| Image Breakers, Image Makers: Producing Race, America, and Television foregrounds my positionalities as a scholar and as a creative artist/practitioner to conduct an unprecedented, ethnographic, and longitudinal cultural study about television and the select few writers and producers who actually "make" television. I examine the spaces and processes of cultural production in order to investigate the hidden relationship between racial formation, Black representation, and television production. More specifically, I focus on the veiled process of script creation and its culture of production as a performative space with national and global implications for the images that can make, break, construct, and/or disrupt our racialized common sense. Employing an interdisciplinary framework that combines critical ethnography, cultural analysis, and performance theory my dissertation posits television production as a crucial "pre-performance" space and process where racial meaning enters into filmed texts, gains a visual and discursive materiality, and becomes a contested but indelible part of what we then call Black representation. Thus, I make a decisive shift in the scholarship on media and Black representation that moves the critique from the hypervisible "artifact" of popular culture to the difficult to access and often invisible "creation" of popular culture. In so doing I also make an argument for the critical necessity of the scholar-artist and artist-scholar to the project of knowledge production.;Taking the NAACP's historical focus on Black representation in film and television as a crucial but under examined prompt, Image Breakers, Image Makers begins by situating the political ramifications of African-American television writer hiring practices within the larger labor practices of the entertainment industry. It then analyzes the elements of production that regulate if, when, how, and what writers are allowed to create and how those elements combine to become a process of racialization. Engaging with a diverse array of scholars in media studies, performance studies, and African-American studies, Image Breakers, Image Makers complicates what I call the frustration of Black representation and centers the day to day struggle for what I call a non-comic Blackness. I discuss the visibility of the performer's agency, but privilege the invisibility of television writer-producers and their role in creating and resisting the materiality of racial performativity. Ultimately, this project reveals how Blackness is contested by television practitioners, and suggests how audiences are primed to ignore race yet make racial sense of images that have, to a large degree, already been constructed and decoded for them. |
