giese-et-al-2023-public-service-media-and-race-relations-in-postcolonial-britain-bbc-and-immigrant-programming-1965-1988.pdf (121.49 kB)
Public service media and race relations in postcolonial Britain: BBC and immigrant programming, 1965–1988
journal contribution
posted on 2023-10-27, 14:35 authored by Julia GieseJulia Giese, Diwas BishtDiwas Bisht, Aswin PunathambekarThis article explores how British Asians negotiated the politics of race in the formative years of British broadcasting from the 1960s to the 1980s. Marked by significant changes within the BBC and British society at large, this period saw the first institutional initiatives oriented towards Caribbean and Asian communities. Drawing on primary research materials from the BBC Written Archives, we analyse the Immigrant Programmes Unit and the Immigrant Programme Advisory Committees as sites where ideas of race, ethnicity and citizenship were continually debated and worked out. We argue that the BBC functioned as a profoundly asymmetrical contact zone in which British Asians’ efforts to counter assimilationist ideas and programmes were stymied by senior managers working with deeply ingrained ideas of cultural, ethnic and racial differences. Immigrants would be accommodated, but in ways that would not challenge the viewing habits of the majority or imagine solidarities across racial, ethnic and national lines.
Funding
British Academy, (grant number GP2\190574)
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Communication and Media
Published in
Media, Culture and SocietyVolume
45Issue
6Pages
1210 - 1224Publisher
SAGEVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The Author(s)Publisher statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Publication date
2023-03-14Copyright date
2023ISSN
0163-4437eISSN
1460-3675Publisher version
Language
- en