The Fantastic Olivia Pope: The Construction of a Black Feminist Subject

Abstract

The article applies some of the central ideas about the importance of the Black fantastic developed in the writing of Richard Iton to the study of the television show Scandal. The discussion of the political possibilities available in the first show to have a Black woman in the leading role in many years provides a way to identify the importance of popular culture in the evolution of racial politics. This analysis contributes to the growing literature on the theoretical relationship between gender and race. It argues for the importance of a specific Black feminist criticism in defining strategies for both improving the politics of representation of Blacks in television and when resolving the problems with the politics of respectability.

Keywords:

• Black fantastic
• Black feminist criticism
• Black popular culture
• critical race theory
• Richard Iton
• Scandal

Notes

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 89. See also, Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 172.

Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 305–345. Also, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 2001), 113, 118, 121.

Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 195.

Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 118, 142.

Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 42.

Ibid., 53.

Iton, Black Fantastic, 16; Stuart Hall, “What Is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” Social Justice 20, no. 1–2 (1993), 104–115.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999).

Ibid., 143.

Imani Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 153.

Iton, Black Fantastic, 170, 181.

Hall, “‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture.”

Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 2009), 230.

Iton, Black Fantastic, 288.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 237.

Iton, Black Fantastic, 287.

Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 2007), 164.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 189.

Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies,” 322.

Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 54.

Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 86.

Ibid., 21.

Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).

Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013); McGuire, Dark End of the Street, 9, 105, 276.

Utz L. McKnight, Race and the Politics of the Exception: Equality, Sovereignty, and American Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2013).

Paul Gilroy, Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010), 92.

Dorothy West, The Richer, the Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 173.

Andra Gillespie, The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 177.

Iton, Black Fantastic, 286.

Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies,” 340.