Black Radio/Black Resistance: The Life & Times of the Tom Joyner Morning Show - Hardcover

Di Leonardo, Micaela

9780190870195: Black Radio/Black Resistance: The Life & Times of the Tom Joyner Morning Show

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190870192 ISBN 13: 9780190870195

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2019

Every weekday, the wildly popular Tom Joyner Morning Show reaches more than eight million radio listeners. The show offers broadly progressive political talk, adult-oriented soul music, humor, advice, and celebrity gossip for largely older, largely working-class black audience. But it's not just an old-school show: it's an activist political forum and a key site reflecting on popular aesthetics. It focuses on issues affecting African Americans today, from the denigration of hard-working single mothers, to employment discrimination and sexual abuse, to the racism and violence endemic to the U.S. criminal justice system, to international tragedies.

In Black Radio/Black Resistance, author Micaela di Leonardo dives deep into the Tom Joyner Morning Show's 25 year history inside larger U.S. broadcast history. From its rise in the Clinton era and its responses to key events--9/11, Hurricane Katrina, President Obama's elections and presidency, police murders of unarmed black Americans and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and Donald Trump's ascendancy-it has broadcast the varied, defiant, and darkly comic voices of its anchors, guests, and audience members. di Leonardo also investigates the new synergistic set of cross-medium ties and political connections that have affected print, broadcast, and online reporting and commentary in antiracist directions. This new multiracial progressive public sphere has extraordinary potential for shaping America's future. Thus Black Radio/Black Resistance does far more than simply shed light on a major counterpublic institution unjustly ignored for reasons of color, class, generation, and medium. It demonstrates an alternative understanding of the shifting black public sphere in the digital age. Like the show itself, Black Radio/Black Resistance is politically progressive, music-drenched, and blisteringly funny.

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About the Author:

Micaela di Leonardo is Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She has published five books and several dozen articles, and has worked as an anti-racist and feminist writer and activist since the 1970s. And she is an avid soul music fan.

Review:

"Micaela di Leonardo's fourteen-year analysis of The Tom Joyner Morning Show brilliantly highlights America's 'best kept secret'--the millions of working and middle-class African Americans' lives and interests ignored by mainstream media. di Leonardo documents the TJMS anchors' and audience's stinging humor, fine musical taste, and broadly progressive activist politics--an important and unique take on the black public sphere in the digital age" -- Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology, University of Pennsylvania

"In this penetrating analysis of The Tom Joyner Morning Show, Micaela di Leonardo brings us inside the world of Black Radio. It is a haven for communion and politics, and not only constructs a distinctive world view, but also provides the ferment for political consciousness and action" -- Stephen Steinberg, Distinguished Professor of Urban Studies, Queens College & Graduate Center, CUNY

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