Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences

 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Television scholarship has substantially ignored programming aimed at Black audiences despite a few sweeping histories and critiques. In this volume, the first of its kind, contributors examine the televisual diversity, complexity, and cultural imperatives manifest in programming directed at a Black and marginalized audience. Watching While Black considers its subject from an entirely new angle in an attempt to understand the lives, motivations, distinctions, kindred lines, and individuality of various Black groups and suggest what television might be like if such diversity permeated beyond specialized enclaves. It looks at the macro structures of ownership, producing, casting, and advertising that all inform production, and then delves into television programming crafted to appeal to black audiences-historic and contemporary, domestic and worldwide. Chapters rethink such historically significant programs as Roots and Black Journal, such seemingly innocuous programs as Fat Albert and bro’Town, and such contemporary and culturally complicated programs as Noah’s Arc, Treme, and The Boondocks. The book makes a case for the centrality of these programs while always recognizing the racial dynamics that continue to shape Black representation on the small screen.  Painting a decidedly introspective portrait across forty years of Black television, Watching While Black sheds much-needed light on under-examined demographics, broadens common audience considerations, and gives deference to the the preferences of audiences and producers of Black-targeted programming.            

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction Part I 1. The Importance of Roots 2. Two Different Worlds 3. A Black Cast Doesn’t Make a Black Show 4. Blacks in the Future Part II 5. “Regular Television Put to Shame by Negro Production” 6. “HEY, HEY, HEY!” Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert as Psychodynamic Postmodern Play 7. Gimme a Break! and the Limits of the Modern Mammy 8. Down in the Treme . . . Buck Jumping and Having Fun? Part III 9. Keepin’ It Reality Television 10. Prioritized: The Hip Hop (Re)Construction of Black Womanhood in Girlfriends and The Game 11. Nigger, Coon, Boy, Punk, Homo, Faggot, Black Man 12. Graphic Blackness/Anime Noir Part IV 13. Resistance Televised 14. South African Soapies 15. Minority Television Trade as Cultural Journey Notes on Contributors Index

About the Author :
BERETTA E. SMITH-SHOMADE is an associate professor and chair of the communication department at Tulane University. She is the author of Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television (Rutgers University Press) and Pimpin Ain’t Easy: Selling Black Entertainment Television.

Review :
"An important contribution to the scholarship on black television representations, Watching While Black fills a gap in the literature by placing recent shows aimed at black audiences front and center." - Darnell M. Hunt (editor of Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America) "Reading this collection is like channel surfing and landing on the black spaces. This is what television scholarship looks like and the televisual experience feels like when the fullness of black life is made central to television." - Herman Gray (University of California, Santa Cruz) "Beretta E. Smith-Shomade has assembled a timely, necessary contribution to and intervention within the literature on television and blackness." (Cinema Journal) "This well-written volume should appeal not only to historians of African American experience, but also Black Studies scholars and those in contemporary Media Studies." (Journal of African America History)