AFRICA UN LTAUM R EARLI C SA TU N DSI T EU SDIES
Technicolored
Black Marriage
Reflections on Race in the Time of TV
ANN DUCILLE , editor
ANN DUCILLE
a special issue of DIFFERENCES: A JOURNAL OF FEMINIST CULTURAL STUDIES
Ann duCille
technicolored reflections on race in the time of tv
From early sitcoms such as
Marriage has been a contested term in African American studies.
I Love Lucy to contemporary
Contributors to this special issue address the subject of “black mar-
primetime dramas like Scan-
riage,” broadly conceived and imaginatively considered from different
dal and How to Get Away with
vantage points. Historically, some scholars have maintained that the
Murder, African Americans
systematic enslavement of Africans completely undermined and
on television have too often
effectively destroyed the institutions of heteropatriarchal marriage
been asked to portray tired
and family, while others have insisted that slaves found creative
stereotypes of blacks as vil
ways to be together, love each other, and build enduring conjugal re-
lains, vixens, victims, and
lationships and family networks in spite of forced separations, legal
disposable minorities. In Tech-
prohibitions against marriage, and other hardships of the plantation
nicolored black feminist critic
system. Still others have pointed out that not all African Americans
Ann duCille combines cultural
were slaves and that free black men and women formed stable
critique with personal reflec-
marriages, fashioned strong nuclear and extended families, and es-
tions on growing up with the
tablished thriving black communities in antebellum cities in both the
new medium of TV to examine
North and the South.
how televisual representations of African Americans have changed over the last sixty years. Whether explaining how watching Shirley Temple led her to question her own self-worth or how televisual representation functions as a form of racial profiling, duCille traces the real-life social and political repercussions of the portrayal and presence of African Americans on television. Neither a conventional memoir nor a traditional media study, Technicolored offers one lifelong television watcher’s careful, personal, and timely analysis of how television continues to shape notions of race in the American imagination. Ann duCille is Emerita Professor of English at Wesleyan University and author of Skin Trade and The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction.
Against the backdrop of such scholarship, contributors look back to scholarly, legal, and literary treatments of the marriage question and address current concerns, from Beyoncé’s music and marriage to the issues of interracial coupling, marriage equality, and the muchdiscussed decline in African American marriage rates.
Contributors Ann duCille, Oneka LaBennett, Mignon Moore, Kevin Quashie, Renee Romano, Hortense Spillers, Kendall Thomas, Rebecca Wanzo, Patricia Williams
Ann duCille is Emerita Professor of English at Wesleyan University and author of Technicolored: Reflections on Race in the Time of TV, also published by Duke University Press; Skin Trade; and The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction.
A CAMERA OBSCURA BOOK
“Demonstrating Ann duCille’s tremendous knowledge, academic expertise, and life experience, Technicolored furthers our understanding of race and representation through the medium of television. And just as significant, the story of her striving black working-class family in a small New England town provides a depiction of blackness that is rarely represented in popular culture. Technicolored is a clearly written, insightful, and entertaining work.”— FAR AH JASMINE GRIFFIN , author of Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progress
ive Politics During World War II
26
A F R I C A N A M E R I C A N S T U D I E S / T V/ C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES/GENDER STUDIES
September 352 pages, 64 illustrations
September 170 pages
paper, 978-1-4780-0048-8, $27.95/£20.99
Vol. 29, no. 2
cloth, 978-1-4780-0039-6, $104.95/£81.00
paper, 978-1-4780-0352-6, $14.00/£10.99
Available as an e-book