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Aymar Jèan Escoffery, "Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture" (MIT Press, 2025)
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A
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B
welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Pete Kunze. My guest today is Amar Jean Escoffery, professor and Margaret Walker Chair at Northwestern University, and the author of Reparative Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture. The book was published by MIT Press in 2025. Good morning, A.J. how are you today?
- [01:33]
C
Good morning, Pete. I'm doing well this morning, thanks for asking.
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B
It's great to have you here to talk about your new book, but before we do, I was hoping you could tell listeners a bit about your background and training.
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C
Yeah, and it all kind of falls together because I view my academic work as like so part of the journey. And I write so much about my experience in my books. But briefly. I started in media actually as a journalist, as a newspaper journalist before getting my PhD at Penn, where I was privileged to learn from some great scholars like John Jackson, an anthropologist, Catherine Sender, a queer media theorist, and Joto Tarot, who was a kind of media systems and industries person. And it was the confluence of those people that really shaped who I was, including the fact that both Katherine and John are filmmakers. And so I've developed this practice of not only studying the media and the systems that enable it to exist, but also working with people outside of academia to make media in order to more deeply understand how those systems affect real people, particularly those who are systemically marginalized because of how they identify by race, gender, sexuality, class, et cetera. So when I got to Northwestern, I had a little bit more of a budget to make media that started this journey of doing digital distribution, really, and production to understand how much we could push the affordances of the Internet to bring equity and justice to entertainment and social media.
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B
And along those lines, in many ways, this book is continuing your work in your first book and also your larger research and social investment in the opente project. Can you tell us more about that?
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C
Yeah. So when I was in grad school, I started very early. This was like 2007, 8ish, to get very interested in online video. YouTube debuted in 2005, and I think was bought by Google in 2006 for like a billion dollars. And that was a very big price tag for a platform like that at the time. And so that got me really interested in what this platform was and why some company like Google might pay so much money for it. So I started digging in and just seeing what was on there. And as a person who'd always loved television, I was really struck by how diverse and weird and eclectic and deeply intimate early YouTube was. So I started interviewing YouTubers and just asking them, why are you doing this? Why are you telling all about your life to strangers on the Internet all around the world? And people had lots of interesting things to say. I wrote a couple articles about that. And then I kind of discovered folks doing not just this direct address, talking about my life form of vlogging that has now become kind of a huge marketplace, but also scripted entertainment that looked more like traditional television with much lower budgets. So I started interviewing those people, and by the end of grad school, I'd interviewed over a hundred folks. And that really was the basis of my first book, Open tv. A couple of those people ended up becoming famous. Most people know Issa Rae, who I interviewed during the first season of her web series Awkward Black Girl, which I think was her second or third web series at the time. I interviewed the creators of Broad City and High Maintenance. So I saw these people go from. I didn't go to film school. I spent a couple thousand dollars maybe making this thing. And now I'm in Hollywood working with HBO and Comedy Central. So Open TV really was about the Internet as a playground, as an incubator for new storytellers who couldn't get in through the traditional channels. Right. They either didn't want to go to la they couldn't get representation. Or like many writers, they just get told no a lot because that's what Hollywood is. And so I saw the Internet as this place of possibility where you could self distribute and go around a very closed distribution system that had existed for decades. And it was in seeing that that made, I think, me think that I could do it myself or help other people do it. So learning from that book that most of the innovation that was happening was in the stories that were told and how they were made. People were telling these TV episodes in under 10 minutes, really loose episodic structures playing around with what an episode is. A lot of episodes were kind of just scenes, as it were. But I noticed when I was interviewing people, folks were generally struggling with distribution. Either they were struggling to find their audiences or they found their audiences. They were struggling to keep them and hold onto them, because that's what a traditional network does. You know, that's why people want to be on HBO or Netflix or ABC is that they do all that work of marketing and corralling the audience for you. So when I had a little bit more money, I decided, let's do that. And I should note that in my grad school years, while I was interviewing people, I also made a web series with my partner. So I tried it out myself. My partner is a theater maker and he and his theater friends wanted to make a web series. And I told them I knew something about that because I'd been interviewing so many people, used my dissertation funds to help them produce it. And that became a case study in the book about the innovations in production. But we too experienced the ways that algorithms are really hard to navigate, especially when you're telling these kind of complex stories that aren't clear cut, where you know the title of the video, I'm talking about this. And the algorithm knows what you're talking about. When you're telling a narrative story, it's about a lot of things. And so how do you communicate that and make it legible to a machine system? And I figured, let's maybe try to go around algorithms through creating a distribution network on top of those algorithms. And that's how OTV was born.
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B
And I think this leads us into thinking about what this project is doing, particularly in relationship to recent interest in critical cultural studies and really in the larger social political discourse on repair reparations, the reparative. So what struck you about these conversations and how they were unfolding and how do you see yourself entering them with not only your work through otv, but also this monograph.
- [08:12]
C
Yeah, it's a really great question. It's been fascinating to see how many folks in. Yeah, cultural studies, the humanities, are thinking about the repair, which wasn't where I started this book. I was really thinking about distribution, which is a much less sexy term because I was trained as a media industry scholar. And I thought, this is about how an industry works, and let's do this industry thing in a different way in order to come up with a different way and better way of making media. I didn't know that that better way was ultimately about healing. I was reading a lot of these scholars who you may be referencing. Hill Malantino, Rebecca Wanzo has written about this. There's really so much. I don't want to name too many names because then you end up forgetting people. But it. I loved how. And a lot of this is coming from disability studies, right, Like Sam Shock's work, for instance, who are thinking about the fact that we live in a harmful society. And this is all happening, I think, burgeoning up under the guise of the first administration of the current administration, and just the onslaught of harm, but also harm that's been happening for decades, if not centuries. And what I loved about this work is it isn't shy about the harm, but it isn't denying the possibility of repair. And it mostly exposes the just very real tension in those two poles. And I was very frustrated as a scholar because I think a lot of us scholars, we make our money on critique and pointing out harm, and we point out everything that's wrong in something, and we're taught to deconstruct, but we aren't incentivized to think about what reconstruction might look like, what it might mean to actually build the world that we want. It's just harder to do. And a lot of us don't have the resources to do it. So I understand why we don't. But I am someone who doesn't like just seeing a problem. I do like to try to make an intervention. It's just my nature. I'm that friend who, when you talk to me and talk about a problem, I am going to try to give you solutions, even if you just want to hear. Have someone hear you out, you know? So I admit that it's not a perfect thing. But. So, yes, I think reading that work, it made me realize that a lot of the things I was doing was trying to repair this broken, broken system. And I was very much pulled in by the artists and storytellers themselves, both by watching the work that they did, which so often addressed the discrimination that they faced as women, queer people, people of color, disabled folks, immigrants, children of immigrants, et cetera, Though not in ways that reduce themselves to that discrimination. Oftentimes they brought in joy and complexity within that. Right. So even within their stories, there was an acknowledgement that, yes, I faced these disadvantages through these various intersectionalities, which is how I organized otv, but also I still live my life and I have joy and I have friends, and I tried to heal through that. So part of it was just watching the stories that were being made, which were not ones that I ordered, but just were the ones that could be made within the constraints of all our limited resources at the time, which is a fascinating way we can talk about. How do we develop television in a different way? We can talk about that later. But then, you know, in a very real way in 2020, there was the revelation of harm that was happening in the community that I wasn't aware of. And I spend the last chapter of the book talking about how as I was taking field notes throughout this process, I was noting mostly conflict, like intra community conflict and interpersonal conflict. But by 2020, there was something that was. There was an incident of very real violence that happened in the community that honestly broke my heart and ripped me open. And it caused me to really rethink everything I was doing. I couldn't see healing, even though I was reading it about it theoretically, that healing is complicated and messy and integrated with harm. I couldn't see what I was doing as like this rosy form of healing anymore. Like there was just no way of denying it. And that was when I really started to think about repair. Because we had to actually try to facilitate repair as best we could. Even though we weren't the ones who did the harm, we were not the survivors. We were implicated because we had supported the person who did harm. And we kind of organically developed a repair process. And it was in that process, in that repair process that I was like, oh, this is about reparative media. And then I eventually got to reparations on a more systemic level at the very end. And I did actually just finish writing a draft of a book called the Media Reparations Manifesto with my friend Khadisha White, where we really talk about the ways that the government and corporations have to do more to repair this harm. It can't just be on small, nonprofit, community based organizations. But that's a long winded way of saying that it didn't start out as about repair, but it Very much became about that at the end when I started writing the book.
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B
There's so much for us to impact in that answer. So we're gonna. We're gonna walk through it slowly, and I'm hoping we can begin with. With you. I want to talk about your. Your preface. It's. It's a deeply personal account you offer us at the outset here. And I appreciate the way in which this book is linking the personal with the systemic and the. The collective with the structural. And part of that process was also your decision to change your name. Some of you may.
- [14:16]
C
Some people out in the listening community
- [14:18]
B
may know you as AJ Christian. And you talk about your decision to rename yourself, to reclaim the name you felt you were born with. Can you tell us about that decision and how the personal is informing and shaping your research here?
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C
Absolutely.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Thank you for the question. In that process, that repair process, actually, which was during the pandemic, when I finally was able to go home to my family the next year, I decided to talk to my auntie. My auntie Roxanne, who's the keeper of the family tree. I'd heard about her family tree interest for years, and I was usually uninterested in the family tree for very queer reasons of not wanting to pass down my name or whatever. And I just started to ask her stories. She kept telling me all these beautiful stories, including about my grandmother, who's kind of a second mother to me. And she told me a lot about my grandmother's kind of family line. And my grandmother was born Barbara Escuffery, but she took her husband's name when she got married, and it wasn't a great marriage. And she basically fled Jamaica for the United States and couldn't really afford the luxury of changing her name in that process, the immigration process. And so she always kept this name that she didn't really love. And so there was that dynamic that I changed my last name to Christian in my early 20s because my parents were really bad about me coming out. And also it's pronounced Jean, but no one really can pronounce that. My first name is complicated. So I've always said Jean. And I didn't want to go by Dr. Jean when I got into my PhD because I just thought it sounded weird. And then Dr. Jean, everyone would ask me if I speak French, which I won't because I don't, because my dad didn't teach me. Anyway, that's like a whole complicated thing. I'd considered my grandmother's name, but then I was like, But I don't have connection to this grandfather who she like had no relationship with. And then my auntie then told me about where that Askafari name comes from. And there is a very famous ancestor from the late 19th century who is kind of known in the scholarship as a pseudo abolitionist. He was campaigning for the rights of, quote unquote, free people of color in Jamaica in the 19th century and was deported from Jamaica by the British Empire for that. And it turns out when I did more research, he was actually a slave owner himself and the rights he wanted for free people of color were not for enslaved and implicitly darker skinned black people. So I was really seduced by this narrative that my grandmother's name that she wanted to have was the name of this moderately noteworthy pseudo abolitionist who was still a community organizer in his way, despite these deep flaws. And, you know, the desire to honor my grandmother. And then this connection to a history of freedom seeking that necessarily points to the ways that we need to continually push our family lineages to more deeply embrace liberation. Right. The fact that he was really campaigning for the liberation of all in hell, that was a charge to me. That I needed to do my best to campaign for the liberation of all people was just something that. It just hit me like a ton of bricks, honestly. And it was a gut feeling that I was like, I have to do this. This is so intimately connected to the repair work that I've been trying to do and the ways that I wasn't able to do that work perfectly. Right. That I actually myself was deeply flawed and in some ways blind to my own blindnesses. And how this name would consistently remind me to make sure that I'm always pushing myself to go deeper and wider in how I tried to repair not only the harms of the world, but also the harms that my family has perpetuated. The men in my family especially have perpetuated.
- [18:33]
B
Yeah, that comes through quite powerfully in the preface about this idea of repair as ongoing and imperfect, but necessary. Right. And I think that it's really useful because so much of the work we see on repair in academic circles is a top down approach. And I know you and I are both interested in political economy and we love political economy, but, you know, it often kind of pushes us to imagine the state, private institutions, corporations, as owing reparations to communities that have exploited, disenfranchised and harmed. And I don't think either of us is saying that it shouldn't, but the reality is that these are hard battles to fight and win. And what do we do in the meantime? But it seems in your approach, what you're offering readers and scholars and organizers is this idea of imagining repair and aberrations that actually comes from the bottom up.
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C
Right.
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B
That's more. I think organic is a word that's circulated quite a bit in your scholarship. Is that a fair assessment? I mean, is this kind of offering us another way of thinking about repair that's less about waiting on the powers that be and more about starting to offer healing and repair from the community itself without necessarily sacrificing those kinds of structural criticisms?
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C
Absolutely. Yeah. We have to keep both poles. There has to be accountability for me at all levels. Right. Governments and corporations have to be accountable for the harm that they do, but individuals and communities do it as well. And I start the book by talking about the healing power of intersectionality because I really do think the framework of intersectionality is a theory of healing. Patricia Hill Collins especially is known for talking about intersectionality at both the interpersonal, communal and systemic level. Right. There's a kind of understanding of the different levels of scale of harm and healing. And I think intersectionality really gets us to the ways that systems manipulate our identities for their own benefit, and then the ways that how we identify within those systems can also perpetuate harm, oftentimes inadvertently, sometimes very intentionally. Right. That gets very complicated at the interpersonal level. But I think it's absolutely important for us to engage the harm that we do on an interpersonal level and the ways that we as smaller collectives can perpetuate harm. Because then as we try to develop strategies for healing that within our own lives, we're starting to build and cultivate the new ways of being the new systems. Right. The new political economies that actually, if they did scale up, might minimize the harm that previous systems had. I think it also makes us more deeply aware about the ways that systems affect us and our lives. So that when we make calls for accountability from corporations and the government, we're actually more specific about what we need and want. Right. So that we're not coming from a theoretical place, we're coming from a deeply embodied place when we actually ask for reparations par excellence. So I think it's a both and. But I do think that we undersell the bottom up power of repair because it's so hard. It's just so hard. And I think also as scholars, we're taught to be in our heads, but it has to be embodied. So much of it is so deeply corporeal and energetic, you know, When I was doing this work, you know, I'm a queer feminist man, you know, I thought, I've read some things, I've gone through some things. I'm pretty aware about the harm that I might cause, and I feel pretty adept at avoiding it. And I think, generally speaking, you know, I didn't. That's violence or anything, but there were ways that I showed up as a black, masculine presenting person that were just challenging for people, you know, because of the harm that black men do and have perpetuated, you know, especially on women and black women. But, you know, depending on how people identify all kinds of folks based on how they identify. And there was a sense as the project went on that just not creating space to just check in with folks very casually and just be like, not only how is this project going, but just how are you doing in your life? How are you processing this experience? I was very work focused because I was on tenure track and I was trying to get data and publish a book. And when I was doing the work, there just wasn't quite enough space to just have people process everything that's going around them. And so I think there was a sense that I, from some of my collaborators, that I was just like, pushing, you know, and there's. That. There's an energetic of that pushing that can intertwine itself with toxic masculinity. Right. And I just wasn't making space for that. And so, you know, towards the later years of the project, it did bubble up in conflict where I was just like. I just noticed that people were kind of, like, agitated, and I was like, what's going on? What's going on? And then I would ask, what's going on? And. Or some. In one case, someone blew up on me, like on set, and just like, kind of was like, you're working me too hard, you know? And here I was thinking that I was only asking people to do labor that they wanted to do. Right. I was basically trying to support people's passion projects. So I was like, why is this happening? And so we had it out, and we not had it out in an altercation. In fact, when I have trauma that I write about from, like, Violent Home, so when people scream at me, I completely shut down. And so I basically froze and just, like, walked away. But then, like, two weeks later, we came together and we actually had a conversation about it. And that was when it was revealed to me that, like, hey, there's just been this energetic dynamic that, for that person who wasn't male identified, was triggering to them. And we both weren't fully aware of it and we had to just name it. We had to name the dynamic and the conflict and the harm that we both had experienced in the past from other people that was affecting how we were showing up in that space. And it did change how I moved as a leader. Like, now in my next project, like, before every meeting, we do like a 5 to 10 minute, like, spiritual check in, you know, like, how are you navigating the energy of the moment? Like, how is this project going for you? Like, what's the energy that you're bringing to this? What do you need to step back or lean in? Or do you need me to step back or lean in? Like, it's become so part of how I work, and it's just so much better. And so then we think about, like, how do corporations act, right? And why do people hate working for corporations? It's because of this drive to labor, right? It's this, like, very kind of masculinist, colonialist drive to exploit and extract from people, right, which we need to not replicate in our own systems and movements. So that was just one very small example. And there's so many others in the book about how the micro doesn't affect the macro and vice versa. And I think there is some scholarship that gets at this, but oftentimes scholars aren't coming through practice. And it's different when it's your body. That's a data point.
- [26:07]
B
No, that's such an important point. It leads me to a question I wanted to ask you about, which is that I think a key part of Repair, as you're thinking about it, is care and care work. And you mentioned how people you were studying, even yourself, were not properly caring for themselves and yourself while they were caring for others. So I'm hoping we can talk about this, this contradiction. And at the risk of plagiarizing Watchmen, you know, who's caring for the caretakers and how is that kind of. How is that dynamic something that you're kind of working with and through in this project?
- [26:46]
C
Yes. Oh, my. Small question, right? Yeah. I mean, there's so much has been written about care work. A wonderful book, of course, called Care Work, which I think I've just loved that there's this. People are asking that question now, who's caring for the caretakers? I think, again, in such a broken society that is so deeply disabling to so many people and then disabling to the people who care for those who are disabled, we have to start Thinking about care work as a form of labor and. Yeah, how we care for ourselves through that process, even if we don't have systemic support for it. So, you know, as I mentioned, I was doing this project on Tanner track. When I'm hearing from my department, like, where are the articles? Where is the book? Right. Teach all these classes, increase your scores, serve on these committees. And that was very much, like, what was going on throughout my head on a daily basis. And then I was going to community, and people were like, I had this story, I need money, I need crew. Help me distribute, Help me market. And I wanted to help them. And I think I came from a position of, like, well, I have this privilege of a salary job. Like, I have capacity to do all this, which, you know, I kind of did a lot of it with the help of a really great team, including my co founder, Elijah McKinnon. But I wasn't caring for myself. I mean, I wasn't moving my body consistently. I had a terrible eating habit. I, you know, really ate bad foods. I was having, like, a giant cookie a day with breakfast. Just, like, I needed to start the day with something sweet because I knew it would be so hard. And it wasn't until I finally was able to release the project. Thankfully, we did get interest from outside funders, which allowed me to. To really hire a staff and bring on an executive director to run it full time so I could get my time back. And that coincided with me getting tenure. And then I had negotiated a sabbatical. It was on that sabbatical when I finally didn't have to work for, like, the first time in my life that I was like, let me check in with my body. And I took time to see different kinds of medical professionals, and I was like, oh, all these foods that I was eating, I'm actually allergic to them. Which is why I was, like, constantly kind of uncomfortable and tired. Maybe that's why I wasn't able to see some of the impacts of my own energy and some of the dynamics in community that were happening outside of me that eventually did lead to conflict and harm, because I wasn't just in my full mental faculties. Like, literally when I figured out that I was eating the wrong things and also started doing yoga, like, almost within a couple weeks, I could feel my mind open up. And all of a sudden, I had all these ideas and all of this energy and all of this clarity that felt like I hadn't had it for, like, a decade. And it's such a luxury, right, to be able to have the time to figure that out.
- [30:01]
B
Right?
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C
Which again, speaks to the ways that systems keep us working and keep us, you know, not at our best. So we neglect ourselves and continue to benefit mostly corporations, right? Including large nonprofit corporations like universities. But that was when I was sort of writing the book, right? So all of a sudden I'm writing the book and I'm like, oh, I'm actually able to care for myself. And I see this whole process more clearly and it made me critique myself for the ways that I didn't care for myself. Because, look, harm is inevitable. I don't know if I could have prevented any conflict or harm in that process. But I do think I would have been better adept at responding to it had I been caring for myself better. And who knows what that could have led to, right? Past is the past. But there is something about caring for yourself that's super important that I think especially academics view as kind of a luxury sometimes. Or, you know, it's a little. It almost feels classist to talk about it in this way. Right? Because we sometimes have the luxury of having summers off or flexible schedules where we can kind of go to doctor's appointments in the middle of the day or we have health insurance. Not all of us.
- [31:21]
B
Right.
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C
Many of us are adjuncts who don't have those things. So there's inequalities within academia as well. But I think that we can't just view self care, quote unquote, as a luxury. Right. We actually have to view it as a right. And something that's not about taking baths with cocktails, but actually about having the time to figure out your own health issues so you can care for others. And having things like good health insurance or a public health care system, it all relates to the systemic as well. So that's a maybe long winded answer. And I think also I learned a lot from artists as well, especially my co founder, I will say, who did a lot of work on themselves throughout this process. And watching them heal themselves really forced me to do the same. So there's a lot of ways that we can learn from people who are structurally screwed over, who manage to care for themselves anyway. That I think makes it feel less patrician in classist to say that self care is a right.
- [32:27]
B
And so I want to pivot from our discussion here into thinking about OTV and the way that stories become. I love this phrase you use that stories are technologies of repair. Can you help me to. I mean, I read your book, so I understand it, but can you help listeners to understand how you see stories as not just vibes, energy, distraction, escapism, but actually as a technology of repair.
- [32:59]
C
Yes, absolutely. I think here I was heavily influenced both by Saidiya Hartman, who's written about stories as repair in part, you know. Cause her work is excavating the stories of enslaved people that have been lost to history because they weren't seen as valuable at the time. And for her, in the context of the still long fight towards reparations for enslaved people, that those stories might be the only form of repair that we have today. So it's reparative in that way. And Indigenous wisdom and Indigenous theory. I was reading a lot about that, a lot of that in preparation for the book. And there's a deep history of storytelling as science in Indigenous Wisdom. I'm thinking about Robin Wall kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which was super influential for me, where she writes as a, you know, very traditionally trained, you know, quote unquote, Western scientist, that a lot of the stories she heard as an Indigenous, I think Potawatomi person were actually embedded in those stories. There was actual science that was either then verified by Western science or sometimes not known by Western science. Right. Ways to plant crops. Right. The healing properties of plants, all these things. Myth is embedded in how that wisdom was transferred intergenerationally. And so when I think about OTV and the stories that we help develop, produce and distribute, I saw Soup to Nuts, both how an artist's very personal story gets translated and mutated through producing that story. And then we show it in space. And I can see in people's eyes and bodies how they respond to that story. And we also did surveys with those audiences. And I could see in those responses that see those stories of those intersectionalities, help them process their experience in different ways, either because they shared those identities or they didn't and they learned something. Right? And so in this context of Silicon Valley and all this big data stuff, where data is quantified and systematized and regularized and predictable, and the ways that these stories are not any of those things, but still form the work of technology, which is as a tool to shape the world, right? And that shaping being the rethinking of identity, of identification, of solidarity and meaning, I think is super important because there's all this money in technology, there's all this academic interest in technology in I think, this very limited way. And it frustrates me that technology scholarship so discount the power of culture and story often, right? And they view entertainment and narrative storytelling as something other to technology. And instead they study platforms and affordances in ways that divorce the way that culture really drives all of that. Right. Because culture actually is the technology that is driving so much of. Especially in the most popular and valuable technologies. Right. Like Google's profit center is YouTube, which is story as technology through and through. You know, so it's a bit of me. Yeah, Helping us think about television differently, television as technology, but also telling the tech people that culture is also a technology.
- [36:31]
B
And this leads us to the big question, which is thinking about the kind of structuring mechanism for your book, which is the cookout. Can you tell us about what brought you to this metaphor and how the cookout allows you to kind of recast the life cycle of the media product, the media object, in terms of repair?
- [36:54]
C
Yes. Thank you for this question. So when I wrote a draft of the book, I sent it to a publisher for first round of reviews, and. And everyone was like, there's lots of great stuff in here. I'm learning a lot. It's so rich. But I don't know what the story is. I need a container for all of this. This is so often the first note we get on our first drafts of our books. And so I was really thinking about, like, okay, how can I bound up this very complex, all encompassing five years of my life? So I was trying to think of images that called to me, that ran throughout the whole book, Just very embodied experiences. And I wanted to ask myself the question, well, how was I able to do this? And how was my team able to do this with so little resources and especially to work with the incredible artists that we work with. I mean, we worked with storytellers who, I think about two dozen or more of which went from OTV to Hollywood, worked for Netflix, hbo, Hulu. We had multiple shows sell to networks, though none directly got made. Some of our storytellers did end up to make very popular things, like Dwayne Perkins, who did the blackning and is doing a sequel for that. We had things screen at Tribeca. We had over 250 articles about us. I'm like, but we did all of this for like, $150,000 max as an operating budget, which is, you know, about a tenth of the cost of one episode of narrative television. And there's like thousands of episodes of narrative television, right? So I was like, how did that all happen? Because it wasn't just me, right? And the image that came to mind was how many people I hosted at my apartment in Lakeview, and I live in Bronzeville But a lot of my first meetings with storytellers were over food. And I thought to myself, there must have been something about being in my home or sometimes at a coffee shop and eating together that built trust, right? Because I was a stranger. I'm not from Chicago, from the New York City area. And people trusted me with their stories, which are oftentimes the most valuable and vulnerable things that they have. And so that gave me thinking about, well, what is this about this communing over food? And then I thought, I asked myself, well, why did I do that? You know, where did I learn that from? And I thought of my parents who hosted cookouts when I was young. It was very normal to me to have people over my house eating food and bringing food that they cooked, right? Cause my mom's an okay cook, but she can't cook everything. And there's better cooks in the family. And so they brought their own recipes, their own dishes to serve to the collective. And, you know, my parents are from two different countries. They also come from two different class upbringings. And so it was also a clash of different kinds of black folks at my house. And so it's not only a framework for how do we serve each other, but also how do we come together despite differences. And so it just became such a rich metaphor for, I think, the underlying architecture for what I was doing. And then it helped me see everything differently. So then the production of those stories became the cooking of something to serve, and the distribution platform became the serving. We were the ones who were creating the framework for people to serve what they had made or cooked, which meant that the spaces that we showed up with in Chicago to serve those things became the space of hosting, right? And, you know, I was. Then I was like, oh, yeah, I literally was hosting these screenings like, I was the host introducing the things that had been made for the collective, right? And oftentimes not the only host, right? We would bring in other community members who were more tied to the representation to talk about what was going on in community, especially later on. Actually, no, we always did that throughout both our more intimate screenings and our bigger screenings. We always had different people who were kind of holding space in the space so that we could refract it just for me, because I could never fully represent all the stories. And so, yeah, thinking about distribution as serving and service, thinking about production as what are the kinds of intimate cultural recipes that we bring to our stories, thinking about platforming as hosting, and what does it mean for OTV to be a host versus YouTube or TikTok, how are they hosting? What are their protocols? How do they make people. People feel seen and heard in that space? Right. How do they attend to cultural differences and thinking about the process of onboarding those storytellers, the. What in Hollywood's called the development process, as inviting.
- [41:57]
B
Right.
- [41:57]
C
And how are you inviting people into the space that you are hosting? And do you invite equitably? Right. What are your norms of invitation? Who do you invite? And what are your ethics of who you invite? Right. This is happening at a time where Netflix is platforming Dave Chappelle, who's just making fun of trans people who are like, my friends. And I'm like, why are you spending hundreds of millions of dollars on that and not on the stories from trans people that I know exist and are great? So it just became such a rich and productive metaphor. And I think it really grounds media and technology and something that everybody knows and shapes our critique and really hones it so that when we critique media and technology and corporations and platforms, we come at it from a deeply felt sense of what it really means to be cared for and seen in our lives in space. And in my opinion, if media isn't doing that, then it's going to perpetuate harm in some way and it's going to struggle to heal because it's just so much easier to tend to wounds when you're staring someone in the face and you're seeing that they're hurting. You just have to kind of do something about it. Right. And then you have to change the way you're operating in order to make sure that doesn't happen. And I just think corporations, you know, they're decades away from thinking about that in any meaningful way.
- [43:23]
B
Yeah. Along this line of rethinking, you know, this book appears in a very prominent series in our field that's dedicated to thinking about distribution. And you're not saying it, but I'll say it. I think distribution studies has been one of the most exciting and dynamic areas of media studies in recent years. But it's also an area that I think tends to lose track of the human. I had a dissertation advisor who was always like, where are the people at here? You know, why do I care about this? And it's also an area that has not always, although there are examples, you
- [43:56]
C
know, you mentioned, and we could talk
- [43:58]
B
about, you know, in theory, if we were talking about it, that that bring together the dynamics of race and gender and class and how that shapes distribution. Like, those questions are often left out. So I'M curious about your decision to rethink distribution and. And redistribution, really. Right. And how that is kind of shaping the way that this project came to be. Right. Is in some ways a kind of implicit challenge to all this energy that's gone into distribution in the last few years and yet has kind of left certain critical axioms by the wayside in the process. I hope that that's not putting too many words in your mouth. They're coming out of my mouth. But I think your project is kind of speaking to some of the frustration I've had at times trying to teach distribution scholarship, which is it's so important and technologically and socially, and yet, you know, it lacks that kind of humanized and humane element that I think a lot of us, like in critical cultural studies work. I'm going to stop talking now because you're nodding. So I think that we're on the same page.
- [45:03]
C
Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much for this question. We share a love of and kind of nerdish desire to talk about distribution, which I think immediately when I say that I could just see the life lead people's eyes. Like it's known as such a dry topic. And I think the way to get people interested in distribution I is through the deeply embodied and the deeply human. It really mattered to me to be on the Distribution Matter series. And I really am very appreciative for both Ramon and Josh for their care in this book and for doing that series, because I think it's powerful. When I teach undergraduates, I always give them the provocation that, for me, distribution is the source of power in media and technology. When you own the relationship between the makers and the receivers, you own the medium, you own the field, you shape what it means to see television or what social media is, what a creator is. Right. How the audience can engage with this work, whether it's through algorithms or through development executives. Right? So distribution is power. But for me, when I hear power as a black queer person, I think about theories of power that are deeply embodied, that are theorizing how our bodies are tools for those are objects, for those in power to shape, manipulate, construct, limit. Right? And for me, that's very deeply embodied. You know, I. Every black person has had that experience where you're walking around living your life and then all of a sudden something happens and you are immediately made aware that you are not just yourself, you're not just an individual. You are this construct called a black person. And then systems will treat you as such, no matter what's going on in the complexities of that moment. Right? And also, you know that there are many other moments where you can shape that, right. You might not always succeed, Right. But you can play with and try to manipulate that construction to be seen differently. Right? And actually, in that work of trying to shape these big structures in this deeply embodied way, that is the innovation that comes, that is the beauty and the artistry that comes from being black. This is why black culture is so foundational to studying distribution. Right? And studying culture. Many of my critical race and media industry study scholars love to cite Jennifer Fuller's Branding Blackness on US Cable television, which I always teach, and how she noted when cable channels wanted to launch original programming slates, they often used race and ethnicity as tools to attract attention and to help people rethink what television could be. And that attention then drew them audiences, which of course gave them money that allowed them to expand and then oftentimes eventually sidelined those people of color. And I started otv, seeing Netflix do the same thing. You know, they. People talk about House of Cards because they spent so much money on it. And House of Cards ended up being a queer show. But Orange is New Black at the time outshined House of Cards when it premiered, right? And it was this deeply intersectional show about all these women of color and immigrant women, though, you know, Ginsey Cohen says using Piper as her Trojan horse, her wealthy white woman to enter into all those stories. But it was a diversity play, right? It was an understanding that, like, by getting into the complexities and nuances and messiness of oppressed people, we can get all this attention and excitement to this new distribution platform called Netflix, and that launched Netflix as like the next HBO and got them all this attention and Emmys and attracted all these higher profile writers and directors, et cetera. Right. Also, their deep pockets didn't help, didn't hurt. But so I was seeing this relationship between distribution and cultural identity, and I wanted to see how that felt if it wasn't coming from a white owned corporation, but coming from a black queer person and a mostly black queer and femme team. Who were the people who did OTB and how might our embodiment shift that relationship? And that's really what the whole book is about. But I absolutely agree that, like, when we see distribution through the stories of people and when we see what is distributed as deeply humane and complex, we understand much better how distribution operates and the value of the human to distribution and the ways that those stories complicate the ways that distributors try to routineize and Regularize, sorry. And regulate, and oftentimes then constrain the human right. When we center intersectionalities and how the human is embedded in that, we actually get to the different ways that we can distribute and we unmake the kind of extractive and limited logics of corporate distribution.
- [50:25]
B
My last question is, unsurprisingly, another big one. But I'm curious. Who do you hope will read the book? And what kinds of work do you hope it might inspire in the process?
- [50:38]
C
Yes, this is a question I struggle with. It's so funny. You release these books, you put your heart and soul into these books, and then you finish it and you're proud of it. But then you're like, is anyone gonna care about this book? And looking at the book as a whole, it's a bit of a collage, it's a bit of a kind of Picasso painting, I feel. Not to say it's a genius work of modernist art. I'm just saying it's a bit messy because it has different views and it's four different people. I wrote a chapter on reparative stories, really for TV and media studies scholars who think about how are Hollywood stories made and why? What kind of representations emerge from that process. And then I wrote a chapter on releasing those stories on digital platforms that is really for social media scholars and critical technology scholars. And how can we think about platforms as hosts outside of algorithms and automating the work of hosting? What does it mean to host digitally in a deeply embodied way? And how does that sharpen our critique of algorithmic culture? Because I think people use the word on platforms and there's been so much work on platforms. But for me, platforming means to raise up, right? A platform raises up so something can be seen. But we don't often hold platforms accountable to who they make seen and who they don't make seen. And what is the work of actually making things visible? So that's like a completely different audience in a lot of ways. Although TV studies is kind of. And media studies is getting more interested in algorithms, obviously. And then I wrote a methods chapter on what does it mean to do community based research? Because I had to account for what created this study. And also I get a lot of junior scholars who come up to me and they say, oh, I want to do what you do. I want to make stuff and also theorize it. And I wanted them to show them how I did that and the different methods I used to hold myself accountable and also make sure I had enough data to write articles and Books about for tenure, you know, so I did the surveys and the interviews and I tracked data quantitatively and qualitatively online and all these things. But also I had to do that while also being a professor. And that's really hard. And the personal part of that chapter is really just trying to let them know, like, if you want to do this, it's not easy, right. And like, buyer beware. I often tell people, I often advise people against it, especially without the resources of a research university and the security of at least a six year contract on tenure track. But go off. And I think we all can do what we can within our resources. For sure. That's definitely a message of the book too. So those are like three different audiences. And then I wanted the storytellers and artists to read it because they also were curious about this process and they wanted to know how did people fundraise for things and how did people produce things and how did people market and release things? And I wanted to make sure there were at least a little tidbits on there for filmmakers who want to just improve their practice of making to get it in there. And then lastly, I wanted media organizers and other platform founders and nonprofit founders. You know, OTV is in a network of really a new generation of nonprofits that serve historically disadvantaged communities. Our peers like Quelly tv, which is another distribution platform, or Blackstar Film Festival, which is an incredible organization that does so much more than the festival. They do a journal, they do fellowships, center for Cultural Power. We all kind of emerged, most of us in the 20 teens. And I wanted those founders and other prospective founders to just get a sense of what it was like to found an organization like this and some of the things they could be thinking about as methods for delivering value for their communities. So I was like, my mind was swirling with like all kinds of things. I mean, even like our funders, I wanted our, our foundations to read this because I think what frustrates me about philanthropy is that when they invest in media, they almost exclusively invest in journalism and documentary. And they discount the power of entertainment as an educational tool for our society. And yet they bemoan the rise of fascism in the United States, which came from what? Reality television? Where did our president come from? Right. So I really, like, I wanted them to know there's rigor to entertainment too. It's not just journalism and documentary. Right. There's actually value here as well. So I hope that those people read it, at least some of them. I did do a comic book version of the book called the Cookout for especially the folks who aren't academics. Because it is on an academic press. There are like over 400 citations in it. So it is primarily for an academic audience. Even though I tried to make it readable for regular folks, I've been told by some non academics that it is readable. But there's a comic book that you can download on my website, my lab website, madelab.org or buy it and you can get the story in a way that kind of helps you do your work a little bit more efficiently. There's also a coffee table book called beyond the Screen. You can go to BeyondTheScreen live to purchase that. It's really beautiful and that kind of shows the community. We have thousands of images of all the events that we did and it shows kind of the beautiful process of that development over 10 years. So yeah, there's multiple constituencies. I hope people read the book. And I really just want to thank you for this interview. It is a complicated, weird book that doesn't fit into categories and so your interest in it and your thoughtfulness and your questions just honestly means so much to me. It really means a lot.
- [56:18]
B
It's a pleasure to talk with you and I don't think I've mentioned yet, and apologies for this, but the book is also open access, so those who would like to read the scholarly monograph version of it can do so through the MIT Press website. Thank you so much for your time today, AJ. It's really been a pleasure to talk with you, so thank you for making time. Thank you. The book is Reparative, Cultivating stories and platforms to Heal our culture. Available now from MIT Press and other online booksellers, but like we mentioned, also open access. This is Pete Kunze and this has been New Books Network. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time.
- [56:59]
D
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ewbooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.