2 MAKING A SPECTACLE OF YOURSELF British-Asian wedding videography as alternative archives of belonging Jilly Boyce Kay and Kajal Nisha Patel This book is concerned with the ways that, in a context of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) – in which social hope is rapidly unravelling and fantasies of the good life are fraying – our emotional and cultural attachments to weddings appear only to be intensifying. Because the “real world”– increasingly characterised by inequality, pre- carity, social fractioning, and racism – is so full of loss, hurt, pain and disappointment, so many of our brittle, anxious hopes seem to ride upon the wedding spectacle. These are hopes not only for romantic coupling, but more broadly for the possibility of connection, ontological security, identity and belonging. As signalled in the Intro- duction, the wedding spectacle carries an unbearable weight of meaning; it is bur- dened with hopes and contradictions that it simply cannot satisfy or resolve. Relatedly, as Misha Kavka (2008) has shown, while the “real world” so often leaves us cold, it is frequently through our encounters with screen media that we experience a longed-for affective intensity; having our lives mediated via screens somehow lends a sense of vivification and emotional force to our existences – or at least, it promises that it will. In contemporary culture, then, the strengthening attachments to both weddings and to screen mediation can be seen as a part of a quest for meaning and meaningfulness – or what Mark Andrejevic (2004, p.8) calls “a longing for a taste of the real”. In this chapter, we analyse the screen mediation of “real-life” weddings via pro- fessionally produced films, in which the affective intensities identified above are mul- tiplied. We look particularly to British South Asian 1 wedding videos, and we are interested in what these spectacular texts make visible – not only about contemporary ideologies of heterosexual romance, but in the narratives and meanings they construct about cultural, diasporic and national identity. In a vexed context of “contested mul- ticulturalism” (Malik 2008), in which “Asianness” is frequently imagined as antithetical to “Britishness”, we argue that wedding videos – which are often made public via social media and videographers’ own websites – constitute what we term alternative archives of belonging, in which diasporic and hybridised identities can be explored and