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Black Middle-Class Britannia: Identities, Repertoires, Cultural Consumption


Black Middle-Class Britannia: Identities, Repertoires, Cultural Consumption

Hardback by Meghji, Ali

Black Middle-Class Britannia: Identities, Repertoires, Cultural Consumption

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£72.25

ISBN:
9781526143075
Publication Date:
4 Oct 2019
Language:
English
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Pages:
192 pages
Format:
Hardback
For delivery:
Estimated despatch 27 - 29 May 2024
Black Middle-Class Britannia: Identities, Repertoires, Cultural Consumption

Description

This book analyses how racism and anti-racism affects Black British middle-class cultural consumption. In doing so, it challenges the dominant understanding of British middle-class identity and culture as being 'beyond race'. Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital and cultural repertoires, Meghji argues that there are three modes of black middle-class identity: strategic assimilation, ethnoracial autonomous, and class-minded. Individuals within each of these identity modes use specific cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption. Those employing strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural equity, consuming traditional middle-class culture to maintain equality with the white middle-class in levels of cultural capital. Ethnoracial autonomous individuals draw on repertoires of 'browning' and Afro-centrism, self-selecting traditional middle-class cultural pursuits they decode as 'Eurocentric' while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift black diasporic histories and cultures. Lastly, class-minded individuals draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation, polarising between 'Black' and middle-class cultural forms. Black middle class Britannia examines how such individuals display an unequivocal preference for the latter, lambasting other black people who avoid middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally uncultivated.

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Taking off the colourblind goggles: Crafting a study on Britain's Black middle class 2 Towards a triangle of Black middle class identity 3 White spaces: consuming traditional middle class Culture 4 Constructing and using Black cultural capital 5 Revisiting race and nation: double consciousness, Black Britishness, and cultural consumption 6 Race, class, and culture in the British racialised social system Appendix: Building a reflexive case study of the Black middle class References

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