Description

From early sitcoms such as “I Love Lucy” to contemporary prime-time dramas like “Scandal” and “How to Get Away with Murder,” African Americans on television have too often been asked to portray tired stereotypes of blacks as villains, vixens, victims, and disposable minorities. In this book, 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. Whether explaining how watching Shirley Temple led her to question her own self-worth or how televisual representation functions as a form of racial profiling, the author traces the real-life social and political repercussions of the portrayal and presence of African Americans on television. Neither a conventional memoir nor a traditional media study, this book offers one lifelong television watcher’s careful, personal, and timely analysis of how television continues to shape notions of race in the American imagination.