The Rationalizing/Racializing Logic of Capital in Cultural Production

Abstract

This article conceptualizes the “rationalizing/racializing” logic of capital as a new form of racial governance. This is most evident in cultural production, where the techniques of rationalization—and in particular, the uses of data—that characterize media industry practices produce racializing effects, transforming the potentially disruptive texts of minority producers into absolute ethnic difference. To illustrate this, the article presents an empirical inquiry into the experiences of British South Asian authors in the publishing industry. It focuses on the use of a point-of- sale technology called BookScan, which, it is shown, is the means through which Asian authors come to be pigeonholed by their ethnicity, and subsequently grouped together, impeding their ability to reach wider audiences. In this way the rationalizing/racializing logic of capital represents a new form of racialized governmentality that attempts to manage the counternarratives of difference as they appear in cultural commodities