Black middle-class Britannia

Identities, repertoires, cultural consumption

Ali Meghji

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781526143075
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526143099
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction – Taking off the colour-blind 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
• Index