Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- The Captivating Aspirations of Post-Network Quality Television in the Age of Mass Incarceration: An Introduction
- 1 Mass (Mediating) Incarceration
- 2 How Does Violent Spectacle Appear as TV Realism? Sources of OZ’s Penal Imaginary
- 3 If It’s Not TV, is It Sociology? The Wire
- 4 Is Entertainment the New Activism? Orange Is the New Black, Women’s Imprisonment, and the Taste for Prisons
- 5 Can Melodrama Redeem American History? Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Queen Sugar
- Conclusion: American Politics and Prison Reform after TV’s Digital Turn
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
5 - Can Melodrama Redeem American History? Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Queen Sugar
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- The Captivating Aspirations of Post-Network Quality Television in the Age of Mass Incarceration: An Introduction
- 1 Mass (Mediating) Incarceration
- 2 How Does Violent Spectacle Appear as TV Realism? Sources of OZ’s Penal Imaginary
- 3 If It’s Not TV, is It Sociology? The Wire
- 4 Is Entertainment the New Activism? Orange Is the New Black, Women’s Imprisonment, and the Taste for Prisons
- 5 Can Melodrama Redeem American History? Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Queen Sugar
- Conclusion: American Politics and Prison Reform after TV’s Digital Turn
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter considers two projects headed by Ava DuVernay: the Netflix documentary 13th and OWN's drama series Queen Sugar. Although they approach the topic of mass incarceration through drastically different genres, each seek to incorporate aspects of Black studies scholarship into their respective brands of advocacy documentary and serial TV melodrama. Together they historicize mass incarceration's roots in slavery in ways which prove conducive to the exploration of the changing contours of Black representation across media forms. However, these treatments nevertheless remain largely entangled with problematic traditions of American melodramatic storytelling.
Keywords: 13th, Queen Sugar, Ava DuVernay, African American history, documentary, Black feminism, Black family melodrama
Publicizing Ava DuVernay as Black Feminist Auteur
In September of 2016, VaintyFair.com posted an article by Yohana Desta entitled “Ava DuVernay and Queen Sugar Look Like the Future of Television.” Indeed, since the success of her 2014 feature film Selma, DuVernay has been both rightfully celebrated and aggressively marketed as a rising star in an industry and profession dominated by white men, quickly becoming an icon of Black feminism in popular culture. In an entertainment industry which has generally diversified the opportunities it offers to Black acting talent, Ava DuVernay occupies space not in front of the lens, but behind it; she has achieved the status of auteur in the most culturally distinguished sense of the term. DuVernay's name has become so synonymous not only with Black and female directorial excellence, but with the politics of inclusion in Hollywood representation, that in 2016 New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, riffing on the notion of the Bechdel test, coined the notion of “the DuVernay test, in which African-Americans and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.”
DuVernay's Netflix documentary 13th was released just a few weeks after Desta's article to almost immediate acclaim.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality TelevisionCaptivating Aspirations, pp. 223 - 268Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022