Arbiters of Race

Advancing the conversation on cultural intermediation by adding the muchoverlooked reality of racism, this edited collection offers a much-needed critical and contemporary focus on the ever-changing landscape of race in the marketplace.

Arbiters of Race: Cultural Intermediaries, Racism, and Consumer Industries addresses the pressing need, in the third decade of the 21st century, to push social theory to incorporate race and racism in our understanding of cultural intermediation—to recognize that cultural intermediaries play a crucial role in framing goods, services, ideas, and behaviors as legitimate and worthy, instilling goods with meanings by engaging in specific cultural narratives that have a fundamentally racial character of consumer industries.

Having changed dramatically since the 1980s and 1990s, cultural and creative markets have become unrecognizable such that cultural intermediaries today manipulate social and cultural tastes as actors in the consumer market to construct value and meaning for products, practices, and consumers—particularly in the cultural and creative industries.

The essays in this collection acknowledge the very real risk of reproducing the very racist structures these markets and industries were founded on, and go beyond past work on cultural intermediaries to challenge the exclusionary racial structures within which cultural markets historically and currently operate.