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Race and the Cultural Industries

Introduction

Very few would argue with the notion that the cultural industries shape society’s ideas about race. Yet there remains relatively little sustained analysis of the production and circulation of racial discourses by the media. Why is the media considered a relatively trivial issue by scholars of race and racism? Similarly, why does the study of race take a marginal status in critical media studies? On the other hand, why in light of the very real material effects of racism – whether racial violence or forms of economic and social exclusion – should we even care about the media, especially in relation to popular culture? One way of opening up this discussion is by briefly uncovering a neglected aspect of the work of Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary, who has become one of the key figures in postcolonial theory.

Fanon is eulogized for his writing on the psychosocial trauma of racism and anticolonial struggle, but he is less known for his interest in the media, popular culture and representation.1 Yet in Black Skin White Masks (1986[1952]), Fanon’s analysis of the psychological devastation caused by racism is littered with references from cinema and literature, and even supposedly benign forms of popular culture such as children’s songs and comics. For Fanon, the inherent Eurocentricity of the narratives contained within these cultural commodities contribute to the alienation experienced by the Negro subject. This is powerfully illustrated in the following quote, which describes his experience watching the Hollywood war film Home of the Brave in a French cinema hall among a white audience:

The Negro is a toy in the white man’s hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes. I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theatre are watching me, examine me, waiting for me. A Negro groom is going to appear. My heart makes my head swim.

The crippled veteran of the Pacific war says to my brother, ‘Resign yourself to your colour the way I got used to my stump; we’re both victims’. (Fanon, 1986: 140)

Fanon here describes the damaging effects of Western cultural goods upon the black psyche. For Fanon, texts such as popular literature, film or indeed Mickey Mouse comics perform the role of providing a ‘collective catharsis’ (Fanon, 1986: 145) for the population; a safety valve where the fears/desires/ aggression that accumulate in a society can be safely released. But in the West only the dominant white subject experiences catharsis, which plays on racial fears (and desires). Meanwhile, the products of Western culture industries flood into colonial societies where young black children learn invariably to identify with the white heroes who feature in the imported comics and storybooks. Growing up in this environment, Fanon, like his fellow colonial subjects from the Antilles and other Francophone nations, subconsciously identifies as white and French. But entering European society, and surrounded by the white people in the cinema hall, he suddenly feels the weight of his ascribed race, forced to identify with the ‘Negro’ protagonist who is about to come onscreen. As the quote vividly captures, this produces a disorienting and debilitating and, indeed, disassembling affect for Fanon, such that his heart makes his head ‘swim’ – and his body and mind eventually ‘explode’.

In the last part of the quote, Fanon refers to the final scene from the film Home of the Brave, released in 1949 (Robson, 1949). In it, an African American soldier called Mossy experiences a double trauma: of witnessing the death of his white best friend during a small US reconnaissance mission into a Japanese-held Pacific Island, and of experiencing racism, back home in America and within his company. Unable to deal with this dual burden, Mossy has a mental and physical breakdown, becoming paralysed from the waist down. A sympathetic psychiatrist eventually cures him by helping him face up to his victimhood. In this final scene, the white sergeant who has lost his arm on the same mission exhorts Mossy to treat his race like the sergeant treats his missing limb, an affliction that he will need to learn to deal with despite the disadvantages and prejudice he will face in the outside world. With its representation of psychiatry and black subjectivity, Home of the Brave uncannily encapsulates Fanon’s own concerns regarding the psychosocial effects of racism and also psychiatry as a means through which individuals of colour are suppressed/assimilated (see Bergner, 1999: 226). It provides a vivid scene for Fanon to explore the experience of being racialized in a white world.

There are two reasons for opening this book with this passage from Fanon. First, it evocatively illustrates the scarring and disfiguring impact of media on racialized minorities. Even the pleasures that black folk seem to experience in watching Hollywood films is regarded as a form of dissimulation for Fanon (1986: 152). Perhaps more than any other scholar, Fanon captures the sheer visceral brutality of racism in its physical and psychosocial manifestations, and, as suggested, an unrecognized element of his work is his attribution to the role of media texts in producing this affect. With particular pertinence for this book, in light of the psychological damage brought about by white cultural objects upon the Negro subject, Fanon considers the potential of black cultural production – using the examples of magazines and songs conceived specifically for black children – as constituting an integral part of a decolonizing project designed to counter the alienation of the Negro (1986: 146–148).

Second, underlining how Fanon’s emphasis on popular culture is a neglected aspect of his work allows me to open up to a broader point: that the study of the media and race as a whole is a relatively marginal area of research and scholarship. As I have suggested, in sociologies of race and racism the study of the media appears on the margins of the discipline. Inversely, in media and communications studies the study of race takes up a similar peripheral status. This is a point shared by Darnell Hunt (2005: 3–9), who describes the sociology of race and critical media studies as ‘two neighbours’ who rarely meet.

This was not always the case, however. The impact of cultural studies on both aforementioned disciplines, when inflected by postcolonial theory, for a moment turned our attention to the question of representation and the way in which ideologies of race take hold in society through the media. The idea that popular culture was something to be taken seriously, as well as news media, was a particularly important intervention. Yet this discussion has somewhat stalled in recent times – what Herman Gray (2013: 771) describes as a ‘“waning” in what a cultural politics of representation can yield’ – and has subsequently been dismissed as part of the culturalist turn in the social sciences, which, in the context of the sociology of race and racism, deflected attention from the very real experiences of racial violence, exclusion and marginalization. While the charge of cultural reductionism is unfair – the best media studies of race framed their approach explicitly in terms of structural racism and social injustice – this field ultimately was unable to translate its complex theoretical ruminations on the politics of representation into meaningful forms of social action.

Race and the Cultural Industries aims to reinvigorate research into race and the media. Studies of ‘race’ and ethnicity in the media are nearly always textual in focus. Such research exposes the ways that media representations shape our understandings of cultural difference, either reinforcing or challenging certain ideas around ethnicity and race at specific times and in specific contexts. Yet the tendency of these studies is to treat the text – whether a film, a book, a television programme or a piece of music – in isolation, as though it sprung directly out of the imagination of the author. That is, there is a lack of recognition of how such texts are a product of the cultural industries and also of rationalized and standardized industrial processes that determine the way that the text appears at the point of consumption. Put more simply, cultural industries shape the media products that we consume and, in turn, ideas about racial and ethnic difference as embodied in these texts. This point has immediate political ramifications. As critical political economist Nicholas Garnham (1990: 44) states, as long as we remain transfixed on just ‘the ideological content of the mass media it will be difficult to develop coherent political strategies for resisting the underlying dynamics of development in the cultural sphere in general which rest firmly and increasingly upon the logic of generalised commodity production’. While textual analyses can highlight the discourses and ideologies that underpin racialized representations of difference, they cannot tell us how and why these representations come to be made in the first place – and crucially, what strategies can be employed to disrupt their spread. In response, this book seeks to explore the complex ways in which race and ethnicity are experienced and operate in cultural production. It asks a...