Media technologies have always played an important role in producing what can be characterized as ârealistic.â Starting with this premise, the volume in hand explores the construction of ethnicity and race as well as the politics of identity representation specificallyâbut not exclusivelyâin the US media. More particularly, the volume highlights contemporary work on the historical changes in the meaning(s) of racial and ethnic identities; in so doing, print and digital media, as well as television and film are brought under scrutiny. Through a variety of case studies written by a team of internationally based contributors, the volume showcases new, emerging theoretical approaches in the field, and pays particular attention to the role of race, ethnicity, and national identity, along with communal and transnational allegiances, in the making of identities in the media. Combined, the chaptersâall of which are interdisciplinary in terms of their methodology and discourseâidentify ways by which ethnic, racial, and national identities have been produced, reproduced, stereotyped, and contested.
The diverse perspectives provided by the following 14 chapters emphasize the interaction of ethnic and racial identities with socially accepted ânational normsâ through the mass media in their various forms: from newspapers, magazines, films, and advertisements, to blogs, sitcoms, and live performances. As the chapters suggest, race and ethnicity can be both projected and erased through representational practices. Although the individual essays present a variety of case studies from diverse historical and cultural locations, they share a strong common interest in the means by which the media as a national institution provide a framework for individuals to respond to and interact within the context of typified roles and power hierarchies. In fact, the collection testifies to the extent to which representational practices may obscure and even erase, but also foreground and problematize, those roles and hierarchies. Such a perspective challenges the view of race and ethnicity as static, transparent, and unambiguous categories, and illustrates the mechanisms through which ethnic, racial, and national identitiesâas represented by the mediaâare often ambiguous, contradictory, and even conflicting.
As stated earlier, the volume is based on a transnational and interdisciplinary methodological approach (for example, Banerjee 2011; Boletsi 2011; Davis et al. 2011a; Grewal and Kaplan 2001; Lee 2011; Shohat and Stam 1994). More specifically, the contributors to the volumeâwhose scholarly backgrounds range from American Studies, to new media studies and cultural criticismâhighlight the ever evolving discourse of ethnic and racial identity representation in the media that foregrounds multiple, simultaneous ties and interconnections across and beyond the borders of nation states. In fact, while engaging with the question of how those ethnic and racial identities are produced and consumed in the twenty-first century, they also look back to the history and politics of this representation. Moreover, all the chapters make a case for a non-essentializing view of identity politics in the media. Importantly, the plural mode of coexistence foregrounded in the volume does not intend to cancel identity as a concept, nor does it dispute the uniqueness of any one specific culture. Instead, it seeks to decolonize âbeingâ and âbeing-with-one-anotherâ from any ethnic, racial or national foreclosure.
Theoretical Framing
The representation of âraceâ and ethnicity in the media has usually been approached through a critique of mainstream images that have often been found to be problematic. As key scholars have shown, such representations tend to emphasize the Otherness of those represented (Hall 1991, 1997), they rely on the conventions and repertoire of discourses such as Orientalism (Said 1995), and they project visions based on Eurocentrism (Shohat and Stam 1994). In addition to revealing systematic strategies of othering and exclusion, these critiques have paved way for more detailed analyses of racialized and ethnicized media representations of minorities and non-Western peoples. The issue of representation is indeed a contested one, as Robert Ferguson (1998) argues, especially in the postmodern era, when diverse, even contradictory and overlapping, discourses are at play. Ferguson (1998, pp. 3â5) underlines the need to contextualize media representations of race in their material and social contexts, as well as to think about them in the context of articulating identity in conditions where power and subordination regulate the production of identity narratives. To use Fergusonâs (1998, p. 4) words, race is often linked with social tensions owing to such reasons as âgenerating fear, outrage, empathy or sometimes titillation for the mixed and changing audiences for particular media messages.â Other critics have presented similar views. For example, Anselmi and Gouliamos (1998) have shown that the patterns of exclusion, falsehood, and disorder are constructed systematically by power elites in order to obscure diversity and quash the autonomy of subordinated communities. Furthermore, Teun A. van Dijk (2000) has relied on a discourse analytical perspective to examine the ways in which apparently neutral modes of discourseâsuch as news reportsâcontribute to the making of the ânew racismâ in modern Western societies. Similarly, Childs (2014) has made the case for the ways in which images of race are frequently transmitted through popular culture.
While ethnic and racial minorities have often been posited as the objects of the dominant media discourse, victimization and passivity should not be seen as the general predicament. Rather, we should pay attention to the ways in which ethnic and diasporic cultures are also producers of media images, not only their recipients, both historically and today. While the problems involved in the production and marketing of such images should not be belittled, as shown in Herman Grayâs (2000) analysis of the politics of race in US television, particular emphasis must, nevertheless, be placed on such program content with which minority views can identify (see Ross 2000). Specifically, with reference to the USA, evidence of the more active role of ethnic media production can be seen in such forms as non-English-language newspapers published since the nineteenth century, in African-American magazines producing non-mainstream representations, as well as in various self-representations in films, television shows, and popular music produced by ethnic and racialized minorities, as well as by diasporic communities. As a result, rather than fixed and stable representations, representations of racial and ethnic identities emerge as performative and transforming, thus empowering the members of their respective communities.
Those observations have also been made in recent studies concerning self-representation and the performative construction of identity. Proposing that transnationalism can be assumed to be processes by which âpopulations on the move forge and sustain multistranded social relations that link societies of origin to those of settlementâ (2011b, p. 3) Davis, Fischer-Hornung, and Kardux suggest that it is through media, music, and art that ethnic and racial identities are established and circulate across geographic, cultural, and political borders. The three authors uphold the view that media constitute todayâs dominant culture, and emphasize the importance of initiating new theoretical frames and proposing new interpretations of the multilayered cultural products they offer for public consumption.
Media offer alternative nodes of ethnic identification, either through decoding, or online communities. In the first case, it has been noted that even the consumption of mainstream television shows is based on the process of contesting reading, where narratives are interpreted in a way that makes them work for the viewer. An example of this is Oneka Labennettâs (2006) study of the surprising popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a series where a young white California girl uses her supernatural powers to fight vampires and other similar monsters, amidst the West-Indian female migrants in New York. What the interviewees revealed to Labennett (2006, p. 289) illuminates Buffyâs superficially surprising appeal to teenage audiences: instead of being read as a white image, Buffy is perceived by teenage viewers as an outsider, contesting representations of ââa regularâ [American] white teenager.â Buffyâs reading and subsequent consumption by teenage audiences is a telling illustration of the ways in which conventional realist readings of race and ethnicity in media discourse are nowadays inadequate and problematic, by nature of their ambiguity and openness.
In the second case identified aboveâthat of online ethnic communities that have emerged as results of globalization, transnational travel, and new computer mediated communicationâit has been suggested that while such sites can be interpreted as a collective attempt to critique existing stereotypes, such stereotypes remain and problematize the formation of alternative identities (Marotta 2011, pp. 545â6). As Marotta (2011, p. 549) mentions, the Internet, while providing a forum for marginal discourses, simultaneously allows space for the articulation of âexclusionary and repressive discourse[s].â Cisneros and Nakayama (2015) have also addressed the deployment of racist discourse on the Twitter attacks against Nina Davuluri, the first Indian American to win the title of Miss America. In other words, often, online identities remain linked with offline realities, rather than presenting truly alternative solutions. Yet, at least in some cases, new media have provided new opportunities for the maintenance and reconstruction of ethnic identities by providing links with tradition and other members of the diasporic community, as shown in Panagakosâs (2003) analysis of the use of the new media amongst Greek Canadians.
As all contributors to this volume agree, faced with the challenge of a âglobal ecumeneâ (Hannerz 1996), ethnic, media, and cultural studies theorists are forced to turn to more interdisciplinary and transnational approaches. Such approaches are necessitated by the controversy surrounding media representations of racial and ethnic identities in the context of fluidly contingent forces of cultural power. Since, as Hannerz has asserted, there really is no âdistant Otherâ or âPrimitive Manâ in this âglobal ecumene,â the interpretive models adopted in this volume are flexible enough to investigate complex, multidimensional ties and interactions âlinking people or institutions across the borders of nation-statesâ (Vertovec 1999, p. 447). In particular, in examining both historical and contemporary mediascapes, the authors of the subsequent chapters adopt new conceptual approaches to the subject of racial and ethnic identities in the media, and, thus, address not only the aspects of continuity and change, but also those of complexity and contradiction. These approaches are bidirectional. More explicitly, on the one hand, they respond to the question of how representations of race and ethnic minorities are reproduced, elaborated, and challenged by the media, while on the other they illuminate the ways in which ethnic and racial minorities themselves respond to, use, and deploy media within their everyday lives, cultures, and identities. Ultimately, the volume as a whole collects new and significant work at the intersection of the fields of transnational cultural studies, ethnic studies, and media studies, and presents a diverse range of critical investigations into the pressing questions of identity formation across the mediasphere.
Reviewing Contributions
Part I of the volume, âMany Atlantics: Exploring Transnational Flows of Ideas,â explores how transatlantic and transnational flows of ideas have been shaped in the media since the nineteenth century. In addition to providing a historical perspective, these essays locate their topics in cross-cultural currents, and underline the role that cultural encounters play in the formation of identity. In particular, the first essay by Robert Stam and Ella Shohat addresses the notion of the âRedâ Atlantic, by illustrating the cross-fertilization of European and indigenous American cultures, which are connectedârather than separatedâby the ocean. What their analysis of various cultural texts and ideologies suggests is that indigenous American as well as European progressive political and socia...