Chapter 2 Resisting Topographies: Immigration, Space and the City in Contemporary British Film
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Abstract
Urban space in Britain can be said to offer resistance to the motives and aims of immigrants, while at the same time immigrants develop strategies of resistance towards the spatial constraints the city imposes on them. Approaches to the meaning of space have offered concepts with which the tensions between material spaces on the one hand and the meanings attached to them on the other can be captured. They have also pointed to the importance of the practices of inhabiting these spaces. After a brief discussion of the ways in which migrants relate to urban spaces and a discussion of some theoretical concepts, this chapter will look at three British films that stage and negotiate this two-sided relationship of resistance. In a reading of Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things from 2002, Kenneth Glenaan’s 2004 film Yasmin, and Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering from 2006, I will explore the various strategies of spatial coping and the tendencies of resistance and appropriation developed by the migrant characters in the context of the overall spatial semantics established by the films.