Overview
The election of President Barack Obama signaled for many the realization of a post-racial America, a nation in which racism was no longer a defining social, cultural, and political issue. While many Americans espouse a “colorblind” racial ideology and publicly endorse the broad goals of integration and equal treatment without regard to race, in actuality this attitude serves to reify and legitimize racism and protects racial privileges by denying and minimizing the effects of systematic and institutionalized racism. In The Colorblind Screen, the contributors examine television’s role as the major discursive medium in the articulation and contestation of racialized identities in the United States. While the dominant mode of televisual racialization has shifted to a “colorblind” ideology that foregrounds racial differences in order to celebrate multicultural assimilation, the volume investigates how this practice denies the significant social, economic, and political realities and inequalities that continue to define race relations today. Focusing on such iconic figures as President Obama, LeBron James, and Oprah Winfrey, many chapters examine the ways in which race is read by television audiences and fans. Other essays focus on how visual constructions of race in dramas like 24, Sleeper Cell, and The Wanted continue to conflate Arab and Muslim identities in post-9/11 television. The volume offers an important intervention in the study of the televisual representation of race, engaging with multiple aspects of the mythologies developing around notions of a “post-racial” America and the duplicitous discursive rationale offered by the ideology of colorblindness.
Full Product Details
Author: Sarah E. Turner ,
Sarah Nilsen
Publisher: New York University Press
Imprint: New York University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 1.80cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.499kg
ISBN: 9781479891535
ISBN 10: 1479891533
Pages: 363
Publication Date: 04 April 2014
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
Acknowledging both the way that the election of President Obama became a touchstone for those who wanted to herald a post-racial America and how, in the years that followed, thinly veiled and overt racism has experienced a troubling renaissance in multiple aspects of American culture, The Colorblind Screen forces readers to question the celebratory rationalizations rampant in various corners of American media culture and to examine how race, ethnicity, and the persistence of whiteness all still matter. -Bambi Haggins, author of Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post Soul America
Author Information
Sarah E. Turner is Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Vermont. Sarah Nilsen is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Projecting America: Film and Cultural Diplomacy at the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958.
