Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Dec 1992 v9 n4 p311(14)
The limits of interpretation: ambivalence and the stereotype in 'Spenser: For Hire.' (Critical Demography) Dana L. Cloud.Author's Abstract: COPYRIGHT 1992 Speech Communication Association
A structural analysis of the racial oppositions in the television program Spenser: For Hire challenges the interpretivist media studies claim that popular culture texts are necessarily polysemic. The article argues that representations of racial difference, in particular, are not polysemic but are rather ambivalent within the structure of the racist stereotype. The character Hawk's oppositional stance and persona, though subject to contradictory critical evaluations, serve the needs of the dominant culture to depict blacks in stereotypical ways.
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Western Journal of Communication, Fall 1998 v62 i4 p387(3)
The rhetoric of : scapegoating, utopia, and the privatization of social responsibility. Dana L. Cloud.Author's Abstract: COPYRIGHT 1998 Western States Communications Association
This article performs an ideographic analysis of the bipartisan political deployment of the slogan during the 1992 Presidential election campaign. The analysis shows that talk functioned during that campaign to scapegoat Black men and poor Americans for social problems. However, the ideograph also is invested with a gendered utopian narrative that makes its scapegoating less apparent and more persuasive. Ultimately, in constructing the family as the site of all responsibility and change, the rhetoric of privatizes social responsibility for ending poverty and racism.
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Critical Studies in Mass Communication, June 1996 v13 n2 p115(23)
Hegemony or concordance? The rhetoric of tokenism in "Oprah" Winfrey's rags-to-riches biography. Dana L. Cloud.Author's Abstract: COPYRIGHT 1996 Speech Communication Association
This article examines television and print biographies of television talk show host and producer Oprah Winfrey. Conventional biographical narratives construct a token "Oprah" persona whose life story resonates with and reinforces the ideology of the American Dream, implying the accessibility of this dream to black Americans despite the structural economic and political barriers posed in a racist society to achievement and survival. The article develops theories of tokenism, biography, autobiography, and hegemony to analyze both racial and gendered dimensions of tokenist biography. It describes tokenism as a rhetorical mechanism of liberal hegemony with regard to race and class. The essay challenges recent redefinitions of hegemony as happy "concordance" and suggests that critics cannot assume that black stars and texts automatically represent difference and resistance in popular culture.
I think Bob Johnson, a black man, profits from that. But maybe she wants the black men to be that way, the noble savage being saved by the Intellectual.
Oops, Noble Savage.
I know you contributed to that thread, GR, but thought others who didn't see it might want to check it out for comparison. With any luck, our universities will be forced to drop these empty-headed "disciplines," such as those our good professor specializes in, from their curricula by the time we've won the war on terror, and she can go back to waiting tables where she belongs.