Blackness as Riot Control: Managing Civic Unrest Through Black Appeal Programming and Black Celebrity

During the uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, black hip-hop artist Killer Mike appeared on television to ask that people remain nonviolent and in their homes. Similar events took place years earlier. James Brown performed a live concert on WGBH to keep Boston peaceful following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. During the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, both The Cosby Show and The Arsenio Hall Show were used to similar ends. These examples demonstrate the ways in which television has activated black identity to quell certain forms of civil rights protest and implicate televisual discourses of liveness, domesticity, and public service.

Copying Cosby

This essay employs pornography to explore the politics of race, gender, and sexuality at play in mimetic performances of Bill Cosby’s The Cosby Show. Focusing on Not the Cosbys XXX (2009), a pornographic parody of the sitcom, pornography is shown to be a venue that lays bare the politics of race, sexuality, and gender that energize cultural practices of mimesis. In mimicking The Cosby Show, Not the Cosbys XXX reveals the racial, sexual, and class politics of authenticity critical to mimesis as a salient technology for the (re)production of blackness in visual culture. Pornography’s spectacular multiplex mimetic performance, which the author terms pornmimicry, brings the quotidian dynamics of mimicry into focus as a primary mode of identificatory performance. More than a frame to elucidate racial sexual performance in pornography, pornmimicry helps us to understand the concomitant pleasure (and violence) bound with the broader cultural repetition of blackness as itself a mimetic practice.