Reading Media (NYU Press, Eds. Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton, 2026)
Author: Lori Kido Lopez
Abstract/Introduction: In this chapter, Lopez discusses the challenges facing textual analysts to come up with novel insights, especially in relation to the subject of racial representation. Lopez suggests ways we can move beyond the reproduction or subversion of existing stereotypes, thereby giving textual analysis greater purpose and relevance. In doing so, she considers textual analysis’s possible futures.
Introduction
Across methods, media studies scholars have been successful in helping us to better understand the ways that race and ethnicity are represented in mainstream media narratives. One of their central tenets is that such images serve to marginalize communities of color in multiple ways due to the overwhelming whiteness of mainstream U.S. media industries in terms of general employment, executive leadership, and prioritized consumers. People of color are underrepresented relative to the growing number of racial minorities in the regions being depicted, and they wield limited creative control over how their own stories are told. As a result, they suffer the indignity of misrepresentation in many different forms. There are a plenitude of studies outlining the different ways that people of color have been harmed by histories of repeated patterns, and textual analysis has been the dominant methodology for producing such work.