Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity (Critical Cultural Communication, 27)

__Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, International Communication Association__ **How Black women in the spotlight negotiate the post-racial gaze of Hollywood and beyond** From Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Shonda Rhimes to their audiences and the industry workers behind the scenes, Ralina L. Joseph considers the way that Black women are required to walk a tightrope. Do they call out racism only to face accusations of being called “racists”? Or respond to racism in code only to face accusations of selling out? __Postracial Resistance__ explores how African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences employ postracial discourse—the notion that race and race-based discrimination are over and no longer affect people’s everyday lives—to refute postracialism itself. In a world where they’re often written off as stereotypical “Angry Black Women,” Joseph offers that some Black women in media use “strategic ambiguity,” deploying the failures of post-racial discourse to name racism and thus resist it. In __Postracial Resistance__, Joseph listens to and observes Black women as they perform and negotiate race in strategic ambiguity. Using three methods of media analysis—textual readings of the media's representation of these women; interviews with writers, producers, and studio executives; and audience ethnographies of young women viewers—Joseph maps the tensions and strategies that all Black women must engage to challenge the racialized sexism of everyday life, on- and off-screen. "Postracial Resistance: Black Women and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity looks at how, in the first Black First Lady era, African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences subversively used the tools of postracial discourse--the media-propagated notion that race and race-based discrimination are over, and that race and racism no longer affect the everyday lives of both Whites and people of color--in order to resist its very tenets. Black women's resistance to disenfranchisement has a long history in the U.S., including struggles for emancipation, suffrage, and de jure and de facto civil rights. In the Michelle Obama era, some minoritized subjects used a different, more individual form of resistance by negotiating through strategic ambiguity. Joseph listens to and watches Black women in three different places in media culture: she uses textual analysis to read the strategies of the Black women celebrities themselves; she uses production analysis to harvest insights from interviews with Black women writers, producers, and studio lawyers; and she uses audience ethnography to engage Black women viewers negotiating through the limited representations available to them. The book arcs from critiquing individual successes that strategic ambiguity enables and the limitations it creates for Black women celebrities, to documenting the way performing strategic ambiguity can (perhaps) unintentionally devolve into playing into racism from the perspective of Black women television professionals and younger viewers."--Website Introduction -- Of Course I'm Proud Of My Country! : Michelle Obama's Post-racial Wink -- Because Often It's Both : Racism, Sexism, And Oprah's Handbags -- I Just Wanted A World That Looked Like The One I Know : The Strategically Ambiguous Respectability Of A Black Woman Showrunner -- No, But I'm Still Black : Women Of Color Community, Hate-watching, And Racialized Resistance -- They Got Rid Of The Naps, That's All They Did : Women Of Color Critiques Of Respectability Politics, Strategic Ambiguity, And Race Hazing -- Do Not Run Away From Your Blackness : Black Women Television Workers And The Flouting Of Strategic Ambiguity -- Coda : Have A Seat At My Table -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- About The Author. Ralina L. Joseph. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.