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Christine Acham

Associate Professor, African American and African Studies
Ph.D., University of Southern California

Email: acham@ucdavis.edu
Phone: (530) 754-6619
Office: 2227 Hart Hall

Christine Acham regularly teaches courses on Black Documentary: Theory and Practice, both as part of the UCD African and African-American Studies, and Film Studies curriculum, and also as a summer session abroad in Trinidad and Tobago (See the COURSES page on the website). She also regularly teaches a course (AAS 169), History of African-American Television, which presents a history of the representation of African Americans in television. In the course, students study ways the representations reflect the social and political forces in American society, and discuss how African Americans have actively taken a role in shaping their representation.

In 2005, she published Revolution Televised (U of Minnesota Press), where she proposes a complex reading of the period of the 1960s in African American television history. She explores the intersection of popular television and race as witnessed from the documentary coverage of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the personal politics of Flip Wilson and Soul Train's Don Cornelius, and the ways in which notorious X-rated comic Redd Foxx reinvented himself for prime time.

Reflecting on both the potential of television to effect social change as well as its limitations, Acham concludes with analyses of Richard Pryor's politically charged and short-lived sketch comedy show and the success of outspoken comic Chris Rock. Revolution Televised deftly illustrates how black television artists operated within the constraints of the television industry to resist and ultimately shape the mass media's portrayal of African American life.