‘Beards, scarves, halal meat, terrorists, forced marriage’: television industries and the production of ‘race’

Abstract

This article considers the persistence of stereotypical representations of ‘race’ that appear in television in the West. According to a particular policy discourse, improving the on-screen representation of non-white groups is a matter of increasing the number of black and Asian folk working in the broadcasting industries – particularly at the senior management level. However, this article argues that the constant production of hegemonic images of ‘race’ cannot be tackled via recruitment measures alone. Adopting a ‘cultural industries’ approach to television production, the article uses an ethnographic study of British Asians working in the UK broadcasting industry to examine the conditions of production through which minority representations are created. By paying closer attention to the experience of cultural work, the article reveals how it is the increasingly commercialized cultures of production in television, constituted by the industry’s shift towards deregulation and neoliberal market models, that steers the work of Asian filmmakers and executives themselves into producing problematic, reductive representations of ‘race’.