基本説明
This book examines the representation of blackness on television.
Full Description
This book examines the representation of blackness on television at the height of the southern civil rights movement and again in the aftermath of the Reagan-Bush years. In the process, it looks carefully at how television's ideological projects with respect to race have supported or conflicted with the industry's incentive to maximize profits or consolidate power. Sasha Torres examines the complex relations between the television industry and the civil rights movement as a knot of overlapping interests. She argues that television coverage of the civil rights movement during 1955-1965 encouraged viewers to identify with black protestors and against white police, including such infamous villains as Birmingham's Bull Connor and Selma's Jim Clark. Torres then argues that television of the 1990s encouraged viewers to identify with police against putatively criminal blacks, even in its dramatizations of police brutality. Torres's pioneering analysis makes distinctive contributions to its fields. It challenges television scholars to consider the historical centrality of race to the constitution of the medium's genres, visual conventions, and industrial structures.
And it displaces the analytical focus on stereotypes that has hamstrung assessments of television's depiction of African Americans, concentrating instead on the ways in which African Americans and their political collectives have actively shaped that depiction to advance civil rights causes. This book also challenges African American studies to pay closer and better attention to television's ongoing role in the organization and disorganization of U.S. racial politics.
Contents
List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi INTRODUCTION 1 The Vicissitudes of the Stereotype 1 Issues and Some Answers 4 Television and Conservative Racial Projects after the '60s 8 CHAPTER ONE "In a crisis we must have a sense of drama": Civil Rights and Televisual Information 13 The Burden of Liveness 13 "Pictures are the point of television news" 15 "We have shut ourselves off from the rest of the world" 20 "That cycle of violence and publicity" 23 "The vehemence of a dream" 33 CHAPTER TWO The Double Life of "Sit-In" 36 "Sit-In"'s Industrial Context 36 "Sit-In" Flashes Back 39 "Sit-In" as a Movement Text 41 "Sit-In" and Black Idiom 44 CHAPTER THREE King TV 48 Rodney King Live 48 Liveness: An Ideology of Television and Race 49 L.A. Law and Televisual Justice 52 Doogie Howser, M.D., and Televisual Instruction 60 Rodney King Dead 68 CHAPTER FOUR Giuliani Time: Urban Policing and Brooklyn South 70 Cops and Cop Shows 70 Giuliani Time 71 How to Identify with the Cops 77 Good Cop, Bad Cop 83 CHAPTER FIVE Civil Rights, Done and Undone 86 "A virtual whitewash in programming" 86 Malcom X on TV 91 The Nick Styles Show 97 Video Surveillance and Counterspectatorship 103 NOTES 109 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 131 INDEX 137
