In Race, Culture and Media (Sage, 2021), Anamik Saha provides an account of the role that media plays in both circulating and shaping ideas about race and racism in the contemporary world. Saha argues that we need to move beyond a focus on representation to engage with how media makes race. As Anamik describes in our interview, alongside providing a much-needed summary of existing work on the media, race and racism, the book also breaks new ground theoretically. By synthesising approaches from postcolonial studies, critical political economy and cultural studies, Saha puts forward an approach he calls ‘postcolonial cultural economy’, one which attends to the specific conjunctural context within which race is made and contested; the intertwined, but separate, forces of capitalism and racism; and which gives equal importance to the role that media production, texts, and consumption as forces which shape race and racisms. With case studies and key themes, ranging from the European migration ‘crisis’ of the mid-2010s to Black Twitter anchoring its analysis, this is an invaluable textbook for students and researchers working in the fields of critical media studies, cultural studies, internet studies and beyond.
Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.
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