Whose Black is it Anyway?: Television, Competing Claims, and Conditions of Possibility in the Black Digital Popular

Abstract

My dissertation analyzes popular cultural representations of Blackness as a reimagination and negotiation between television industries, streaming platforms, audiences, and the digitalization of these screen industries – a space I call the Black Digital Popular. Representations of Blackness and Black mixed-race identity in film and television have long been a subject of scholarly research in media studies. Still, in the burgeoning era of digital studies, one must return to these representations to understand how representation, industrial practices, and logics are better understood in light of contemporary internet distribution platforms. How do these platforms affect the conditions of possibility for representations, and how do digital technologies mediate audience understandings and constructions of race? The cultural theorist and media scholar Stuart Hall asked, “What is this Black in Black popular culture?” my dissertation uses this notion as a foundation to ask, what is this Black in the Black Digital Popular? The question posed is not to create some sharp and well-defined divide between Black popular culture and Black digital culture, but rather to highlight the shifting conditions of possibility for what Blackness is - as we take into consideration new technological affordances and ever-changing media industry logics, the digitalization of screen industries, and audience and user practices in the digital sphere around screen productions that come to constitute larger industrial formations. The Black Digital Popular, then, is a digital sphere in which user practices and popular culture collide, a rich layer within Black technoculture where I am interested in the pathways to meaning-making and how this journey is mediated by technology. The Black Digital Popular is a space where Black users and media industries wrestle with and reform imaginations and representations of race and make identity claims on Blackness that are both political and pleasurable. There are always tensions surrounding the ways we draw boundaries around identity, and particularly Blackness, as what it is and what it isn’t. These tensions are brought to the surface in several ways, and my dissertation explores this issue from several different vantage points – most notably through popular culture representations of Blackness that encompass gender, sexuality, and mixed-race identity while interrogating understandings of digital technologies and user practices, television, and tech industry moves.