Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn

"Fiske’s Development Geography: The Mediation of Africa in Contemporary TV Drama"

Since the 1960s, the first world has been saturated with stereotypical images of Africa. These include the pathetic image of the starving African child with swollen belly and ribs showing, or sundry displaced people wandering around or fleeing with possessions to represent an African refugee crisis. In such representations, African refugees are frequently depicted as “wallpaper,” unable to speak for themselves, a backdrop to the expert voice of the aid worker or reporter (Wright 2004).

While such representations have been heavily criticized by African and Africanist scholars, they nevertheless continue to circulate formulaically in mainstream TV news and charity campaigns. Meanwhile, many recent complex humanitarian emergencies in African countries, such as those in Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, have failed to garner the attention of mainstream first world TV news and its audiences at all, or do so only when these crises become objects of celebrity activism. John Fiske (1993: 150) discusses how such “othering” representations both assert the superiority of the developed world and depict the “third world” as an appropriate arena for the exertion of “first world” power and control.

This paper examines the extent to which such power-bearing representations may be complicated, contested and destabilized in contemporary TV drama that takes recent African crises as its subject matter. Popular TV dramas, including ER, West Wing and Boston Legal, have all screened episodes dealing with the civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Darfur and Rwanda. As Fiske (1987: 109) notes, intertextual meanings cross generic boundaries with ease (so that “othering” meanings of Africa circulated through news and current affairs programming may for instance be activated and indirectly reinforced in TV drama), though genre nevertheless exerts powerful organizational force within intertextual relations. Contemporary TV drama, considered as a generic form whose narrative attractions include character-identification and complex negotiations between competing discourses and emotional perspectives, arguably overcomes certain textual constraints and limitations associated with most TV news. For example, forms of generic hybridity at work in contemporary TV drama that explores recognizable geopolitical relations and events often generate high levels of textual complexity, openness and polysemic possibility, and facilitate genre-shifting by audiences (Fiske 1987; Jenkins 1992).

In this paper, we examine what happens when Africa is brought into the regimes of narrative complexity often associated with television drama in the new millennium, and the possibilities these textual forms offer audiences. We argue that these shows provide a diverse and alternative set of perspectives, both reworking and disrupting formulaic framings of the continent. In addition, we consider what Jonathan Gray (2010) has termed media paratexts, including George Clooney’s mediated activism on Darfur and online fan commentaries. Fan commentaries demonstrate the complexity of the cultural politics of representation in contemporary TV drama. While fans sometimes reassert generic boundaries that seek to exclude “politics” from “entertainment,” they also apply what they learn as consumers of entertainment to more overtly political realms (Jenkins 2006).