Review of Module 4: Black Popular Culture

Flashcards reviewing key vocabulary and concepts from the lecture notes on Module 4, focusing on Black popular culture, sitcoms, representation, and related theoretical frameworks.

Rap music and hip hop culture

Often examined and celebrated as fundamentally altering the direction of mainstream popular culture.

New Black Cinema and the hood film

Have also proved terrifically influential and a neat hybridity is noted in recognizing the various examples of crossover between all of rap music, hip hop.

Black sitcoms of the 1980s and early 1990s

An influential tradition that rose in prominence and in numbers on the heels of the terrific success The Cosby Show enjoyed quickly after debuting on NBC in 1984.

Sitcoms (situational comedies)

Have often been subjected to criticisms ranging from being simplistic, repetitive and mundane to uncritical and empty of “any real meaning.

Horace Newcomb sees the sitcom as

Providing a simple and reassuring problem/solution formula.

Television comedy endures as a recognized dramatic form that

Uses humour and ends happily.

As an integral part of society, television drives the cultural milieu it seeks to emulate and receive profit from; Because of its inability (or rather lack of desire) to extricate itself from this environment,

television emits and constructs racialized, gendered, sexualized, and generational tropes.

Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream, Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis preface their study of arguably the most important, influential, popular, as well as conflicting, polarizing, debated upon, and scrutinized sitcoms in American television history by

Reminding readers that the late 20th century mythology declaring racial harmony, tolerance and colour blindness was just that: a myth.

For Gates then, The Cosby Show

Is most damaging in its foregrounding mythology rather than spurring on critical thinking.

Herman Gray supports Gates in his perspective, and adds that while The Cosby Show may have constructed and enabled new ways of representing African Americans’ lives… [but] within black cultural politics of difference… [it]

Confined black diversity [to] the limited sphere of domesticity and upper-middle-class affluence.

The sitcom

Is also explored here as a genre that can include and communicate to viewers both legitimate and critical commentary, as well as having the capacity to also neatly penetrate hegemonic structures and subsequently offer from the inside of Hollywood out to mainstream viewers a cogent deconstruction of the very dominant culture of which it is also a part.

As Herman Gray states,

Television is a system of production and representation through which [racialized] meanings…are produced.

In Racist Ideologies and the Media, Stuart Hall instructs that

Sitcoms provide a neatly obscured exercise in allowing viewers to consume racialized meanings, but while under the guise of comedy.

More specifically, The Cosby Show’s

That mainstream success and appeal does not mean that it was consumed in a universal manner by all viewers.

As Stuart Hall maintains, Black popular culture is a site of contestation, a contradictory space

Bound up in characteristics such as power, access and privilege, and as such resistant to typical binary oppositions such as high and low culture, resistance and incorporation, and authentic and inauthentic.

Whiteness is

Ideological, it is made up of the accumulation of various social elements and policies that together form a broad and wide ranging meaning system producing “common sense norms.”

Wendy Leong structures George’s conflict as a characteristic of racial capitalism. For Leong, George’s conflict with Mr. Morgan provides an opportunity for understanding how

Race is valued and the way racial value can be harnessed and exchanged, and a “useful lens for understanding the value assigned to non-whiteness is that of capital.

The fictional (George) and the non-fictional (President Bush) is instructive in demonstrating to you how each of those dominant white bodies

Attempt to construct an identity beneficial to them, but saddle Black bodies with the task of aiding them, and entering those bodies into the racial capitalism Leong explains in the process.

Leong examines race as it can be used or mobilized as a commodity resulting in a particular perceived social achievement for the dominant racialized body within the equation. More specifically, for Leong, “problems with racial capitalism arise when white individuals and predominantly white institutions seek and achieve

Racial diversity without examining their motives and practices.

And illustrative of a “historically specific setting,” is what has been examined as a sort of “only the strongest shall survive” opposition in which Friends and Living Single

were ostensibly pitted against each other on opposing networks – NBC and Fox – and were also produced by the same larger company, Warner Bros.

In the Harvard Law Review, Wendy Leong introduces racial capitalism,

A concept examining race as it can be used or mobilized as a commodity resulting in a particular perceived social achievement for the dominant racialized body within the equation.

More specifically, for Leong, “problems with racial capitalism

Arise when white individuals and predominantly white institutions seek and achieve racial diversity without examining their motives and practices.

While The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince

May not be categorized formally as activist, the less popular, but certainly impactful, Cosby Show spin-off A Different World has been critically lauded as being “ahead of its time,” so to speak, in particular in addressing various social issues that conventional mainstream sitcoms steered clear of.

One of the most compelling aspects of A Different World is how audiences were presented with two distinctly disparate versions of the series, the first under the direction of Anne Beatts, a white woman, and the second under the guidance of Debbie Allen, a Black woman

Under the direction of Beatts the show underperformed and was underwhelming in terms of viewer engagement.

Coleman and Cavalcante ask how Allen was

“able to create new counter narratives that focused on and cast Blackness as sociopolitically provocative and relevant given the historically poor treatments of African Americans in media, the confines of the situation comedy genre, and the strictures of commercial network television?

Under Allen, A Different World

Was encoded with new representations and meaning systems and each in term offer opportunities for viewers to decode and engage with those representations and meanings.

In summary then, “A Different World was about more than offering up a unique experience for viewers, it was about inviting her audience to understand and experience Blackness. She

Exploit the knowledge function of television by presenting forms of cultural knowledge and political struggle in new ways, accessible to both Black and non-Black audiences.

Hip hop in mainstream culture

Hip hop is often examined as fundamentally altering the direction of mainstream popular culture and can be influential in film and television.

Criticisms of sitcoms

Sitcoms are often criticized for being simplistic, repetitive, mundane, uncritical, and empty of real meaning.

The Cosby Show's impact

The Cosby Show is important, influential, popular, conflicting, polarizing, debated upon, and scrutinized within American television history.

Racial capitalism

Wendy Leong introduces racial capitalism in the Harvard Law Review. It examines race as a commodity resulting in social achievement for the dominant racialized body.

A Different World

A Cosby Show spin-off, lauded for addressing social issues that mainstream sitcoms avoided, especially under Debbie Allen's direction.