In You Get Me?, Mahtab
Hussain focuses on the identity, ostracism, rejection, and shame experienced by
many young, working-class South Asian men in contemporary Britain and the tension
between those feelings of displacement and the men’s desires to become Westernized
and accepted. Looking to film and television for role models, the young men take
violence for masculinity and adopt the postures and symbols of African American
gang culture—chains and teardrop tattoos— to assert a sense of self. Hussain’s
intimate portraits reveal the tentative, and at times painful, transformation
of individual identity against a common backdrop.