Double Negative:
The Black Image and Popular Culture
“An amazing and much-needed critical intervention…”
From the antics of Flavor Flav on Flavor of Love to the brazen behavior of the women on Love & Hip Hop, so-called negative images of African Americans are a recurrent mainstay of contemporary American media representations.
In Double Negative Racquel J. Gates examines the generative potential of such images, showing how some of the most disreputable representations of black people in popular media can strategically pose questions about blackness, black culture, and American society in ways that more respectable ones cannot. Rather than falling back on claims that negative portrayals hinder black progress, Gates demonstrates how reality shows such as Basketball Wives, comedians like Katt Williams, and movies like Coming to America play on "negative" images to take up questions of assimilation and upward mobility, provide a respite from the demands of respectability, and explore subversive ideas.
By using negativity as a framework to illustrate these texts' social and political work as they reverberate across black culture, Gates opens up new lines of inquiry for black cultural studies.
Duke University Press, 2018
Reviews
“I am happy I get to be a scholar after the work of Racquel Gates, because otherwise I am not sure what type of scholar I would have become.”
- Sam A. Carter, JumpCut (read the full review)
“Gates considers not only formal producers of media but also black audiences who engage with these works, successfully arguing for a more nuanced understanding of what makes for black cultural production.”
“Racquel J. Gates’ unpacking of black racial media figures postulates that negative images derived from cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding practice can be reconfigured to provide agency and hybridity to black figures. . . . Recommended. All readers.”
“Double Negative is a penetrating piece of theoretical scholarship.”
- Ayten Tartici, UChicago’s Critical Inquiry (read the full review)
“In Double Negative, Racquel J. Gates places us in front of image after black image that folks concerned with the ‘positive’ representation of the race have tried, unsuccessfully, to repress. In the process, this willfully disobedient book challenges us to look at ourselves, as readers—the aesthetic judgments, political assumptions, old anxieties, and surprising pleasures that animate our encounters with blackness onscreen.”
“‘Double Negative’ is a penetrating piece of theoretical scholarship.””
“An amazing and much-needed critical intervention, Double Negative interrogates the ways in which respectability politics are imbricated in discussions of black representation. By questioning how media representations are deemed negative, Racquel J. Gates explodes the idea of privileging ‘good’ texts over less desirable ones. She contests the notion that negative texts are bad objects and guilty pleasures on every front, allowing for negotiated readings that offer spaces for identification, pleasure, and even empowerment.”