Advancing the conversation on cultural intermediation by adding the much overlooked reality of racism, Arbiters of Race: Cultural Intermediaries, Racism, and Consumer Industries offers a much needed critical and contemporary focus on the ever changing landscape of race in the marketplace.
Advancing the conversation on cultural intermediation by adding the much overlooked reality of racism, this edited collection offers a much needed critical and contemporary focus on the ever changing landscape of race in the marketplace.
Arbiters of Race: Cultural Intermediaries, Racism, and Consumer Industries addresses the pressing need, in the third decade of the 21st century, to push social theory to incorporate race and racism in our understanding of cultural intermediation – to recognize that cultural intermediaries play a crucial role in framing goods, services, ideas, and behaviors as legitimate and worthy, instilling goods with meanings by engaging in specific cultural narratives that have a fundamentally racial character of consumer industries. Having changed dramatically since the 1980s and 1990s, cultural and creative markets have become unrecognizable such that cultural intermediaries today manipulate social and cultural tastes as actors in the consumer market to construct value and meaning for products, practices, and consumers – particularly in the cultural and creative industries.
The essays in this collection acknowledge the very real risk of reproducing the very racist structures these markets and industries were founded on, and goes beyond past work on cultural intermediaries to challenge the exclusionary racial structures within which cultural markets historically and currently operate.
Arvustused
Arbiters of Race offers a much needed critical and contemporary focus on the ever-changing landscape of race in unexposed areas in the U.S., Canada and the UK. The book is a timely collection of essays on an important contemporary global intellectual issue. This volume epitomizes what is best about sociology.
Kimberley Ducey, Professor of Sociology, University of Winnipeg
This book, with its focus on cultural intermediaries and consumer industries, is timely and of utmost importance. As an edited collection it brings together key scholars and researchers in the field to produce a collaborative and relevant overview of a pressing topic in which resources like this are very needed. A strongly commendable volume with an undoubtedly long shelf-life.
John Solomos, Professor of Sociology, Warwick University, and Editor-in-Chief of Ethnic and Racial Studies Journal
Introduction: Arbiters of Race? Instilling Race into Our Understandings
of Cultural Intermediaries, Erik T. Withers and David L. Brunsma; Section
One: Arbitering Race in the Media;
1. Organizations as Cultural
Intermediaries? A Case-Study of a Conservative Think Tank, Annie Jones and J.
Scott Carter;
2. Cultural Intermediaries Promoting Critical Racial
Consciousness: The Potential Public Pedagogy of Podcasts, Jan Meij; Section
Two: Arbitering Race in Creative Industries;
3. Behind the Scenes: The
Institutional Uses of Diversity in the Production of MoMAs Film
Curatorship, Tania Aparicio;
4. Curating Music Festivals: The Racialized
Entanglements on the Curation of Music Festivals, Jo Haynes; Section Three:
Arbitering Race in Bodies;
5. The Darkest Shade: Mediating the Politics of
Skin Tone, Jordan Foster;
6. Cosmetic Surgeons as Arbiters of a Beautiful
Nose: The Nariz Negroide in Brazil, Carole Myers; Section Four: Arbitering
Race in Consumer Goods and Services;
7. Becoming Tastemakers: The Affective
Labor of Latinx Millennials in the Specialty Coffee Industry, Karina
Santellano;
8. Justice, Diversity, Equity, and INclusion Deja Vu: Cultural
INtermediaries in the Fashion Apparel Retail Industry, Sherita M. Cuffee and
Shelly Brown-Jeffy;
9. Racial Capitalism on the Retail Sales Floor: Examining
Cultural Arbiters as Organizationally Embedded Actors and Informal Practices
that Perpetuate the Racial Ordering of Consumers, Cassi Pittman Claytor;
Section Five: Arbitering Race in Racialized Space;
10. You Almost Cant
Describe It: A Case Study of the National Urban League Conference for Black
Space, Social Movement Communities, and Cultural Intermediaries, Candace C.
Robinson;
11. Commercial Gentrification and Local Businesses as Cultural
Intermediaries in the Racialization of Space, Steven Tuttle
Erik Withers is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology, Criminology, and Anthropology Department at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls where he also serves as the coordinator of the Womens, Gender, and Sexualities Studies program. He researches and teaches in the subject areas of race and ethnicity, gender and sexualities, and consumer culture. He and his wife (Vanessa) have three daughters (Harper, Ellison, and Hope). In his free time, he explores Western Wisconsin with them and coaches their ice hockey and softball teams.
David L. Brunsma is Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. He is founding co-editor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the official journal of the Section of Racial and Ethnic Minorities at the American Sociological Association as well as the founding co-editor of the University of Georgia Press book series of the same name. His research is currently focused on understanding the ways that whitespaces function across multiple domains of social and cultural life. He lives, learns, and loves in Blacksburg, VA with his family.
