Black Middle-Class Britannia: Identities, Repertoires, Cultural Consumption

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This book analyses how racism and anti-racism affects Black British middle-class cultural consumption. In doing so, it challenges the dominant understanding of British middle-class identity and culture as being 'beyond race'. Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital and cultural repertoires, Meghji argues that there are three modes of black middle-class identity: strategic assimilation, ethnoracial autonomous, and class-minded. Individuals within each of these identity modes use specific cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption. Those employing strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural equity, consuming traditional middle-class culture to maintain equality with the white middle-class in levels of cultural capital. Ethnoracial autonomous individuals draw on repertoires of 'browning' and Afro-centrism, self-selecting traditional middle-class cultural pursuits they decode as 'Eurocentric' while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift black diasporic histories and cultures. Lastly, class-minded individuals draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation, polarising between 'Black' and middle-class cultural forms. Black middle class Britannia examines how such individuals display an unequivocal preference for the latter, lambasting other black people who avoid middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally uncultivated. -- .

Reviews

'A tour de force with original arguments, empirical richness and theoretical ambition, all presented in a beautifully crafted written narrative.'
Les Back is a Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London

'Black middle-class Britannia offers a fascinating portrait of race and class in contemporary London. Using the cultural world as a site to examine inequality, Ali Meghji shows how racial and class boundaries are both understood and navigated in varying ways depending on the identities of middle-class blacks. While some see the existence of middle class blacks as evidence that Britain is now color-blind, Black middle-class Britannia provides a timely and in depth counterpoint to this view.'
Patricia A. Banks, Associate Professor of Sociology, Mount Holyoke College

Author Bio

Ali Meghji is a Lecturer in Social Inequalities in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge