Black Film and Television

A comprehensive look at the history of African Americans on television that discusses major trends in black TV and examines the broader social implications of the relationship between race and popular culture as well as race and representation.

This book illustrates how Queen Sugar acts as an industry model for exemplary representation of Black women in television. The author demonstrates how the narrative can change when culturally sensitive and conscious women of color tell their own stories

In Black Power TV, Devorah Heitner chronicles the emergence of Black public affairs television starting in 1968. The book reveals how regulatory, activist, and textual histories are interconnected and how Black public affairs television redefined African American representations in ways that continue to reverberate today.

Black Television Travels provides a detailed and insightful view of the roots and routes of the televisual representations of blackness on the transnational media landscape.

With iconic imagery and engrossing text, Black TV is the first book of its kind celebrate the groundbreaking, influential, and often under-appreciated shows centered on Black people and their experiences from the last fifty years.

Black women's work in television has been, since the beginning, a negotiation. Black Women and the Changing Television Landscape explores the steps black women, as actors, directors, and producers, have taken to improve representations of black people on the small screen. Beginning with The Beulah Show, Anderson articulates the interrelationship between US culture and the televisual, demonstrating the conditions under which black women particularly, and black people generally, exist in popular culture.

Black Women in Reality Television Docusoaps explores representations of Black women in one of the most powerful, popular forms of reality television - the docusoap. This book discusses images of Black women in reality television during the 2011 viewing year, when much criticism arose.

In the years before the civil rights era, American broadcasting reflected the interests of the white mainstream, especially in the South. Today, the face of local television throughout the nation mirrors the diversity of the local populations. The impetus for change began in 1964, when the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ and two black Mississippians, Aaron Henry and Reverend R. L. T. Smith, challenged the broadcasting license of WLBT, an NBC affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi.

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.

Offering a fascinating examination of the explosion of black television programming in the 1980s and 1990s, this book provides an interpretation of black TV based in both journalism and critical theory. Kristal Brent Zook shows how the Fox hip-hop sitcom both reinforced and rebelled against earlier black sitcoms from the sixties and seventies.

The Complexity and Progression of Black Representation in Film and Television examines the intricacies of race, representation, Black masculinity, sexuality, class, and color in American cinema and television.

FOX's musical drama Empire has been hailed as the savior of broadcast television, drawing 15 million viewers a week. A "hip-hopera" inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear and 1980s prime-time soap Dynasty, the series is at the forefront of a black popular culture Renaissance--yet has stirred controversy in the black community. Examining the evolution and potency of black images in popular culture, the author explores Empire's place in a diverse body of literature and media, data and discussions on respectability.

This book seeks to interrogate the representation of Black women in television. Cheers explores how the increase of Black women in media ownership and creative executive roles (producers, showrunners, directors and writers) in the last 30 years affected the fundamental cultural shift in Black women's representation on television, which in turn parallels the political, social, economic and cultural advancements of Black women in America from 1950 to 2016. She also examines Black women as a diverse television audience, discussing how they interact and respond to the constantly evolving television representation of their image and likeness, looking specifically at how social media is used as a tool of audience engagement.

Even after a rise in gay and Black representation and production on TV in the 1990s, the sitcom became a "generic closet," restricting Black gay characters with narrative tropes. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., argues that the Black community is considered to be antigay due to misrepresentation by shows that aired during the family viewing hour and that were written for the imagined, "traditional" Black family.

From Amos 'n' Andy to The Jeffersons to Family Matters to Chappelle's Show, this volume has all different genres--animation, documentaries, sitcoms, sports, talk shows, and variety shows--and performers such as Muhammad Ali, Louis Armstrong, Bill Cosby, and Oprah Winfrey. Additionally, information can be found on general issues ranging from African American audiences and stereotypes through the related networks and organizations.

In I See Black People, journalist Kristal Brent Zook talks with the people who have struggled to retain an independent voice within the media despite the consolidations that have swept through the industry. I See Black People makes a powerful case that ownership does matter. When the media fails to reflect the diversity of its audience, it is inevitably the voices of the least powerful that vanish first from the airwaves.

Broadcast on public television between 1968 and 1973, Soul!, helmed by pioneering producer and frequent host Ellis Haizlip, connected an array of black performers and public figures with a black viewing audience. In It's Been Beautiful, Gayle Wald tells the story of Soul!, casting this influential but overlooked program as a bold and innovative use of television to represent and critically explore black identity, culture, and feeling during a transitional period in the black freedom struggle.

Launched in 1980, cable network Black Entertainment Television (BET) has helped make blackness visible and profitable at levels never seen prior in the TV industry. In 2000, BET was sold by founder Robert L. Johnson, a former cable lobbyist, to media giant Viacom for 2.33 billion dollars. This book explores the legacy of BET: what the network has provided to the larger US television economy, and, more specifically, to its target African-American demographic. The book examines whether the company has fulfilled its stated goals and implied obligation to African-American communities.

Donald Bogle traces the changing roles of African Americans on primetime - from the blatant stereotypes of television's early years to the more subtle stereotypes of recent eras. Bogle also reveals another equally important aspect of TV history; namely, that television has been invigorated by extraordinary Black performers who frequently use the medium to make personal and cultural statements, and whose presence on the tube has been of enormous significance to the African American community.

Offers a complex reading of African Americans appearing on television in the 1960s and 1970s, finding within these programs opposition to white construction of African-American identity and the potential of television to effect social change and limitations.

While previous scholarship on African Americans and the media has largely focused on issues such as stereotypes and program content, Struggles for Equal Voice reveals how African Americans have utilized access to cable television production and viewership as a significant step toward achieving empowerment during the post-Civil Rights and Black Power era.

This is the first book to fully document the historical contributions of African Americans to broadcasting in the United States from the beginning of commercial broadcasting in 1925 to the age of television in 1955. This work fills a void that has only been marginally covered by previous books on the history of American broadcasting.

In Technicolored black feminist critic Ann duCille combines cultural critique with personal reflections on growing up with the new medium of TV to examine how televisual representations of African Americans have changed over the last sixty years.

Examines the cultural politics of television and race. In the late 1980s and early 1990s television representations of African Americans exploded on the small screen.

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. Also includes 2023 edition.

In recent years, there has been a rise in diverse racial representation on television. In particular, Black characters have become more actualized and have started extending beyond racial stereotypes. In this collection of essays, the representation of Black characters in professionally defined careers is examined.