Black Practice, Hidden Culture, and Access within the UK Creative Industries

It is now acknowledged that there is marked underrepresentation of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) practitioners and practices in the creative industries. Empirical research has noted the underrepresentation of BAME practice and consumption in the UK's creative industries (Foord, 2005; Oakley, 2006) as well as marginalisation from discussions of cultural value and participation (Bakshi and Cunningham, 2016). Debate extends beyond widening participation to political spaces through which 'invisible creativity' occurs (Mould, 2014), exclusion materialises (Leung, 2016; Eikhof, 2017), and divergent motivations and ideas emerge from policy assemblages. This is especially significant given the influence of urban black culture on the creative industries overall, the predominance of black creative enterprise in some spaces (Gregory, 2106), and emergence of black genres e.g., Black British Literature, 'Blackdesign' (Brydges and Pugh, 2021), and film and theatre (see Alacousica and O'Brien, 2021). In some cultural arenas such as Drill music, there are complex and interweaving characteristics, including strong and largely independent underground practices, formal and institutionalised uppergrounds, and policy assemblages that all shape affective spaces. Thus, BAME practice in creative industries intersects with broader complexities of policy, power, actor-agency, and austerity that need decoding.

For example, Drill and Hip-Hop have evolved from alternative Black music/heritage into a creative movement, mediated by the use of music, dance, dress, graffiti and other semiotic signs and codes, and hyper-localised as regional scenes. Yet, the term Drill connotes 'anything from females getting dolled up to war on the streets' (Meara, 2012) to "entirety of a culture: the lingo, the dances, the mentality..." (Drakes, 2017), interwoven with grassroots austerity oppression (e.g., Major and Billson's' Cool Posture Theory). Similarly, there are dangers in depicting black access and under-representation in the creative industries without first examining hidden cultures, affective spaces, and political power, from within.