ABSTRACT
Much contemporary mainstream and radical theorizing on race and popular culture places television, film, and advertising outside the circuits of social meanings, as though these practices were preexisting, self-constituting technologies that then exert effects on an undifferentiated mass public (Parenti, 1992; Postman, 1986). This essay counters that tendency. We see television and film as fulfilling a certain bardic function, singing back to society lullabies about what a large hegemonic part of it “already knows.” Like Richard Campbell (1987), we reject the vertical model of communication that insists on encoding/decoding. We are more inclined to theorize the operation of communicative power in horizontal or rhizomatic terms. Television and film, then, address and position viewers at the “center” of a cultural map in which suburban, middleclass values “triumph” over practices that drift away from mainstream social norms. In this arrangement, the suburb, in the language of Christopher Lasch (1991), becomes “The True and Only Heaven”: the great incubator and harbinger of neo-evolutionary development, progress, and modernity in an erstwhile unstable and unreliable world.
