Page 208 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

RACE

concept of race is itself, like the concept of nation, relational – each
race is to some extent a product of its difference from others in the
system. It is clear that over time and in different circumstances the
system changes, altering such fundamental matters as the number of
races that are recognised, and therefore the way that different
characteristics and attributes can be distributed and distinguished.
Thus, there is a great element of culture in what counts as race. Race
is a meaningful category, rather than a biological given; the ideals and
characteristics of races are not natural but are constantly reproduced in
language, historical ideologies and discourses, images and other
cultural practices.
In media and cultural studies, writing on race emerged alongside
identity politics. Concerned with what were perceived to be limited
representations of raced identities in the media, text analysis was
undertaken in an attempt to chart the relationship between societal
attitudes and raced characters. Work by Bogle (1989) and Jhally and
Lewis (1992), for example, argued that representations relied on
stereotypes and promoted a form of implicit racism. While important
in highlighting the limits of raced representations, this form of
investigation often relied on a binary of positive/negative images.
Binaries such as these seemed to suggest that there was indeed a
paradigm of positive characteristics that are representative of a given
race. But neither good policy nor good media content could come out
of a demand for ‘more positive images’ to redress the balance.
Said’s (1979) concept of Orientalism offered a theoretical means
of addressing this problem. He argued that race was a discourse that
served to shape howEuropeans understood themselves through
assigning undesirable characteristics to other races. By constructing the
inhabitants of the Orient as savage, uncivilised and exotic, Europe
imagined itself as brave, cultured and noble. Said’s model could not
necessarily be applied to other nation/race dynamics, but it does
reinforce the notion that characteristics of race are constructed, and are
often less a ‘construction’ of the race to whom they are applied than of
the people who create and sustain the discourse. This has lead to post-
colonial and post-structuralist work that continues to move away from
the essentialism inherent in previous writing on race, in favour of an
approach that recognises the socially constructed and dialogic nature of
the categories.
Race is constantly under reconstruction. In the nineteenth century
the term was virtually synonymous with ‘nation’ – one could write of
the Czech or Belgian or Bantu ‘race’. Later, race was reduced to three
global categories – ‘caucasian’, ‘mongoloid’ and ‘negroid’. Later still,

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