Introducing Colourwashing - Towards a Definition

The Contemporary Cultural Industries (CCI) are instrumental proponents in an exponential rise in the representations of minority groups over the recent past. In many respects and vantage points, from publishing, to television, online, print and radio, this apparent paradigm shift can be characterised as an ascendancy in diversity discourse. This conference paper seeks to demonstrate the ambivalence of this cultural shift in representations and introduces into the academy the analytical concept of colourwashing. The research paper is derived from a section of a much larger body of scholarly work. Itself seeking to locate the current politics of representations in formative terms of power and agency. We engage with the current cultural/media landscape and assume that society is making virtuous headway in the march towards equality, for all. However, based upon a working hypothesis, this paper seeks to interrogate and problematise the current CCI paradigm – to expose how plurality in this configuration acts as a form of racialised governance.
Despite recognition in the literature that new modes of racialised capital flows are increasingly mapped to CCI internalised policy imperatives. Inquiry and critical discussion remain understudied aspects of this new paradigm. Further, scholarly literature is scant in providing adequate interrogation to describe discursive formations and their impact on the embodied that power seeks to over-represent. Methodologically, this paper begins with discussion regarding the hypothesis that the concept of colourwashing and the wider thesis seeks to test. While the CCI – judging from its mass communications output – suggests that the moral and economic case for diversity is aligned, this paper argues an opposite reading. Rather, that this current iteration of the CCI is complicit in reductive outcomes for those who it embodies. Furthermore, CCI output acts through hyper-racialised symbolic practices to provide cover and deflect from structural inequalities inherent in its political economy and the wider society that it mediates.