Introduction 1 the Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Notes on Theory

Notes Introduction 1. The list could be endless with titles such as Goddess for Hire (Sonia Singh 2004), Imaginary Men (Anjali Banerjee 2005), Bindis and Brides (Nisha Minhas 2005), Bollywood Confidential (Sonia Singh 2005), Trust Me (Rajashree 2006), The Hindi-Bindi Club (Monica Pradhan 2007) and the Zoya Factor (Anuja Chauhan 2008), which connects chick lit with cricket and is defined as the Ladki lit for the new millennium. 1 The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Notes on Theory and Practice 1. Adorno was associated with the Institute for Social Research at the Frankfurt School, a social science and cultural intellectual hub for promot- ing socialism and overthrowing capitalism. It was responsible for creat- ing the philosophical practice referred to as ‘critical theory’, which takes the stand that oppression is created through politics, economics, culture and materialism, but is maintained most significantly through conscious- ness. He was among the first philosophers and intellectuals to recognize the potential social, political and economic power of the entertainment industry. 2. Adorno used The Dialectic of Enlightenment to summarize the theory on which he had been working for many years. Adorno had identified the theme of the cultural industry in the 1920s (although he did not use it until later), analysing the use of light music and jazz as commodified forms of music. All these things were written in Europe before Adorno had become famil- iar with the cultural situation in the US. After 1938, Adorno’s experience of US culture only reinforced his conviction. Later on, the cultural industry references not only the industrialization of production but also fields such as radio, film, music hall, fairgrounds, astronomy, newspapers and so on. Adorno now placed the cultural industry in a broader context, presenting it as an important example of the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, according to which the disenchantment of the world reverts to myth: despite, and indeed precisely because of a man’s liberation from his irrational fear of imposed domination, a new form of domination has emerged (1996: 3–42). Academics have traditionally attributed the ‘Cultural Industry’ chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment to Adorno. This is fair as Adorno was the main author, but we should not underestimate the influence of Horkheimer. It started as a manuscript by Adorno and underwent two rounds of revision by both authors. 228 Notes 229 3. ‘Exchange value’ refers to one of four major attributes of a commodity, i.e. an item produced for and sold on the market. Use value is the value/utility of any labour product. 4. For a comprehensive analysis of the literary canon as cultural capital see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problems of Literary Canon Formation (1993). See also John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (1995), and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (1988). 5. In Forms of Capital, Bourdieu expands the notion of capital beyond its economic conception (which emphasizes material exchanges) to include ‘immaterial’ and ‘non-economic’ forms of capital, specifically cultural and symbolic capital. He explains how the different types of capital can be acquired, exchanged and converted into other forms. The term ‘capital’ represents the collection of non-economic forces such as family background, social class, varying investment in and commitments to education, and different resources, which influence academic success. Bourdieu distinguishes three forms of cultural capital: (1) The embodied state is directly linked and incorporated within the individual and represents what they know and can do. (2) Embodied capital can be increased by investing time in self-improvement in the form of learning. (3) As embodied capital becomes integrated into the individual, it becomes a type of habitus and therefore cannot be transmitted instantaneously. The objectified state of cultural capital is represented by cultural goods, material objects such as books, paintings, instruments or machines. They can be appropriated both materially, with economic capital, and symbolically, via embodied capital. Finally, cultural capital, in its institutionalized state, provides academic credentials and qualifications that create a ‘certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to power’ (1986: 248). These academic qualifications can then be used as a rate of conversion between cultural and economic capital. Throughout his discussion, Bourdieu favours a nurture rather than a nature argument. He states that the ability of an individual is primarily determined by the time and cultural capital invested in them by their parents. Accord- ing to this model, families of a given cultural capital could only produce offspring with an equal amount of cultural capital. This approach is often criticized as being too inflexible. Bourdieu does not account for individuals who elevate their social status or increase their cultural capital from what they inherited. 6. See the work by the American critic John Guillory which explains Bourdieu’s refusal (1993). 7. Pierre Bourdieu (2012) Picturing Algeria, Franz Schultheis and Christine Frisinghelli (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press. See also An Inter- view with Pierre Bourdieu by Franz Schultheis. College de France, Paris, 26 June 2001. Available online www.cup.columbia.edu/media/7671/ bourdieu-excerpt-picturing.pdf 230 Notes 8. See Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms (1980) and Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Resistance Through Ritual (1993). 9. See on this Morag Shiach ‘Cultural Studies and the Work of Pierre Bourdieu’ (1993). 10. In James Procter, Stuart Hall (2004: 59–61). 11. Therefore, as Hesmondhalgh writes in his book, The term ‘cultural industries’ (in the plural, my emphasis) has tended to be used in a much more restricted way than this, based implicitly on a definition of culture as the signifying system through which nec- essarily a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored. (Williams 1981: 13). To put this a little more simply, the cultural industries have unusually been thought of as those institutions (mainly profit-making companies, but also state organizations and non- profit organizations) that are most directly involved in the production of social meanings. Therefore, nearly all definitions of the cultural industries would include television (cable and satellite too), radio, the cinema, newspapers, magazines and book publishing, the music recording and publishing industries, advertising and the performing arts. These are all activities the primary aim of which is to communicate with an audience, to create texts. (Hesmondhalgh 2013: 16) 12. Gilroy’s work concerns what he calls the Black Atlantic, a ‘webbed network’ between the local and the global, comprising elements of African, American, Caribbean and British culture, but without a core essence. Criticizing what he calls ‘a brute pan-Africanism’, Gilroy challenges essentialized and purified conceptions of black culture, refuting identity politics as the contemporary expression of a centuries-long tradition. As he acknowledges, it is a ‘potent idea’ that is ‘frequently wheeled in when it is necessary to appreciate the things that (potentially) connect black people to one another rather than think seriously about the divisions in the imagined communities of the race’ (1993: 24). 13. Cashmore goes on to say that according to this vision black soul could be seen as an artefact of whites: a music forged in the smelter of oppression and exploitation, soul is often seen as the special preserve of blacks, but not always as a compensation for the ‘experiences of unfreedom’ as Gilroy would argue. To this I would add that the very term ‘black soul’, to describe a fusion music that owes much to blues and gospel, is a creation of whites; most probably a racist creation too (1997: 10). 14. On an Adornian adagio there is the issue of Gilroy’s complaint that tech- nology is deskilling music, as the digitalization and commodification is dispossessing current and future generations of the aesthetic resources of black musical virtuosity present in live performance. As he writes towards the end of his book, I feel obliged to confess that my critical standpoint has been shaped by an acute sense of being bereft of responsible troubadours – a feeling that is a wider generational affliction. I do not wish to capitulate to the pressures which dictate a nostalgic relationship to [a] departed golden age. And yet, at the same time, I can recall the glorious parade of black Atlantic Notes 231 performers that flowed through London’s musical scenes between 1969, when I first started going out to enjoy live music, and the more recent point, when deskilling, aesthetic stagnation, and what can politely be called ‘recycling’ all intervened to make live performances less alive and less pleasurable than they had been before. (Gilroy 2010: 122) 15. Desi Threads is an apparel marketing company known for producing cloth- ing designed to critique structures of racism. 16. The term ‘desi’ originates from the term ‘desh’; in its most precise render- ing, it signifies ‘homeland’ but it has been appropriated by South Asians to describe powerfully resonant forms of solidarity that function as a counter- narrative to the racist identifications of South Asians as a model minority. Desi imagines South Asian diasporic identity as a politically

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