Summary
Contents
`This is one of the most important books on race, representation and politics to come along in a decade…. Sarita Malik's book is a brilliant contribution to the literature on race, cultural studies and public pedagogy' - Henry Giroux, Penn State University Representing Black Britain offers a critical history of Black and Asian representation on British television from the earliest days of broadcasting to the present day. Working through programs as wide-ranging as the early documentaries to `ethnic sitcoms' and youth television, this book provides a detailed analysis of shifting institutional contexts, images of `race' and ethnic-minority cultural politics in modern Britain.
Introduction
Introduction
Britain is constantly engaged in debates about race, racism and national identity. The identification in Sir William Macpherson's Report (following the unprovoked murder of Black British teenager, Stephen Lawrence, in 1993) of ‘institutional racism’, triggered a new set of discussions around British race relations, and helped many to belatedly recognize that racist processes are at work within the deep-seated culture of institutions such as the police, the media, education and the government (Macpherson, 1999).1 Although the British media might not have seen itself as directly implicated in the findings of the report, it has always been located as a key site of contestation and cultural negotiation in matters of race and ethnicity, where we, as the viewing nation, both publicly and privately struggle to ...