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"African Americans in the mass media industry History."
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Cinema Civil Rights
From Al Jolson in blackface to Song of the South, there is a long history of racism in Hollywood film. Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the \"N-word.\" This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers.
Cinema Civil Rightspresents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards.
Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched,Cinema Civil Rightspresents us with an in-depth look at the film industry's role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.
eBook
Represented : the Black imagemakers who reimagined African American citizenship
In 1948, Moss Kendrix, a former New Deal public relations officer, founded a highly successful, Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm, the flagship client of which was the Coca-Cola Company. As the first black pitchman for Coca-Cola, Kendrix found his way into the rarefied world of white corporate America. His personal phone book also included the names of countless black celebrities, such as bandleader Duke Ellington, singer-actress Pearl Bailey, and boxer Joe Louis, with whom he had built relationships in the course of developing marketing campaigns for his numerous federal and corporate clients. Kendrix, along with Ebony publisher John H. Johnson and Life photographer Gordon Parks, recognized that, in the image-saturated world of postwar America, media in all its forms held greater significance for defining American citizenship than ever before. For these imagemakers, the visual representation of African Americans as good citizens was good business. In Represented, Brenna Wynn Greer explores how black entrepreneurs produced magazines, photographs, and advertising that forged a close association between blackness and Americanness. In particular, they popularized conceptions of African Americans as enthusiastic consumers, a status essential to postwar citizenship claims. But their media creations were complicated: subject to marketplace dictates, they often relied on gender, class, and family stereotypes. Demand for such representations came not only from corporate and government clients to fuel mass consumerism and attract support for national efforts, such as the fight against fascism, but also from African Americans who sought depictions of blackness to counter racist ideas that undermined their rights and their national belonging as citizens. The story of how black capitalists made the market work for racial progress on their way to making money reminds us that the path to civil rights involved commercial endeavors as well as social and political activism.
Book
Trying to Get Over
From 1972 to 1976, Hollywood made an unprecedented number of films targeted at black audiences. But following this era known as “blaxploitation,\" the momentum suddenly reversed for black filmmakers, and a large void separates the end of blaxploitation from the black film explosion that followed the arrival of Spike Lee’s She's Gotta Have It in 1986. Illuminating an overlooked era in African American film history, Trying to Get Over is the first in-depth study of black directors working during the decade between 1977 and 1986. Keith Corson provides a fresh definition of blaxploitation, lays out a concrete reason for its end, and explains the major gap in African American representation during the years that followed. He focuses primarily on the work of eight directors—Michael Schultz, Sidney Poitier, Jamaa Fanaka, Fred Williamson, Gilbert Moses, Stan Lathan, Richard Pryor, and Prince—who were the only black directors making commercially distributed films in the decade following the blaxploitation cycle. Using the careers of each director and the twenty-four films they produced during this time to tell a larger story about Hollywood and the shifting dialogue about race, power, and access, Corson shows how these directors are a key part of the continuum of African American cinema and how they have shaped popular culture over the past quarter century.
eBook
Shaping the Future of African American Film
In Hollywood, we hear, it's all about the money. It's a ready explanation for why so few black films get made-no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff. But what if the money itself is color-coded? What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns? This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case. In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films.How does history come into it? Hollywood's reliance on past performance as a measure of potential success virtually guarantees that historically underrepresented, underfunded, and undersold African American films devalue the future prospects of black films. So the cycle continues as it has for nearly a century. Behind the scenes, the numbers are far from neutral. Analyzing the onscreen narratives and off-screen circumstances behind nearly two thousand films featuring African Americans in leading and supporting roles, including such recent productions asBamboozled, Beloved, and Tyler Perry'sDiary of a Mad Black Woman,Ndounou exposes the cultural and racial constraints that limit not just the production but also the expression and creative freedom of black films. Her wide-ranging analysis reaches into questions of literature, language, speech and dialect, film images and narrative, acting, theater and film business practices, production history and financing, and organizational history.By uncovering the ideology behind profit-driven industry practices that reshape narratives by, about, and for people of color, this provocative work brings to light existing limitations-and possibilities for reworking stories and business practices in theater, literature, and film.
eBook
Equal Time
Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement explores the crucial role of network television in reconfiguring new attitudes in race relations during the civil rights movement. Due to widespread coverage, the civil rights revolution quickly became the United States' first televised major domestic news story. This important medium unmistakably influenced the ongoing movement for African American empowerment, desegregation, and equality. Aniko Bodroghkozy brings to the foreground network news treatment of now-famous civil rights events including the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign, integration riots at the University of Mississippi, and the March on Washington, including Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. She reveals how TV executives worked through the ethical dilemmas they faced, how reporters and camera operators dealt with very real dangers of reporting events, how reports were constructed and aired to support integration, and how interviews were selected to project an image of a South ready for change. Television networks also looked to the entertainment industry to address the question of race relations, as prime-time comedies and dramas could no longer ignore the changes in American life. Bodroghkozy examines the most high-profile and controversial television series of the era to feature African American actors-- East Side/West Side, Julia, and Good Times --to reveal how entertainment programmers sought to represent a rapidly shifting consensus on what blackness and whiteness meant and how they now fit together.
eBook
Vixen Resistin': Redefining Black Womanhood in Hip-Hop Music Videos
In recent years, scholarship on Black womanhood has become more closely connected to postmodern discourses on identity and resistance, following in the footsteps of Audre Lorde's claim that identity and sexuality have emancipatory potential. However, in the post-hip-hop era, feminists and media critics have once again brought up the idea of who controls the image. The purpose of this study is to describe possible sites of self-definition by Black women in music videos while accounting for the cultural industries that reproduce and exploit Black women's sexuality. Using textual analysis and the perspective of a noted music video performer, Melyssa Ford, this study articulates the expanse of ambiguity that lies between the images of Black womanhood that bombard consumers of BET and MTV and the self-conceptualization of the women who play those roles.
Journal Article
Scholars do Bravo Too: Reality Television, Public History, and the Historians on Housewives Podcast
In spring 2019, doctoral candidates Kacey Calahane and Max Speare partnered with Dr. Jessica Millward, associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, to create the Historians on Housewives (#HonH) podcast. We envisioned this project as a multi-platform and interdisciplinary endeavor to make scholars accessible to a broad public audience and to help them communicate their work in ways that transcend the academy, using reality television as the primary subject and medium. Our podcast brings together scholars from across the academy to use the pop cultural phenomenon of The Real Housewives reality television show as a vehicle to explore questions about United States and world history and interdisciplinary methods of research. Historians on Housewives and guests on the podcast interrogate characters and episode story arcs to contextualize academic history for a public audience using BravoTV's vast catalogue, including non-Housewives programming, as an archive. Launched in August of 2019, the first season tackled a broad spectrum of subjects, including slavery; segregation; the politics of fashion and identity formation; wealth accumulation and branding; publishing; colonialism; immigration; historical memory; oral history; genocide; adolescence; feminism; motherhood; fertility; divorce; and domestic violence.
Journal Article
New African Cinema
New African Cinemaexamines the pressing social, cultural, economic, and historical issues explored by African filmmakers from the early post-colonial years into the new millennium. Offering an overview of the development of postcolonial African cinema since the 1960s, Valérie K. Orlando highlights the variations in content and themes that reflect the socio-cultural and political environments of filmmakers and the cultures they depict in their films.Orlando illuminates the diverse themes evident in the works of filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène'sCeddo(Senegal, 1977), Sarah Maldoror'sSambizanga(Angola, 1972), Assia Djebar'sLa Nouba des femmes de Mont Chenoua(The Circle of women of Mount Chenoua, Algeria, 1978), Zézé Gamboa'sThe Hero(Angola, 2004) and Abderrahmane Sissako'sTimbuktu(Mauritania, 2014), among others. Orlando also considers the influence of major African film schools and their traditions, as well as European and American influences on the marketing and distribution of African film. For those familiar with the polemics of African film, or new to them, Orlando offers a cogent analytical approach that is engaging.
eBook
Rethinking the Scopes Trial: Cultural Conflict, Media Spectacle, and Circus Politics
The Scopes trial has long been interpreted through claims about science and religion and about individual rights and liberties. This article recovers a different debate about the trial's political history that emerged in the later 1920s and resonated down the twentieth century. Here the trial figured as a fraught national circus, which raised difficult questions about the relationship between media spectacle and cultural conflict in the United States. The trial's circus dynamics intensified the conflicts it staged without ever actually resolving them; this trap was then perceived and negotiated in different ways by contemporary liberals, conservatives, socialists, and far-right activists.
Journal Article