Haptic Urban Ethnoscapes: Representation, Diasporic Media & Urban Cultural Landscapes

This article posits the theoretical framework of the ???haptic urban ethnoscape???. Haptic urban ethnoscapes invite us to think about the body of film and media and the bodies of audiences as meeting and interacting in multi-sensory ways, in metropolitan locales. These are developed out of a critical theorizing about the concept of representation as a way of extending text-based analyses beyond the materiality of film and media to consider their articulations in and through urban cultural geographies. Examples of diasporic film and media representations of British multicultural high streets, namely in Birmingham and West London, are considered through select illustrations in Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and also outlined through new media postings on YouTube. These are set alongside and contemplated in relation to actual socio-cultural observations of the same.