Anamik Saha - Race, Culture and Media

For Latika and Uma

With the publication of Race, Culture and Media, Anamik Saha has established himself as one of the leading critical theorists of race and the media. The book is at once both an original contribution to the fields of race, culture and media and also a comprehensive summation of the current debates. In short, there is no clearer introduction to the complex interrelations between race, culture and media available today. Race, Culture and Media, guides the reader through the contested and, at times, contradictory role of the media in race-making, as Saha expertly summarizes key debates from postcolonial theory, to the political and cultural economy of the media. With carefully chosen case studies, up-to-date examples, and clear summaries of key concepts, as well as guides to further reading, Race, Culture and Media will be an invaluable resource for both teachers and students, interested in the latest research in media and communication studies.

Ben Carrington, Associate Professor of Sociology and Journalism, University of Southern California

Dr Anamik Saha is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes the MA Race, Media and Social Justice. After completing his PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, Anamik worked in the Institute of Communication Studies at the University of Leeds, firstly as an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, then as a Lecturer in Communications. He has held visiting fellowships at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Trinity College, Connecticut.

Anamik's research interests are in race and the media, with a particular focus on cultural production and the cultural industries in relation to broader issues of commodification and racial capitalism. His work has been published in journals including Media, Culture and Society, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Ethnicities. With David Hesmondhalgh (2013) he co-edited a special issue of Popular Communication on race and ethnicity in cultural production, and with Dave O'Brien, Kim Allen and Sam Friedman (2017) he co-edited a special issue of Cultural Sociology on inequalities in the cultural industries. In 2019 he became an editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Anamik's first book Race and the Cultural Industries (Polity) was published in 2018. In 2019 he received an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow grant for a project entitled Rethinking Diversity in Publishing', which led to a report published by Goldsmiths Press in June 2020. His research has featured across a range of media, including BBC Radio, The Guardian, TES and New Statesman.

I finished this book half-way through 2020, a turbulent and era-defining year. Both the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in a disproportionate number of BAME deaths, and the #BlackLivesMatter protests, reignited by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, highlight how dispensable black and brown lives remain. It has also produced a profound reckoning with race in Western societies in particular, a process that such societies have tried their best to deny.

While the question of media might feel trivial when we are literally talking about life and death, media are absolutely central to the way that these two moments are made sense of and understood, and as a consequence, our responses to them. Corporate news media continue to set, or indeed limit, the agendas and frames within which we discuss these issues. But audiences especially those on the margins can influence these agendas in unprecedented ways thanks to social media. Indeed, both the Covid pandemic and #BlackLivesMatter highlight media's contradictory tendencies. For instance, the accessibility of new digital technologies exposes the brutalisation of racialised people at the hands of the police or white supremacists, which are first circulated online and then broadcast on national and global media, leading to the perpetrators to meet a measure of if not full justice. But the mediated nature of the racial tragedy that unfolds leads to the further spectacularisation of black death, reduced to media content that becomes normalised as well as commodified as it circulates through media. As another example, media and cultural institutions, whether public or corporate, were quick to release statements that demonstrated their support for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. But to what extent does this represent genuine solidarity and understanding? The apparent consensus around racism as a real material force that structures life experience as articulated through these branded messages certainly feels novel, especially in this supposed postrace era. Yet the same actions have been read as performative, disingenuous at best, ideological at worst, that hides the way such institutions continue to exclude and exploit those racialised as Other. It remains to be seen whether this moment leads to meaningful change. Such a contradiction is arguably a mere fact of racial capitalism.