Reorientating Darkness: the intersection of racial diversity and blindness within television technology and representation, a case study of US TV

This interdisciplinary media archaeological project relocates darkness within television. Developed by coloniser countries during an era of imperial expansion, TV has been considered an electrical seeing object that privileges Whiteness, vision, and light. Notions of darkness, blackness or not seeing have not received equivalent attention.

This intervention moves beyond TV Studies' focus on race and disability (ethnography/the audience; cultural studies/representation) to excavate TV's materiality. It argues that, in its focus on vision and light, TV utilises a negative understanding of darkness: the blackness of not seeing and the darkness of pigmentational difference as

threat to US White society. With a US context, this project repositions darkness within TV (its technology, representational forms, imaginary) to reveal its dynamic function as a trope. It reconsiders how this translates into TV's representational politics and identifies a new space to understand race and blindness.