States contest representation markets over who speaks for whom

Evidence

The (racial) state, in its institutional sense, must be seen thus not as a static thing but as apolitical force fashioning and fashioned by economic, legal, and cultural forces (forces of production, of sociolegality, and of cultural representation). It is a player not just in productive, distributive, circulating, and consumptive patterns and tensions, and in their reproduction. It has been central to political contestations over control of the materialities of society but also (and especially) of its own instrumentalities, its means and modes of rule and representation, of social supervision and control, over the style and substance of social governmentality. In short, the state is a contestant in the markets of representation, of who speaks for whom and in and on what terms. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1687

Categorization

• SEED: A usable frame: state as a contestant in the ‘markets of representation’ — useful for an essay on how states control the terms of who speaks for whom (relevant to current free-speech and cancel-culture debates).