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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
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Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Kiuchi, Yuya. "THE BLACK IMAGE IN THE BLACK MIND: THE HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICANS' ACCESS TO CABLE TELEVISION IN BOSTON AND DETROIT, 1963-1989," Michigan State University, May 2009. Advisor: Pero Gaglo Dagbovie
Within the history of the cable television system, a history dating to the end of the 1940s, there has been a constant practice of African American community empowerment and community building particularly during the last third of the twentieth century. Analyses of blacks experience with cable television reveal the evolution and little discussed history of the black image in the black mind. The idea that public access and cable television services were community property helped germinate the idea that communications technology could give the power of information to citizens equally across colorlines despite its incomplete execution even today. This new form of television production and consumption offered African Americans of the post-civil rights era, a group who had been forgotten, ignored, silenced, or marginalized in the mainstream mass media, the opportunity to produce their own collective memory, to achieve self-representation, and to create a sense of community membership. In this way, cable television worked as a vehicle of community justice for African Americans.
Employing a framework comparing Boston, Massachusetts, and Detroit, Michigan as case studies, this dissertation argues that since the early 1970s African Americans in these cities possessed and exercised political and social agency and influenced the decision making processes in their respective municipalities. By using cable television as a concept and as a technical medium, they raised their self-esteem through empowerment, strengthened community ties, and they reversed the negative images of blacks that had disseminated in visual-media dependent American society.
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