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This chapter examines Oprah Winfrey’s emergence as one of the nation’s leading entrepreneurs in the entertainment business, as well as an American cultural icon. Beginning in 1985 with The Oprah Winfrey Show, she constructed a wide-ranging financial empire. At the close of the twentieth century Oprah Winfrey was included in the list of “Forbes 400 Richest People In America,” with a net worth in 1999 of $725 million. She is the only African American woman with joint venture ownership in a cable television station and, in addition to owning her own show, Oprah is also one of only three American women in the television and movie industry to establish and own a production studio, HARPO, based in Chicago, Illinois.

This chapter uses Patricia Misciagno’s theory of de facto feminism as a framework to explore Oprah Winfrey’s feminist identification, and shows that while claiming to be the anthemic Everywoman, Winfrey does not claim a feminist identity for herself or for her talk show. She does, however, occupy the position of the premier de facto feminist: “Oprah promotes feminist ideology and practice without explicitly acknowledging the fact that she is endorsing either feminism or the United States women’s movement.”

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of The Oprah Culture Industry (TOCI), which comprises her embodiment, her cultural productions, her actions, and her ideology, and then sets out the book’s purpose, which is to provide theories and hypotheses that address the questions which drive TOCI. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Riché Richardson’s approach to Faulkner via Oprah Winfrey’s promotion of his novels for her book club shows how Winfrey’s effort to bring Faulkner’s work into the public sphere (via television and the Internet) resembles his fiction’s treatment of the same phenomenon. She treats novels like Sanctuary and Intruder in the Dust – as well as both book’s film adaptations – that, in thematizing the access to public space, share the egalitarian impulse that Richardson shows animated Winfrey’s goal of making Faulkner’s texts themselves accessible as another kind of interpretive and imaginary “space.”

This chapter explores Oprah Winfrey’s early life. It interrogates her own words as disseminated in popular press interviews and situates a highly constructive biography in the historical realities of 1950s Mississippi, 1960s Nashville and Milwaukee, and 1980s Chicago. The chapter identifies a queer turn in this hagiography: a repurposing of the American Dream trope for a multicultural America.

This chapter discusses how The Oprah Winfrey Show presented the aftermath of 9/11 and the pending war in Iraq in its episodes. It shows that in “The Oprahfication of 9/11,” the show’s discourse on terrorism and war “transform[ed] possible feelings of fear, anger, anxiety, and grief into acts of American patriotism,” turning “9/11 into a personal yet collective experience of the political.”

Oprah Winfrey has become not just a widely loved talk show host but a spiritual leader in her own right. This chapter shows how she blends New Age culture with a racialized “sister sensibility” to create a unique female-centered ministry for her largely female audience. By analyzing the appearances of white, New Age experts on her talk show, it demonstrates how Oprah positions women at the center of her church by translating a New Age vision authenticated by African American struggle. Women’s spiritual experiences are central on The Oprah Winfrey Show, not secondary or peripheral. Oprah’s appeal to women, white women in particular, is her ability to filter white, New Age ideas in gendered terms that are legitimized through race.

This chapter considers the television celebrity. Compared with the film celebrity, who plays with aura through the construction of distance, the television celebrity is configured around the conceptions of familiarity and mass acceptability. The domestic use of television and the family structure under which it is viewed by its audience; its live or simulated live format style; its primary function of selling the audiences to advertisers; and its focus on the personal, psychological, and intimate content of programs, demonstrate the manner in which television is involved in the process of exhibiting the significance of public personalities. A study of television celebrity Oprah Winfrey describes the phenomenon of the emergence of celebrity within the institution of television.

This chapter examines the impact of Oprah Winfrey’s message on a selected group of Chicanas in California’s Central Valley comprised of college students and professionals. It shows that while Chicana viewers embrace Oprah’s message of love-thyself and self-actualization, they did not feel that her show addresses important “issues, problems, culture, or life situations” affecting Chicanas. In fact, many subjects point to The Oprah Winfrey Show’s limitations in reaching out to other ethnicities and races besides white and black Americans. In another vein, while Chicanas see themselves within the general category of “universal woman” and view women’s independence as a vital factor in their own lives, they are also turned off by the underlying emphasis on individualism of Oprah’s message, which conflicts with the mores of their Mexican and Chicano cultures rooted in family and community connections.

This chapter turns to Oprah’s Book Club, asking whether it is the text, the author, the reader, or the host who carries the most influence in determining textual reception and perceptions. It shows that, beyond merely reaping the extreme financial benefits from Oprah’s seal of approval, authors, such as the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, must reckon with the politicization of readers as they claim agency according to Winfrey’s edicts, and apply that agency to their literary works in both expected and perhaps unintended ways.

This chapter offers a theoretical exploration of how the production of the cultural value of “serious” literature depends on economies of symbolic capital that run counter to the actual economies of the book market. The singularization of a book or author is not unrelated to the market, the chapter explains, but neither is it related in a straightforward way. Looking at the singular Toni Morrison and at how her novels have been read in the context of Oprah Winfrey’s book club, the chapter proposes that cultural value is best understood as a kind of consecration, a production of sacrality.

This chapter analyzes iconic figures in American popular culture to highlight the ways in which race is read and utilized by audiences, fans, and television programming. It specifically examines the career of Oprah Winfrey and her thirteen episode series “Racism in 1992” by discussing Winfrey's claim that she “transcends race.” This inquiry highlights the interconnection between the rise of the neoliberal political-economic project over the last quarter century and the emergence of a post-civil rights racial ideology of colorblindness that is part of the fundamental reformulation of thinking about the problem of race in American society. The ability to evoke a “para-social relationship” and “intimacy at a distance” with a majority white audience reflects Winfrey's skill at simultaneously embracing her black heritage while keeping at arm's length aspects of the black historical experience that might alienate white fans; this fits perfectly within the colorblind ideology of post-racial America.

This chapter discusses The Oprah Winfrey Show’s hybridization of the news and talk show conventions. Using the show’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath as a case study, the chapter shows how an Oprahfied brand of “soft” news characterizes the devolution of mainstream broadcast news under the guise of advocacy journalism.

This chapter explores the regime of abstinence and what messages are circulating about teen sexuality, social agency, and stigma on The Oprah Winfrey Show (TOWS). It shows that in heightening parental paranoia, TOWS’s approach to public health issues makes teens’ allegedly deviant behavior hypervisible, thus shifting the focus from fostering healthy teen sexuality to reasserting hegemonic sexuality.

Chapter three examines the historicized women’s life narrative as it migrates into the 21st century, via Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club and television show, to the genres of self-help and redemption --analyzes how the memoir scandals of the late 1990s were invoked to discredit Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio, but also focused additional vitriol at women who wrote about incest and sexual violence within families. The chapter goes on to offer an alternative history of the memoir boom to the conventional association of memoir and confessional culture by dating its beginning to self-representational writing by radical women of color, queer activists, and literary innovators in the 1980s, and uses the response to Kathryn Harrison’s memoir, The Kiss, to demonstrate how judgments about women’s credibility operate across legal and cultural courts of public opinion. The chapter further claims Harrison as pivotal episode in the memoir boom that solidified the power of the backlash and made it a formal part of the boom, and identifies further lack of credibility and social authority as James’ Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was attacked. The chapter concludes by examining how Elizabeth Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed revived and redefined memoir to feature a traumatized heroine who may evade critique is she is resilient and sexually well-adjusted

This chapter examines the visual adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved into the 1998 Hollywood film, exploring whether or not it can convey alternative experiences and meanings of the maternal within despite the racialized discursive terrains within which the construction and reception of its narrative occurs. It also assesses the maternal media persona of Oprah Winfrey and considers how her publicly granted titles, “America’s psychiatrist” and “The Conscience of Our Times,” impact the sentimental racial codes through which the film’s productions of history, memory, and motherhood are read.

This chapter, which examines the kind of online community that is created by and for The Oprah Winfrey Show viewers, shows that on Oprah.com, Winfrey’s mission is at the center of the topics presented for discussion on her message boards. But similar to the existing literature’s argument for Oprah’s Book Club as politicizing, Oprah.com message board users claim agency for themselves and talk back to Oprah’s experts. Often they ignore the experts who are purported to know best about their lives. This may be the unexpected side effect of a genre (the talk show) that sought to establish all personal experience and opinion as valid. Regardless, even in privileging their experience, Oprah. com message board participants create their own meaning but only do so once that experience is filtered through Oprah-approved ideological constructs.

This chapter draws on Oprah’s “Christmas Kindness” (2005) episode, released as part of The Oprah Winfrey Show: 20th Anniversary DVD Collection, to interrogate her philanthropic activities in Africa. It analyzes Oprah’s holiday adventure and her efforts to convince viewers of the “joy” of giving to needy Africans. The chapter suggests that while Oprah is “doing good,” she is simultaneously displacing political engagement on the part of viewers/consumers with a weak and ultimately ineffective version of action. Oprah-style philanthropy may bring in dollars through appeals to emotion, but it precludes direct, sustained political engagement and thus ultimately lasting structural change.