Book review of: Ellis Cashmore (ed), Encyclopaedia of Race and Ethnic Studies, London: Routledge, 2004
What are encyclopaedias good for?
In an age of information over-load, the implosion of meanings and forever sliding signifiers, has the imperious authority of such texts been undermined? Or conversely, precisely because of our amnesiac contemporary culture caught in a perpetual presentism – particularly in relation to failing to grasp the contortions of ‘race’ – is the role of such an encyclopaedia needed more than ever?
Cashmore’s legitimacy and scope of his expanded text is made explicitly clear in the introduction: the 4th Edition has now matured from a dictionary to a full-blown encyclopaedic status. The sheer size of the volume is impressive, and with a list over eighty international contributors, he has laudably edited an array of substantial entries which extend the boundaries of ‘race’ work towards an interdisciplinary agenda. Entries such as ‘Mike Tyson’, ‘Central Park Jogger’ and ‘Consumption’ are unlikely to appear in conventionally narrow sociological dictionaries of ‘race’ and ethnicity. Continue Reading »
Some notes based on a talk I gave at the Bhangra Symposium, School of African and Oriental Studies, 15 Sept 2007:
I’m interested in how we can tell the story of Bhangra. The majority of accounts about South Asian life in Britain have been invariably reductive: either an immigrant story of doing ’shit work’/racism or a predictable tale of community/exotic celebration
“The relationship between art practices and the state apparatuses of the police and judiciary has always been a tense one. In the criminalization of activist artists of the Critical Art Ensemble and the PublixTheatreCaravan, in the growing number of cases of the censorship and legal prosecution of artists and curators in the post-communist region, or in the application of terrorism paragraphs to critical scholarship as in the recent case of the Berlin sociologist Andrej Holm, there are more and more indications of an exacerbation of this relationship. Instead of seeing this new quality purely as a means of social subjugation, this issue of transversal seeks to grasp these phenomena in an expanded concept of policing (especially in a confrontation with the relevant theorems of Foucault and Rancière).”
Below are some notes (a handout) for the talk I gave at the Migrating University event at Goldsmiths, 14 June 2007:
Critical pedagogies attempt to distinguish the method (how we teach) from the content (what we teach)…”we teach students how to critically think, not what to think”. But can we really hold on to such a distinction? Continue Reading »
Review of Tejaswini Niranjana (2006) Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. London: Duke University Press.
This book rethinks diaspora and global modernities in the very considerations of the formation of Indo-Trinidadian music and identity. Tejaswini Niranjana’s wager is to
…contribute to the development of alternative frames of reference, so that Western modernity is no longer seen as the sole point of legitimization or comparison (Niranjana 2006, p.13)
Below is an edited version (for anonymity) of feedback comments I received from a well-established peer reviewed ‘race’ Journal for a submitted article exploring the limits of anti-racist readings of popular texts. My brief responses are highlighted in red-italics. (Though I didn’t waste my time sending them to the journal editors).
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Reviewer Comments to the Author
The article has at least three agendas: first, there is an attempt critically to assess the [...] messages about race and racism, and especially the [...] “take” on whiteness; second, there is an attempt to discuss teaching about race (and once again, most especially about whiteness), using the [...] as a pedagogical tool; and third, there is an attempt to do theoretical/interpretive work on the meaning of racial identity, drawing largely but not only on poststructural theory.
Whatever you may think of the academic credentials of Naomi Klein, her work reaches a ‘mass’ audience. Although, as with semiotics being appropriated by ‘Saatchi & Saatchi’ et al, No Logo is similarly being taken up by the ubiquitous branding industry.
Her latest work The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is being virally promoted to great effect, especially via a short documentary directed by Jonás Cuarón (of Children of Men) accompanying the book.
15 September 2007 10am – 6pm, S.O.A.S., University of London
British Bhangra is a genre of popular music that fuses Punjabi beats, music and lyrics, UK pop, RnB, reggae and other world sounds. Its history in Britain dates back to the immediate post-war period when migrants from the Punjab, India, resettled their lives and homes in the UK.
In the post-00s the music can now be heard across the soundscapes of multicultural cities around the globe, to mainstream fashion and advertising, and even in the songs and music of Bollywood films. British Bhangra’s centres of music industry are increasingly located in Birmingham and London, from where its musical products are distributed and performed internationally. Yet, this recent visibility is also marked by a history of cultural racism, community politics and a music and cultural industry that has struggled to stake its place in British popular culture.
This one day symposium brings together leading international practitioners, aristes and academics who have been involved in producing and charting the story of British Bhangra music and its industry. The event will include panel presentations with Q&A as well as a roundtable discussion with all participants.
Read my review of the Soho Road to the Punjab exhibition.
Book review of: Ellis Cashmore (ed), Encyclopaedia of Race and Ethnic Studies, London: Routledge, 2004
