Race, Ethnicity and Culture

Abstract

It can be argued that cultural studies has been ethnocentric and allowed ‘race’ to be invisible (Gilroy, 1987, p. 12). A slightly different criticism is that of unintended intellectual racism of some of this work:

Non-English readers may feel at times … the constriction and airlessness of a certain parochialism, a preoccupation with figures and issues that seem, under a different sky, less momentous than we would make them. They should remind themselves that we are living out the dotage of an imperial culture, and that our dreams are peopled by ghosts. But from that culture we have inherited other habits too, towards which no indulgence can be extended; for the ‘common politics’ which … gives some kind of coherence to … cultural analyses and critiques … brings with it a uniformity of a more negative kind: its virtual blindness to questions of race (Batsleer et al., 1985, p. 10).