Duke University Press Technicolored: Reflections on Race in the Time of TV (A Camera Obscura book)

From early sitcoms such as I Love Lucy to contemporary prime-time dramas like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, African Americans on television have too often been asked to portray tired stereotypes of blacks as villains, vixens, victims, and disposable minorities. In Technicolored black feminist critic Ann duCille combines cultural critique with personal reflections on growing up with the new medium of TV to examine 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. Review " Technicolored is a beautifully written and deeply engaging text that makes media criticism available in multiple registers. Media critics, Black Studies scholars, those interested in literary experiments that bridge memoir and theory, and all students of culture will learn considerably from duCille's achievement."--Michael Litwack "The Black Scholar" (2/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "Ann duCille offers an eloquent analysis of the relationship between representations of people of color and their absence in television from the 1950s to the present. She skillfully blends her comprehensive, historically grounded research with personal memories and her present connection to television. . . . Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty."--K. Sorensen "Choice" (2/1/2019 12:00:00 AM) "In her book Technicolored, Ann duCille deftly blends memoir and television criticism to create an important critical intervention into the study of race and media."--Jacqueline Johnson "Film Quarterly" (6/1/2019 12:00:00 AM) Review “ Technicolored explores how identities are ‘screened,’ how personal memory and public history intersect, and how our society and ourselves might be (tele)envisioned. Interweaving memoir and cultural theory, media analysis and social commentary, this beautifully written book not only stretches the limits of intellectual production; it brilliantly reveals how understandings (or misunderstandings) of race are themselves produced, stretched, and limited through media.” Author: Lynne Joyrich, author of Source: Re-viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture From the Author 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. About the Author 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.