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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. Â
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. Â
Recent years have seen an increase in public attention to identity
and representation in video games, including journalists and
bloggers holding the digital game industry accountable for the
discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers,
and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these
critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has
lagged far behind. Gaming Representation examines portrayals of
race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like
Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to
mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The
Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation
and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger
connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, the
contributors to this volume push gaming scholarship to new levels
of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.
Recent years have seen an increase in public attention to identity
and representation in video games, including journalists and
bloggers holding the digital game industry accountable for the
discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers,
and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these
critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has
lagged far behind. Gaming Representation examines portrayals of
race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like
Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to
mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The
Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation
and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger
connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, the
contributors to this volume push gaming scholarship to new levels
of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.
Television scholarship has substantially ignored programming aimed
at Black audiences despite a few sweeping histories and critiques.
In this volume, the first of its kind, contributors examine the
televisual diversity, complexity, and cultural imperatives manifest
in programming directed at a Black and marginalized audience.
Watching While Black considers its subject from an entirely new
angle in an attempt to understand the lives, motivations,
distinctions, kindred lines, and individuality of various Black
groups and suggest what television might be like if such diversity
permeated beyond specialized enclaves. It looks at the macro
structures of ownership, producing, casting, and advertising that
all inform production, and then delves into television programming
crafted to appeal to black audiences-historic and contemporary,
domestic and worldwide. Chapters rethink such historically
significant programs as Roots and Black Journal, such seemingly
innocuous programs as Fat Albert and bro'Town, and such
contemporary and culturally complicated programs as Noah's Arc,
Treme, and The Boondocks. 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 sheds much-needed light on
under-examined demographics, broadens common audience
considerations, and gives deference to the the preferences of
audiences and producers of Black-targeted programming.
Blackness Is Burning is one of the first books to examine the ways
race and psychological rhetoric collided in the public and popular
culture of the civil rights era. In analyzing a range of media
forms, including Sidney Poitier's popular films, black mother and
daughter family melodramas, Bill Cosby's comedy routine and cartoon
Fat Albert, pulpy black pimp narratives, and several aspects of
post- civil rights black/American culture, TreaAndrea M. Russworm
identifies and problematizes the many ways in which psychoanalytic
culture has functioned as a governing racial ideology that is built
around a flawed understanding of trying to ""recognize"" the racial
other as human. The main argument of Blackness Is Burning is that
humanizing, or trying to represent in narrative and popular culture
that #BlackLivesMatter, has always been a barely attainable and
impossible to sustain cultural agenda. But Blackness Is Burning
makes two additional interdisciplinary interventions: the book
makes a historical and temporal intervention because Russworm is
committed to showing the relationship between civil rights
discourses on theories of recognition and how we continue to
represent and talk about race today. The book also makes a formal
intervention since the chapter-length case studies take seemingly
banal popular forms seriously. She argues that the popular forms
and disreputable works are integral parts of our shared cultural
knowledge. Blackness Is Burning's interdisciplinary reach is what
makes it a vital component to nearly any scholar's library,
particularly those with an interest in African American popular
culture, film and media studies, or psychoanalytic theory.
For over a decade, Tyler Perry has been a lightning rod for both
criticism and praise. To some he is most widely known for his drag
performances as Madea, a self-proclaimed ""mad black woman,"" not
afraid to brandish a gun or a scalding pot of grits. But to others
who watch the film industry, he is the businessman who by age
thirty-six had sold more than $100 million in tickets, $30 million
in videos, $20 million in merchandise, and was producing 300
projects each year viewed by 35,000 every week. Is the commercially
successful African American actor, director, screenwriter,
playwright, and producer ""malt liquor for the masses,"" an
""embarrassment to the race!,"" or is he a genius who has directed
the most culturally significant American melodramas since Douglas
Sirk? Are his films and television shows even melodramas, or are
they conservative Christian diatribes, cheeky camp, or social
satires? Do Perry's flattened narratives and character tropes
irresponsibly collapse important social discourses into
one-dimensional tales that affirm the notion of a ""post-racial""
society? In light of these debates, From Madea to Media Mogul makes
the argument that Tyler Perry must be understood as a figure at the
nexus of converging factors, cultural events, and historical
traditions. Contributors demonstrate how a critical engagement with
Perry's work and media practices highlights a need for studies to
grapple with developing theories and methods on disreputable media.
These essays challenge value-judgment criticisms and offer new
insights on the industrial and formal qualities of Perry's work.
For over a decade, Tyler Perry has been a lightning rod for both
criticism and praise. To some he is most widely known for his drag
performances as Madea, a self-proclaimed ""mad black woman,"" not
afraid to brandish a gun or a scalding pot of grits. But to others
who watch the film industry, he is the businessman who by age
thirty-six had sold more than $100 million in tickets, $30 million
in videos, $20 million in merchandise, and was producing 300
projects each year viewed by 35,000 every week. Is the commercially
successful African American actor, director, screenwriter,
playwright, and producer ""malt liquor for the masses,"" an
""embarrassment to the race!,"" or is he a genius who has directed
the most culturally significant American melodramas since Douglas
Sirk? Are his films and television shows even melodramas, or are
they conservative Christian diatribes, cheeky camp, or social
satires? Do Perry's flattened narratives and character tropes
irresponsibly collapse important social discourses into
one-dimensional tales that affirm the notion of a ""post-racial""
society?In light of these debates, From Madea to Media Mogul makes
the argument that Tyler Perry must be understood as a figure at the
nexus of converging factors, cultural events, and historical
traditions. Contributors demonstrate how a critical engagement with
Perry's work and media practices highlights a need for studies to
grapple with developing theories and methods on disreputable media.
These essays challenge value-judgment criticisms and offer new
insights on the industrial and formal qualities of Perry's work.
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