The Oprah Phenomenon (review)

The Oprah Phenomenon joins a shelf already crowded with scholarly texts on aspects of the career and influence of one-time newsreader, now media mogul, Oprah Winfrey. There are at least two volumes on Oprah’s Book Club alone, and, with the 2008 publication of Janice Peck’s The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era, the field of critical Oprah studies seems only to continue to expand, not unlike Winfrey’s own media empire. Tack on an armload of unauthorized biographies, tonnage in self-help and cookbooks by Winfrey proteges, and a list of new and classic titles selected for the book club, and the genealogically entangled Oprah literature would stock a small bookshop. Is there room for one more? Do we need another Oprah book?

Maybe so. Jennifer Harris and Elwood Watson have brought together thirteen contributions to ‘Oprah studies’ that are unified in their succinctness, readability, and enthusiastic engagement with their subject. Commendably, the essays that Harris and Watson have selected are less unified in their relationships to that subject, providing ideological analysis that is at times tempered by genuine appreciation (for Winfrey herself, for Oprah’s Book Club, her philanthropic work, and, especially, for the significance of the show to its viewers, as in Linda Kay’s ‘My Mom and Oprah Winfrey: Her Appeal to White Women’) that rarely turns fannish. In other words, Harris and Watson have produced a volume of imminent teachability, most critically in regard to the racial and gender politics of the Oprah empire and responses to it, as in Tarisha L. Stanley’s ‘The Specter of Oprah Winfrey,’ and Valerie Palmer-Mehta’s ‘The “Oprahization” of American: The Man Show and the Redefinition of Black Feminist,’ as well as excavations of self-help spirituality, undertaken by Winfrey in a kind of pantheist New Agism, by Maria McGrath and Denise Martin.

At times, the theoretical tools brought to bear on analysis of Winfrey and her sprawling productions are remotely grand. Marjorie Jolles positions Winfrey’s columns in O: The Oprah Magazine as Emersonian rhetoric, arguably celebrating a related unfettered individualism, but an ambitious comparison when ad-copy aphorisms such as Winfrey’s ‘Live your best life’ simper rather than sing. Damiana Gibbon approaches Winfrey as a Benthamite mastermind behind a panopticonic multimedia environment enforcing neo-liberal values, but the metaphor may not hold: Winfrey and her health-achieving, money-making team (which counts, as magazine columnists, regular guests, and spinoffs, Suze Orman, Dr Phil, and Rachel Ray) may exemplify self-regulating apparatus, but Oprah never visits – even, cannot visit – the guard tower. Mass media are still (perhaps thankfully!) insufficiently interactive to qualify as a panopticon, so that a theory of surveillance from above requires a complementary theory of surveillance from below. Nevertheless, each essay provides ample fodder for discussion regarding the growth of the media and their role in daily life.

In 2008, just a year after the book’s publication, a foray into primetime reality television (Oprah’s Big Give, on abc) failed to sustain initially impressive ratings, while both O and The Oprah Winfrey Show suffered their third consecutive year of shrinking readership and viewership. In 2007, scandal sullied the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Henley-on-Klip, South Africa, and Winfrey shook off her pledge to stay out of partisan politics, stumping for Barack Obama during the Democratic primary race, and alienating some Hillary Clinton supporters in her audience. Meanwhile, she navigated rumours about a nasty breakup with boyfriend Graham Stedman and a lesbian romance with best friend Gayle King. Signs that Oprah’s star power is fading? Hardly. A hearty tabloid presence didn’t dent Harpo Productions’ 2006 launch of Oprah and Friends on xm Satellite Radio, plans to create a new series featuring Dr Mehmet Oz in 2009, and a deal to transform Discovery Health Channel into own: The Oprah Winfrey Network, also in 2009. An endorsement from Oprah’s Book Club is still a sure shot to the...