{"id":1684,"date":"2012-12-10T21:20:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T21:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/12\/a-tyler-perry-academic-conference-applies-highbrow-criticism-to-a-lowbrow-empire.html"},"modified":"2012-12-10T21:20:00","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T21:20:00","slug":"a-tyler-perry-academic-conference-applies-highbrow-criticism-to-a-lowbrow-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/12\/a-tyler-perry-academic-conference-applies-highbrow-criticism-to-a-lowbrow-empire.html","title":{"rendered":"A Tyler Perry academic conference applies highbrow criticism to a lowbrow empire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

<\/p>\n

Sometimes the secret purpose of academic conferences, roundtables, and symposia seems to be to make whatever subject they\u2019re covering more substantive than it actually is. That particularly applies to academic conferences devoted to seeming pop ephemera, like last year\u2019s University Of Chicago academic conference concerning\u00a0The Jersey Shore<\/a><\/i>. Part of my attraction to Northwestern University\u2019s Madea\u2019s Big Scholarly Roundtable (subtitle: \u201cPerspectives On The Media Of Tyler Perry\u201d) lies in the seeming incongruity of devoting sober academic analysis to films about a weed-smoking, sass-talking, whupping-delivering old woman played by a man in drag. But it would be a mistake to assume that just because\u00a0Tyler Perry<\/a>\u00a0traffics in lowbrow entertainment that his oeuvre is not worthy of serious criticism or scholarship.\u00a0<\/div>\n
Perry, after all, isn\u2019t just the dominant black commercial filmmaker of our time; he\u2019s the dominant black commercial filmmaker of\u00a0all\u00a0<\/i>time, a one-man industry whose uncanny gift for discerning the emotional needs of his audience has made him a billionaire. Perry has cracked the code of commercial filmmaking like no filmmaker before him, black or white. In 2011,\u00a0Forbes\u00a0<\/i>listed Perry<\/a>\u00a0as the highest-paid man in entertainment, having made $130 million in a single year. Perry has figured out a way to crank out modestly budgeted, almost invariably successful films, television shows, and plays at a pace no one else can match. Perry matters. His films matter. His aesthetic matters. His work has radically changed the landscape of black film. But is that a positive or negative development?\u00a0<\/div>\n
By virtue of being an academic conference, Madea\u2019s Big Scholarly Roundtable featured the liberal use of thousand-dollar terms like \u201chetero-normative,\u201d but the word that reappeared the most was \u201cambivalence.\u201d The passionate, invested black academics of the conference approached Perry\u2019s fame, work, and cultural significance with profound ambivalence, particularly regarding his extraordinarily problematic treatment of gender. The women in Perry\u2019s films read like a who\u2019s-who of leading black actresses and cultural icons: Maya Angelou, Cicely Tyson, Angela Bassett, Taraji P. Henson, Jill Scott, Sanaa Lathan, Alfre Woodard, and Gabrielle Union. He regularly gives meaty roles to gifted black actresses, but it comes at a steep cost. While it\u2019s great that a popular and prolific filmmaker casts strong black women in lead roles, it\u2019s also unfortunate, many at the conference held, that those high-profile roles invariably center films whose sexual politics remain stuck in the distant past.<\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes the secret purpose of academic conferences, roundtables, and symposia seems to be to make whatever subject they\u2019re covering more substantive than it actually is. That particularly applies to academic conferences devoted to seeming pop ephemera, like last year\u2019s University Of Chicago academic conference concerning\u00a0The Jersey Shore. Part of my attraction to Northwestern University\u2019s Madea\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nA Tyler Perry academic conference applies highbrow criticism to a lowbrow empire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sometimes the secret purpose of academic conferences, roundtables, and symposia seems to be to make whatever subject they\u2019re covering more substantive\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/12\/a-tyler-perry-academic-conference-applies-highbrow-criticism-to-a-lowbrow-empire.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Tyler Perry academic conference applies highbrow criticism to a lowbrow empire\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sometimes the secret purpose of academic conferences, roundtables, and symposia seems to be to make whatever subject they\u2019re covering more substantive\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/12\/a-tyler-perry-academic-conference-applies-highbrow-criticism-to-a-lowbrow-empire.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Rhetoric Race and Religion\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-12-10T21:20:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Andre E. 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