‘Beards,scarves,halal meat,terrorists,forced marriage’: television industries and the production of ‘race’

Multiculturalism and the political economy of public service broadcasting

Simply put, Asian filmmakers who make stories about Asian lives for terrestrial television are almost exclusively broadcast by the BBC and Channel 4. It is no coincidence that these channels are both public service broadcasters, operating within public service remits which commit them to broadcasting ‘minority-interest’ programmes. According to the Royal Charter (DCMS, 2006), in addition to ‘sustaining citizenship and civil society’, the BBC has an obligation to represent ‘The UK, its nations, regions and communities’. Channel 4 is mostly self-funded and reliant on advertising revenue, but nonetheless has a similar remit to appeal ‘to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society’ (Houses of Parliament, 2003). ‘Asian programming’ of course can be found elsewhere. With the proliferation of new digital channels there has been an ever-increasing number of Asian channels available on cable and satellite networks, often catering for specific communities (e.g. Punjabi or Bengali), broadcasting programmes syndicated from the Indian sub-continent. But, for the purposes of this article, I choose to focus on terrestrial television, for its potential in providing a progressive ‘multicultural public sphere’ (Malik, 2008a: 344), and as an illustration of a tension between public service ideals (tied to ideas about citizenship, national identity and cultural diversity) and market forces. How British Asians working in the television industries negotiate this tension is one of the key themes of this article.

Even though public service broadcasting in theory should be insulated from the market, the effects of the overarching trend in the cultural industries towards deregulation and marketization have been felt within the industry in a profound way (Hesmondhalgh, 2007). The BBC in particular has found itself under increasing commercial pressure to generate consistently high ratings in order to justify its relevance, and therefore the licence fee. This has been compounded by the most recent Royal Charter, where borrowing limits were restricted to almost half of what the BBC were hoping to receive (Shepherd, 2007). As such, the BBC’s focus has drifted towards more populist offerings rather than developing the sort of programming that is beyond the private sector (Born, 2004: 471–82). Similarly, Channel 4 has also felt intensifying commercial forces, in this instance against the backdrop of falling advertising revenue – to the extent that in recent times it has argued that it should receive a portion of the licence fee in order to remain competitive (Robinson, 2005). As with the BBC, the channel’s output has also seen a shift from offering programmes geared specifically towards minority audiences to commercially successful global formats, and US imports in particular, that are considered to guarantee big ratings (Fanthome, 2006; Malik, 2008a).

The increasingly competitive climate within which public service broadcasters are forced to operate has inevitably had an impact on the minorities such channels are supposed to serve – not least British Asian producers and directors. As Sarita Malik (2008a: 346) observes, against the backdrop of increasing competition, lighter touch regulation and technological advances, there has been a concurrent change in the way that public service broadcasters now approach ‘minority-interest’ programming. We have seen the adoption of a new approach, shifting from one focused upon catering for the specific needs of particular neglected and distinct audiences, to a strategy that aims to integrate minorities into mainstream programming. A Pact report (Pollard et al., 2004) on ‘minority ethnic-led’ independent television companies similarly highlights the industry’s move ‘towards mainstreaming cultural diversity’ (2004: 18), following a rationale ‘that mainstream and minority tastes are no longer divided’ (2004: 30). The closure of Channel 4’s Multicultural Programmes Department, the BBC’s Asian Programme Unit and the almost-closure of BBC radio’s Asian Network, all in the past decade, is indicative of this trend. Malik in fact outlines a ‘discursive turn’ (2008a: 346) in the way that pubic service broadcasters – and Channel 4 in particular – discuss race politics, where a particular quantitative and somewhat ‘politically correct’ version of ‘multiculturalism’ has been replaced with a broader (more vague) notion of ‘cultural diversity’ within which ethnic diversity is just one component (2008a: 346). The outcome of this shift can indeed be seen to be an increase in representations of minorities in mainstream programmes (though Malik argues that this is not necessarily due to the implementation of a diversity agenda, but rather more to do with the popularity, and subsequent ubiquitousness, of lifestyle programmes dependent on a diversity of social and cultural types), but it has also meant the demise of specialist programming, and the ability to tackle what are considered ‘niche’ stories in any kind of depth.

The article’s intention is not to directly debate whether the shift from ‘minority’ to mainstream programming is a positive thing or not for race relations. My aim is to address a gap that I believe is present in Malik’s otherwise excellent account. Malik outlines parallel changes in both the political economy of the television industry and the way in which public service broadcasters approach issues of multiculturalism and cultural diversity. But while from reading Malik’s analysis we understand that these twin trends are probably linked, we have little sense of how they actually connect. The key issue that needs further elaboration is how structural changes in broadcasting, and the ‘discursive turn’ in the (multi)cultural policies of public service broadcasters, overlap and intersect, and affect the work of black and Asian people working in television. That is, how do Asian programme-makers in particular, feel the effects of increasing marketization and deregulation (or as Hesmondhlagh, 2007, prefers, ‘re-regulation), and the concomitant ‘mainstreaming of cultural diversity’ upon their creative practice, and what are the implications of this for the politics of representation? This I believe is the crux of the issue and unpacking it will help us truly understand the persistence of hegemonic and reductive representations of Asianness and ‘race’ in television, going beyond the rather simplistic, numbers-based policy analysis (Malik, 2008b) that defines the problem in terms of recruitment and human resources alone.

Chicken tikka wraps: sensationalism and cultural dilution

The case I am about to present is taken from a broader ethnographic study of British Asian cultural production in three cultural industries – publishing, theatre and television. The research consisted of interviews with over 50, mostly Asian cultural producers and creative managers, and participant observation conducted over a year to see how respondents ‘perceive and imagine the world in which they are working’ (Negus, 1999: 11). The aim was to consider the ways in which the actions of British Asian symbol creators and cultural intermediaries at the ‘editorial’ stage of production (Garnham, 1990), and their exegeses on the experience of cultural production, produce knowledges about how the cultural industries work to reproduce racial and ethnic stereotype.

Illustrating the above account, the issue of the shift from niche interest to mainstream programming and the implications this has for the kind of programmes they can make was a key theme in my interviews with British Asians working in television, whether they were freelance directors or in executive roles. Respondents would explain how programmes could no longer target just ‘niche’ or minority audiences. Rather, they described how their ideas would need to be seen as having mainstream appeal in order to get commissioned. The following quote from an Asian freelance producer/director who had recently completed a film for Channel 4, was typical in this respect:

I think maybe the difference between TV documentary and other craft-forms like plays, books, films, is that TV is a mass medium and it’s a mass appeal medium so it has to be this catch-all thing. And we’ve long since stopped making films for niche audiences; the whole idea is to pull in as many people as you can.

Here the respondent rationalizes the mainstreaming of cultural diversity in terms of the status of terrestrial television in particular as a ‘mass appeal medium’, dealing in mass audiences (though it is not clear what has changed since broadcasting has always been a form of mass communication). The respondent’s notion that documentaries have to be a ‘catch-all thing’ hints at the implications this has for narrative and the stories Asians can tell about themselves.

For some, the emphasis on targeting the mainstream constitutes a politics of recognition, a way of re-addressing the marginalization of minorities in both the media and society as a whole. This was the view of an Asian executive producer I interviewed, speaking of the BBC’s ‘British Asian flagship’ series Desi DNA – a BBC2 series produced by the Asian Programming Unit that covers British Asian art, culture and entertainment from a youth perspective. The respondent in this case explained the incorporation of niche-interest subjects into mainstream programming in terms of public service values, providing a platform for British Asians to share their experiences and worldviews with the British public at large:

I think that, that is the role of public service broadcasting, to introduce the mainstream community to our world if you like. So that was kind of the idea of the programme [Desi DNA].[…] And whatever criticism Desi … might get, it is the only programme of its kind. There’s no other broadcaster – including Channel 4 – who are doing a dedicated British Asian flagship series and committing themselves to it. So it’s quite a big responsibility to get right. And you’re never going to keep everyone happy.… And that’s always a tricky balance where the remit is to service your Asian community, but I think those days are gone, it’s not an Asian-only channel – we’re not Zee TV, we’re on BBC 2. There are more non-Asians watching this programme then Asians. So we have a responsibility to make programmes that appeal to them, that can’t be insular, but is also outward thinking.

In this quote the respondent explains not just the commercial necessity but also the political importance of targeting an audience beyond an Asian one. The comment again reflects the discursive turn that Sarita Malik highlights, of how those days of servicing a particular audience are now gone. There is also an allusion to how this has arisen out of technological developments and the rise in satellite television and specialist channels (such as Indian satellite broadcaster Zee TV) that are seen as taking care of specific minority needs. Again, my intention here is not to interrogate whether such reasoning is based upon valid assumptions. What is of specific interest is how the respondent highlights the task of negotiating the tricky balance between widening a programme’s appeal while not alienating the core audience. The question of how Asians are forced to negotiate this tension, and the impact of changes in the television industries and cultural production, subsequently become critical issues.

It is this article’s contention in fact, that the demand placed on British Asian filmmakers to tailor their stories of Asian lives for the so-called mainstream audience has certain reductive consequences for their narratives and the politics of representation. In the introduction I outline the ways in which representations of Asians in the media are often reduced to stereotype, either highly exotic, Bollywood-esque images of South Asian popular culture or sensationalist representations of abhorrent cultural practices (which in current times are almost exclusively associated with Islam). I argue that the turn towards ‘mainstreaming cultural diversity’, while no doubt increasing the visibility of blacks and Asians on prime-time television, has actually had little impact on the quality of representations, and has in fact has created the conditions that allow reductive, Orientalist effects to be produced.

A pressure to conform to mainstream, white sensibilities produces two reductive epistemological effects in particular. The first regards the issue of sensationalism. Speaking of the shift towards mainstream programming, an independent director/producer discussed the negative repercussions that such a change has had for documentary making:

Serious programming about serious issues, it’s very hard to get that on across the board […] there will be less. There will be more dramatic stories that get made, but more subtle issues will not get reflected. And I do think there is a problem in British media increasingly in the last few years, Channel 4 in particular seems to be stuck in this mode of representing British Muslims – so much emphasis on the terrorism question, on fanaticism – that is what they are interested in. And yes it is an important issue but it is by no means the most important issue in the whole.… I think if you were to look at Channel 4 […] a lot of the documentary output related to Asian people, a lot of it is related to terrorism. Which I think is very sad.

Again, this was a common narrative in my interviews, particularly the critique of Channel 4 and its apparent (negative) preoccupation with Islam – a topic I shall return to. Another Asian freelance director/producer described to me two instances when she was approached by BBC commissioners to make documentaries about the British Asian community, one about caste prejudice, the other about skin lightening – what she described as ‘sensationalist stories’ that she felt ‘perpetuated false stereotypes’ (she turned both of them down). From these instances we see how the particular commercial climate of the television industry is seen as having adverse effects upon the politics of representation, where, according to the first respondent in particular, difficult issues of ‘race’, ethnicity and religion are constructed in reductive terms that conceal the complex and subtle circumstances underlying the cultural phenomena being explored.

The rise in sensationalist news and current affairs is an obvious effect of the increasing commercialization of broadcast television, and indeed has been remarked upon elsewhere (Bourdieu, 1998; Grabe et al., 2001; Sparks and Tulloch, 2000). But on the reverse side of the coin we find instances when cultural producers describe feeling how they have to dilute their stories of Asianness in order to get them commissioned. I refer here to the watering down of the more intense and uncomfortable aromas of difference embodied in Asian-made cultural objects, in order to make them more palatable to a so-called mainstream (white) audience. This was made particularly evident in discussions of the popular BBC cookery show, Indian Food Made Easy presented by Anjum Anand (often referred to as the ‘Asian Nigella Lawson’), which was being aired at the time of the fieldwork. In an interview with then Channel 4 Head of Religion Aaqil Ahmed, he criticizes Desi DNA for being too niche and specialist, but hails Indian Food Made Easy for providing the perfect illustration of how to create British Asian-driven narratives for prime-time viewing, As he states: ‘it’s mainstream enough for a wide-enough audience and it’s subject matter that everyone is going to be interested in’. However, an Asian respondent involved on the show had certain misgivings over the finished product and a different idea about why the series proved so successful:

[Indian Food Made Easy] is kind of hailed as one of those successes in terms of finding talent that crosses-over. The irony is, I don’t know what your Asian friends think about it but all my Asian friends thought it was one of the most diluted shows on the planet! Who eats chicken tikka wraps? It is curry for middle-class, middle-England. That’s what it is.

Ethnic cuisine as representing a celebratory yet superficial form of multiculturalism has also been remarked upon elsewhere (Kundnani, 2004; Parker, 2000), but here we find an indication of how this is produced through a commercial rationale. In this comment, the respondent refers to ‘dilution’ as the sanitization of aesthetics (or more problematically perhaps, the ‘authentic’) in order to broaden the text’s mainstream appeal. His sense of ‘crossing-over’ into the mainstream depends on targeting ‘middle-class, middle-England’, which necessitates the dilution of the content. The respondent’s disbelief at Andand’s recipe for ‘chicken tikka wraps’ constitutes a wider frustration with how, in television production, certain more diluted representations of Asianness (or indeed cultural hybridity) are constructed for the centre, stripping away any politics, in this case, the respondent’s desire to reflect the ‘true’ experience of British Asian culture. The appearance of chicken tikka wraps on prime-time television thus becomes the quintessential commodified hybrid moment (Hutnyk, 2000) – a more palatable form of Asianness modified especially for white, bourgeois tastes.

In contrast to a process of sensationalism, what we have in this instance is the production of a particular softly exoticized, or even a banal form of difference that, to paraphrase bell hooks (1992: 21), consists of just enough spice ‘to liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture’. Such a theme is explicitly addressed in an exchange with an Asian respondent who works in development at one of the BBC’s regional centres. Here the subject was how she tailored programme concepts based around Asian-centred narratives in order to improve their chance of getting commissioned:

To be honest, making sure our talent is obviously diverse in background but not so in-your-face … for instance, at the moment I have three people and they are all second generation. They look like models, that’s the way it is. They don’t have anything obviously racial or ethnic in them other than the colour of their skin, so the way they enunciate, the way that they behave, their interests, you know the way that they are, is very British, it’s very much like everybody else. I’d be very wary of giving an idea where somebody is wearing a sari and talking, if I am honest … actually, that would make hilarious television, having someone wearing a sari and talking about gardening in your front garden! That would be hilarious! Of course that would be the kind of thing I would be worried about. I would want to make sure they look, very polished, doesn’t look so in-your-face ethnic.

In this revealing comment, the respondent admits how developing a concept or talent involves a process of cultural dilution, in order to make a subject less ‘niche’ and more ‘mainstream’. This is made explicit in her attempts to manage the image of her presenters, so they do not look ‘so in-your-face ethnic’. This was a tongue-in-cheek comment, but underlying it is a very serious point about polishing the Other – literally wiping away dirty, offensive ethnic signifiers. Furthermore, it is interesting to note how the humour she finds in the image of an Indian woman in a sari presenting a show about gardening (supposedly the quintessential English pastime), is derived from it being a rather more surprising, convivial and in fact, unsettling form of hybridity – certainly more subversive than chicken tikka wraps. Yet, in the commercial climate of television, the idea of a host of a gardening show dressed in a sari would be the kind of thing she’d ‘be worried about’ presenting to commissioners, based on what she understands as their expectations about which programmes they would want to produce (and what their audience would like). What we also get in this quote is a suggestion of how the cultures of production in broadcasting steer the work of Asian cultural producers into creating reductive representations of Asianess. This is to be explored in more depth in the section that follows, where I zoom in further and focus on cultures of production.

Channel 4 and making some noise

In 2007 I attended a Channel 4 ‘networking and learning’ event hosted by the channel’s Diversity Unit, held specifically for up-and-coming black and Asian producers/directors/writers. The event involved a panel, consisting of Angela Jain (Head of E4 and one of the few Asian executives working in mainstream television), two other Channel 4 executives and a commissioner at the independent television company Maverick Productions. In addition to giving general advice about progressing in the industry, the panel provided specific details about the kind of programmes they were looking to commission for the upcoming season. The idea was that attendees would get a flavour of what commissioners were looking for, and would therefore tailor their ideas to the channel’s needs, thus improving their chances of getting commissioned.

What struck me about the event was how the panellists narrated the process of commissioning without any mention of ‘race’, despite the theme of the event. When discussing what kind of programmes they were looking to commission, it effectively came down to ‘good ideas’. Typical comments included ‘good ideas energetically presented’, ‘If it’s a good idea it will come through’ and ‘ideas have to be really grabby’. There was an emphasis on immediacy, where such ‘good ideas’ were dependent on being pitched in a succinct, concise manner in order to get commissioned. As the commissioner of documentaries at Maverick Productions stated: ‘being able to get hold of something very fast is very important. And if you can’t genuinely summarize your idea in one line it probably isn’t ready to be pitched.’ The Channel 4 commissioner of news and current affairs added: ‘If you can write it on a t-shirt you probably have a very good idea.’

The reason for opening this section with this scene is to draw attention to the normative terms in which commissioning in television gets narrated. I argue that describing the process of commissioning in apparently neutral language (for example, the need for a ‘good story’) hides the underlying commercial logic that determines what gets commissioned, informed (though not determined) by the particular social and cultural background and worldview of commissioners. That is not to imply that there is a conspiracy behind what stories executives decide to commission. But the discourse of ‘good ideas’ and ‘one-liners’ has a specific epistemological effect with regard to British Asian-made texts. It is precisely through such normative language, and the imagined autonomy of commissioning practices (after all, if it is a good idea, it will succeed) that I argue the counter-narratives of difference are governed. The way in which decisions in cultural production are rationalized is also the process by which reductive, racializing processes are enacted unseen. Thus in this section I focus on the micro-processes of commissioning, to shed more light on how the narratives of British Asians are constrained by these cultures of production.

The distinctiveness of the cultural commodity is that its use value is based on novelty and difference. Therefore success is impossible to predict and, consequently, its production is characterized as high risk (Garnham, 1990; Hesmondhalgh, 2007). While the response has been the increasing rationalization of cultural production – intensified by the growing shift towards neoliberal market models (Hesmondhalgh, 2007) – what was immediately apparent in respondents’ reflections on commissioning in television was that it was not a scientific process. Rather, it depended upon the personalities and values of commissioning editors and executive producers and their perception of what programmes best fit the channels’ brand. This is suggested in the following comment from Channel 4’s Head of Religion, Aaqil Ahmed:

The thing is you shouldn’t be in a situation where you want to make things that are not going to work. Does that make sense? You kind of like get a flavour of it, and you kind of understand what’s supposed to work and what’s not supposed to work. And we do talk a lot; you talk to your colleagues to understand.

What is made evident in this quote is the human aspect to commissioning. Narratives of getting a ‘flavour’ of what works, through talking to colleagues, stress the socio-cultural dimension to what are ultimately economic decisions (that is, what products are produced and sold). Similarly a BBC executive producer I spoke to makes a similar point, emphasizing that getting a programme commissioned is a process of ‘second-guessing the commissioner, who in turn is second-guessing the controller, who in turn is second-guessing the audience and the BBC Trust’. Echoing Keith Negus’s challenge to deterministic accounts of the production of culture, such narratives stress the unpredictability of cultural production and how economic processes occur through the ‘messy, informal world of human actions’ (1997: 94).

Yet, there is a risk that the emphasis on individual agency can underplay the influence of larger forces. Rather, the nature of cultural work occurs as a dynamic between the agent’s own vision and values, and certain ‘invisible’ expectations from above. This is suggested in the following comment from the respondent quoted earlier who works in programme development at the BBC:

It’s funny, people think my job sounds great, but it’s very pragmatic, my job. It’s very much tailoring. I have my creative abilities, which are completely free, blue skies, but now I know the system so well, that I know how to tailor it to make it like what they want. Not what I want or what I think the audience wants […] but it’s almost like I know how to tailor it to give what they want. So it doesn’t become a creative process, it becomes very much like I am a supplier and this is what I supply. And you have to be very tactical; it becomes a very tactical job.

In this comment, the respondent alludes to how organizational culture stifles her creativity, to the extent that she compares her role to that of a wholesale supplier. While commissioning is an unpredictable, unscientific process, there is nonetheless a trend towards standardization and rationalization which attempts to extract maximum efficiency from cultural work. Thus, development work may have an aura of creative freedom and ‘blue skies’ thinking but, according to this comment, this freedom is constrained through the particular culture of production, which is such that she intuitively knows how ideas must be ‘tailored’ in order to appeal to certain commissioners and controllers (rather than the audience). This suggests larger forces at play than a single messy layer of human mediations. The danger with Negus’s argument is that it can suggest that economic actions occur randomly, based on the whims of the individual. Yet this account paints a more complex picture, where the autonomy of the creative worker (and in turn, her ability to produce unsettling/enlightening forms of multiculture) is mediated through cultures of production, which in turn are determined by an increasingly commercial broadcast landscape. It is the invisible expectations of what Nikolas Rose (1999: 5) calls ‘macro-actors’, and the political economy of broadcasting, that steers cultural output in particular ways.

Thinking through the implications of this upon the politics of representation, I want to draw from one further illustration of the way in which the conditions of cultural production can steer the work of Asians into problematic directions, using a brief case study on Channel 4 and its depictions of Asian Muslims in particular. As alluded to earlier, a common narrative from respondents working in television was how Channel 4 in particular has a tendency to produce sensationalist representations of Muslims. As part of this research I interviewed Aaqil Ahmed who, as noted, was at the time of the interview Head of Religion at Channel 4 and responsible for the commissioning of all religious and ‘multicultural’ programming. Aaqil is a British-born Pakistani, who during the course of our interview would express defiant pride over his working-class roots and lack of Oxbridge education (one assumes in contrast to his colleagues). The purpose of the interview was to see how Aaqil approaches commissioning programmes that depict Asian communities and religions in particular. And we see in his account of his particular approach to commissioning a clearer view of how narratives of the British Asian, and the Muslim experience in particular, come to be racialized and, indeed, sensationalized in very specific ways.

Fitting with the shift in diversity policy outlined in this article, Aaqil Ahmed’s approach to commissioning is based upon a desire to make mainstream religious programming, that is, programmes about religion that are broadcast in prime time. The problem is that the subject of religion is not traditionally seen as a huge ratings driver. And, as I suggested earlier, against the backdrop of falling advertising revenues, channels such as Channel 4 can no longer afford to target niches – especially at prime time. As such Ahmed’s particular strategy was to place less emphasis on ratings and to concentrate on generating ‘noise’ – that is press coverage. As he states:

From my point of view, basically we’re not going to get out and out huge ratings as much as we can try, so we do definitely want the programme to be noticed. We want it to get written about, we want it to win awards. We want it to have some noise, as they say.

Thus for Ahmed, since programmes on religion are not going to beat Eastenders in the ratings war, the next best thing is to generate reviews and news stories, and possibly awards, that would in turn provide recognition for the channel, the department and himself.

Through a quick scan of some of the programmes Ahmed has commissioned we can see exactly how he has attempted to make ‘some noise’. In his time as Head of Television he commissioned such programmes as Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber, The Cult of the Suicide Bomber, Women Only Jihad, The Fundamentalist, The Road to Guantanamo, Putting the ‘Fun’ in Fundamental. This is obviously a very selective list, and I would stress that I am not necessarily saying that these subjects were crudely or insensitively dealt with. Nonetheless, we get a sense of how Ahmed has attempted to generate press coverage through provocative subject matter (or indeed, ‘grabby ideas’) that tends to reinforce rather than challenge a post-9/11 racialized agenda. With regard to the politics of representation, I argue that the way in which such programmes are presented and aestheticized (particularly in their titles) for the specific purpose of generating noise produces deeply problematic, sensationalist effects. As stated Channel 4 came in for much criticism in my interviews, and in the public domain at large, for its stereotypical, reductive representations of Islam in particular. As a Muslim journalist put it, speaking on Channel 4’s TV Show: ⁴

The fact is we don’t see a diversity of real Muslim experience. The fact is what we see is categorized into beards, scarves, halal meat, terrorists, forced marriage.

Regardless of how sensitively these subjects are investigated, there was a sense that such programmes – and in particular their titles – constitute a discursive formation that perpetuates a particular racist stereotype of Islam as abhorrent and absolutely, irreconcilably different from Western cultural practices. Such stories may generate a lot of ‘noise’, but it is a noise with unruly feedback in terms of the negative representation of Islam and Asians in the UK.

We see then how it is the processes of cultural production that produces problematic effects for Asian practitioners. Negative representations of race are not always determined at the point of conception – the films I have referred to could have been made by filmmakers who genuinely felt that they were challenging a particular regressive understanding of Islam and Asian Muslims. Rather it is standardized, rationalized commissioning process (where if you are not going to get the ratings, at least make some noise), compounded by increasingly commercialized cultures of production, where representations of Asianness are reduced to stereotype. Moreover, I argue that the decisions and practices that produce these effects are not simply the outcome of racial prejudice or bourgeois values of the particular social class who tend to dominate the upper echelons of the cultural industries – not least since in the case study I just presented the subject is a British Asian Muslim with working-class roots. But, critically, the decisions and strategies regarding the commissioning and production of films and documentaries that deal with particular Asian experiences are narrated through normative language and produced through what appears as a common-sense economic rationale. (On a superficial level, there was nothing particularly controversial about the strategy Ahmed described of aiming to generate noise.) But it is my argument that it is within precisely such normative terms – passed as common-sense commercial logic – that these racialist ideologies are hidden, embedded in commercial practices that are becoming more intensified in these neoliberal times.

Conclusion

As described earlier, Sarita Malik outlines two concurrent changes in both the political economy of broadcasting and public service discourse on multiculturalism. But I would go further and suggest that these twin processes are part of the same trend. They are together a consequence of the global shift towards neoliberalism, representing the further spread of commodification – driven by deregulation and marketization (Hesmondhalgh, 2007). The aim of the article has been to demonstrate how the governance of racialized minorities within the politics of representation is connected to the specific conditions of capitalistic, industrial cultural production. As Melamed (2006: 1) states, ‘race continues to permeate capitalism’s economic and social processes, organizing the hyperextraction of surplus value from racialized bodies’, and it is this logic that has driven the discursive turn towards mainstreaming cultural diversity. I have argued that the seemingly positive integration of minorities into mainstream programming merely leads to further repetition of ethnic and racial stereotype, as black and Asian cultural producers, as well as their white counterparts, are exposed to commercial forces that see exotica as a ‘key competitive advantage in an overcrowded market’ (Huq, 2003: 37). Earlier it was suggested how public service broadcasting in the UK can represent a progressive multicultural public sphere, providing a space for marginalized voices to be heard. But in this hyper-competitive climate, the BBC and Channel 4 are no longer buffered from market forces and can no longer afford to produce the kind of programmes that are beyond the reach of the commercial sector (Born, 2004), with serious ramifications for minority producers.

The purpose of this article has been to demonstrate how Asian cultural producers – despite their best political and ethical intentions – become complicit in the production of problematic representations of ‘race’ due to the increasingly commercial cultures of production in the television industries. Such an assertion might be troubling for some critical media industry researchers, who would flinch at the perceived allusion to economic determinism, and scholars who would rather declare an open verdict on the outcome of commercial production of ethnicized cultural commodities (see Dwyer and Crang, 2002). But the danger is that such a perspective downplays the entrenched forms of racism in modern capitalist societies (and therefore the cultural industries) that bear upon the everyday lives of blacks and Asians. The case I have presented describes a different kind of institutional racism; one that is not just about restricted barriers to entry or glass ceilings, but the rationalized, standardized and commercially driven processes of contemporary television production that are inscribed with a broader neocolonial logic that coaxes black and Asian cultural producers into creating reductive representations of difference. As I have shown, these individuals are particularly vulnerable to the materialities of cultural production, which through the varying degrees of a complex hegemony and the durability and strength of imperial discourse (Said, 1991: 5) embedded in capitalistic production, steers symbol creation down particular, dangerous routes. To reiterate, it is through the changing political economy of television, and the increasingly commercialized processes of cultural production, that the articulation of a particular Asian identity is reduced to a stereotype of ‘Asianness’, with all the racialized pathologies that such signification holds. Through a cultural industries approach, paying closer attention to how such effects are actually produced, we see exactly how this reductive process occurs. In this way we begin to understand how it is in fact the cultural industries that is the real critical site for the politics of representation and the cultural politics of difference.