape a difficult past involving drug dealing and petty crime.

Like Guz Khan, British Pakistani Nida Manzoor found success with her program We are Lady Parts (2021), highlighting a potential new path for diasporic media makers exploring opportunities in the streaming video sector. Capturing multicultural diasporic British life, the show tells the story of an all-girl Muslim Punk rock band in Tower Hamlets in East London – another locality where social and political life has been shaped by histories of migration and working-class communities. Initially commissioned as a pilot for Channel 4’s Comedy Blaps in 2018, Lady Parts was later picked up as a six-part series and a collaborative production by Channel 4 in the United Kingdom and Peacock TV in the United States. For Manzoor, frustrations over one-dimensional representations of Muslim women led her to look for inspirations in the women she met at art collectives, poetry readings and the musicians she saw in and around East London (Ravindran, 2021). The evident disidentification between onscreen and offscreen worlds underpins her efforts at crafting a fantastical, rebellious world of young, aspirational women from East London, weaving together the seldom associated genres of comedy and punk music with Muslim gendered subjectivities.

Manzoor’s creative choices reinforces genre as a key dimension of worldmaking. As Jerng (2018) has argued in his analysis of the production of racial categories across fantasy, romance and science fiction, genre functions not as a ‘fixed set of tropes, rules, or conventions’, but rather as ways to organize meaning and to project (new) worlds (p. 8). The long history of television comedy and the mediation of race and ethnicity in the United Kingdom and the United States speaks precisely to this view of genre (Gillespie, 2003; Gray, 1986). Shows like Lady Parts also reveal that it is less about hewing to a specific formula and more about developing a hybrid aesthetic, one that draws from traditions of social documentary and comedy while also bringing together punk, Afghan folk music and Hip-hop to unsettle viewers’ expectations. In doing so, creators like Manzoor re-position Muslimness. The show’s characters emerge out of a complex set of intersections involving British Muslim femininities, varied trajectories of migration and racial formations, different linguistic and cultural affiliations, and in the process, insist on a diasporic view of East London.

Within the United Kingdom, East London has not only been a crucial site for the historical struggle of migrant communities against far-right racist forces like the National Front but also for forging Black, South Asian and white anti-racist solidarities, exemplified in the work of groups like the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) and the Rock against Racism (RAR) movement of the 1970s. The history of British punk music is unanimous with RAR’s anti-racist solidarity and the emergent British youth cultures of multicultural London (Dawson, 2005; Goodyer, 2003, 2013), using confluences of punk music with reggae and Carnival to catalyze activism. In making these diverse spatial and temporal connections, the show’s soundtrack features a rich mix of both western and South Asian musical references such as the ghazal of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to a poetry recital of Faiz Ahmad Faiz to Radiohead’s ‘Creep’. The punk rebellious spirit of the show’s figures is embodied by their music and lyrics, appropriating the genre’s subversive and humorous aesthetics in songs that showcase the creator’s playful self-awareness of their own multifarious intersectional identities. Songs like ‘Ain’t no one gonna Honor Kill my sister but me’, ‘Bashir with a good beard’ and ‘Voldemort under my headscarf’ are confrontational and transgressive, playing on long established stereotypes and expectations of Muslim men and women.

Music becomes a central motor of worldmaking in its capacity to activate complex and meaningful relationships between ‘emotion, selfhood and public identity’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2011: 100). For diasporic subjects, especially those on the margins of mainstream national and global cultural formations, music has long held the potential to carve out more welcoming cultural spaces and serve as channels for expressions of aesthetic cosmopolitanism (Hesmondhalgh, 2013; Zuberi, 2017). As Zuberi’s (2017) powerful account of ‘listening while Muslim’ in the post 9/11 moment revealed, even music that was not explicitly about Muslim life was ‘conscripted for life during wartime’, allowing diasporic subjects to ‘engage with war and terror, racism and media’ and come to terms with ‘new and indeterminate ways of being Muslim’ (p. 33). Lady Parts’ mishmash of genres, comedy and music thrives on an anarchic energy, making a world that explores the limits of what is perhaps possible but unimaginable in the multicultural realities of the United Kingdom in the present – an all-women Muslim rock band performing a punk rendition of Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 in a pub full of white men.

Working from the diasporic sites of Birmingham and East London, Guz Khan and Nida Manzoor’s work reveals two dimensions of worldmaking: in terms of storytelling, their shows offer glimpses of worlds we could be living in, in which recognition hinges not on religious and racial difference, but rather on social and political connections forged through varied lived experiences; and in relation to media production, their labor also reveals the significance of trans-Atlantic ties, especially in terms of distribution. Manzoor’s show is a transatlantic production between Channel 4 and NBC’s Peacock TV, while Guz Khan has expanded his work to various transnational streaming platforms. Khan starred in South Asian American producer Mindy Kaling’s miniseries Four Weddings and a Funeral (2019, Hulu) and appeared in several other Netflix productions alongside notable actors, directors and producers including Idris Elba, Judd Apatow and Zac Snyder, thus establishing his presence in diverse contexts.

Post-American Muslim networks: Ramy and Ms Marvel

Much like their British equivalents, comedy series like Netflix’s Mo (2022–), Hulu’s Ramy (2019) and Disney’s Ms Marvel (2022–) draw on diasporic experiences and are built on diasporic production networks. Mohammed Amer, a longtime collaborator of Guz Khan, created his first series Mo (A24, distribution: Netflix) by diving into a fictionalized version of his experiences as a Palestinian American. Citing African American comedians of the 1990s as a major inspiration (Althoff, 2015), he draws on those sitcoms’ aesthetics to tell a story of the decades-long process of seeking asylum, personal trauma, being a Muslim in the United States, and the ups and downs of daily, everyday life. The program’s trilingual approach (English, Arabic and Spanish) tightly relates to Amer’s lived realities. When he was 9 years old, his family fled the Persian Gulf War and relocated to Houston, USA, home to significant populations from Mexico, El Salvador, India, China and Vietnam. Through his program, he captures the linguistic dimension of diasporic worldmaking that reaches out to other communities rather than remaining in a bubble. Houston becomes a locus of connected global diasporic geographies, but its passport-less protagonist can only dream of wandering. Just like his British colleague, Mohammed Amer uses music to build his world, one in which US-American Hip Hop effortlessly meets Palestinian music, such as Walla’at and Clarissa Bitar, and Mexican Pop. The program is a product of intense collaboration between diasporic media makers, with whom Mohammed Amer made friends throughout his decade-long career. He worked with other comedians like Muslim American comedy giant Dave Chappelle but also with Egyptian American Ramy Youssef, who became a co-writer on Mo.

Ramy Youssef is a New Jersey-based comedian and creator of Ramy (2019–present). After landing a few small comedic roles as an actor, most notably as part of the drama thriller Mr Robot, with Ramy Malek and director Sam Esmail, Ramy collaborated with Jeord Carmichael, of the Carmichael show (NBC), and Ramy was finally picked up by Hulu, alongside Mindy Kaling’s revival of Four Weddings and a Funeral. The program explores the journey of an intergenerational Egyptian American Muslim family living in a politically divided New Jersey neighborhood. Throughout its three seasons, Ramy navigates the complexities of the diasporic Muslim lives in multicultural New Jersey, exploring themes from stereotyping after 9/11, Black and Arab Muslimness and gender and sexuality in Islam, to how diasporic Muslim and Jewish communities navigate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the diaspora.

In terms of its worldmaking practices, Ramy also foregrounds a diasporic hybridity of Muslim linguistic cultures: whether it is the title of the show that appears in Arabic or the effortless way the characters switch between English and Arabic, Ramy presents a diasporic soundscape. This diasporic atmosphere is also curated by the show’s international soundtrack, largely through a diverse mix of Arabic music from across the decades. He is making connections between contemporary American hip-hop and classic Egyptian sounds, defined by artists such as crooner Abdel Halim Hafez, funk band Al Massrieen, national icon Umm Kulthum, composer Hany Shenouda’s iconic ‘Lounga 79’, and the freshest trap artists in Cairo. His musical curating relates tightly to diasporic practices of localization and space-making. The show, set in New Jersey, paints a diasporic melting pot of communities and cultures. Capturing the diner culture and locales of the Jews, Blacks and Arab Muslims that inhabit it, more importantly, Ramy maps spatial connections across Egypt, Israel, Palestine and New Jersey. In doing so, he brings forward a range of diasporic connections. He invites Muslim personalities from across ethnicities, nationalities and creative industries to feature on the show. These most notably include Oscar winner actor Mahershala Ali, and Palestinian Dutch American model Bella Hadid, bringing reel and real-life solidarities among Muslims to the forefront. Collaborative and creative practices are evident behind the scenes as well, and Ramy often engages with diasporic writers and directors. To bring forth the everyday realities of Palestinian lives in season 3, he made sure to work together with Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir and journalist Myatha Alhassen. While shows like Prime’s Transparent and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel have filmed in Israel before, Ramy, in showing his experiences as an Arab American in Israel, breaks ground in the collaborative, co-authored way it constructs this world of Arab American Muslimness.

Ms Marvel, produced by Disney+, was created by British Pakistani Bisha K. Ali, who also wrote for Mindy Kaling’s Four Weddings and a Funeral (Hulu, 2019). In this instance, the backdrop of New Jersey pays homage to the American comic book genre and the legacies of Captain America: The First Avenger. Just like in Ramy, New Jersey becomes the site for tensions that reflect a melting pot of Muslim experiences. While Ramy’s main focus is on Arabic experiences, Ms Marvel shines a light on the South Asian American community. Ms Marvel (2022) is a product of strikingly transnational networks involving diasporic writers and directors whose social, cultural and political affiliations and experiences link India, Pakistan, Morocco and Belgium to the United States and Canada.

The careful stitching together of such ‘working worlds’, in turn, help imagine new fictionalized worlds by taking the raw materials of a path-breaking comic book and giving life to the superhero, Kamala Khan, a character created in 2013 by Sana Amanat, G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona. The story follows a teenage Pakistani American girl living with her family in New Jersey, whose superpowers derive from a golden bangle she receives from her Pakistan-based grandmother. Unsettling, and perhaps recuperating traditional depictions of the gendered and racial body, Kamala reorients the bodily expectations of a Muslim Pakistani girl that move beyond simplistic notions of needing saving toward a (super) heroic figure. Breaking into a male-dominated industry and following previous historical controversies of whitewashing in the Marvel Comics Universe, Kamala’s adventures offer a departure from the universal Western superhero. The worldmaking discourse of this fantasy production brings about new possibilities for audiences’ awareness by creating new immersive realities that reshape race relations.

There are two dimensions of worldmaking at work here, particularly in the way the program engages in a spatially and temporally reparative labor. Significantly, traveling from the United States to Pakistan and in reaching out toward the past, the show dives into the entangled and complicated histories of South Asia, and imagines a utopian futurity that foregrounds a diasporic sensibility. Steering clear of resurgent right-wing nationalisms in South Asia and the United States, Ms Marvel stresses that the diasporic experience is the norm rather than the exception. Centering on the 1947 Partition from a diasporic perspective, contemporary challenges of Muslim life in the United States are synthesized with shared colonial legacies. Bringing together Muslim writers, producers, directors and actors to address the historical aftermaths of colonialism, the program stands out for its ability to facilitate new networks in production culture through the opportunities opened up by streaming video on demand services. Not only does this shine a light on important narratives and experiences that are part of a diasporic (media) world, but it also bridges new relations between practices of localization with wider geographies of Muslim diasporas. Employing diasporic actors and those based in the subcontinent, the series brought together new talents like Canadian Pakistani Iman Vellani, who plays Kamala, but also established Pakistani actors Fawad Khan and Mehwish Hayat and Indian actor Farhan Akhtar.

This is also reflected in the program’s music and design choices. Ms Marvel was scored by Laura Karpman who worked closely with Kamala Khan’s original creator, comic book writer Sana Amanat. Featuring orchestral music recorded in Vienna as well as recordings in India and Pakistan of a range of classical South Asian instruments, the score itself is a product of transnational collaboration (Burlingame, 2022). Involving the music of diasporic artists such as American Pakistani duo Krewalla, British Eelam Tamil M.I.A., British Pakistani Riz Ahmed and Canadian Indian Tesher alongside artists from the subcontinent reinforces networks the show is able to spin. The inclusion of hits like ‘Pasoori’ by Ali Sethi and Shae Gill and voices like EvaB from the popular Pakistani music program Coke Studio also point to a close engagement with South Asian popular cultures and their resonance in contemporary diasporic media circuits. In this instance, by focusing on a type of world-making that does not entirely cater to the white imaginary, the incorporation of South Asian music and art cuts across intergenerational diasporic consciousness that, in turn, unsettles territorial and nation-bound discourses of citizenship and belonging. Music, then, not only functions as a means of connection across diasporic communities but also broadens our musical grammar to center diasporic cultural forms within powerful Anglophone media cultures.

Conclusion: diasporic screen cultures and the end(s) of diversity

Beginning with the premise that making media is about making (and remaking) cultural worlds, we have argued in this article that the political struggle against marginalization exceeds what is possible by asking for more, better and fairer representations in mainstream media. What if we were to foreground worldmaking as a broader cultural practice that includes, but goes beyond, an emphasis on representation? Drawing on scholarship from a range of disciplines and queer and diasporic studies in particular (Gopinath, 2005), we have explored worldmaking practices in shows like We Are Lady Parts and Ms Marvel. Fueled by trans-Atlantic collaborations, new financing and distribution opportunities that streaming video services have created, a richly diverse linguistic palette, and sophisticated narrative techniques, these acts of worldmaking integrate diasporic influences into established genres like situation comedies. In other words, rather than merely calling for better representation, worldmaking refers to the ability of media creators to imagine and construct new cultural worlds that do not align neatly with corporate and state approaches to diversity. This is not about tokenism or superficial inclusion in the name of diversity or representation; rather, it is about creating space for complex, multifaceted depictions that offer collective, reparative opportunities for media makers to assert agency in a world that has often rendered them invisible or marginalized. We agree with Gray (2013), Saha (2018) and other scholars who have pointed out the limits of a politics of representation in a historical moment defined by the depoliticization of race and a savvy linking of racial and ethnic identities to individualize life-style choices. Returning to Stuart Hall’s foundational arguments about ‘new ethnicities’, our goal here has been to explore how to find a new ‘politics of criticism’, one that can be situated ‘inside a continuous struggle around . . . the forms of representation, the subjects of representation, and above all, the regimes of representation’ (1988: 30).

Of course, in a context marked by the epistemic and interpretive violence of surveillant and algorithmic modes of worldmaking for Muslims and other minoritized subjects in the West, it is crucial to not position and interpret diasporic media labor as part of a shifting media industry, one in which marginalized subjects have, finally, arrived. Moreover, the programs we have analyzed in this article do emerge from distinct diasporic contexts with crucial historical and national differences. Our approach to diasporic worldmaking in a digital conjuncture marked by new logics of platform capitalism is oriented, therefore, to maintaining a position of radical skepticism and continually asking how the politics of visibility works to ‘incite recognition’ of particular subjects during periods of technological, social and political change. Indeed, Evelyn Alsultany’s (2012) argument about the disjuncture between mainstream media representation (in often positive and sympathetic terms) and the material and symbolic dispossessions that Arab and Muslim communities contend with in the West is crucial to keep in mind. As we have outlined above, the media labor that goes into producing these shows does occur within highly extractive corporate spaces and in relation to state practices that militate against the imagination of socio-cultural and political futures that de-center whiteness. At the same time, for communities that have borne the brunt of Islamophobic state surveillance, exclusion from social, cultural and political arenas, and, on the whole, the denial of full citizenship, this ongoing attempt at worldmaking is no mere thing.