Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (review)

Newton Minow, FCC chair during the Kennedy administration, in 1961, responding to concerns over a lack of decency, decorum, and quality children's programming, dubbed television a "vast wasteland." Gil Scott-Heron in 1974 in his song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" similarly deemed television a wasteland of irrelevancy with its promptings to worry about "a tiger in your tank, or a giant in your toilet bowl." Moreover, according to Scott-Heron, television uniquely fails African Americans because "there will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay" nor any images of "Roy Wilkins strolling through Watts in a Red, Black, and Green liberation jumpsuit." Minow's and Scott-Heron's disappointment in the medium has been echoed and extended by numerous cultural critics and industry analysts. However, Christine Acham in Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power argues that Minow, Scott-Heron, and other analysts are shortsighted, assigning too much repressive power to the medium while overlooking the fact that there is agency to be found in TV and through its participants. Acham uses 1960s Black Power–era television as her springboard to argue that the last 40 years of television have witnessed a disruption of its narratives and industry practices, resulting in the medium becoming not a wasteland, but a significant site for resistance, and, ergo, (televised) revolution.

In her attempt to "rehistoricize, reconsider, and recuperate arenas of black popular culture such as television" (2), Acham challenges the reader to consider why many of the shows that focused on Blackness met with such disdain in the late 1960s and 1970s, and why, past or present, "televisual Blackness [can] be so easily reduced to kitsch or seen as negative representations" (3). Acham employs critical, cultural, historical, and discursive analyses to "reread" classic and contemporary television texts, such as Black Journal,Soul Train,The Flip Wilson Show,Sanford and Son,Julia,Good Times,TheRichard Pryor Show, and The Chris Rock Show. Acham's choice of television programs may prompt some readers to question why these shows were chosen over other important airings such as The Nat King Cole Show,Showtime at the Apollo,Arsenio, or the oft-studied The Cosby Show. Acham works to explain that her choices reflect those shows having national prominence but often ignored in scholarship. However, one may also point to the archives she relied on as also possibly informing her selections (USC School of Cinema-Television Library, UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Museum of Radio and Television in Los Angeles).

Revolution Televised sets itself apart from other works concerned with blacks in media by focusing on prime-time texts that cross genres and functions. For example, J. Fred McDonald's seminal Blacks and White TV (1992) crosses genres to examine shows such as The Cosby Show, Roots, and network news, but opts to attend largely to the "positive representations, negative stereotypes" debate. No less than six times over the first seven pages of her book does Acham reject studies that stay within a positive/negative binary. While this point becomes pedantic, Acham is more intellectually innovative when she asserts that analysts have misread the deployment of black vernacular, humor, and double-talk, failing to see them as a way to subvert dominant narratives around blackness.

In chapter 1, Acham lays the groundwork for spying out blacks' potential for revolution while working in mainstream popular culture arenas. She documents how the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) and the "Chitlin" circuits of the early 1900s through World War II provided counter-revolutionary stage time for black performers such as Spo-Dee-O-Dee and Moms Mabley whose comedy offered "a thinly veiled portrayal of the relationship between black and white society" (12). In chapter 2, documentary TV such as 1965's CBS Reports' Watts: Riot or Revolt?, which asked if the uprising was riot, revolt, hoodlum lawlessness, or festering social illness, is juxtaposed against...