Core Response 4

This week’s readings offer contextual approaches to representation on television, and to varying degrees address the limits of textual analysis as a means of understanding the representational power of the televisual apparatus. I am drawn to these contextual approaches to representation; in Film Theory last semester, I examined the apparatus of representation as related to Blackness in American film, but I only considered television tangentially, and exclusively through the lens of a cinematic apparatus of representation. In scrutinizing the industrial and political contexts of The Cosby Show, other black-oriented sitcoms in the eighties and nineties, and Ugly Betty, Acham, Gray, and Esposito signal certain traits of the televisual apparatus that render television as a unique battleground for questions of representation.

Gray explores the positioning of network television in the media landscape of the 1980s in order to dispel the notion that the rise of black-oriented shows at the time was “driven by sudden cultural interest in black matters or some noble aesthetic goals on the part of executives in all phases of the industry” (68). Instead, he attributes the proliferation of these programs to a series of industrial shifts and financially-motivated decisions on the part of networks, who recognized that black audiences watched TV at higher rates than other demographics, were concentrated in network-dominated urban markets, and were purchasing VCRs and cable at lower rates (67). I was reminded of a scene from Mad Men in which Pete Campbell attempts to pitch an ad campaign targeting black audiences to a pair of white television manufacturing executives (clip below). A “cultural interest in black matters” motivated neither Pete nor network executives in the 1980s. Gray’s compelling analysis of the contexts from which these programs emerged suggests that the representational capacity of the televisual apparatus can be more effectively understood through historical/economic approaches than through textual analysis.

Acham and Esposito incorporate textual analysis into more historical frameworks. Acham situates The Cosby Show within the individualist narratives of Reaganomics and Cosby’s own “fantasy of post-racial harmony” (110). Esposito argues that an episode of Ugly Betty that focuses on affirmative action stages a discourse between the postracial imaginary that emerged after the 2008 presidential election and the reality of systemic and structural racism. She makes a case for a historicized, embedded form of textual analysis: “Textual analyses…that examine relations and discursive practices within popular culture texts…confront ways particular conceptions of race are created and sustained. These discursive constructions of race are always structured within particular historical, political, and economic moments” (525).

Gray, Acham and Esposito move away from what Richard Dyer calls “images of” studies that focus on representations themselves, and instead prioritize the contexts and mechanisms through which representations are constructed and propagate. Their work makes me wonder whether television – being episodic, increasingly auteurist, and somewhat interactive – might be the ideal medium through which to analyze representation. As programs air over years or decades, an abundance of “relations and discursive practices” emerge (network/creative changes, advertising strategies, platform shifts, etc) that can be read against “particular historical, political, and economic moments.” “So Chineez” and “Lemons” could be read as individual texts, or singular “representations” of race in the United States, but to consider these episodes in relation to each other, and ABC’s entire slate of 30-minute comedies, and their respective pre- and post-2016 election settings, and their production histories creates a rich contextual landscape in which to situate their representations of race, made possible by the particularities of the televisual apparatus.