Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture. Trystan T. Cotton and Kimberly Springer, eds. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 188 pp.
The ubiquitous Oprah Winfrey is a global media icon. Her syndicated daytime talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, is the highest-rated talk show in American television history, and when it ends in September 2011 will have aired for a quarter-century. Her Book Club recommendations virtually guarantee best-sellerdom for authors. Harpo, Inc., her production company, is behind films, television shows, satellite radio programs, and O: The Oprah Magazine. In January 2011 she launched her own 24/7 cable network. She even dispenses millions of dollars through Oprah’s Angel Network philanthropy. Regardless of her platform, Oprah’s message is positive, inspirational, and spiritual as she exhorts her fans to, “Live your best life.”
So what’s not to like?
Well, according to Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture, Oprah’s message of personal empowerment and New Age self-help may prove uplifting to individual fans, but it often ends up being a depoliticized, deracialized, non-threatening balm that fails to address the systemic and institutionalized cultural oppression at the root of many people’s problems. At the same time, Oprah fails to credit the social movements and forces that helped propel her rise from her hardscrabble Mississippi beginnings to preside over her current media juggernaut. From a communication theory standpoint, Oprah’s message matters because given her media empire’s worldwide hegemonic reach, she is the ultimate agenda setter, telling people not what to think but what to think about.
Co-editors Trystan Cotton, an African American studies professor at California State-Stanislaus, and Kimberly Springer, a senior lecturer in the American Studies Department at King’s College London, pull together eleven chapters written by fifteen contributors—mostly American and European academics, ranging from doctoral students to department heads. Stories of Oprah examines Oprah’s impact on topics as wide-ranging as race, feminism, philanthropy, self-help, teen-age sexuality, and the 9/11 attacks and subsequent war in Iraq. Springer argues that the book shows that “it is possible to admire and even envy the accomplishments of an American cultural icon while maintaining a critical perspective that asks for more than what is presented on the surface by the Oprah Culture Industry.”
While acknowledging Oprah’s power and accomplishments, many of the contributors claim she shirks a larger duty to address deeper problems that might cause her audience—or advertisers—to reject her. Political science Ph.D. candidate Jennifer Rexroat writes that Oprah, as a de facto feminist, “refuses to pigeonhole herself as an explicitly identified feminist because of the many problematic and often pejorative associations made by numerous Americans with the feminist label.” Adriana Katzew and Lilia de Katzew explain Oprah’s failure to serve as a role model to many Chicanas by noting “a cultural gap that comes across in Oprah’s message when her measure of happiness and self-fulfillment for women does not take into account the specific ethnic and cultural life-worlds of diverse women—specifically that of Chicanas,” many of whom deal with poverty, powerlessness, and other problems.
In other essays, Oprah takes a drubbing for her “Oprahfied brand of ‘soft’ news” that “characterizes the devolution of mainstream broadcast news under the guise of advocacy journalism,” and for Harpo Inc.’s film Their Eyes Were Watching God, whose producers “deracialize the novel and mute [novelist Zora Neale] Hurston’s black feminist voice, thus glossing America’s social consciousness of racial, class, and gender inequalities.”
One of the strengths of Stories of Oprah, however, is that so many of the contributors build on a common theme: Oprah’s perception of failure and its solutions as a personal rather than a structural problem, and how her approach to personal improvement and fulfillment displaces viewers’ political engagement. Whether this was by design or accident, this makes for a unifying tone to the overall essays. Another is that most of the writing is well-sourced and also clear and compelling; although the book is intended for an interdisciplinary academic audience, only a few pieces were mired in tired-sounding theoretical jargon.
The book’s main shortcoming seemed to be a refusal by many of the authors to understand the corporate or cultural pressures that might be shaping Oprah’s approach to doing good. Would advertisers and audiences be put off if she reframed her message in an avowedly feminist manner, or if she attacked the political and economic underpinnings of Africa’s AIDS crisis rather than give gifts to AIDS orphans? Probably. I think the writers failed to give sufficient credit to Oprah for navigating the real commercial boundaries required to make it as a media star. Also, as a black woman operating in a white man’s media world, she may well have cultivated and internalized the idea that her success is linked to a non-threatening persona.
A second, lesser issue was the organization of the eleven chapters into three parts: “Oprah the Woman, Oprah the Empire,” “Contesting the Oprah Experts,” and “The Oprahfication of Media.” The categorization seems unnecessary, as the essays held together on their own.
Stories of Oprah does make a solid overall contribution to the paucity of academic studies of Oprah’s extraordinary influence. The introduction notes that as of the publication of this book in 2010, academic research and writing about Oprah have been limited to only four books of critical analysis, one published anthology, and various journal articles and book chapters.
As co-editor Springer observes, “It would not be far off, given the wealth of material yet to be investigated, to situate Stories of Oprah within a field of Oprah Studies.”
PEGGY DILLON
Salem State University