Race, Taste, Class and Cars: Culture, Meaning and Identity

Description

Sociologist Yunis Alam offers new insights on how cars impact, moving beyond debates around the environment, traffic and safety, and instead focussing on gender, taste, ethnicity and class. Love them or hate them, most of us have an opinion about cars. If not the cars themselves, then it's driver competence and behaviour that can offend us. And then there's modification: alloy wheels, custom audio systems and bespoke paint jobs. For some, changing the look, feel and sound of a car says something about themselves, but for others, such enhancements signify a lack of taste, or even criminality. In subtle and complex ways, cars transmit and modify our identities behind the wheel. As a symbol of independence and freedom, the car projects status, class, taste and, significantly, embeds racialisation. Using fascinating research from drivers, including first-person accounts as well as exploring hip-hop music and car-related TV shows, Alam unpicks the ways in which identity is rehearsed, enhanced, interpreted.

Yunis Alam is a sociologist, working at the University of Bradford. His research interests span ethnic relations, popular culture, ethnography and postcolonial literatures. He has also published a number of novels and short stories.

"A fascinating exploration of how identities are expressed through urban consumption. ... encourages us to reflect anew about our own entangled relationship with material objects and mobilities" John Eade, University of Roehampton This outstanding book shows in an exemplary way how social science can help us understand diverse experiences. Alam is an eye opener. Joerg Huttermann, University of Bielefeld