1.22.2006
Watching Race (Film and Media Studies)
Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
Gray states that the aim of Watching Race is to "extend these critical discourses [of identity and expressive culture] and cultural strategies, particularly as they bear on commercial electronic mass-media forms, especially television. I examine critical debates about black expressive culture and black cultural productions within television as a means of exploring processes by which questions about the American racial order - and, within it, blackness - are constructed, reproduced and challenged." (1) The author focuses on the 1980s as a time in which television/commercial culture should be viewed as a "resource and a site in which blackness as a cultural sign is produced, circulated and enacted." (2) His methodology is firmly within the realm of Cultural Studies, drawing much of its premise from British Cultural Studies - that is, a serious interest in popular media that does examine the texts at stake for possibilities and productivities, but maintains a materialist critique and boundedness to the ways in which these texts are / can be- produced and received. He explores the 80s and Reaganism's use of blackness as a cultural sign to codify and reconfigure American conceptions of self / other towards a particular conservative end. He posits Reaganism, and its reliance on televisuality, as the backdrop for the kinds of representations of African Americans circulating in that era. He discusses these representations as circulating as part of the construction/claiming/contestation of blackness for African Americans themselves and its shifting meaning within dominant culture . "I want to locate television representations of blackness, then, at the intersection of social and cultural discourses within African American communities and dominant culture." (36) Further, in setting up his case studies of three shows of the 1980s, Herman is careful to locate the possibility of such programming within a history of representation of blackness on television (Amos and Andy in the 50s, Nat King Cole in the 60s, What's Happening / Roots in the 70s, and the Cosby Show in the early 1980s) and the material and commercial shifts in the television industry (corporate takeovers of the major networks, competition from cable and VCRS leading to niche marketing, the inception of the FOX network, etc.) - an important part of this inquiry as an approach to television as its own "political economy, industrial organization, and technologies, because these structures are central to television's construction, organization, and circulation of blackness." (57)
Gray designates television of the 1980s as belonging to three kinds of discursive practices, dictated by the framing and assumed privileged gaze of the show.
1. Assimilationist - Family Ties, The Golden Girls, Designing Women, etc. Here race is seen as an individual, inconsequential attribute. "The historic and contemporary consequences of structured social inequality and a culture deeply inflected and defined by racism are invisible and inconsequential to the lives of its citizens." (86) "The privileged subject position is necessarily that of the white middle class." (ibid)
2. Pluralist or Separate-but-Equal - Family Matters, 227, Amen. These shows recognize "race (blackness) as the basis of cultural difference (expressed as separation) as a feature of U.S. society." (87) However, these shows are constructed under the premise that this black world is parallel to a corresponding white world and use the same means of normative representation. Further, these shows depend on a totalizing, universal representation of blackness.
3. Multiculturalism/Diversity - A Different World, In Living Color, Frank's Place, Roc, etc. These programs are framed from an African-American perspective as opposed to a dominant white middle class framing / gaze. They often blur the genre of the television sitcom, not always relying on easy resolution. "Television programs operating within this discursive space position viewers, regardless of race, class, or gender locations, to participate in black experiences from multiple subject positions." (90)
Gray then goes on to closely examine A Different World, Frank's Place and In Living Color as very different examples of the 3rd discursive practice of representing blackness. He has a lot of praise for the first two, but is clearly uncomfortable with the satirical ambivalence of In Living Color.
The book concludes with a chapter on hyperblackness and black youth culture and reiterating the move from struggle around the representation of blackness in the media to mere representations of racial difference
Keywords
Blackness ("the constellation of productions, histories, images, representations, and meanings associated with black presence in the United States: (12)), Struggle, Expressive Culture, Cultural Sign, Popular Imaginary, Hyperblackness.
Other Thoughts
"Television is the medium that surrounds our everyday lives without appearing to do so, intrusive without being obnoxious, a part of our common sense. Like Reagan's rhetoric, television can confront, represent, and circulate immorality without appearing hostile, judgmental, or most important, racist." (34)
This book was good and important. I can't say I found it that interesting, but I know that it was looking at these shows through a framework that hadn't really been done before - not about positive or negative representation, but as Herman repeatedly says, it is about figuring out how blackness operates at multiple discursive sites (here, televisual sites), is informed by political, historical, and social realities, and in turn, is part of a process of a struggle for meaning. So actually, yeah, I thought the methodology chapters and the framework was excellent and really useful.
I had a problem with the chapter on In Living Color - it actually exemplified an issue I have with a lot of the work that is bound up with British Cultural Studies. I get that this isn't a rescue project with uncritical praise of subversion. I also get the need to stake a claim that television is an important part of how blackness is constructed - and that it is difficult to walk the line between taking the text seriously while not going overboard and forgetting the material realities that structure both what we see and how we can see it. I think this is important, obviously. But once again, humor and pleasure are sort of like these stinky, weird, undisciplined things that can't be fit into this framework. I just don't know what to make of this statement: "What is most troubling to me about In Living Color's parody is not so much its humor, but its use of humor in the service of ambivalence."*
And all the episodes of a Different World that he thought were so great , like the apartheid episode (where they all did a "South African" dance at the end? Seriously, that episode?), were actually pretty corny. So I guess I am saying that the actual "case studies" were unconvincing. But what do I know - I was about 9 years old when all of that stuff was on television.
*I mean, I get bogged down in stuff like this when I try to explain why Sarah Silverman totally sucks even if white boys think she is all subversive and hot - but I guess that is because I hate irony. Ha ha, I am lame. But seriously, Sarah Silverman, you are not outside of ideology - you are just weird and racist.
Other QE Works Cited
Allen, Robert. Channels of Discourse. (Film and Media Studies)
Hall, Stuart. Encoding/Decoding. (Film and Media Studies)
hooks, bell. Black Looks (Film and Media Studies)
1.21.2006
Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Note: this is really, really long. I will try not to make my notes so long in the future. But the tone of it is about what I intend for this blog - mostly rough, some summary, some quotes, some random musing.
Title
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary:
Anderson begins his project of charting the development and legitimization of nationalism by noting how notoriously difficult it is to name (at least, naming as some sort of truth telling venture) what a nation is. Here Andersen lays out the stakes of his project: "My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word's multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy. I will be trying to argue that the creation of these artifacts towards the end of the eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became 'modular,' capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations." (4)
We then get what is probably the most important keyword for the text, or at least the most referenced (I mean, it is the title), the imagined community. The nation is an imagined community - the obvious example is that a person does not, and can never, know each member of her nation, but must, rather, imagine an abstracted relationship through the nation. I like the point that Anderson makes that this does not then suggest that the imagining is false or that behind or beyond nation there might be some essential truth of community - it is a useful thing to keep in mind when thinking about questions of authenticity. The nation, along with being imagined, is also limited, sovereign, and a community - "the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship." (7)
The nation is tied to conceptions of time and space. Obviously, we can see that through the definition of imagined community. Further, this issue of time and space is linked to the nation's preoccupation and rootedness in death and fatality. With this comes the linking of nationalism to both newness (historically) and legitimating permanence and continuity. Anderson traces the downfall of previous delineations of time and space, as self-evident at their own historical moment as the nation - the two forms are the religious community and the dynastic realm. The nation came about (and of course, it is not such a simple coming about - but this blog is about note taking, really...) alongside the downfall of these due to that other most important keyword of this text: print capitalism. The novel and the newspaper fundamentally changed the conception of time from messianic to calendrical, homogenous time. Further, as printing presses allowed for the rapid expansion into vernacular markets, the imagining of communities was facilitated by the very act of communal reading across space. "What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relationships (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity." (43) In that it was print, language was now fixed on the page as opposed to mutable through speech. As print-capitalism traded in the vernacular (although there were various calibrations of what this vernacular might be, either state-official or popular), new power structures of language were created. "The convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in it basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation." (46)
Anderson goes on to map why, through the power of language and print, the New World with its Creole pioneers came to nationalism first (linguistic similarity with the metropol and the impossibility of mobility for the Creole to the metropol) as opposed to the Old World (linguistic dissonance between the linguo-cultural practices of the people and the state). Further, simply because the New World came to nationhood first made nation an imaginable possibility, reproducible in Europe and post-WWII. In the case of the empire, official nationalisms of the colonizer simultaneously masked and produced the paradox of Englishman, for example, who could never be Englishmen. I think here we get shades of Homi Bhabha and later, as he revises his discussion of "Last Wave" nationalism in the Post-WWII period (that is, in the former colonies) of Fanon’s native intellectual. There is a lot more here, I mean, more detail and complexity as to the historical contingencies that allowed these differing moments of nationalisms to come into being, but I feel that I have outlined the general threads that run through the specificities of time and location Anderson discusses in depth and what is at stake in thinking nationalism.
Other Thoughts:
I am interested (ok, get ready for a shock!) this blue-print idea of nationalism and the transplantability of the almost empty term of nation (as it is bounded so often by what has fallen before it or by what it masks or by its paradoxes) across borders. And then, in his chapter on maps and museums, Anderson goes into how this transplantability is part of a process of detachability of the nation from all other nations as "pure sign." (175) Kind of neat.
Also, this imagining as something tangible and real is neat in terms of the body - what kind of print capitalism is needed to understand the body as a bounded unit that will never, ever be understood? Another, shock, I am fascinated by all the death and fatality in here. "Seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed." (146)Not really a surprise since he is talking about new narratives of community and ways of understanding life and times.
Interesting also that the chapter on Patriotism and Racism should also be the chapter on love of nation: "What the eye is to the lover-that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with - language - whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue - is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at the mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures are dreamed." (154) That's weird, right?
On a final note, Anderson's discussions of language, time and space come into a really cool place in the final chapter on memory and forgetting. I think I'll just write out some of the quotes - given my fields and interests it should be pretty clear why I am ending with them.
"All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives." (204)
"Out if this estrangement [he is talking about looking at the photograph of oneself as a baby] comes a conception of personhood, identity (yes, you and that naked baby are identical) which, because it can not be 'remembered' must be narrated. Against biology's demonstration that every single cell in a human body is replaced over seven years, the narratives of autobiography and biography flood print-capitalism's markets year by year." (204) Ok, wow, this is really cool, I think. Where is narrative bleeding into imagining? And where is memory stored, anyway? It is already breaking down the bounded body, esp. with the foundation on the terminus, death. Plus, I am giggling because I am thinking about James Frey and Oprah. And also Lacan.
Other QE Works Cited:
Barthes, Roland. Michelet par lui-meme. (Narrative)
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. (Film and Media Theory)
Said, Edward. Orientalism. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Read it and weep.
I am a graduate student in a program in American Studies and Ethnicity and in about three months time, I will be taking my Qualifying Examination. In this written and oral exam, I will be tested in four fields of my choosing: Postcolonial Asian American Studies, Film and Media Studies, Narrative, and History and Theory of the Body. I have created this page on the suggestion of one of my professors in an effort to put my thoughts on the work I will be reading for the exam in a place accessible to my advisors and peers.
Go ahead. Take the Blog. And after you return it, I'll ask you how you like it. And we can talk about it for a while. Then we can talk about life. And how we feel about things...*
*I was in Fiddler on the Roof in 8th grade. I should have played Golde, but I got Fruma Sarah instead.
Politics, what are you gonna do, right?
Anyways.
This a speech made by a Russian soldier to Chava.
She eventually falls in love with him and they elope. It really burns Tevye up.
Of course, he wasn't talking about a blog - it was a book.
But it a pretty great thing to say to a girl to get her to fall in love with you.
