Core Response #2 - Alexandria

I was surprised that Esposito had to do so much work throughout her article to argue that race and representation matters. I wasn’t aware that the discourse around TV and representation when it was published in 2009 had veered so far into a post-racial framework. But I think that the more interesting part of Esposito’s analysis was how Ugly Betty worked to center Marc’s whiteness, while othering Betty’s Latinaness, despite Betty being the main character, and I wish that part of the analysis was explained more fully. 

I found both the Gray and Han articles to be super interesting and helpful in terms of how media producers, companies and conglomerates work to both recognize and construct racialized audiences. It reminded me of Anamik Saha’s book Race and the Cultural Industries in which he argues that media industries actually work to construct race through segmented marketing strategies. Sometimes, as Gray’s analysis of black TV in the 1980s, they can effectively “construct and produce” an audience, and other times, as in the Han article, they fail to do so. ImaginAsian Entertainment was not able to attract their desired audience because they “used English as a marker of transnational Asian American cultural identity and programming strategy” (287). 

Gray’s argument “the sensibilities, choices, and habits of black audiences were becoming far more central to the look, rhythm, and feel of commercial television” in the 1980s reminded me of Ariel Stevenson’s talk last week about viral phrases and dances created by black teens on Vine and TikTok. Stevenson argued participation in the Internet currently requires heavy reliance on black cultural logics. I think Stevenson’s line of thinking has more to do with how black diasporic traditions can operate and spread as a cultural contagion within systems that continue to systematically exploit black people, whereas the state of TV in the 80s seems like something slightly different. Gray says that it was much more about an investment in a black audience out of economic necessity, a realization that many black audiences had not migrated to VCR and cable as white audiences had. I’m still trying to unpack some of the differences between these two examples, but I am really interested in scholarship that identifies when a specific medium begins to be characterized by black cultural logics.