ABSTRACT This dissertation examines how Tyra Banks, Shonda Rhimes, and Tyler Perry negotiate blackness in terms of racial representation both in their interactions with the press and public as well as in their final product. Banks, Rhimes, and Perry are among the few prominent African American executive producers working in an industry of inequality. Each is the creative figure behind a prominent prime-time television show. This project contributes to the discussion of race and representation in the field of television studies. I argue there is a connection between how Banks, Rhimes, and Perry publicly discuss race and how these perspectives are encoded in America’s Next Top Model (Banks), Grey’s Anatomy (Rhimes), and House of Payne (Perry) from 2005-2010. These three are vital case studies because their shows offer a range of African American representations and extra-textual discourses about representations. Chapter Two historically contextualizes the industrial shifts in mainstream broadcast networks and basic cable channels as it relates to blackness onscreen and diversity behind the scenes. ABC, The CW, and TBS are the focus of this chapter because they are the outlets for Banks, Rhimes, and Perry’s shows. I also position ABC, The CW, and TBS in relation to the rest of the industry as it has moved from the multi-channel transition to the post- network era. Chapter Three examines how Banks, Perry and Rhimes promote and publicize themselves as the key creative figure of their shows. This analysis places each individual in different sites of the burden of representation, which each handles differently. Chapter Four explores the connection between the role blackness plays in their image as public creative figure and how it is represented in their texts through a representational analysis of America’s Next Top Model, Grey’s Anatomy and House of Payne. This dissertation advocates a neo-racial framework to examine blackness on television and behind the scenes. A neo-racial framework acknowledges that racial inequities continue to exist and the context surrounding these inequities needs to be examined. I conclude that the Banks, Rhimes, and Perry cases show that we are not in a post-racial society or in the post-network era.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Abilene Christian University, 2008. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-100).

This dissertation examines a small selection of the hundreds of films made by Andy Warhol and his collaborators between 1963 and 1968. Each chapter contextualizes a particular aspect of Warhol's filmmaking in terms of the artistic and cultural circumstances that informed it. Through an analysis of the content of specific films, rather than just their formal or stylistic tendencies, I discuss how the filmmaking process might have functioned for those involved in the films' production, as well as how those films might have functioned for specific spectators. The first chapter is a speculation on how Warhol might have understood filmmaking as a method for creating concrete connections between feelings and things -- for collecting imagery with his camera in order to create a historical catalog of people and their emotions. This first chapter also considers how some art critics in the 1960s used Warhol's early silent films as exemplars for their own anti-formalist art-historical and critical discourses. The second chapter examines the relationship between Warhol's films and the proliferation of amphetamine use amongst his collaborators. Amphetamines functioned to perpetuate for its users a way of life based on an alternative conception of time, and often involved a continued engagement with bad feelings, which fueled much of the creativity of the artistic community whose locus was Warhol's Factory in the mid-1960s. As such, many of Warhol's films from this period exhibit what I term an "amphetamine aesthetic" -- visual clues that suggest the effects of long-term amphetamine use by its participants. The third chapter is an analysis of a single film, Lonesome Cowboys. Participants in the film's production used the conventions of the Hollywood Western film genre to create a circumscribed space for transforming their everyday lives and their relationship to contemporary politics in the late 1960s. All of these chapters explore the effects of Warhol's particular approach to filmmaking, which involved Warhol's own detached style of directing, as well as his cultivation of an ultrapermissive environment in which his collaborators -- actors, directors, writers, and technicians -- felt free to experiment. This environment was predicated on the idea that the boundary between the space in front of the camera and the world beyond it was simultaneously arbitrary and deeply imbricated. Such a fluid boundary between the world inside and outside the scope of Warhol's camera is in part why some spectators, watching his films a half-century after they were made, might still find new meanings for the present in the films themselves. / text

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, May, 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1990. / Bibliography: leaves 217-225.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Abilene Christian University, 1994. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-220).

Thesis (D. Min.)--New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 1993. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-196).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Abilene Christian University, 2008. / Abstract and vita. Description based on Microfiche version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-100).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: William Lasher. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.