Abstracts
Keywords:
- Race and racism,
- publishing,
- diversity,
- cultural studies,
- media industry studies
Mots-clés :
- Race et racisme,
- édition,
- diversité,
- études culturelles,
- études sur les industries médiatiques
Anamik Saha is a researcher specializing in race and media, with a particular focus on “diversity” in the creative and cultural industries. After completing his PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, he joined the University of Leeds as an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute of Communication Studies, and later as a Lecturer in Communication. From 2014 to 2022, he was based at Goldsmiths before returning to Leeds as Professor of Race and Media in the School of Media and Communication. He has also held visiting fellowships at MIT and Trinity College, Connecticut. He is the author of Race and the Cultural Industries (Polity, 2018), Race, Culture and Media (Sage, 2022; second edition, 2025), and The Anti‑Racist Media Manifesto (co‑authored with Francesca Sobande and Gavan Titley, Polity, 2024). Issue editors Julien Lefort‑Favreau and Sarah Brouillette spoke to Anamik Saha via video chat on March 3, 2025. Their conversation has been edited for clarity. As someone British‑born, with parents from Bangladesh, there were questions of identity and culture my entire life. Throughout my teenage years, as with many children of migrants, I was particularly invested in popular culture and how it was making me feel as a child of migrants—where I was present and where I wasn’t. This question of not belonging was bothering me, and at Goldsmiths, I realized that I could study this now! Being in a media studies department with a strong cultural studies community, I understood that it was basically a condition of being a member of the diaspora. At the same time I was attending lectures which were telling me about the importance of media ownership, and how that puts limits on cultural expression. My education sat between those two worlds, which I didn’t see in opposition so much as two distinct factions arguing amongst themselves. I was learning loads. I had a startling moment while I was writing Race and The Cultural Industries (my first book). I had returned to Goldsmiths as a lecturer, and I shared my manuscript with a colleague who was a renowned political economist—excitedly thinking he would be interested in my approach to issues of race and identity that weren’t typically present in political economy studies. After reading my manuscript, he responded, “I read this with great interest, but it’s not really political economy, is it? This is cultural studies.” It caught me completely off‑guard. I remember being really wounded by that response, because I thought I actually was engaging with critical political economy—I’ve learned so much from that field, from people like Nicholas Garnham and David Hesmondhalgh (who, incidentally, taught me in my undergrad). Subsequently I did end up going back to Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, thinking about popular culture in terms of a tension between the structural and the discursive, not just with the structural determining the discursive but the other way around as well. That’s a central question for me, trying to unpack those dynamics which, as Raymond Williams taught us, involve incredibly complex relations. Thinking about capitalism and culture is my frame for looking at race, and vice versa—race is my lens for exploring that relationship between capitalism and culture. We get involved in these kinds of debates, which I think are really important to understand, about a visibility‑based way of understanding inequality. There’s no coincidence that “diversity” (I often use scare quotes around diversity) gets talked about predominantly in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender—primarily because they are the most visible forms of difference compared to class or sexuality. I appreciate that doing that quantitative work is revealing about inequality in some …