Consuming Race [Paperback]

From the rise of Nordic noir to a taste for street food, from practices of natural gardening to the aesthetics of children's TV, contemporary culture is saturated with racial meanings. By consuming race we make sense of other groups and cultures, communicate our own identities, express our needs and desires, and discover new ways of thinking and being.

This book explores how the meanings of race are made and remade in acts of creative consumption. Ranging across the terrain of popular culture, and finding race in some unusual and unexpected places, it offers fresh and innovative ways of thinking about the centrality of race to our lives.

Consuming Race provides an accessible and highly readable overview of the latest research and a detailed reading of a diverse range of objects, sites and practices. It gives students of sociology, media and cultural studies the opportunity to make connections between academic debates and their own everyday practices of consumption.

1. Introduction  2. Theorizing Racial Consumption  3. Ethnic Appropriateness: White Nostalgia and Nordic Noir  4. Engaging Whiteness: Black Nerds  5. The Taste of Race: Authenticity and Food Cultures  6. Race and Children: From Anthropomorphism to Zoomorphism  7. Animals and Plants: Natural Gardening and Non-Native Species  8. Stories about Race: Knowledge and Form.  Conclusion

This book explores how the meanings of race are made and remade in everyday acts of consumption: it is through the consumption of products, TV, new media, books, food, design, toys and games, plants, animals and landscapes that we make sense of ourselves and others.

Ben Pitcher is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Westminster, London. He has written extensively on race and racism, alÓW