Description
Popular culture is increasingly seen as a discursive site of international politics, reflecting and reifying local, national, and global discourses of race, migration, and belonging. Repeated and shifting constructions of ‘the other’ in international settings filter down into the everyday experiences of individuals, affecting their own identity construction, including through their engagement with popular culture and media. This paper explores discourses of racial belonging in popular culture and their effects on Black/white and Asian/white mixed-race identity in Britain. It examines how mixed-race individuals draw on transnational elements of popular culture, in conjunction with their own experiences, to construct racial identity, and how this facilitates unique and varied identity constructions. This framework for examining the influence of international politics and transnational culture in identity construction allows us to explore the relationship between popular culture/media and racial identity in new ways, particularly in exploring the role of phenotype and appearance in how discourses of popular culture are personally interpreted. It sheds light on the ways discourses of belonging emerging from international politics are (re)produced in popular culture and are internalised, subverted, or challenged by mixed-race individuals, as they negotiate multiple or ‘in-between’ identities.
