Title: Strategic Visionaries: The TV da Gente Television Network and the Politics of Representation in Brazil, presented by, Reighan Gillam.
Please join us on Thursday, April 23, 2015 for a presentation by Reighan Gillam
4 - 5:30pm - Room 5450 North Quad
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Strategic Visionaries: The TV da Gente Television Network and the Politics of Representation in Brazil
Launched on November 20, 2005, the TV da Gente (Our TV) Television Network was Brazil’s first channel to include fair racial representation as part of its mission. By explicitly attempting to increase the representation of Afro-Brazilians in the public sphere, the network directly contradicted and challenged Brazil’s traditional view of itself as a racial democracy, or a nation without racial categories and without racism. In this talk I will trace the development of the network and show how their programming navigated the complex terrain of racial discourses in Brazil. The Our TV Network allowed Afro-Brazilian media producers a space of relative autonomy to create programming and I will examine how they thought blackness should be represented.
About the Speaker
Reighan Gillam received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her dissertation, “The Revolution Will Be Televised: Afro-Brazilian Media Producers in São Paulo, Brazil” documents the work of the TV da Gente (Our TV) television network, hailed as the ?rst network in Brazil to include equal racial representation as part of its mission. Overall, her dissertation contends that commercial television acts as a new site of and resource for black cultural politics in Brazil. Her work has been supported by Sage Fellowships from Cornell University, a Five College Fellowship at Mt. Holyoke College, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Fellowship. Her work has been published in Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences (Rutgers University Press 2013) and in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.
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Reighan Gillam
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