A landmark study by the leading critic of African American film and television
Primetime Blues is the first comprehensive history of African Americans on network television. Donald Bogle examines the stereotypes, which too often continue to march across the screen today, but also shows the ways in which television has been invigorated by extraordinary black performers, whose presence on the screen has been of great significance to the African American community.
Bogle's exhaustive study moves from the postwar era of Beulah and Amos 'n' Andy to the politically restless sixties reflected in I Spy and an edgy, ultra-hip program like Mod Squad. He examines the television of the seventies, when a nation still caught up in Vietnam and Watergate retreated into the ethnic humor of Sanford and Son and Good Times and the poltically conservative eighties marked by the unexpected success of The Cosby Show and the emergence of deracialized characters on such dramatic series as L.A. Law. Finally, he turns a critical eye to the television landscape of the nineties, with shows such as The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, I'll Fly Away, ER, and The Steve Harvey Show.
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About the Author:
Donald Bogle, one of the country's foremost authorities on African Americans in film, is the author of three prize-winning books. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films is considered a classic study of Black movie images. Brown Sugar: Eighty Years of America's Black Female Superstars was adapted into a four-part PBS series. Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography won wide critical acclaim. Bogle teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He lives in Manhattan.
Review:
"In this thoroughly researched, witty and often shocking social history, media scholar Bogle fashions an in-depth chronicle of the way television has mirrored and influenced the politics of race in the U. S. . . This major new work in television and media studies will be welcomed by both academics and general readers" --Starred review, Publishers Weekly
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- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0374527180
- ISBN 13 9780374527181
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages448
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Rating