Technicolored

“Demonstrating Ann duCille’s tremendous knowledge, academic expertise, and life experience, Technicolored furthers our understanding of race and representation through the medium of television. And just as significant, the story of her striving black, working-class family in a small New England town provides a depiction of blackness that is rarely represented in popular culture. Technicolored is a clearly written, insightful, and entertaining work.” - Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics during World War II

“Technicolored explores how identities are ‘screened,’ how personal memory and public history intersect, and how our society and ourselves might be (tele)envisioned. Interweaving memoir and cultural theory, media analysis and social commentary, this beautifully written book not only stretches the limits of intellectual production; it brilliantly reveals how understandings (or misunderstandings) of race are themselves produced, stretched, and limited through media.” - Lynne Joyrich, author of Re-viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture

"Ann duCille offers an eloquent analysis of the relationship between representations of people of color and their absence in television from the 1950s to the present. She skillfully blends her comprehensive, historically grounded research with personal memories and her present connection to television. . . .  Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty." - K. Sorensen, Choice

"For many readers, the author’s assessment—a portion of which is commentary and the other part memoir—is an introduction to early television shows that ended before several generations had the opportunity to make their own analysis of them. [Technicolored] provides ample American history as well as critical race theory analysis suitable for anthropologists, sociologists, and students of the visual arts." - Patricia M. Muhammad, International Social Science Review

"In her book Technicolored, Ann duCille deftly blends memoir and television criticism to create an important critical intervention into the study of race and media." - Jacqueline Johnson, Film Quarterly

"Technicolored is a beautifully written and deeply engaging text that makes media criticism available in multiple registers. Media critics, Black Studies scholars, those interested in literary experiments that bridge memoir and theory, and all students of culture will learn considerably from duCille’s achievement." - Michael Litwack, The Black Scholar

“In Technicolored, Ann duCille presents a series of analyses of the myriad ways that blacks and blackness have been envisioned on television. Tracing the spread and development of television in the latter half of the twentieth century, duCille examines a vast range of televisual offerings…. While television history has significantly overlapped with the civil rights movement and the changes wrought in its wake, duCille reminds readers how the changes in African American inclusion and representation on television have, more often than not, had more to do with commercial incentive, than any kind of progressive, social awareness, or agenda.” - Joelle Tapas, Journal of Popular Culture