Being Mara Brock Akil: Representations of Black Womanhood on Television examines the body of work of Mara Brock Akil, the showrunner who produced Girlfriends, The Game, Being Mary Jane, and Love Is__. The contributions to this volume are theoretically anchored in Patricia Hill Collin’s Black Feminist Thought, with a focus on how Brock Akil’s shows intentionally address Black humanity and specifically provide context for Black women’s lived experiences and empathy for Black womanhood by fea...

Narratives of Storytelling Across Cultures demonstrates how meaning found within interpersonal communication is not universal across all cultures. Miscommunication can occur when the foundations of cultural meaning within stories, as told socially and within media, vary among different cultures. Positioned within the communication and media field, this book connects issues of societal tension and political battles to media portrayals, social communication events, and power dynamic...

From Blackface to Black Twitter: Reflections on Black Humor, Race, Politics, & Gender traces the roots and fruits of comedy over the centuries to analyze and offer insights into the intersections of race, gender, and politics in humor that is by, for, and/or about black people.

Race, Gender and Image Restoration Theory: How Digital Media Change the Landscape explores themes that are relevant to the socio-political landscape of twenty-first-century America, including race and gender representation, social media and traditional media framing, and image restoration management. This book provides a comprehensive discussion of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Image Restoration Theory (IRT) to establish a baseline for a conversation on celebrity image restoratio...

Using the cultural prism of race, this book critically examines the image of African Americans in media of the twenty-first century. Further, the authors assess the ways in which media focused on gender, religion, and politics in framing perceptions of the President and First Lady of the United States during the Obama administration.