Channeling Blackness

Description

Blackness has always played a central role in the American imagination. Therefore, it should not be surprising that popular television--a medium that grew up with the Civil Rights Movement--has featured blackness as both a foil and a key narrative theme throughout its sixty-year existence. Ironically, in modern "colorblind" times, we are faced with a unique turn of events--blackness is actually overrepresented in television sitcoms and dramas.
Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America presents fifteen classic and contemporary studies of the shifting, complex relationship between popular television and blackness. Using a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches, these essays examine four key issues that have framed popular and scholarly inquiries into the nature of race on television:

* The black-white binary * The power of media * Distinguishing between "negative" and "positive" images * The relative importance of markets versus racial motives in television

Firmly establishing popular television as a central cultural forum in our society, Channeling Blackness looks at how television has profoundly shaped and been shaped by America's ambivalent relationship with blackness. It provides numerous examples of how our current interaction with television distinguishes the lived experiences of today from those of the past. The book also shows how the entertainment function of television often masks its ideological purpose, particularly its role in reflecting and reproducing America's racial order. A useful supplement in any number of courses on race and society, Channeling Blackness is an ideal text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on race and media, media and society, television studies, television criticism, communication studies, and African American and ethnic studies.

Table of Contents

1. Making Sense of Blackness on Television, Darnell M. Hunt
2. The News Media and the Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
3. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, Stuart Hall
4. Television and Black Consciousness, Molefi Kete Asante
5. Television and the Black Audience: Cultivating Moderate Perspectives on Racial Integration, Paula Matabane
6. White Responses: The Emergence of "Enlightened" Racism, Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis
7. Hearing Anita Hill (and Viewing Bill Cosby), John Fiske
8. A Myth of Assimilation: "Enlightened" Racism and the News, Christopher P. Campbell
9. The Politics of Representation in Network Television, Herman Gray
10. Ralph Farquhar's South Central and Pearl's Place to Play: Why They Failed Before Moesha Hit, Kristal Brent Zook
11. Body and Soul: Physicality, Disciplinarity, and the Overdetermination of Blackness, C. Richard King and Charles Fruehling Springwood
12. "Where My Girls At?" Negotiating Black Womanhood in Music Videos, Rana A. Emerson
13. The Spectacular Consumption of "True" African American Culture: "Whassup with the Budweiser Guys?", Eric King Watts and Mark P. Orbe
14. In a Crisis We Must Have a Sense of Drama: Civil Rights and Televisual Information, Sasha Torres
15. Black Content, White Control, Darnell M. Hunt
Bibliography
Index