Reflections on representing Black Britain

This short essay forms part of the special issue What Was Cultural Economy? The issue has its origins in a January 2020 symposium, held at City, University of London, marking two decades since Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke convened a ‘Workshop on Cultural Economy’ at the Open University in Milton Keynes. That earlier event culminated in the publication of the edited collection Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life [du Gay, P., and Pryke, M (eds.) 2002. Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. London: Sage.]. What Was Cultural Economy? collects responses to these founding moments in the field from a number of key figures, who each reflect on the relationship between conceptual clarification and their own academic histories. Here Sarita Malik reflects on the early part of her journey towards academia, with a particular focus on the institutional contexts she encountered in the 1990s. As a former PhD student at the OU with Stuart Hall, and the author of the first book in the Culture, Representation and Identity series (ed. Hall and Du Gay), Sarita discusses the decisive shift, away from the associations with issues of ‘cultural identity’ that her early work on television focused on, to a growing awareness of the role of cultural economy in shaping social relations.