Remembering Pre-Streaming Television Through Black Music

Faculty: Patrick Johnson

American Multicultural Studies

College of Education, Counseling, and Ethnic Studies

Following Lynn Spigel’s (2022) call to think of the snapshot camera and television as “companion technologies,” whose histories and uses within domestic spaces are inextricably intertwined, this project considers how, for a generation of Black people, the same can be said for television and music technologies like the sampling drum machine and the turntable. In this work, Black music serves as “an alternative framework through which to account for television and everyday life” (Spigel, 2022, p. 3). This project is guided by a set of central questions: What are the resonances between pre-streaming era television and Black music for Black audiences? How does television serve as a site through which Black people remember pre-streaming era television? And finally, how does the convergence of Black music and television serve as a site of pleasure for Black people?