Core Post 3: Representation is Risky Business

In his chapter "The Transformation of the Television Industry and the Social Production of Blackness," Herman Gray intervenes into popular criticism and academic scholarship whose explanations for “the sudden proliferation of black-oriented situation comedies in the mid- to late-1980s”  leave questions concerning “the complex institutional and industrial machinations of American commercial network television” as the unthought of their “focus on discursive struggles, cultural politics, and textual analysis” (57). Rather, Gray offers an “approach [to] television by way of its political economy, industrial organization, and technologies, because these structures are central to television’s construction, organization, and circulation of Blackness” (57). Gray's un-siloing generates a vocabulary for critiquing the epistemological centrifuge of, and thinking otherwise the co-constitution of the symbolic and representational, and the economic and political. As such, Gray sharpens our tools for thinking the terms of and attachments to incorporation into representational-televisual apparatuses. Gray concludes with a particularly powerful paragraph illustrative of this kind of analytic modality, that I’ll quote at length:

The recognition and engagement with blackness were not for a moment driven by sudden cultural interest in black matters or some noble aesthetic goals on part of executives in all phases of the industry. In large part, they were drive, as most things are in network television, by economics. To the extent that black-oriented programs were cost-efficient and advertisers could be attracted, such programs were well worth the risk. [...] In the end, black programs and the audiences they could deliver were worth the risk because black audiences had fewer options and therefor depend on commercial television for their primary programming choices. (68)

For Gray, this establishes an imperative “to consider the various ways that television representations of blacks are tied to and enabled by the political economic transformations and institutional conditions in the television industry” (62). In the mid- to late-1980s, this meant a negotiated alignment between “[t]he force of neoconservative cultural assaults” and “the proliferation of network television representations of blackness” such that the “issues” of Black-oriented television programming “were neither different nor far removed from concerns that dominated the agendas of the moral entrepreneurs of the new right” (60). In her chapter "The Cosby Show: Representing Race," Christine Acham excavates a similar, ostensible paradox in the airing of the last episode The Cosby Show, "an antiquated sitcom about a wealthy black family," and the start of the LA Riots of 1992 (103).

These observations made and questions raised by Gray and Acham have me wondering a couple of things. First, their vocabulary ("representation") has me thinking about a related term ("visibility"), which appears more frequently in my own writing than the former. How do we parse the two terms? What are their shared and/or separate genealogies? What kind of force of history do their bring to analyses? I wonder how and whether in a biocentric sphere in which race and, in particular, Blackness is produced, in part, through the epidermalization of racial inferiority, whether the two can be separated, and how/whether Blackness troubles the very terms of representation, visibility, and their presumed separateness.