The Politics of Representation in the Digital Age: The Problem of Hyper-visibility

a talk by

Herman S. Gray

Thursday, April 13, 2006
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center
4:00-6:00 PM

Respondent: Victor Thompson, Department of Sociology, Stanford University

Background reading for Professor Gray's talk are pp. 1-10 and 185-193 of his book Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation. For an electronic copy of the reading, please contact Julie Minich at jminich@stanford.edu.

Abstract: As our technological capacities to store, network, and manipulate information accelerate, what does it mean to continue to insist on visibility, recognition, and inclusion of black people in media as a basis for cultural politics? Have petitions for inclusion and representation resulted in, not just more visibility for blacks, but the production of a kind of hyper-blackness which has become both normative and regulatory? Using a range of black cultural practices and sites, this project is broadly concerned with these forms of power and the procedures and techniques through which they operate.

Herman S. Gray is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of several important books on race and the contemporary politics of representation, including Cultural Moves: Culture, Identity and the Politics of Representation. (Berkeley: University of California Press 2005), Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, 2nd Edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2004), Watching Race: Television and the Sign of Blackness (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Producing Jazz: Theresa Records, Case Study of a Jazz Independent (Temple University Press, 1988). He has also edited Television Studies Handbook (with Toby Miller, Milly Buonanno, and Manuel Alvarado, Sage Press) and just recently his "Black Television Representations in the Post Network, Post Civil Rights Era" appeared in Black Cultural Traffic, edited by Harry Elam (University of Michigan Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in Renaissance Noire, Critical Studies in Mass Media, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture, Callaloo, and in Cultural Studies.

Victor Thompson is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. He earned a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His interests are in social demography and intergroup relations. He has taught courses in race and ethnic relations, immigration and identity, and political sociology. His dissertation, entitled Learning from Multiracial Identity: Theorizing Racial Identities from Response Variability on Questions about Race, explores response variability to questions about race using Census data and large sample surveys.