Dr. Dayna Blogs

 

[daynacphdblogs]

Viola Davis’ Emmy awards speech. 

[daynacphdblogs]

Taraji P. Henson wins Best Actress in a Drama Series at the 2016 Golden Globes for her role as Cookie on Empire.

[daynacphdblogs]

STUDY: African Americans Watch More TV, Multiscreen More

African Americans watch an average of 10 hours of television per week, 1.2 times more than the overall U.S. population, and 56 percent said they are constantly active on other devices while watching.

[daynacphdblogs]

On the Glorification of the Side Chick

I'm a blackgirl, a blackgirl connoisseur of ratchetness, a blackgirl fascinated by media representations of other blackgirls, a blackgirl who cares deeply about the connection between ratchetness, representation, and lived experience. I probably care about how television curates ratchetness because I grew up witnessing different kinds of unconventional (and regularly dysfunctional) romantic relationships and have on occasion found myself unwillingly and unwittingly participating in such relationships. The 21st century Jezebel, the side chick is the quintessential scapegoat in popular culture at the moment. She is presented and understood as someone who is unethical, immoral and disrespectful of other women and their relationships. Blackgirls, all blackgirls, are worthy of more care and nuance. Let's start by complicating portraits and representations of the "other" woman, because the experience is always more complicated than the trope suggests.

[daynacphdblogs]

Why Issa Rae's HBO comedy 'Insecure' is a must-watch

Internet star and comedian Issa Rae's long-awaited comedy series Insecure is coming to HBO this fall, and you absolutely must see it.

[daynacphdblogs]

What people don’t get about ‘Black Twitter’

What people get wrong about "Black Twitter"

Quoted in this article from The Washington Post. 

[daynacphdblogs]

Jessica Moulite's--a staff reporter for Neon Tommy, USC Annenberg’s digital news outlet--interview with me about my research on Black Twitter. We also discussed contemporary television programming, and Black web series. 

(Apologies for the number of times I use “kinda”! Apparently–somewhere along the way–I replaced the common filer word “like,” which is native to we Californians, with “kinda.”) 

[daynacphdblogs]

This cover photo for ESSENCE is EVERYTHING! In a way it represents a time line of sorts of black women’s visibility behind the scenes of television (with some folks missing of course): Debbie Allen in the late ‘80s with A Different World, Mara Brock Akil working on a number of shows throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, Shonda Rhimes’ mid-00s rise, Ava DuVernay directing an episode of Scandal,  and Issa Rae leading the charge in making black web series’ visible.  It truly is an important time to be thinking about the role black women are playing as television professionals (e.g. show runners, writers, producers, directors, etc.) working behind the scenes. 

[daynacphdblogs]

Fandom

Today I have been revisiting Henry Jenkins’ canonical text on fandom, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. As I was reading it I couldn’t help but reflect not only on my immediate work on Black American fans of contemporary television programs (e.g. Scandal, Being Mary Jane, Empire, etc.) but also on my own experience being a fan. My primary experience with fandom has been music related. As a teen I would buy magazines just to post the pictures of Aaliyah, Jodeci, Dru Hill, TLC on my bedroom wall or carry around in a curated binder with associated articles and other items. I recently have become interested and a part of a new world of music fandom: K-pop. K-pop, in many ways, takes my back to my days as a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s. Yesterday, for instance, I found myself being as excited for the release of the new EXO album as I was whenever my favorite American artist dropped an album back in the day. 

In the near future I will share more about my work on Black American fans of contemporary television programs on this blog, and also place such work in context of my own experience of being what Jenkins calls an “aca-fan” (academic fan). 

As a side note: Check out EXO’s 2nd LP Exodus! Both the Korean and Mandarin versions sound awesome. 

[daynacphdblogs]

...But institutions like the media are peculiarly central to the matter since they are, by definition, part of the dominant means of ideological production. What they 'produce' is, precisely, representations of the social world, images, descriptions, explanations and frames of understanding how the world is and why it works as it is said and shown to work. And, amongst others kinds of ideological labour, the media construct for us a definition of what race is, what meaning the imagery of race carriers, and what the 'problem of race' is understood to be. They help to classify out the world in terms of the categories of race. The media are not only a powerful source of ideas about race. They are also one place where these ideas are articulated, worked on, and elaborated.

Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Gender, Race and Class in the Media: A Text Reader, ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 19-20.  

[daynacphdblogs]

The modern Black diaspora problematic of invisibility and namelessness can be understood as the condition of relative lack of Black power to present themselves to themselves and others as complex human beings, and thereby to contest the bombardment of negative, degrading stereotypes put forward by White supremacist ideologies

Cornell West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” October 53 (1990): 102. 

[daynacphdblogs]

Black women’s visibility as leading or co-leading protagonists on television has been dismal given the more than 75-year history of the medium. As part of my dissertation I am trying to not only pinpoint and explain why the current shift in Black women’s visibility in dramatic programing has occurred, but also think about why such visibility is important for contemporary viewing audiences in general, and Black women viewers specifically. 

[daynacphdblogs]

--Excerpt from Stereo Williams, “The Cookie Conundrum: Is ‘Empire’ Wrong to Portray Blacks as Criminals,” The Daily Beast. 

[daynacphdblogs]

--Mara Brock Akil quoted in the above excerpt from an article by Adrienne Gaffney (Vulture)

[daynacphdblogs]

The soundtrack to my dissertation—which focuses on the production and reception of images of Black women on contemporary television—has, thus far, been Korean pop (K-pop) related. (I’m sure there is something I can analyze about that at a later date.) I have grown particularly fond of SHINee who are considered a “veteran” K-pop group even though the members are in their early to mid twenties. They just have some really good R&B songs that give me the musical feels of the late '90s and early '00s.

[daynacphdblogs]

[daynacphdblogs]

Excerpt from Willa Paskin, “Network TV Is Broken. So How Does Shonda Rhimes Keep Making Hits?” NYTimes.com