Consuming Race: Exploring Meanings and Identities Through Creative Consumption

Module aims

This module explores how the meanings of race are made and remade in acts of creative consumption. By consuming race we make sense of other groups and cultures, communicate our own identities, express needs and desires, and discover new ways of thinking and being. Ranging across the terrain of popular culture, and finding race in some unusual and unexpected places, this module offers fresh and innovative ways of thinking about the centrality of race to our lives.

Module aims

This module is designed to:

1. Provide an introduction to debates around consumption in contemporary race theory.

2. Interrogate the production and reproduction of racial meanings in everyday practices of consumption.

3. Develop an understanding of racial consumption as a performative practice that produces knowledge about ourselves and others.

4. Develop an understanding of the power relations involved in acts of racial consumption, and the intrinsic relationship between racial meanings other categories of social identity.

5. Provide students with the conceptual tools to undertake detailed critical analyses of a range of cultural texts.

6. Give students the opportunity to develop a range of skills in writing, critical thinking, creative analysis, independent study, time planning and management, and the appropriate use of sociological resources.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, the successful student is expected to be able to:

1. Demonstrate knowledge of contemporary debates in the study of race and consumption.

2. Describe and critically evaluate how racial meanings are inscribed in practices of consumption, with an attentiveness to the power relations involved in such practices.

3. Be able to make connections between the generation of racial meanings and other categories of social identity.

4. Select and apply appropriate methods in researching and analysing particular cultural texts.

5. Undertake close and detailed analyses of cultural texts with an attentiveness to the wider contexts in which they circulate.

6. Demonstrate evidence of transferrable skills, including effective writing, critical thinking, creative analysis, independent study, time planning and management, and appropriate use of sociological resources.

How to pass this module

Attendance is expected at all lectures and seminars, and will be necessary for the successful completion of this module.

Weekly set readings are available in the form of e-readings or library e-books, and must be completed in advance of the relevant seminar class. Readings are accompanied by questions designed to help you focus your reading, and which will be discussed in class.

Learning outcomes

Set readings are available alongside further recommended texts via this module’s online reading list.

Other relevant information, including videos, lecture slides and handouts will be uploaded to the Blackboard site.

Leave yourself plenty of time for the completion of assignments. Full instructions on assignments are given towards the end of this module handbook.

Consult the sociology ‘red book’ for details of how to present your essays. Work that  is incorrectly referenced or presented will be marked down as a matter of course. Check your emails and the Blackboard site for this module on a regular basis. Information on Blackboard may supercede instructions in this handbook. Consuming race is a level six module. A greater degree of sophistication is expected than at levels four and five.

Reading questions:

Q1: what does Hall mean when he writes ‘“the West” is a historical, not a geographical, construct’ (p. 277)

Q2: how did a ‘Western’ identity get defined (pp. 278-80)? Can you think of an example of a ‘Western’ characteristic and how/why this has come about?

Q3: according to Foucault, what is the difference between ‘ideology’ and ‘discourse’(pp. 292-5)?

Reading questions:

Q1: Nadeem writes: ‘Cultural hegemony is thus not simply imposed; rather it is lived and acted out in unpredictable ways’ (p. 229). What is useful about the concept of ‘mimetic desire’?

Q2: In the TV show ‘we, the people’, what qualities get attributed to dark skin, resulting in the ’fetishisation of dark people’ (pp. 234-5)

Q3: List some of the values and characteristics that in Nadeem’s analysis come be associated with ‘fairness’.

Reading questions:

Q1: What are the characteristics of the ’tropical exotic’ (pp. 116-180)?

Q2: What is the symbolic status of the ‘promontory witness’ (pp. 180-3)?

Q3: Why are ‘appropriative performances’ about the exercise of power (pp. 183-7)?

Lecture topics:

This week we look at the role of travel and tourism in the construction, representation and consumption of ‘authentic’ cultures, and consider how these might be linked to last week’s discussions of neo-imperialism and orientalism. The exoticization of indigenous cultures by the tourist or traveller raises questions as to the nature of the relationship between the ‘host’ and ‘guest’ – the extent to which groups are subject to, or agents of, the ‘tourist gaze’.

Seminar topics:

To what extent is culture a tourist commodity? What positive effects can tourism

have on local communities? Is ‘the traveller’ (e.g. backpacker, adventurer) different

from ‘the tourist’? Is tourism a new form of cultural imperialism? Is your own

relationship with a diasporic ‘home’ informed by the tourist gaze?

Reading questions:

Q1. What does Hall mean by the idea of heritage as ‘governmentality’ (p. 24)?

Q2. What does hall mean when writes that we ‘should think of The Heritage as a discursive practice’ (p. 25)?

Q3. How does Hall suggest mainstream versions of heritage might ‘rewrite the margins into the centre’ (p.31)?

Lecture topics:

The stories we tell about the past are important reminders of who we are, socially, culturally, politically, and as individuals. Yet the search for roots and traces of national or cultural ‘belonging’ often lead to exclusive and essentialist articulations of  identity which marginalise the influence and presence of certain groups and cultures. Today we will consider ways in which different forms of cultural and national heritage  can both promote and combat processes of marginalisation and cultural exclusion, prompting the question: whose stories are being told, how and why?