ABSTRACT
As a contested concept much has been written about taste, but it is rarely, if ever, considered in relation to the making of the black British home. Indeed, in the representation of black communities (African-Caribbean) there is a recycling of a colonial trope, which portrays black families as pathological, and inscribes black identity as urban (read ‘the street’) as if they have no homes to go to. Unpacking, therefore, how taste-cultures in the domestic interior of the black subject are constructed and enacted provides a paradigm in thinking about how identity is produced and reproduced. This approach problematises the received notion of taste, cultural capital and habitus that Bourdieu defined as solely class-based. Therefore, from a black diasporic perspective, this essay explores how taste codes are embodied performatively in the material culture of the Black British home through the sensorial, sensual and creative agency of the everyday. For instance, coded within the material culture of the front room is a dialectical relationship between Victorian bourgeois tropes of respectability, propriety, decorum (read ‘good grooming’) and the migrant aesthetics of post-colonial modernity such as creolisation.
