Scratchin' and Survivin'

Scratchin' and Survivin' PDF Author: Adrien Sebro
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978834853
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the decade’s notable Black sitcoms were made by a single company, Tandem Productions. Founded by two white men, the successful team behind All in the Family, writer Norman Lear and director Bud Yorkin, Tandem gave unprecedented opportunities to Black actors, writers, and producers to break into the television industry. However, these Black auteurs also struggled to get the economic privileges and creative autonomy regularly granted to their white counterparts. Scratchin’ and Survivin’ discovers surprising parallels between the behind-the-scenes drama at Tandem and the plotlines that aired on their sitcoms, as both real and fictional African Americans devised various strategies for getting their fair share out of systems prone to exploiting their labor. The media scholar Adrien Sebro describes these tactics as a form of “hustle economics,” and he pays special attention to the ways that Black women—including actresses like LaWanda Page, Isabel Sanford, and Esther Rolle—had to hustle for recognition. Exploring Tandem’s complex legacy, including its hit racially mixed sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, he showcases the Black talent whose creative agency and labor resilience helped to transform the television industry.

Scratchin' and Survivin'

Scratchin' and Survivin' PDF Author: Adrien Sebro
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978834853
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Get Book Here

Book Description
The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the decade’s notable Black sitcoms were made by a single company, Tandem Productions. Founded by two white men, the successful team behind All in the Family, writer Norman Lear and director Bud Yorkin, Tandem gave unprecedented opportunities to Black actors, writers, and producers to break into the television industry. However, these Black auteurs also struggled to get the economic privileges and creative autonomy regularly granted to their white counterparts. Scratchin’ and Survivin’ discovers surprising parallels between the behind-the-scenes drama at Tandem and the plotlines that aired on their sitcoms, as both real and fictional African Americans devised various strategies for getting their fair share out of systems prone to exploiting their labor. The media scholar Adrien Sebro describes these tactics as a form of “hustle economics,” and he pays special attention to the ways that Black women—including actresses like LaWanda Page, Isabel Sanford, and Esther Rolle—had to hustle for recognition. Exploring Tandem’s complex legacy, including its hit racially mixed sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, he showcases the Black talent whose creative agency and labor resilience helped to transform the television industry.

Trail of Echoes

Trail of Echoes PDF Author: Rachel Howzell Hall
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0765381176
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Detective Lou Norton investigates crimes against exceptional African American girls who belong to the same school district.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde PDF Author: Tia Williams
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1538726726
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Days in June, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is an epic love story one hundred years in the making… Leap years are a strange, enchanted time. And for some, even a single February can be life-changing. Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn’t one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she’s the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they’re long-stemmed roses, she’s a dandelion: an adorable bloom that’s actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her. When regal nonagenarian, Ms. Della, invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth, and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmers. One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way. Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance, and opportunity of New York, and whose lives are uniquely and irreversibly linked. Includes a Reading Group Guide.

Black Cool

Black Cool PDF Author: Rebecca Walker
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593764170
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Soft Skull Press proudly offers this tenth-anniversary edition of visionary essays exploring the glory and power of Black Cool, curated by thought leader and bestselling author Rebecca Walker, with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Originally published in 2012, this collection of illuminating essays exploring the ineffable and protean aesthetics of Black Cool has been widely cited for its contribution to much of the contemporary discussion of the influence of Black Cool on culture, politics, and power around the world. Curated by Rebecca Walker, and drawing on her lifelong study of the African roots of Black Cool and its expression within the African diaspora, this collection identifies ancestral elements often excluded from colloquial understandings of Black Cool: cultivated reserve, coded resistance, intentional audacity, transcendent intellectual and spiritual rigor, intentionally disruptive eccentricity, and more. With essays by some of America’s most innovative Black thinkers, including visual artist Hank Willis Thomas, writer and filmmaker dream hampton, MacArthur-winning photographer Dawoud Bey, fashion legend Michaela angela Davis, and critical theorist and cultural icon bell hooks, Black Cool offers an excavation of the African roots of Cool and its hitherto undefined legacy in American culture and beyond. This edition includes a new introduction from Rebecca Walker, a powerful meditation on the genesis, creation, completion, and subsequent impact of this landmark volume over the last decade.

You Still Ghetto

You Still Ghetto PDF Author: Bertice Berry, Ph.D.
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1466851651
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description
Still confused about what ghetto is...and what ghetto ain't? You know you're still ghetto if: -You're looking for a brother or sister who will pay your rent -You think you had a great workout because you shouted in church -You always eat before you go to a dinner party because "you never know what them people go" -You know what H.I.B. stands for (Hair I Bought) -You live on an island but you can't swim -You fish in the city Remember: Ghetto is not where you live. Ghetto is not about income or social status. Ghetto is a state of mind.

FAB

FAB PDF Author: Kieran Batts Morrow
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767918983
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Get set to meet the fearless, funny, and feisty girlfriends of FAB: Bianca has left her job in fashion and her best friends in New York to pursue an offer in Los Angeles. While the West Coast attitude and weather suit her fine, the men she meets and the salary cut she takes put living the good life way out of reach. Carolyn, whose fabulous career in advertising is built on selling the idealized female body, is obsessed with her own failure to fit the image. Certain that no man will love her as long as she isn’t model-thin, she comforts herself with designer shoes and Taco Bell binges. Taylor is the high-powered, foul-mouthed chick that women love to hate. Her salary at a New York law firm provides for a lavish lifestyle—when she finds the time to have a life. Roxanne is an actress with eight years of struggle under her belt. While suffering through countless demoralizing auditions for “fly girl #1,” she dreams of landing roles that will inspire the masses and pay the bills.

Colored Television (A GMA Book Club Pick)

Colored Television (A GMA Book Club Pick) PDF Author: Danzy Senna
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593544390
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK “A laugh-out-loud cultural comedy… This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard.” –LA Times “Funny, foxy and fleet…The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart.” –Dwight Garner, The New York Times A brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.” Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp. But things don’t work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer,” and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong. Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.

The Privileged Poor

The Privileged Poor PDF Author: Anthony Abraham Jack
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674976894
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
An NPR Favorite Book of the Year “Breaks new ground on social and educational questions of great import.” —Washington Post “An essential work, humane and candid, that challenges and expands our understanding of the lives of contemporary college students.” —Paul Tough, author of Helping Children Succeed “Eye-opening...Brings home the pain and reality of on-campus poverty and puts the blame squarely on elite institutions.” —Washington Post “Jack’s investigation redirects attention from the matter of access to the matter of inclusion...His book challenges universities to support the diversity they indulge in advertising.” —New Yorker The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In this bracing exposé, Anthony Jack shows that many students’ struggles continue long after they’ve settled in their dorms. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This powerfully argued book documents how university policies and campus culture can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why some students are harder hit than others.

Jet

Jet PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
The weekly source of African American political and entertainment news.

The Sitcoms of Norman Lear

The Sitcoms of Norman Lear PDF Author: Sean Campbell
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476602557
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, Maude--the television sitcom world of the 1970s was peopled by the creations of Norman Lear. Beginning in 1971 with the premier of All in the Family, Lear's work gave sitcoms a new face and a new style. No longer were families perfect and lives in order. Mostly blue-collar workers and their families, Lear's characters argued, struggled, uttered sometimes shocking opinions and had no problem contributing to--or at least, acknowledging--the turmoil so shunned by 1960s television. Significantly, not only did Lear address difficult issues, but he did so through successful programming. Week after week, Americans tuned in to see the family adventures of the Bunkers, the Jeffersons, and Sanford and Son. With a thorough analysis of his sitcoms, this volume explores Norman Lear's memorable production career during the 1970s. It emphasizes how Lear's shows reflected the political and cultural milieu, and how they addressed societal issues including racism, child abuse and gun control. The casting, production and behind-the-screen difficulties of All in the Family, Sanford & Son, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons and One Day at a Time are discussed. Each show is examined from inception through series finale. Interviews with some of the actors and actresses such as Rue McClanahan of Maude and Marla Gibbs from The Jeffersons are included.