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.
Media anthropology: studying the life of media consumers through audience ethnography