Representations Of Ethnicity In American Sitcoms In The 1990s

Situation comedy, or sitcom, has been one of the most durable and most popular television genres in the United States of America. However, despite its longstanding popularity, sitcom has not received its due attention from the critical world. The traditional prejudice of valuing tragedy over comedy has impeded many critics and scholars from taking sitcoms seriously. In opposition to the conventional bias towards comedy, it is our conviction that sitcom, like any other television drama, is deeply inscribed with prevailing ideologies and is also equally capable of reflecting, representing, and reshaping the social changes in the United States.Equipped with this conviction, this study attempts to examine how American sitcoms represent ethnicity, one of the most pervasive and contending issues in the multi-ethnic American society. Built on the previous studies of sitcoms in relation to ethnicity, this study focuses on the representations of ethnicity in American sitcoms in the 1990s. By combining both discursive and semiotic analyses, complementing quantitative with qualitative methods, this study makes an original exploration of how ethnic groups are represented in some of the most influential and popular black, yellow and white sitcoms during this period. It is found that, compared with sitcoms in the 1970s and 1980s, the landscape of sitcom on American television in the 1990s changed but only within certain aspects in representing ethnicity. Whiteness continued to dominate the screen either in terms of appearance and /or character construction. "White and black" division continued to be the main feature of ethnic representations in sitcoms. While black sitcoms increased dramatically, the other colored sitcoms remained marginal or invisible. In terms of representing ethnic characters and their cultures and communities, ambiguities, ambivalences and contradictions permeated and characterized the sitcoms in the 1990s. In the study of the colored sitcoms, we found that while trying to produce more colored sitcoms with more positive and diversified images of colored people to counter the conventional stereotypes and satisfy the increasing minority audiences, the networks were found hard to discard the "tested and tried" familiar stereotypes. In the analysis of popular white sitcoms, namely, Seinfeld and Friends, it is found that underneath the seemingly positive portrayals of ethnic minorities still lie the traces of stereotyping and otherizing the people of color. New types of racism, mainly in the form of representing the whites as the center, the heroes and/or heroines, and the norm, but the colored people as the peripheral, the supporting and the deviant are found in the discourse of sitcom representations of ethnicity in the 1990s.As an interdisciplinary inquiry and critique of representations of ethnicity in sitcoms, this study draws on different schools of thoughts and critical discourses, such as semiotics, classical /neo Marxism, Foucauldian analysis of knowledge, discourse and power, theories of comedy, postcolonial studies and more recent studies on popular culture and television. A major objective of doing so is to understand critically not only what was shown and seen, but also how their meanings were actually constructed and interpreted. In other words, we not only try to explore and reveal the complexities, contradictions, ambiguities, ambivalences in the representations of ethnicity in sitcoms in the 1990s, we also try to probe the underlying contending forces and discourses, forces of economic, political, socio-cultural and psychological nature and discourses of the television networks, the producers, the performers, the audiences and the critics, that jointly form and reform, construct and deconstruct, transform and perpetuate the landscape of representations of ethnicity in sitcoms. It is our conclusion that representations of ethnicity in sitcoms in the 1990s were the results of the contestation and articulation of various social forces and voices in the American society; and sitcoms in the 1990s were deeply inscribed with the dominant ideology of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. Sitcoms serve as the site for different ethnic groups to represent their existence and contest for meaning and pleasure.