Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means in an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this updated edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters. Contributors traverse programs and platforms to wrestle with a changing television industry that has exploded and included Black audiences as a new and central target of its visioning. The book illuminates history, care, monetization, and affect. Within these frames, the chapters run the gamut from transmediation, regional relevance, and superhuman visioning to historical traumas and progress, queer possibilities, and how televisual programming can make viewers feel Black. Mostly, the work tackles what the future looks like now for a changing televisual industry, Black media makers, and Black audiences. Chapters rethink such historically significant programs as Roots and Underground, such seemingly innocuous programs as Soul Food, and such contemporary and culturally complicated programs as Being Mary Jane and Atlanta. The book makes a case for the centrality of these programs while always recognizing the racial dynamics that continue to shape Black representation on the small screen. Painting a decidedly introspective portrait across forty years of Black television, Watching While Black Rebooted sheds much-needed light on under examined demographics, broadens common audience considerations, and gives deference to the preferences of audiences and producers of Black-targeted programming.  

Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means in an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this updated edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters. Contributors traverse programs and platforms to wrestle with a changing television industry that has exploded and included Black audiences as a new and central target of its visioning. The book illuminates history, care, monetization, and affect. Within these frames, the chapters run the gamut from transmediation, regional relevance, and superhuman visioning to historical traumas and progress, queer possibilities, and how televisual programming can make viewers feel Black. Mostly, the work tackles what the future looks like now for a changing televisual industry, Black media makers, and Black audiences. Chapters rethink such historically significant programs as Roots and Underground, such seemingly innocuous programs as Soul Food, and such contemporary and culturally complicated programs as Being Mary Jane and Atlanta. The book makes a case for the centrality of these programs while always recognizing the racial dynamics that continue to shape Black representation on the small screen. Painting a decidedly introspective portrait across forty years of Black television, Watching While Black Rebooted sheds much-needed light on under examined demographics, broadens common audience considerations, and gives deference to the preferences of audiences and producers of Black-targeted programming.  

In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.

In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.