Afro-American Studies 297V - ST-African American TV Studies

Media has played an important role in our society's ever-evolving constructions of race, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries. For African Americans, media representations typically involved exaggerated and negative depictions of black femininity and masculinity. This course will analyze and critique representations of African Americans in television genres - comedy, reality shows, dramas, and documentary / news - and explore the juxtaposition of external and internal representations of race and gender. Because African Americans created and attempted to sustain an advocacy television to project positive representations and to affirm and validate the existence and collective experiences of their race, African American counter-media production will be examined in this course. Guiding questions include: What are televisual representations of African Americans and what are the political and social implications of those representations? How do black and non-black audiences internalize these representations? What is African American media and who produces it? Finally, we will analyze recent studies on Inclusion or Invisibility? Diversity in Entertainment that found just one-third of speaking characters were female (33.5%), despite the fact that women represent just over half the U.S. population. Just 28.3% of characters with dialogue were from non-white racial/ethnic groups, though such groups are nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population.