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IMAGE BREAKERS, IMAGE MAKERS:
PRODUCING RACE, AMERICA, AND TELEVISION
by
Anthony Sparks
________________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
August 2012
Copyright 2012 Anthony Sparks
Object Description
| Title | Image breakers, image makers: producing race, America, and television |
| Author | Sparks, Anthony |
| Author email | asparksnyc@aol.com;sparksanthony@me.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | American Studies and Ethnicity |
| School | College of Letters, Arts And Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2012-04-17 |
| Date submitted | 2012-07-26 |
| Date approved | 2012-07-27 |
| Restricted until | 2014-07-26 |
| Date published | 2014-07-26 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Kondo, Dorinne |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Houston, Velina Hasu Banet-Weiser, Sarah Wilson, Francille Rusan McPherson, Tara |
| Abstract | 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. |
| Keyword | black representation; critical media industries studies; production studies; new television studies; blackness; performance studies; black performance; African American studies; critical ethnography; television writing; television producing; African American television writers; Herman Gray; Dorinne Kondo; artist-scholarship; scholar-artist; black cultural studies; black popular culture; racial formation and hegemony in popular culture; NAACP 1999 television protest |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Sparks, Anthony |
| Physical access | The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given. |
| Repository name | University of Southern California Digital Library |
| Repository address | USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 7002, 106 University Village, Los Angeles, California 90089-7002, USA |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume4/etd-SparksAnth-1037.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | IMAGE BREAKERS, IMAGE MAKERS: PRODUCING RACE, AMERICA, AND TELEVISION by Anthony Sparks ________________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY) August 2012 Copyright 2012 Anthony Sparks |
