Racism, anti-racism and the politics of popular culture
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to LSE for this evening's hybrid event, Racism, Anti-racism and the Politics of Popular Culture. My name is Lee Edwards, I'm Professor of Strategic Communications and Public Engagement here in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE and I'm really pleased to be here to welcome Professor Anamik Saha and Dr Francesca Sobande to both our online audience and to our audience here.

onomic is a professor in race and media at the school of media and communication at the university of leeds and he researches race culture and media with a focus on the creative and cultural industries and diversity his books include race and the cultural industries and race culture and media and his latest book the anti-racist media manifesto is co-authored with francesca sobani and gavin titley

And today he will be exploring and examining how a children's... Ooh, no, that's not right. You're not doing children's rights, are you? I'm going to let you introduce what you're going to talk about shortly. Francesco Silvani is a writer and reader in digital media studies at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University.

Her books include Big Brands Are Watching You, Marketing, Social Justice and Digital Culture, and Consuming Crisis, Commodifying Care and COVID-19. And her research areas include popular culture, alternative rock genres and subculture, and issues to do with race, gender and the internet. And her recent work includes the co-authored book also, The Anti-Racist Media Manifesto, and there's a new book about to come out that she'll be able to tell you a bit more about.

For Twitter users in the audience, the hashtags for today's event is hashtag LSE events. And I'd ask you please to put your phones on silent so as not to disrupt the event. It's being recorded and will be made available as a podcast subject to no technical difficulties.

As usual, there'll be the chance for you to put your questions to our speakers. Both speakers are going to talk for around 20 minutes and then after that we'll have a brief discussion here and then 30 minutes for a Q&A.

For our online audience, you can submit your questions via the Q&A feature on the web screen. So please include your name and affiliation if you're asking questions. And for those of you in the theatre, I'll let you know when we'll open the floor for questions. I'll make that indication. Please just raise your hand and wait for the stewards to arrive with the roving microphone to get to you. And again, please let us know your name and affiliation as well.

And I'll try and ensure that there's a range of questions both from people here and also from our online audience. So without further ado, I would like to invite Onamik to lead us a little... Hi everyone. This is certainly the tallest stage I've ever appeared on.

Okay, I'm not scared of heights. I might stage dive at the end of this, depending on how the talk goes. Hi, everyone. My name's Onamik, and it's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you to CETA and everyone else who were involved in putting this event together. It's a department I hold in very high esteem, so I'm really happy to be here and also see some old friends as well. Emphasis on old. And yes, today I'm going to talk about the crisis of diversity. I've been giving this talk

This is a work in progress, and I've given this talk already a couple of times, and annoyingly recent political developments have forced me to revisit this argument.

So it might be slightly clumsy, but I hope together we can work through it and you can help me clarify and finesse. So as Lee suggested, I'm a sociologist working in cultural studies, media studies, and I'm interested in the politics of race, particularly in relation to...

media and popular culture. My initial interest in this topic goes back to the 1990s, where I was interested in the representation of racialized groups in media, which at the time, certainly growing up, you know, seeing people like myself, you know, I was barely, rarely saw us. And if you did, you know, it was a terrorist or a shopkeeper, and nearly always played by Art Malick as well. Poor guy. But since then,

So that was kind of my interest. And then for my PhD, I wanted to know what was happening, what was happening inside cultural industries, especially when I was meeting really smart, interesting Asian, people of Asian descent who were working in media. I was very interested in British Asian identity and cultural politics. And I was kind of noticing how they...

I'd talk to them and they'd talk about their art and they'd talk about the kind of ways in which they want to challenge the stereotypical reductive representation of our communities in their work and then I'd go and look at their work and it would be another play about honour killing or it would be

it would be another film about terrorism or another book cover with the woman in a sari running barefoot across a marble floor. And I was like, what the hell's going on? Are these people being disingenuous? Were they lying to me? Or was there actually something happening inside the cultural industries that was steering them into kind of making these kind of particular portrayals of Asian people? And so since then, I've kind of looked, kind of been...

doing mostly qualitative research inside these industries, looking at the experiences of black, brown and Asian people. And what's been really interesting the last 10 years is that while my initial interest was in where are we, now it's like we're everywhere. Black, brown and Asian people are everywhere in media. And if you look, we're having a brilliant time. You know, we're kind of falling in love, we're having families, we're...

You know, we're kind of like judges, CEOs, we're even leaders of the free world, we're even superheroes saving the world from destruction. And so all of a sudden, we've got this super diversity that's happening on our screens.

While this appears progressive, and so inside the cultural industry, I'm seeing this on our screens, I'm not seeing this reflected inside. And while it felt like this was something, this felt at least progressive, or dare I say something to celebrate, actually, through my research, I was kind of actually finding that this diversity turn, and I call it a diversity turn in media, isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

And actually what was happening, and I'm going to talk about this in my paper a bit, is that these diversity initiatives, it's not that they weren't working, certainly in terms of increasing the representation

People of colour inside cultural industries. But also, I argue that diversity discourse and diversity practices are actually reproducing racial hierarchies inside these creative and cultural industries. We're going to talk a bit more about that later. So, all of a sudden, this is up to a year ago, I'm making these bold arguments, slightly smug arguments, I have to say, about we need to end diversity.

Diversity is the problem. We're not going to fix racial inequalities until we get rid of this diversity discourse. I give this talk a year and a half ago where it's called End Diversity. And I'm feeling, like I said, very smug about this. This kind of bold, provocative argument. But then something's happening politically. You have the rise of the far right. Back in the summer of 2024, I'm seeing images...

I'm seeing, I'm feeling feelings that I hadn't felt since, you know, the 1990s, early part of the 1990s. And all of a sudden, you know, it's not as, it wasn't necessarily as pronounced there, but in the US, you're seeing politicians really calling out diversity, where EDI or DEI, whatever you want to call it, is the target now. And you're seeing the rolling back.

of affirmative action and di initiatives in the us and all of a sudden my kind of anti-racist critique of diversity feels you know i say this literally and metaphorically feels academic feels academic and actually what we're seeing now is a really powerful far-right discourse that is kind of has diversity in its targets so that's what i want to explore today

So, and I've just realised I've eaten into that five minutes into my time after that long intro. But what I'm going to say, it's going to be three parts, right? So the first part, I'm going to talk about the rise of diversity. And I'm going to present to you what I call an anti-racist critique of diversity. And the second part, I'm going to try and make sense of this ascendancy of diversity and also this simultaneous ascendancy of the far right.

and try and make sense of those two things together. What I'm going to suggest to you, it might just appear that diversity on our screens doesn't really seem to influence society in any way, which is turning more reactionary, but actually what I'm going to suggest to you is that the ascendancy of diversity and the ascendancy of far-right are two sides of the same neoliberal coin, actually, that's what I'm going to say. And then in the third part, I'm going to dare to offer some solutions based on the recent book I wrote with Francesca and our friend Gavin,

Plug there, hope you don't mind. So, does that sound alright? Good. I'm going to talk, let me talk then about the rise. This is the kind of stuff I was interested in in the 90s.

These kind of images, I was like thinking, why is this, you know, trying to make sense of this Orientalism? And as I said, things changed. I meant to show this slide earlier, but things have changed. We're seeing something very different. I just want to start off with this quote. I know you're all big fans of quaint English crime drama. This is Midsomer Murders, and this was a quote from 2011 from then producer of Midsomer Murders. He's basically reacting to an accusation

his crime drama based in the fictional county of Midsomer. Have many of you seen this show?

yeah okay getting some enthusiastic nods um it's yeah so it's fictional town fiction in county the sleepy village where there happens to be a murder every week um and this producer's been kind of responding to accusations that there's not enough diverse where's the diversity he says we don't have ethnic minority we just don't have ethnic minorities involved it wouldn't be the english village without them with them i'm sorry it would it just wouldn't work with a last bastion of englishness and i want to keep it that way

he got demoted after this but I think he got reinstated shortly after and what's really interesting about this quote is not just the kind of nostalgic Englishness that is kind of

being kind of expressed. But also later on in this interview, I didn't have space to kind of include it, he's also talking about how, well, the global audience, when they tune into an English crime drama, they want a particular portrayal or image of Englishness. So what's being kind of articulated is this kind of conservative nostalgia, but also this kind of economic understanding of what he thinks the audience wants. Fast forward to last year, and I...

I happened to, like very informally, meet a writer from the popular Netflix period drama Bridgerton, which I'm sure you've all heard of, one of the first period dramas that featured people of colour where they weren't just the servants or indeed the slaves. And I asked her, I said to her, you know, do you think, can you imagine like this, but this is a year ago,

or maybe a year and a half ago, can you imagine a new production, a Netflix production, not having a person of colour in it? And she said, no, she can't. At this point, I don't think that would ever happen again, unless...

it was integral to the storyline that it was all white people. So I think the zone of interest had just come out then. So I think, yeah, in that instance, OK, maybe you wouldn't have people... I do amuse myself by thinking of the casting corps for a film like The Zone of Interest. Wanted Nazi German family. We encourage actors from diverse backgrounds to apply. So that was really... So, you know, we've come a long way since 2011...

This is undeniably a radical shift. We've gone from invisibility to hypervisibility. So, again, the question now is where did diversity come from? And I've argued that there's three factors. I'm going to kind of speed through this bit because I have written about this a lot, so if you're interested, you can...

investigate my work. But there's three factors that I say have led to the rise of diversity discourse. First is what Stuart Hall calls multicultural drift. This is a slow incremental way that societies are becoming more heterogeneous and mixed, like tectonic plates moving across the ocean floor, despite the best efforts of reactionary nationalist forces and racist immigration policies. I mean, you know, Brexit happened, but migration's gone up.

So that's kind of proof there and then. It's an outcome, I would argue, and this is going to become a theme, and I'd like to get your thoughts on this if you think I'm right here. But I think this is an outcome of conservative politics, actually, of conservatism. You have free market globalists who demand and want to dominate global economy in terms of the exploitation of raw materials and labour.

but also you have a kind of ethno-nationalism as well. You want to protect the cultural integrity and, dare I say, purity of the nation.

Either way, multicultural drift is happening. It doesn't necessarily have any political agenda, but it is a fact. Stuart Hall is describing how this is just a fact of living in a globalised society, and because of multicultural drift, you're just going to see people of colour, for want of a better term, by the way, kind of drifting into these kind of, you know, political, powerful, socially powerful positions, actually, despite the challenges it took them to get there. And, you know, what multicultural drift

Drift has done is it's produced, we've seen the emergence of an increasingly globally minded kind of younger audience who have demands and desires for diversity. You also see a form of popular anti-racism emerge in this moment that sees media as a site of social justice. And you know, Black Lives Matter movement in particular plays massive demands on creative and cultural industries to do diversity right.

We're also seeing developments in new media, streaming services, their business models rely, which are based around catalogues, selling subscriptions to catalogues, they rely on having diversity in its content. That's just a fact that it has to deal with.

But also you see the success of DIY forms of content creation from creators of colour. That is challenging, kind of industry law, if you like them. That's L-O-R-E, it's Tim Havens, the media scholar, uses this notion of industry law to talk about the understandings that producers have around black cultural production in particular. And also you see social media, for all of its ills, giving marginalised voices a chance to kind of talk, to build clout and challenge the dominant culture.

Also we see the ascendancy of neoliberalism and diversity has always been present in cultural policy, certainly in the UK, but with creative industries policy that arrives in the UK and Australia, diversity all of a sudden takes on an economic quality. It's seen as the driver of originality, of innovation.

um is seen as diversity being important to a competitive creative industry so diversity kind of takes on this economic dare i say neoliberal hue diversity which was originally informed by the politics of recognition is now based upon ensuring representational parity for marginalized you know which was then sorry politics representation that was based upon kind of attaining representational parity for minoritized groups

under neoliberalism has become conflated with niche marketing now. So those kind of minoritised groups are now seen as kind of niche markets to be targeted. So, you know, from this, I'm kind of doing my research inside creative industries.

And I kind of, I don't think diversity is all that it's cracked up to be. We're seeing this super diversity of a screen, a little diversity behind the camera. Diversity is linked to brand reputational value. You know, this is why brands wanted to kind of show they're doing diversity as a way of kind of

maintaining the reputational value. Diversity is enacted on the terms of the dominant culture. It's seen as an added extra rather than a transformation of the inside of these industries. And it's a way for the status quo to appear to be managing the larger minorities while keeping privilege in place. This was back then. This was back then. And I hate to talk about it in past tense, but it is. Diversity is in crisis though.

I've presented a very brief rundown of the anti-racist critique of diversity, but diversity is under attack from the right. It's attacked by the right in the context of culture wars, and again, this is a contradiction of capitalism, I think, for the right. Diversity is a way of making money based on the commodification of racial identities, but diversity is also a threat to the cultural purity of the nation, so there's a contradiction there.

And this is exemplified by the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis' battle with Disney, following Disney's criticism of Florida state law that restricted the teaching of sexuality in schools. This is not simply, I want to suggest to you, it's not a battle between the right and progressives in this instance, but rather a battle between conservative America and corporate America. And I think it's arguably the former that is winning now.

Big brands are dropping EDI targets. As I said, affirmative action, EDI initiatives are being rolled back, or in fact banned in many places, along with the teaching of critical race theory. In nations like the UK, where we haven't, you know, the right haven't been able to kind of stoke the cultural flames in the way that they perhaps wanted to, we're still seeing similar issues.

patterns ETI initiatives been quietly rolled back due to economic pressures I just saw today that BT I think was it BT who dropped EDI targets recently mimicking what's happening in the US right now in the media a number of high-profile EDI kind of executives have been stepping down because of like just the lack of resources a lack of support and not being replaced as far as I can tell

So, we're seeing this happen, you know, diversity all of a sudden is being attacked from the right. And as I said, the anti-racist critique of diversity is falling apart. It's not even being registered right now. And then this happens. You have this in the UK, scenes that I said I haven't seen since the early 90s. You see similar things happening in Germany and in France, where the far-right party get within an inch of national power.

And of course, we have Trump. So the question for me, you know, it's hard to say whether diversity on our screens provokes the far right into rioting and gaining the momentum and power that they have right now.

it's hard to say whether diversity on the screens has has you know kind of provoked that though i'm guessing that those far-right activists will have a lot to say about black people in midsummer if you like um but what i want to do for the remainder of this talk is think about kind of make sense of this super diversity we see in our screens and the ascendancy of the far right which as

And it's tempting, as I said at the beginning, to think about, well, does this show that media doesn't have any influence? Like the super diversity we're seeing in our screens is somehow not resulting in a more open-minded progressive society. What I want to suggest to you is that actually...

as I said, part of the same process, actually. So part of the same neoliberal coin, that contradiction of capitalism that I just spoke about. And in order to unpack that,

I want to kind of think about, I want to draw from some really important and amazing kind of critical race scholarship. So I'm thinking about Lisa Duggan, for instance, and she's saying this back in 2003, where she's talking about multicultural neoliberal equality politics as a phase of neoliberalism. This is a stripped-down, non-distributive, redistributive form of equality designed for global consumption during the 21st century and compatible with continued unification

upward redistribution of resources. So in other words, it's kind of a good multiculturalism, multiculturalism that can be exploited economically, that again, kind of fits in nicely with the logics of neoliberalism. I'm thinking as well of Jasbir Pua's influential work on homonationalism, which he calls liberal multiculturalist exclusion.

where marginalized groups who can show their economic worth are incorporated as part of liberal multiculturalist inclusion, while those who fall out of it are exploited and subjected to harm and violence. I'm also thinking of Gargi Bhattacharya's work on racial capitalism and how it produced a form of racial differentiation, where race in particular context has value when it aligns with a consumer lifestyle.

And in other times it doesn't, when the racial other is deemed to have no value to capitalism and is kind of dismissed, pushed to the margins and again subjected to violence and harm. So I think these theories are interesting, there's a quote which I'm not going to...

For the sake of time, I'm not going to go into it. But I think those theories are really helpful for understanding how a particular kind of racial difference is really useful to capitalism. So to recap this part of the talk, I'm going to come to the end shortly. Diversity...

in its race, in its commodified form, is useful to capitalism and is valued. So diversity, essentially. This is the type of racial difference that capitalism loves. Whereas uncommodifiable subaltern populations are dispensable.

The ascendancy of neoliberal diversity rhetoric and the rise of the far right, as I said, are different sides of the same coin, actually. They're both happening together.

And I think as well, maybe instead it's both an expression of the perennial crisis and conservative nationalism, capitalism, you know, diversity on one side, versus ethno-nationalism and racism. And I think it's out of that contradiction, out of that crisis, that I think has paved the way for the far right. What does all this mean in the time of Trump? You know, it's the immediate aftermath...

of Trump has seen the intensification of attacks on ETI, which was somehow implicated in the failure to prevent the LA virus and the Washington DC plane crash. I mean, it was astonishing.

how that rhetoric kind of worked, actually, that happened. Are we going to see the same kind of rollback of diversity on our screens? Will media owners call time on diversity? Time will tell? I'm not so sure, actually. I think the post-racial version of society that diversity has produced actually aligns quite nicely with the vision that Trump has of America.

Actually, Evelyn Asoltani, who I think has written some really important work on the representation of Muslim and Arab Americans in the US, she was writing extensively, she's been writing extensively on this issue of the representation of Muslim and Arab Americans in US media.

And she's noticed how during the last Trump administration, we saw the emergence of what she calls crisis diversity, referring to the response of US media to Donald Trump's Muslim ban, which prevented Muslims from freely entering the US. And she says she actually sees an expansion in Islam.

the kind of representation of Muslims I don't know if you know any of these shows in particular but this is quite a marked difference to the way in which Muslims have historically been represented in US media and she puts this down to two things one is the kind of moral and ethical Fortitude actually of like media owners who felt guilty and ashamed about Trump's kind of politics and attitude towards migrants and Muslims

She also sees pressure from anti-racist activists and younger, more progressively minded audiences that led to this widening in the regime of representation with regard to Muslims. But, you know, she goes on to argue that, you know, this is still all done in the name of diversity. And actually what it does is, you know, it kind of provides some light relief, but doesn't actually deal with the entrenched Islamophobia that exists in the U.S.,

But it's quite, yeah, so again, she wrote this during the last Trump administration, so it's quite interesting to think about how things might change this time around. So I want to think about a radical diversity. Right now, the fear for the left of the UK is that what's happening in the US is going to spread over here. It can feel hopeless and inevitable. It's important to know that the cultural war discourse has never...

at the moment taking the same hold in the UK, as I said, despite the attempts of desperate politicians and newspaper editors. So what is the responsibility of media during this conjunctural crisis and the role it can play in an anti-racist politics? Some activists would say that media is at best of minor concern, at worst the distraction from the real kind of political work of like organising

and on-the-ground activism that we need. In response, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a political scientist, Adam Cooper Elliott, who argued that an anti-racist movement needs both grassroots organisation in terms of mobilisation and organisation, but it also needs conviviality, you know, what Paul Gilroy calls conviviality. And the media can play a role in facilitating both, but I think particularly the latter.

And despite my critique of diversity in media as a veneer to look at, maybe it's when it goes beyond its commodity form and enters into the social world, it starts interacting with the social world, rather. And it starts doing something politically. That's when it starts doing something politically, providing the kind of, not just the images, but the material and the resources that can enable us to live, you know, to better learn how to live with difference and, dare I say, lead to a form of collective flourishing.

So what does a radical diversity look like? Well, I think we need to admit we are in a culture war, but I mean that in the Gramscian sense. You know, he argued that this is absolutely a culture war. Culture is where hegemony is secured. Stuart Hall argues popular culture is the terrain where the struggle for hegemony plays out, where there is never a winner.

other words we're in a permanent war of position so we need to engage with that a media is a place to do it and a fetch unfortunately emphasis on culture sometimes gets dismissed as a bourgeois concern and again not helped by the diversity turn and I think we need to reinstate an emphasis on culture and culture making as an important part of anti racist product by practice we need the politics of production and

and this is something that i've explored with francesca i'm not going to for the sake of time and i'm not going to go into detail here but essentially it's almost like good old-fashioned media reform you know more robust public service media regulation that breaks up corporate power this also entails a discussion of fixing what sophia noble calls algorithms of oppression financial support for independent community-led media

But also, I think we need a renewed sense, a renewed politics of representation. And I think we still need to make a case for... At the moment, it's tempting to defend diversity...

And I think this is what's happening in the US right now and I get it I understand why the left are mobilizing on those terms and I can see already There's kind of like legal defenses being put together now in the face of the tax on EDI But nonetheless, I think in terms of discourse, I think we need to do with a language of diversity We need to do away with this language of visibility and accuracy, which I think is like holding us back We need to stop paying diversity bingo

a critique based on exposing absences. I just don't think that is enough. What we need is what Stuart Hall again calls a critical politics, a politics of criticism.

This involves, you know, kind of, maybe it's based on Paul Gilroy's notion of, like, conviviality, or maybe Raymond Williams' notion of emergent tendencies, which are there, they're always, they're a permanent feature of society. So how can we transform media such that it enables these forms of, like, convivial culture to emerge?

I think we need a more socially theoretically grounded analysis of how structure shapes the discursive and vice versa. So it's not enough to just keep on talking about representation. We need to think about creating the conditions of production that can enable, again, a convivial culture to emerge and have an impact

society at large i think we need to take emotion and effects more seriously i'm kind of here lamenting the kind of popular discourse and this obsession with representation and getting representation right which again i think is what diversity discourse has done i think we need the form of what catherine hall calls reparatory history um kind of thinking about not just the role of historians but symbol creators the world they play in kind of a project of a reparatory history kind of

kind of showing and helping us work through the pains of colonialism and slavery which still affect us today.

So what I've suggested to you, sorry to kind of gone over, thank you for accommodating me, but the crisis of diversity, as I said, is part of a broader conjunctural crisis. And I think it is born out of a crisis of conservatism, kind of a global capitalist version and a conservative nationalist version, which I think has paved the way for far-right nationalism to kind of come back into political vision at least, or if not power.

I think we need to enable diversity, a rather convivial multicultural from below. I think that is our task in terms of a transformation of media. And this entails creating, as I say here, the conditions of production inside creative and cultural industries to enable these forms of convivial culture to emerge. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Onamik. And let's just immediately, without further ado, welcome Francesca Sobande to the lectern as well.

Hi everyone. I just want to start by saying thank you for the opportunity to be here today and to say I appreciate a lot of work goes on into making these things happen, especially when there's both an online and in-person element. So thank you.

Before I speak about the specifics of this topic, I also wanted to contextualise some of what I'll be sharing and I wanted to do that by also reflecting on, I want to say the state of higher education, but that in itself feels flippant. So I guess I say this, I'm joining you as someone who's a writer and reader in digital media studies at Cardiff University, which has been in the press quite a lot in recent days. I'm sure many of you have

already encountered that coverage and the university at the moment looks to be cutting a number of different jobs with sort of the number 400 floating around in various places and i say that because when we're speaking about issues to do with inequality oppression when we're speaking about structural power dynamics and we're talking about this in an educational context it feels important to think about what it means to see these sorts of things unfolding in real time

I say this as somebody who works within a school at the university that's been framed as safe, but a cut to one is a cut to all. And I think we need to not only think critically, but we need to act and respond to the reality that there are implications in terms of who's most likely to be disproportionately impacted by changes to student learning conditions, staff work conditions, and the fact that for some students, they're also staffed.

As we're talking a lot about the arts and the creative and cultural industries and the humanities, it's also worth me stressing that at Cardiff University there are many different schools and areas of research departments that are being particularly targeted in terms of what's going on. And we see that around music, we see that around public health, nursing, and we see that around a lot of different forms of work that focus on creativity.

So I just wanted to emphasize that that's the position from which I'm coming from today. And I think sometimes people

frame academia as abstract theorising but it's always rooted in material realities and I hope that in the spirit of sort of moving with a sense of collectiveness and trying to change the conditions we all exist within these are things we can all keep talking about and also making changes or coming together to act in response to.

On a slightly different note, there will be spoilers ahead and I don't want to assume how many people here are or aren't familiar with Interview with a Vampire, so I'll be sharing some level of detail within the confines of timing and I'll be speaking broadly about pop culture portrayals of vampires, immortality and the racial politics of desiring demons.

This means that I'll be speaking a lot around some work that I've done in collaboration with independent writer, researcher, organiser and curator Leila Roxanne Hill. We've done a lot of work that focuses on black life and history in Scotland and more recently we've been looking at the different ways in society emotional expression, forms of connectedness and forms of physical touch are and aren't encouraged in different contexts.

So this relates to a forthcoming book that's out later this month, Look, Don't Touch, Reflections on the Freedom to Feel. So the point around emotions and affect was a nice bridge to this. But it also engages with matters to do with racism, racial politics, and the sort of work that we've been doing with Gavin, thinking about anti-racist media and what that might or what that can look like.

So based on the influential 1976 book Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice, the gothic horror TV show of the same name from 2022 till present has captured hearts drawing us into the immortal lives or immortal-ish lives of vampires who burn with desire and some of whom desire to burn. This is a world where you both love and bite deeply.

The writing that led to the show started out as a short story by Rice, which was turned into a book months after the bereavement of her young daughter. While Interview with the Vampire is a gory story, we argue it's also gloriously tender in its treatment of subjects such as intimacy, shame, kinship, madness, and the raw magnetism of desiring beings who find each other again and again and again.

And I won't be speaking about this at length today, but I'm really interested in the intro-textual nature of Interview with the Vampire, from the TV show, the films, the books, the Vampire Chronicles space, and although it won't be at the forefront of what I'm discussing today, I'm particularly drawn to the way that music plays a role and how it's been framed.

So as part of this work with Leila Roxanne Hill, we've looked a lot at new metals role in the film Queen of the Damned, and more recently looking at different alt-rock metalcore sub-genre descriptors that have emerged in recent years. I like niche, so I won't deep dive that too much.

But what it means to essentially see blackness and in particular the work and creativity of black women being simultaneously engaged and erased as part of the interview with the vampire world and as part of different alt-rock genres and subcultures. But returning to the TV show, unlike the film, the TV show, which is also based on Rice's book, or I should say, unlike...

Yeah, unlike the film, the TV show, it doesn't simply skirt around themes of queerness that are part of the original source material. If it helps to know, I was having a conversation with a friend who was like, have I seen this show? Have I not? And he was saying, so I saw something. There were a lot of gay people and I think there was a vampire. And I was like, it sounds like Interview with a Vampire. So if you haven't seen the show, that gives you a sense of some of its vibes. Although there's more to it than that.

So unlike the book, the TV show specifically foregrounds black queerness as poignantly explored through the characters of both Louis and Claudia, discussed in a bit more detail today. And when thinking about today's focus in particular, I feel that something that connects the show and this world to all of what we're speaking about is that it represents many different forms of othering. And here it's thinking about ideas to do with...

monsters to do with demons and the different ways that forms of oppression, real forms of oppression are depicted in the show but are also reimagined through the lens of being a vampire. Building on the affection and eroticism that is present on the pages of Rice's book, the TV show Interview with the Vampire portrays climactic experiences of intimacy. My French isn't good so bear with me here.

Drawing parallels between the referenced idea of 'en petit coup' and the unspoken but well-known concept of 'le petit mort' , the show really sort of plays with different ideas to do with desire and disgust, death and life, intimacy and distance. So across two seasons so far, the show traverses experiences of romance, of grief, sexuality, race, gender, ageing and love.

It's an outlandishly enthralling portrayal of beings who are, to draw on the 2005 lyrics of indie band Block Party, known for having a taste for blood. In an introduction to a 2008 edition of Interview with the Vampire, it's stated that it's hard to imagine Buffy the Vampire Slayer without Interview with the Vampire. And I think it's interesting to think about the different ways that vampires, pop culture portrayals of them throughout time, and literature have sort of

ebbed and flowed and become knotted and how that has occurred with regards to in particular whiteness, racialisation and matters to do with sexuality. Some of which is sort of explicitly acknowledged in TV and film and other times there is a more sort of subtle allusion to it. Expanding on the significance of Rice's tale in that introduction to that edition

The introduction continues by saying that every era creates the monsters it needs. And we say in our forthcoming book, Look, Don't Touch, society paints certain ideas and people as evil, ferocious and unknowable to maintain the power of others who are positioned as pure, friendly and familiar. Here I want to speak a little bit about the brilliant work of Mariam Jamila, including a crucial account of the unchanging nature of constructions of South Asian Muslim women post 9-11.

In that thesis, Djamila explains one particular figure popular in horror and fantasy genres that uses monsters to work through white anxiety is that of ghosts, particularly in relation to how trauma is processed and moved on from. Ghostly apparitions in fiction have a long history of representing a past trauma or requiring action in order to exercise them and their unfinished business. And similarly, portrayals of vampires can voice such sentiments.

Characters in the TV show Interview with the Vampire reflect an amalgamation of monsters needed at the time the book was written, the 1970s, and those that are conjured up in response to the crises of contemporary times, the 2020s. This includes when thinking about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and different forms of intimacy that have or haven't been a part of that, as well as different concerns to do with contagion. Society's supposed monsters and the stories told about them sometimes serve as a confessional,

A conduit through which transgressive desires are reframed as demons to create some sense of a distance between the monsters and those who can't keep their names out of their mouths. To recall the subtitle of the edited collection, True Blood and Philosophy, about the US vampire series, we want to think bad things with you, but not everyone is a vampire freak. I'm not going to add a fit note explanation of that for anyone who's unfamiliar, but if you're interested in these things, let's keep the conversation going.

While Rice's book is the work from which the show sprung, the TV depiction of Interview with the Vampire departs from the original text. And it does so in many different ways, such as by rupturing the image of vampires as all white, and by playing with the idea of multiracial monstrosities, melancholies, and intimacies. There's a lot of self-searching, a lot of sadness, a lot of sex, and arguably a lot of softness and tenderness as well.

And when thinking through this, we draw parallels between brilliant scholarly works, research and writing on black metal and the reality that harshness and softness can exist at once simultaneously. And again, thinking about the sonic backdrop of the TV show, the film, and sort of the different ways that genres do and don't appear or are reframed. At the centre of the plot of the TV show is the charming and unreliable narrator Louis Dupont de Lac, affectingly played by Jacob Anderson.

The blend of the first episode's captivating cinematography, exquisite costumes, moving soundtrack and otherworldly acting makes for a movie series or a movie experience, sorry, a media experience that is unlike many others and I'm sure in case you couldn't tell by now I'm a fan. Memorable parts of the script such as 'I loved him more than anyone on earth' and 'Our daily stroll to St Augustine was the measure of a good day started' said by Louis about his brother Paul,

return to you often, reminding you of the show's sweetness amid its sharpness and the many different types of love and closeness that it dotingly depicts, often focusing specifically on how this is experienced by black people and eventually black vampires. Unlike the book and film in which Louis is a white man and plantation owner, the TV show Interview with a Vampire portrays him as a dapper-dressed black creole man, Louis' brother to Paul, and Paul is portrayed as being schizophrenic.

suggested by lines of Louis such as "Paul confused the dining table with a pulpit that none of us would recognise." An in-depth discussion of the show's treatment of the topic of sanity and insanity and black madness is beyond the scope of today's talk, but related depictions and interview with the vampire include its portrayal of Paul and how the show alludes to his ability to sense and see Lestat the vampire in this image on the right with his hands on Louis' chest

and strikingly played by Sam Reid, for who and what he is. So Paul, played by Stephen G. Norfleet, is portrayed as being demonised, stigmatised. We see the intersections of racism, colourism and ableism colliding. But the show is also, we argue, hinting at very real forms of intuitiveness, connection and sensing rooted in black people's embodied ways of knowing, which are often written off as madness, insanity and the opposite of okay.

Something else that we look at as part of this work is how the notion of okayness and the language of okayness in society is pushed to placate and police people and their emotions and to sort of try and essentially suppress and repress people, particularly in relation to issues to do with oppression, be it matters that relate to settler colonialism, the genocidal actions of government and significant health disparities shaped by racial capitalism and the specifics of anti-blackness.

Born in the 1870s in New Orleans, Louis cuts a fresh and clean yet forlorn figure as he graces the screen. His powerful presence pierces through the noise of busy scenes and his rousing words convey the intensity with which love, life and death are felt.

Louis is a man turned into a vampire by Lestat de Lis in court, who is a disarming white French, and that's an important part we'll come back to, man-vampire born in 1760, and who Louis calls my murderer, my mentor, my lover and my maker. Louis, who refers to Lestat this way, can be viewed as both narrator and Nosferatu. Louis invites you in while lurking in the shadows, so close yet also so far away.

After the show's finished, his familiar and fervent drawl echoes. "It was a cold winter that year and the Stat was my coal fire. And for the first time in my life I was seen.

And I think there's a lot that could be said about ideas to do with seeing and being seen, representation, visibility, invisibility in the show and how it connects to some of what you were speaking about to do with diversity and the extent to which forms of visibility aren't preparative and the extent to which they are or aren't something that meaningfully addresses issues to do with oppression.

LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, back to the event. So these are statements that are oftentimes as delicious as they are devastating. And throughout the show, there are many lines that Louis utters about having never felt okay in an imagining world within which he exists as a black and gay man. There's a long history of the gothic being associated with blackness, yet black people and the gothic are still quite a rare pairing in pop culture.

As Andrew Keehy wrote in an article for the Black Youth Project, we deserve to see more black vampires on the screen and we argue including in the gothic setting of shows that span different eras. Yet as is highlighted in the fantastic book The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscars by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris, black vampires are not new and they're part of not only black horror history but they're part of history and pop culture media period.

This includes singer and actor Alia's portrayal of Queen Akasha in Queen of the Damned, a loose sequel to Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles. In this TV show, Interview with the Vampire, we see aspects of black gothic horror being brought to the front and centre, while departing from the sexual puritanism that was part of the Twilight film saga and other depictions of chaste and very white vampires in the 2000s and 2010s.

The show does some of this through the character of Louie, as I mentioned, and a black girl named Claudia, evocatively played by Bailey Bass in season one, as Lilliany Hales in season two.

Louis saved Claudia from a fire when she was 14 years old and upon his request she's turned into a vampire by Lestat who previously turned Louis. And we could speak a lot more about the different ways that we see the intersections of race, violence, help, harm, care and harassment play out on screen in the show. Claudia's physical appearance doesn't age as she becomes a vampire but her mind and outlet become that of an adult over time.

As the three of them form a dysfunctional domestic dynamic, the sense of sibling-like closeness between Louis and Claudia sparks discord between him and Lestat. And definitely we see the politics of race and racism play out as part of this. The reasons for such disharmony are many, including Lestat's jealousy. We see his insecurities, among other feelings, manifest through his efforts to control Louis.

A current that courses through our interview with the vampire is messages about the power of emotions, perceptions, memories and dreams. Who gets to dream? How do they dream? In what ways are people responding to those dreams? The show also focuses on the horrors of numbness and the controlling actions of individuals with the power to sedate others.

When witnessing the show's exploration of people or queer vampires living life loudly and facing the risks of doing so out in the open, you may be reminded of the challenges faced by those who are oppressed in real life. Undoubtedly, vampires in the show are far from being okay and are represented as flawed, but they're also represented as boldly refusing to submit to their societal suppression.

And in turn, such characters hold a mirror up to some of the monstrous actions of humans, while also reflecting both the fight against and freedom from certain types of oppression. Although critiques of the TV show have included claims that it sidesteps explicitly addressing issues related to racism and racial politics, something that could be discussed and potentially debated, although I think the framing of debate is often used as a guise to push some very problematic positions. But

But certainly, despite some of those critiques, I'd argue that from its start to its present season to finish, Interview with the Vampire powerfully explores and engages with how race and its intersections with age, disability, gender and sexuality shape the experiences of its on-screen characters, including forms and expressions of desire and intimacy.

And I'd go one step further and say it's precisely the nature of some of these critiques, this critique that it's not explicit and obvious, that tells me sometimes the people voicing those critiques are certainly not people who've been on the receiving end of racism or these forms of oppression, because it looks and takes many different forms. And if you're missing it, then maybe you need to reflect on whether or not you're more likely to be the oppressed or the oppressor.

So one of numerous examples of all of this in the show is the character of Claudia, as I said, whose depiction in the AMC TV series deals with themes concerning blackness, misogyny, abuse and embodiment. The audience witness Claudia grow close to the character of Madeleine. The two eventually go on to become partners in their semi-immortal lives. And as a white Jewish woman, Madeleine is the target of anti-Semitism in the show.

This is portrayed in a particularly harrowing scene which involves Claudia intervening and effectively saving Madeleine's life. As that episode represents, both Claudia and Madeleine are societally othered and oppressed in various ways that no matter their differences, reflect the racial politics and outright racism and other forms of discrimination that contribute to their societal demonisation and violent actions against them.

In addition to that, as is captured by lines such as, and it's her, a weird white lady I met by happenstance, spoken by Claudia when talking about choosing a person for herself, having always felt like a third wheel in relation to Louis and Lestat as a family. As lines such as that point to, the show, despite portraying similarities between different forms of othering, oppression, demonisation and stigmatisation, doesn't collapse or deny distinct differences between them.

In other words, whiteness and its workings and impacts in the show are acknowledged in many different ways, both directly and more tacitly. Other memorable moments related to this include Louis laughably correcting his sister by defensively saying "He ain't white, he's French" in response to her disapproving comment on Lestat being white.

Later in the show, following on from racist targeting that occurs throughout, we see Louis respond to this by putting up a sign that challenges the white supremacist messaging of public signage statements such as 'whites only'. And he does so by adding this sign that features the contrasting lines 'coloured only, no whites allowed'.

The sign being on the door of the home or the space that shares that, who is white no matter how French he might be, points to some of the ways that the show sort of addresses the blurred boundaries or lines between different perceptions of oppression, racialisation and otherness. So specifically in this scene and other parts of the show,

I would say you see Interview with the Vampire really dealing with the ways that Lestat's whiteness is always present, it's always in the room. But Louis' perception and repositioning of it shift at different points in time. And I think how the show depicts this is both meaningful and messy, even though it might not fit the preconceived notion that some people have of how race and racism shows up on screen.

So I'm going to wrap up by saying that as observed by writers S.E. Smith in 2019 and Melanie McFarland in 2022, a rise of media and literature about vampires can be symptomatic of economic downturns and accompanying desires for escapism that offer entertaining outlets for engaging existential ideas of life and death. As the AMC TV show Interview with the Vampire demonstrates, pop culture can also respond to, reflect,

or reimagine racial, gender and sexual politics, in addition to issues to do with class, ableism and many other forms of inequality and discrimination. In this show, we see these matters brought to life and death in a whole host of different ways, whilst it also addresses the very maddening nature of our world. Thank you very much, and to find out more about the work, you can check out our book. APPLAUSE

Thank you very much Francesca, that was great. Really fascinating lectures that went together incredibly well and Francesca it strikes me that you have just illustrated how pop culture has that ability to rupture as you said. I'm going to take Chair's privilege and ask one question which I hope will connect the two talks and then we'll open it up to the audience.

But I was really interested in thinking about that ability to rupture and that representation of radical diversity that you were kind of demanding or seeking, if you like, on a make. What is it that translates a programme like Interview with a Vampire into something that makes things different on the street? How can we make that work harder? And I'm thinking also, I guess, in terms of the role of the audience, you talked about critiques,

What responses do we need from this kind of content to make things change, to create the convivial multiculturalism? And perhaps also then, I wanted to go back to the institutional realities, the fact that these are made by large companies, there's a whole lot of money behind them, they're marketed in particular ways, they're still a product. And so how do we make sense of that in this mix as well? Who would like to start? Small question to start you off there.

I'll keep my answer brief. So I think I'm definitely not suggesting that the show does the work of solving or resolving or ending racism. I mean, I think the place from which we come with the work that we do, structural pressure is not going to be solved by...

commercialized activities but instead what I am interested in is the different ways that this show depicts the sorts of issues that we're speaking about and I would argue depicts it in a way that very few shows do at this moment and have done and I think it's no coincidence that it's a show that is often not on the radar of various places and conversations to do with these matters so for me it's less about saying this is Interview with a Vampire and I'm positioning it as a radical media text

is more what does it mean to see this show portrayed in this way at this point in time and to see the significant differences between the racial politics of this show relative to the films, the books. How does Louis being who he is in this

totally shift the narrative of the show, but in a way that can absolutely effectively respond to contemporary social and political matters, including the pervasiveness of anti-blackness, and also thinking about when there are conversations to do with issues related to homophobia, ableism, classism, to what extent colourism and anti-blackness is or isn't meaningfully brought to the forefront as part of that beyond the context of the screen. So I think it's...

it's that sort of reflection, reimagining, and I also don't want to lose sight of the enjoyment in this, because I think there's a risk sometimes when we speak about race, media, and society, there's a risk that

There is no space for us to acknowledge the ambivalence and tension with regards to the fact that people want to enjoy stuff on screen, but people can still be critical in their engagement with it, whilst laughing at a meme of Louis hanging that sign up and thinking about how that shift in terms of the content of the sign speaks to this longer history that is always in the room right now. Yeah, thank you, Leigh.

I've always worked to, you know, I've kind of, in my talk, I kind of lament, we talked a bit about this very briefly, but I kind of lament the way in which diversity discourse in particular has kind of, encourages us to kind of think about these terms of like accuracy, visibility, right? Whether this representation is correct or not.

whether this group are even visible. And Stuart Hall, in his famous New Ethnicities essay, something I just keep on returning to time and time again. There was that great quote in there where he, I'm paraphrasing, but he basically says, we don't need to like something just because it's black, or made by a black director.

And he's kind of at the moment, at that time, he's writing in the late 80s and he's kind of seeing this kind of explosion of amazing film and televisual work by British born black and Asian

creative, creative producers, cultural producers, whatever you want to call them. And he's kind of, you know, he's like, yes, we've kind of got to this new stage now. We don't have to reverse negative representations with positive ones. You know, we don't have to emphasize good over bad anymore. All these characters, he's referring to like My Beautiful Laundrette by Hanif Qureshi and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and, you know, these kind of films. These kind of messy characters.

I think we've kind of gone back to this kind of problem of like this reductive way of thinking about representation and I'm kind of, yeah, I'm all for doing away with it. I like to think of the way media can work is in terms of how it can make race in a way that contributes to its undoing, that kind of challenges the kind of ontological rooting of race, race thinking period. I think that's what maybe I saw you kind of express in

I just wanted to put some nice memes up, you know. And in terms of, yeah, and one of the biggest challenges, and this is what we were talking about, one of the classic traps we always fall into as people who do media and cultural studies is that we all know that the audience can, you know, kind of make meaning out of a text in kind of almost infinite and out of the ways, right? But as scholars of representation, we still can't help but try and find the one true meaning of the text or the correct meaning.

And that's not how representations work, actually. That's what I'm kind of learning. It's not about, you know, kind of necessarily just what they signify. And that's why I think kind of focusing on emotion effect can be really interesting. Because then all of a sudden, we're positioning these texts in the real world, in the social world. And the way in which kind of different marginalized groups, minoritized groups are represented end up becoming kind of like...

I don't know, something physical, kind of becoming the actual material that we can start using to kind of, yeah, assemble new identities that kind of challenge the politics of, what Homi Bhabha calls the politics of polarity, that kind of forces us into these boxes and actually does something. And that demands research, like more and more research, and it's a difficult thing to explore. It's the affective and the emotional effects, if you like, of these emotional effects.

you know what I mean, of media techs as they exist in the social world. Which brings us back to the higher education context that you mentioned at the beginning, we have to still do this stuff and we have to have the resources to do this stuff to be able to contribute to this kind of undoing as well.

Thank you very much both of you, fantastic talks. I'll open up the two questions from the floor. Thank you for your talk, very thought provocative to think about race and the cultural industries. Anarmik, I had a question about maybe because you were talking about the US and the UK and the place of the cultural industries.

And I'm thinking about the US. Of course, we're all horrified by all the fascist noise that comes from

Donald Trump, but the other side in terms of thinking about the liberal establishment and the Democrats and how, whether in the Harris or in the Clinton campaign, they relied on the cultural industry, on Hollywood stars in their failed campaigns and kind of didn't learn the lesson from the first time. And actually, like...

or bringing to the foreground that screen diversity almost as a way that is devoid of politics and as a distraction from the materiality of

the destruction that US had Germany, what it means to the world, particularly with the Harris campaign, obviously with the genocide in Gaza and the American role in it and how that was almost like shaming people to don't talk about this, don't look there, look here.

if you're not with us, you're, I don't know, from another age. So, like, is it that use of the cultural industries that also creates this backlash of diversity? And is that a difference between America and the UK in terms of the weaponization of diversity by, like, the liberal ideology in power? And Francesca, I'm a big fan of the,

the show as well. And it's a hard question to ask because I don't know if it's a spoiler, but just like about the vampire Armand, who you did not mention, but it's also very interesting to read from in your framework.

We need to talk more because I'll say briefly about that and it relates to the previous question and the point around audience is it's really interesting to see the different audience responses to the characters and actors and who people frame as the real baddie amongst the

The fact that everybody in the show, like there's nobody in the show who, you know, it goes beyond the good and bad binary, whether it's in relation to the representations of the characters themselves. So I'd love to hear more about your thoughts of that character, because I have my thoughts, but I'm particularly fascinated in terms of who people frame as being the real protagonist in the show, right? Because it's interviewed with the vampire, and Lou's the one being interviewed. But there are many people who seem committed to treating Lou as a side character, which I think...

speaks to these issues to do with racism, anti-blackness and who is sort of redeemable and recuperated and who becomes the hero even when they're bad and who is relegated to the margins even in the context of pop culture so let's talk more. Yeah I thought I really thought Taylor Swift was going to swing actually for the Harris campaign so that was so naive. Thank you for that question.

And I think it just goes to show, like, just the limits of the diversity we're seeing and that's been mobilised in the US. Just two things that got sent to me recently. One was, so apparently, so it's the Super Bowl this Sunday. And I don't know if you saw this. So basically, and you're seeing this in corporate sports all over the place, including the Premier League, there's these anti-racism, notes of racism kind of promotions going on.

And at the Super Bowl, usually for the past year or two, there has been a no racism kind of banner, kind of mowed into the lawn, if you like. And they've removed it this year. Trump's going to be in attendance at the Super Bowl. And there's this, you know, people are horrified by this. Like they're actually kind of removing this, yeah, this kind of promotion. And that's exactly what it is. It's kind of,

So I think this kind of misplaced that critique. I get it. It is symbolic and illustrative of this new moment we're in, and this kind of, as you say, this fascistic noise that's happening in, well, at least the turn to fascism. But that was never the solution anyway. It was always kind of, kind of, kind of,

Fixed within this kind of promotional cultural approach to fixing racism, right? And so it was never you know, and this is the NFL who like treated Colin Copernic You know the NFL with this the quarterback the black quarterback who took a knee who like absolutely? Vilified him and turfed him out of the game and they have the audacity to put like no to racism kind of slogans all over so

that's yeah so it was never going to work because that kind of diversity that superficial kind of form of diversity that we're seeing um in our screens that was never going to galvanize or kind of actually tackle entrenched racism anti-migrant feeling anti-muslim feeling that is in the u.s and in the uk and i think is similar to what's happening in the uk but dwell on that let's just take a couple more so one here and then one from the

Hi, my name is Nias and I study media communication and development with Shaku. I have a question and I think in part you started to answer it with your sports analogy. Well for both of you, I absolutely love the idea when you mentioned the whole issue of the commodification of diversity. And I'll probably argue that

in terms of diversity and when you spoke about the super diversity over the past few years that it sort of has existed but not in a field that has been studied very much which is in sport

I mean, Stuart Hall spoke about the fetishization of black men, especially black athletes. And if we use the U.S. as a case study, we look at U.S. sports like basketball, like American football, as far back as Jackie Robinson and all the famous black athletes who have literally been the

the backbone of American sports. And when you look at representation, you look at the power dynamics around that. The black people were the ones who brought people to the screen to watch this. Because if you know American sports, the media and the spectacle around it is just as important as the game itself. So you have that part. But when you look at the ownership

of these teams, who the coaches are, these are predominantly black, white people, right? And it is something that I think has not been really discussed as much. So I guess my question would be, especially as it relates to black representation as far back, and I mean we don't even really speak about it in terms of contemporary sports, can this be something that can be absorbed by the whole umbrella of pop culture?

And do you think that that is something that is worth exploring based on in terms of the commodification of diversity, as you put it? Yeah, thanks. Thank you. So hold on to that, and we'll take the second question.

Hi, I really enjoyed both of your talks. Francesca, I have a question for you because I also love vampires but I haven't watched that show. I'm personally interested in how when it comes to the genre of fantasy, bodies of color are almost seen as out of place and suddenly although it is fantasy, historicity is brought up

Like for example in Little Mermaid they were like well mermaids can't really be black because mermaid skin color can't be tan. So that's an interesting like bodies out of place, POC bodies and anachronistic almost. So what do you think about that? Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, obviously there's so many parallels between sports. Sport is so mediated now, corporate sport is so mediated now, that obviously the boundaries between those two fields is utterly blurred. There's absolutely remarkable parallels between the people who manage sports teams who are entrusted with managing sports teams and the people who are entrusted with...

running cultural industries, creating our diets are from the same dominant culture, again to use Stuart Hall's term. And that's my critique of diversity, is that, you know, it's kind of, it feels like it's inclusive, it feels like we're being represented, it's kind of

Yeah, it feels like a form of recognition, but talking in terms of political economy, it's a very particular group who are extracting all the profit from it, essentially. And this is why I think Cedric Robinson's notion of racial capitalism is still really valuable, where he talks about, where did I just land myself into now? I've forgotten.

what he said, but essentially saying racial capitalism works to allow the un-raced group to actually profit from the means of production and that kind of feels so relevant now and it seems Ben Carrington's work on this is really good. I think there's something particular about sport about the fetishisation of the black body in particular that happens in sport but yeah it's obviously incredible parallels

Yeah, and I think, well it sounds like you might be doing potentially some interesting work around this or you have some thoughts on doing that, so we'd like to know more. But I also think about the role of music in this. So I'm really interested in the Super Bowl halftime coming up this weekend. Who's doing it? Don't ask that question! You're living under a ton of voice in news right now. So, and this is black music, you know, black folks in sport, music, pop culture, and again, think about Stuart Hall's work. Well, it's going to be a geophic, right? So...

We'll talk, we'll talk. Think about Kendrick, think about everything, yeah. And also think about who he's been collaborating with. Yeah, I think there are fascinating conversations to do with Kendrick specifically, and the iconicity of certain black celebrities. I'm thinking about the work of people like Janessa Williams. So Janessa and I did a little bit of work thinking about Jimmy Butler and how following his sort of press conference experience

feature or press conference, I guess, experience when he had like a sweeping fringe and was sort of framed as emo for a fleeting period of time and there were all these sort of viral posts and before you knew it he was being referred to as Heat Wentz in reference to Pete Wentz from Bullet Boy and I say all of that because I think music and black folks period are at the helms of a lot of this and so I'm especially interested in how

and sports and the fetishisation of blackness and black men specifically in all these different spaces is part of the commodification of diversity and again thinking about who's benefiting from this and also who isn't positioned as like

being part of this as opposed to like popping in for a minute and popping back out. So what it means to come into the Super Bowl halftime or what it means to be sort of emo for a week when there's these larger conversations messing around, you know, who's really bringing the audience to that Super Bowl

who is listening to this music outside of featuring at a press conference and being sort of mocked for appearing emo in that moment. So, yeah, blackness in pop culture, music, sports, all the above and more, and how it's digitally mediated and remixed. And I'd...

i'm looking forward to us continuing to speak about this stuff i would just say yes yes and yes what does it mean when we're dealing with fantasy imagination and i'm thinking about the fantastic work of ruha benjamin on imagination in relation to all this and and justice and and how the limits that are placed in people's imagination again in relation to racial capitalism means we have people saying like vampires yes but black vampires like never and and erasing the history of films such as queen of the dams and again who featured in that

how black music, black musicians and black women specifically were at the centre of that film. And thinking about life and death, what it means when we reflect on that being Alia's last on-screen performance as an actor in relation to a film that has often been discussed in ways that are very dismissive of her and her work, not only in that, but as a musician, as a creative,

and as someone who, as we speak about in this book, relates to notions of baddiness as we know it in the present day, which is something that has been drawn on as part of discussions to do with metal sub-genres such as baddiecore, which is a term used almost exclusively in relation to predominantly male and all white bands. So, yeah, music, sports, film and fantasy, who gets to imagine and dream and how that is or isn't encouraged by certain institutions.

If I could just add a point to that. So there's this kind of trend of race bending, right? I think it's what they call it. So where you kind of take characters who've been historically cast or made as white and turn them black or brown or...

Or maybe you change the gender or so on. Or bring a sexuality, kind of bring sexual identities into play as well. And you know what? Like, you know, when Little Mermaid, Disney wouldn't have done that without testing it over and over again with audiences, right? So the only reason they did that was not necessarily out of a moral kind of ethical code. Maybe there was some of that discourse at play. But it would be based on a very, very kind of highly researched, calculated approach

based on a very highly research calculated economic rationale and I'm so fascinated about what's going to happen actually to Hollywood whether the kind of liberal I don't know how liberal Hollywood really is but you know certainly

not, you know, came out quite, as you suggested, quite strongly against Trump. I wonder if they're going to double down on this stuff or whether actually we're going to see what's happening with big brands, whether that's Harley Davidson or Jack Daniels rolling back their ETA. I wonder if that's going to... I don't think...

Fascinating, it's like, sort of like, you know, kind of popular culture, but I'm really interested when they turned, like, Captain America, the new film, it's like, gonna be black, it's the Falcon, right? He's a black guy, he's the new Captain America.

i'm gonna that's out in a few months so i think there's gonna be a really powerful discourse going on around there um and it seems kind of absurd to think about well you know again these films that they can feel so trivial in some respects but you know kind of this politics is happening at the level of the popular right now and so i think it needs like real like real interrogation so yeah i'm just gonna ask luam if there's anything online so we have two questions online

the first one is how does the question of authenticity fit into conversations about representation on tv can integrity be maintained for ethnic minority characters in particular without slipping into essentialist and reductionist portrayals and the second question is as a comment in the question i've been fantasized

by this phenomenon where people hate a group of people in general but love their neighbours' cohorts from this group. Do you think that the media contributes mainly to this general hatred towards a vague concept such as illegal immigrants? But then how do you explain why the hatred is eroded when it comes to real people? I kind of wrote about some of that in my book, Racing Cold, you know, in the preface to actually that, you know...

even in like a super diverse city like i use that term very ambivalently i might go into it now but um super diverse city through like london you know our understandings our attitudes towards mates more likely to be shaped by media than through our neighbors actually and our actual everyday encounters um which is i don't know if you agree with that i just feel like that's um

Really, yeah, really kind of troubling, actually, that media almost trumps everyday experience and everyday encounters. I don't think that people can relate the two. And, yeah, on the subject of authenticity, yeah, this is, again, I think this is the problem with the diversity turn in media is it kind of encourages us to think about notions of accuracy and visibility, which leads to this kind of essentialist

kind of strain which I think has re-emerged. I think, you know, Black Lives Matter was such an important moment. But I think one of the ambivalent parts of it was it kind of re-energised the particular kind of essentialist thinking about defining text by their racial identity or whatever other identity. And I think this was kind of made, intensified by social media platforms that kind of reduced discourse rather than open it up.

So, yeah, I find that a really troubling tendency. I see some amazing forms of popular culture as well, as Francesca spoke about. But nonetheless, the ways in which we talk about them still really troubles me.

Yeah, I think that second question, if I'm understanding it correctly, it makes me think of a conversation I was having with somebody in Cardiff about being black in Wales, and they've lived in Wales their whole life. I've lived in Cardiff for six years, and he was saying, you know, his neighbour's racist, and he was saying, his neighbour kept saying, but I've got a black friend. And I guess if I understand that question correctly, he was saying,

You can't love those people if you hate the group, the demographic that those people you claim to love are from, right? So I think we need to be realistic about what love means and what people claim when they say they have a friend, they have a lover, they have people in their life they love and care about, but they are racist in their actions and in what they say. And with that first question, I think it's coming back to the fact that authenticity is a construct, right? There's...

No such thing as authenticity. There are systems of value that determine when something does or doesn't feel more relatable, resonant,

realistic, relational, and that's not to take away from the fact that certainly there's a huge difference between perhaps a media depiction that is created by people who are part of the social group who are depicted, but that's also not to suggest that everything created by someone who has an experience, let's say, as a black person is going to be a depiction that resonates with all black folks, and it's going to be a depiction that's not without its issues.

So I think doing away, as we've sort of been coming back to, with doing away with the focus on authenticity and pushing back against essentialist notions of, you know, this is what it looks like to be a person with this experience, but also staying critical and alert to times when there are just

clearly oppressive depictions and narratives and news coverage and media that's out there that has to be challenged but I think the best way to challenge that never involves focusing on the lens of authenticity and I think speaking more about structural power dynamics and speaking about the specifics of oppression what oppression is at work is a more useful starting point. Thank you we've got time for two three more questions let's take a

Thank you. This question relates to the first part of the lecture. So, despite the rise of diversity over the last 15-20 years, the media and experts frequently discuss weak leadership or leadership crisis. How do you explain this contradiction

And to what extent might these narratives be shaped by racial or cultural biases? Sorry, what was that? Leadership. Leadership, yeah. Leadership, quite. Thank you. And there's a question just down here. Hi, I've got two brief questions for both of you. The first one is, I mean, I want to say I love both your talks and I'm also a big fan of Interview with the Vampire and...

I'm interested in here a defense of media but saying we've somehow overlooked the popular nature of popular politics. So I want to refer to Olufemi Taiwo's critique of elite capture and to argue that in mirroring sort of the Obama phenomenon, the black president, a lot of the politicians that we see today are simply ventriloquizing the far right, the brown and black politicians.

and that that is doing a hundred times more damage in the US and elsewhere in other countries in France too that it's doing much more damage than any of these popular culture diversity initiatives could ever do and the flip side of that is I want to make a case that actually there is something about imagination and seeing yourself on screen which is not vacuous and empty diversity.

which is really, really important for small children, for queer children, for queer teenagers, for those of us growing up in villages where there are very few other black and brown people and so on and so forth. So sort of both of those questions for you both. Fantastic, thank you. And we'll just take one more and then we'll answer.

Thank you, I really enjoyed both of your talks and I just wanted to know if you thought it would have been possible for us to get to this level of representation to where it is now in popular culture without having token characters in media and TV shows and if so how would you envision a different route to establishing proper representation with like behind and in front of the camera?

I'm sorry, I didn't quite get the first question. Can we hear the first question again? Sorry, if you can... It's about leadership. Note it down faster. Yeah, the question is, despite the rise of diversity over the last 15, 20 years, right, so we frequently hear from the media and experts about weak leadership or leadership crisis, right? Yeah.

So the question is, how do we explain this contradiction? And to what extent might this narrative be shaped by racial or cultural biases? Are you talking about how...

the way in which ETI has been blamed for weak links. In the beginning of your lecture, you've said that there is a lot of diversity in the media and the leadership in many positions in the society, in positions of power. So I'm connecting that with the

Oh, right. So the way in which Black Brown... The leadership crisis that we hear quite often in the media. Right. How do these things connect and how do you explain this contradiction? Yeah, I think... As a sociologist. Yeah. So I think that kind of relates to what Shakan Dula was saying about...

how popular politicians are doing way more damage than popular culture right now and definitely have more clout i think um joe litter's written about this kind of recently um piece of like model minority discourse right that's um which i haven't read yet i mean it kind of shows limitation representational politics i think that's what it does you know and in the uk i mean it's absolutely it's absolutely

fascinating, troubling how it was kind of black Asian kind of Tory politicians who employed horrendous far-right rhetoric. You know, I would say there's a dialogue, sociologically speaking, as a sociologist, I would say there was a direct causation between the words of Badenoch and Sweller-Baveman to what happened over the summer.

So, yeah, I think this is... And that's why I think popular culture really... Why we need to be studying more than ever now, because this is where the terrain of politics is happening. So, yeah, I take that point on board, Shaku, but also... Yeah, and also I want to say that I understand that what we see on our screens is important. I don't know if you saw, but a lot of the stuff I showed on my slideshow were definitely texts that mean something to me and, you know, kind of...

entertain me but also kind of do other things as well. I kind of produce new perspectives, insights and as a parent of two children, I love CBeebies. You know, it's really and it's been absolutely, you know, so valuable and such a beautiful thing and it's children's television that does diversity better than anyone incidentally. And just to go back to that final question,

Yeah, well, like I said, I think for me, I guess this is the hook, and I'm sorry, Francesca, I'll pass on, but I want to stop talking, I think I just want to enable people from minoritised groups to tell the stories in the way they want to tell them, whatever they want to be, whether it's an expose of racism, or whether it's a vampire versus werewolf movie.

I remember speaking to an Asian author and he was just lamenting. He was like, steered into producing particular kind of books. He said, "I just want to write shit science fiction." And that's the kind of creative freedom I want to enable in everyone. And I want a media system that enables people to do shit science fiction. I mean, it's still got to be good, right? It needs to resonate. - By his standards. - Yeah, well, yeah. Okay, here we go. But that's kind of what I want to see. And that...

This is what our new book's about, Anti-Racist Media Manifesto, is trying to imagine what a more radical anti-racist media would actually look like. And that involves a lot of change of political economy, as well as an emphasis on craft and the stories that we tell. Sorry, Francesca. Francesca?

I was just going to say, yeah, it's always the politics of pop culture and the pop culture politics. They're often closer together than both cares to admit. And I think in particular, a lot of the conversations in recent times in the media, public and political spheres, are an EDI, DEI, sometimes gloss over the fact that people who are incensed, understandably, about the rollback, a term that often undermines the significance of what we're seeing, the segregationist nature of it. But sometimes people incensed about that

are people who haven't said anything about genocide. They haven't spoken about Palestine, they haven't spoken about Congo, they haven't spoken about Sudan. So absolutely all of this at once because we see the commodification of EDI, DEI to push nationalism, to push US imperialism, to push colonialism. So it's always about looking at both at the same time. And yeah, I think your point around also the meaningfulness for some people

of these depictions absolutely resonates and I imagine some of what I said conveys the meaningfulness of that show for me. So again, it's sitting with all of it, saying it's messy, it's meaningful and we can be critical, creative and also find forms of pleasure whilst also thinking carefully about who's still in pain and to what extent what we are or aren't enjoying may be part of that.

I would just finish by saying it's always more than representation matters full stop. I think it's always representation matters question mark. And on that question mark note, will you please join me in thanking both of you. Fantastic talk. So important. Really brilliant.

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