Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means in an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this updated edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters. Contributors traverse programs and platforms to wrestle with a changing television industry that has exploded and included Black audiences as a new and central target of its visioning. The book illuminates history, care, monetization, and affect. Within these frames, the chapters run the gamut from transmediation, regional relevance, and superhuman visioning to historical traumas and progress, queer possibilities, and how televisual programming can make viewers feel Black. Mostly, the work tackles what the future looks like now for a changing televisual industry, Black media makers, and Black audiences.
Chapters rethink such historically significant programs as Roots and Underground, such seemingly innocuous programs as Soul Food, and such contemporary and culturally complicated programs as Being Mary Jane and Atlanta. 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 Rebooted sheds much-needed light on under examined demographics, broadens common audience considerations, and gives deference to the preferences of audiences and producers of Black-targeted programming.
Foreword
Herman Gray
Introduction: I Still See Black People…Everywhere
Beretta E. Smith-Shomade
Part I: Historicizing Black
Chapter 1: Audiences and the Televisual Slavery-Narrative
Eric Pierson
Chapter 2: History, Trauma, and Healing in Ava DuVernay’s 13th and When They See Us
Christine Acham
Chapter 3: Thinking about Watchmen: A Roundtable
Michael Boyce Gillespie
Chapter 4: From Sitcom Girl to Drama Queen: Soul Food’s Showrunner Examines Her Role in Creating TV’s First Successful, Black-Themed Drama
Felicia D. Henderson
Part II: Attending Black
Chapter 5: Gaming as Trayvon: #BlackLivesMatter Machinima and the Queer Metagames of Black Death
TreaAndrea M. Russworm
Chapter 6: “Trying to Find Relief”: Seeing Black Women through the Lens of Mental Health and Wellness in Being Mary Jane and Insecure
Nghana Lewis
Chapter 7: On Air Black: The Breakfast Club, Visual Radio, and Spreadable Media
Adrien Sebro
Part III: Monetizing Black
Chapter 8: Black Women, Audiences, and the Queer Possibilities of the Black-Cast Melodrama
Alfred L. Martin, Jr.
Chapter 9: In A ‘90s Kind of World, I’m Glad I Got My Shows! Digital Streaming and Black Nostalgia
Briana Barner
Chapter 10: Tyler Perry’s Too Close to Home: Black Audiences in the Post-Network Era
Shelleen Greene
Part IV: Feeling Black
Chapter 11: “I’m Trying to Make People Feel Black”: Affective Authenticity in Atlanta
Brandy Monk-Payton
Chapter 12: I’m Digging You: Television’s Turn to Dirty South Blackness
Beretta E. Smith-Shomade
Chapter 13: I Feel Conflicted as F*ck: Netflix’s Dear White People and Re-presenting Black Viewing Communities
Jacqueline Johnson
Notes on Contributors
Index
