Media and Minorities

From the Politics of Representation to the Politics of Production  45
This seems fairly innocuous on first reading — a straightforward narrative on
how a salesperson can veto the aesthetic choices of an editor. (Indeed, the increasing
influence of sales and marketing personnel in editorial decisions was
something on which respondents in my research repeatedly remarked.) But it
also reveals how representations of Asianness are mediated through what Bill
Ryan14 calls the “rationalization” of cultural production in its corporate form.
In this example, the salesperson insists that the Asianness of the text be
foregrounded in order to make it stand out in the marketplace. I found that it
was precisely this sort of thinking that irritated Asian authors, who were aiming
to tell universal stories but found that they were reduced to their own or,
as in this case, their characters’ ethnicities. As one Asian writer said to me,
“It’s about what you’re allowed to be.” Thus, I interpret the executive editor’s
remark as referring to the increasingly commercialized and rationalized cultures
of production in the cultural industries that during the aestheticization
of the cultural commodity “format”15 it in a way that reproduces hegemonic
representations of race designed to appeal to white fantasies of the Other in
order to make a profit.
For another example of how cultures of production shape representations of
race, I want to draw from an interview with a Channel 4 executive — a Britishborn
Pakistani Muslim with self-proclaimed working-class roots who had
taken up a leading role in the organization as its commissioning editor for religious
and multicultural programming. The purpose of my interview was to
examine how he approaches the commissioning process with particular regard
to television programmes that deal with multicultural issues. We see in
his account a clear view of how narratives of the British Asian, and, in particular,
the Muslim, experience come to be presented in very specific ways. The
executive described his main aim as producing mainstream religious programming
for broadcast during primetime. But, since these stories aren’t going to
get high ratings, he has to focus on generating “noise,” that is, press coverage:
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 this respondent, since programmes on religion do not generally attract
the biggest audiences, the success of a programme depends on garnering
positive reviews in the national press and, possibly, awards. And we can see
how he attempts to do this through a quick scan of some of the programmes
14 Bill Ryan, Making Capital from Culture: The Corporate Form of Capitalist Production
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991).
15 Ibid., 164–184.