Is the Tween World Ready for the Subaltern?
A.N.T. Farm and the Politics of Blackness
Having already graduated Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Demi Lovato to various forms of stardom, it should be of little surprise that Disney has sought to infuse younger talent as a way to maintain its stranglehold on tween audiences. In recent years this has increasingly proven difficult given the success of Nickelodeon with the emergence of Miranda Cosgrove and Victoria Justice.
Realizing the increasingly fickle marketplace, Disney has sought to change-up the formula in some regards in building a show around a young African-American girl, Chyna. A.N.T Farm chronicles the story of three genius middle-schoolers who because of their talents and skills attend high school as part of its advanced program. While participating in the Advanced Natural Talent Program (A.N.T), they face numerous dilemmas resulting from their special gifts, tensions with their older schoolmates, and simply because they are kids growing up in a complex world.
Although A.N.T. Farm explores this issues amongst the three main characters, Chyna (the musical prodigy), Olive (the girl with a photographic memory), and Fletcher (the artist), the show is truly a show about Chyna. From the inclusion of her family to the endless opportunities for her to showcase her musical talents, whether it be playing the violin, jamming on the guitar, or singing a familiar pop song, the show is really one that is selling China Anne McClain (Tyler Perry’s House of Payne), who stars as Chyna.
According to one review of the show, A.N.T. Farm represents a continuation, albeit modified, of the proven formula of Disney’s grooming stars of significant marketing potential: “Disney has turned the concept into its latest situation comedy—and a star-grooming vehicle for the very talented China Anne McClain. China, who plays Chyna, is one of the Mouse House's latest singing, dancing mini-Mileys, sure to soon grace lunchboxes and toothbrushes everywhere.” While certainly true, with a CD and the back-to-school Chyna accessory package just around the corner, the significance of this A.N.T. Farm transcends the commercial practices of Disney.
The introduction of an African American potential superstar in the tween marketplace, one that requires star power and crossover appeal, is important. Brooks Barnes, in The New York Times, describes the qualities required of a tween superstar as follows:
Creating a breakout tween superstar takes years of careful grooming that hark back to Hollywood’s studio system days. Disney, scouring audition tapes and the Web, looks for various elements: presence, a genuine interest in show business and raw talent in acting, singing or dancing. Good looks are a must, but so is a certain blandness. Tween viewers gravitate toward actresses who they think have best-friend potential; the slightest mean-girl whiff can prevent a star-in-the-making from reaching the stratosphere.
Given the history of race and racism, the persistent demonization of African American women as loud, mean, and aggressive, and given the systematic erasure of young black girls from television culture, it is easy to see the ways in which the arrival of A.N.T. Farm can be seen as transformative and ground-breaking.
Evidence by blog commentaries, the prospect of a Disney show starring a young African American girl led to praise and celebration. For example, Kimberly Seals Allers laments the lack of diversity available for youth of color, praising Disney for the creation of A.N.T Farm because of its potential positive impact on African American girls: “As a mother, trying to raise a young black girl with positive self-esteem and self-love for her hair, her body and her mind, it’s frustrating that my daughter doesn’t see many images of herself on her own favorite channel. I knew things were bad when she begged me to buy her a Hannah wig (it wasn’t Halloween) and complained a lot about her own thick hair,” writes Allers on a parenting blog. “So I was really happy to see the new Disney show starring the very sweet and lovely, China Anne McClain.... And the character has a two-parent home! Whoo hoo! When she says she wants her hair to be straighter and longer and her skin lighter, it breaks my heart. I’m working super hard to do my part to counteract that. But I’m hoping a vivacious, and talented young brown girl on the TV screen every week will help a little too.”
Searles reiterated this same theme on her own blog, Mocha Manuel, focusing on the show’s potential message to young African American girls: “Anyway, I know it's up to us parents to instill in our little brown girls the self-love that the media could never do and to fill the hole of positive images with our own research and resourcefulness, but I'm hoping an A.N.T. Farm and this talented, beautiful, young black girl can help a little too. Are you hoping the same? Why are we still struggling to see positive young black girls on kids TV?” Similarly, Meghan Harvey, who praised the show for a variety of girls, seemed to highlight the shows efforts to challenge stereotypes, especially as it relates to girls and African Americans
Smart is Cool – The girls on these shows are all smart girls who make good grades and school a priority, yet they are all cool. In fact the show Ant Farm, centers on the “ANT” program for gifted youngsters who have skipped a few grades including our lead character. And with A.N.T. Farm it’s also great to see a super smart African American girl back on the Disney channel! It’s about time.
The concerns and hopes here are obviously real, reflecting on the damaging impact of popular culture and society at large on African American identity (See Kari Davis). It does represent an important intervention in a cultural world that normalizes whiteness as the standard of measurement all while demeaning and devaluing those who come to embody the OTHER within the dominant white imagination. According to Anne Ducille, in writing about her experiences with toys and dolls, children’s culture is one of hegemonic whiteness:
Whitewashed by the images with which I was daily bombarded, for most of my childhood I little noticed that the dolls I played with, the heroes I worshipped, and the alter egos I invented did not look like me. The make-believe world to which I surrendered my disbelief was profoundly white. That is to say, the “me” I invented, the self I day-dreamed in technicolor fantasies, was no more black like me than the dolls I played with” (duCille, 1996, pp. 11-12, in Guerrero p. 187)
As such, the introduction of a show centering around a young-African American girl represents a counter narrative to the cultural jamming of whiteness, albeit limited because of broader racial realities and its emphasis on a middle-class sensibility, its elevation of a politics of respectability, and of course the difficult path of countering hegemonic stereotypes. Celebrations, notwithstanding, the show replicates what S. Craig Watkins describes as a commitment “to the notion of promoting respectable – or in other words, bourgeois – images of blackness.”
The creation of A.N.T Farm, however, should not simply be thought of in terms of Disney’s efforts to challenge persistent racist images within American culture or even its efforts to provide black youth with “role models” and “positive representations.” It is clearly a marketing strategy that seeks to capitalize on a market share that has ostensibly been ignored by television networks: African American families. Describing it as “shrewd marketing” “at a time when children’s channels are working harder to find minority stars.” Brooks Barnes highlights the economic calculations here. It is
Signaling to parents that diversity is a priority. But Nickelodeon and Disney also want to hold a mirror to a diversifying viewer base. “We have taught children to look for themselves,” Mr. Marsh said.
Other actresses vying for tween superstardom are Zendaya, a biracial 14-year-old who co-stars in Disney Channel’s budding dance hit, “Shake It Up.” Coco Jones, 12, is an African-American singer. (Combine Jennifer Hudson with Rihanna and give the results a middle school gloss.) Ms. Jones has become a darling of Radio Disney. Nickelodeon is developing a series around Cymphonique Miller, a 14-year-old African-American singer and actress, called “How to Rock Braces and Glasses.”
While writing about Nickelodeon in her fantastic book Kid’s Rule: Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship, Sarah Banet-Weiser’s observations are applicable to Disney and in this case A.N.T Farm, a show that imagines a world where “race is simply something that ‘happens’ in a kid’s world” (p. 170). Thus far, it has gone to great lengths to avoid racial conflict and tension, all while imagining blackness and whiteness as insignificant in the daily lives of American kids. In this regard, it operates through the commodification of blackness that ultimately reifies the hegemonic practice of reducing race to little more than a cultural or aesthetic marker.
Embodying Anne DuCille’s idea of “mass produced difference” A.N.T Farm, highlights the broader approach to race within children’s television culture (and popular culture as a whole). “Any time representation of race is produced it reflects a stereotype or a narrativizing of a cultural myth about race – even if ostensibly ‘positive,’” writes Banet-Weiser. Or as Lisa Guerrero notes, “race merely serves as another kind of ‘accessory’ that signifies ‘hipness,’ without incurring the actual costs and consequences of real world racial signification.” As such, Disney “employs several different strategies of representing race: race either is represented as hip or cool, as a kind of aesthetic style or it is represented through the lens of authenticity, with ‘real’ tropes structure the narrative of the program. The inclusion of explicitly racial images . . . coincides with the exclusion of a specifically racial agenda, so that inclusion functions as a kind of exclusion” (Banet-Weiser, p. 171).
A.N.T Farm bridges these two themes together, using race as an unspoken backdrop for viewing Chyna all while constructing her as a “real” breath of fresh air that challenges the less desirable and less positive (yet no less supposedly real) representations of blackness within popular culture. Most importantly, it follows suit with other programs through its erasure of an explicit “racial agenda.” It lacks even the mere hint of the ways in which the race, class, sexuality, and gender are lived by American teenagers.
In her essay about race, gender, and the Bratz dolls, Lisa Guerrero highlights the complex relationship between children (particularly children of color) and dolls/toys/popular culture. She notes that, at one level, visibility, inclusion, and the ability to see oneself within spaces of play and consumption are important. At another level, given commercial demands and the practice of denying and erasing the real-life realities of race, gender, and class, these representations can be at best limiting, and at worst problematic, all while normalizing whiteness. Guerrero notes in “Can the Subaltern Shop: The Commodification of Difference in the Bratz Dolls:”
As much as the dolls rely on images of difference, that difference relies on naturalized notions of whiteness. The dolls may be succeeding in presenting a new, and much needed idea of difference as beautiful and coveted, but that idea still exists in opposition to the “normal,” White beauty that Barbie, and the ideals reflected in her and her world, present. Ultimately, though, it is a start.
However small the impact of a doll may seem, and despite some of the paradoxes of the Bratz’s representation of difference, there remains an important oppositional potential about the collection. They have presented a challenge to the Anglocentric version of womanhood found in the arena of toys that has been dominant since the 1959 introduction of Barbie. They have given face to difference and provided images through which young girls of color might find themselves reflected. And they have begun the work toward opening up a space in the popular imaginary for the normalization of multiracial identities.
A.N.T. Farm, despite its shortcomings, much of which reflects the broader cultural/political landscape and the dubious motives and marketing plans of Disney, illustrate this same important instance of change. The tween world is embodies the hyper emphasis on materialism and consumption, yet given the hegemony of whiteness the entry of China Anne McClain it is hard not to think about this change as transformative a frustrating intervention at that.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.
