Racial Regimes in Rupture in the Cultural Industries

Research Seminar - Department of Art History and Cultural Practices, University of Manchester

Racial Regimes in Rupture: Persistence and Contestation in the Cultural and Creative Industries

Dr Roaa Ali, University of Manchester

Abstract
This talk examines how racial regimes adapt, persist, and are contested within the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) during moments of rupture such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the global antiracist uprisings of 2020, and the current nationalist resurgence in the UK. Drawing on empirical research with racialised creatives, critical race theory, and cultural sociology, it argues that crises in the CCIs function less as opportunities for transformation than as mechanisms through which whiteness reasserts itself. The analysis highlights how the pandemic disproportionately undermined the employment, wellbeing, and career trajectories of Black and ethnically minoritised workers in theatre, music, and the visual arts, while initiatives amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement proved largely performative and easily rolled back.

These dynamics unfolded within a wider conjuncture where the fleeting insurgent energies of 2020 met a resurgent “anti-woke” backlash and rising nationalist politics, which is impacting CCIs by stalling progress on racial diversity and reshaping equity and inclusion agendas. To interrogate these processes, the talk foregrounds the concept of racial regimes (Omi & Winant, 2015; Goldberg, 2002) and critiques of meritocracy (Littler, 2017) and risk (Erigha, 2021), exposing how the sector’s rhetoric of “talent,” “creativity,” and “risk” aestheticises whiteness while obscuring systemic inequalities. At the same time, it identifies limited but vital spaces where antiracist activists within CCIs disrupt the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Taken together, the analysis shows how crises both reassert and entrench whiteness in the Cultural and Creative Industries while also, at times, creating openings for antiracist intervention. These dynamics underscore the urgent need for structural accountability and genuinely transformative, rather than “non- performative” (Ahmed, 2006), approaches to equity.

Biography

Roaa Ali is a Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Manchester, specialising in race and diversity in the cultural sector. Her research focuses on inequality, anti-racism, and the politics of cultural production in the creative industries. Roaa has published in journals such as Sociology, Cultural Sociology, Cultural Trends, and The Sociological Review. She co-edited Arabs, Politics and Performance (Routledge, 2024) and has contributed book chapters on diversity, interculturalism, and censorship. Her upcoming monograph, The Cultural Production of Conditional Visibility: Contemporary Arab American Drama (Routledge, 2026), examines Arab and Arab American creative production within neoliberal and neo-orientalist contexts.

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