The brown culture industry: Theodor Adorno meets Talvin Singh

As theorised by Theodor Adorno, the “culture industry” is a pervasive structure that produces cultural commodities for the mass audience, while supporting dominant political and economic imperatives. What interests me here is not so much to focus on an apparent Adornian tendency to unify the culture industry, but to underscore the dynamic and conflictual makeup of the cultural industries. In an attempt to recoup Adorno’s arguments, critics have revisited them over the years and argued that the culture industry thesis is more counterbalanced and less pessimistic than it appears at first sight. Such double-edged nature of the Adornian critique might be relevant in understanding the workings of postcolonial cultural production. Hence, as an update to the concept of culture industry, and as a variation of Ellis Cashmore’s notion of a “black culture industry” (1997), I propose the idea of a “brown culture industry”. This conceptual category will allow for a fusion between one of the foundational theories in the study of popular culture, and a prevailing concern of postcolonial theories regarding the commodification of cultural difference investigated most prominently by John Hutnyk and Graham Huggan.