Reighan Gillam / University of Michigan

Reighan Gillam received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her dissertation, “The Revolution Will Be Televised: Afro-Brazilian Media Production in São Paulo, Brazil” documents the work of the TV da Gente (Our TV) television network, hailed as the first network in Brazil to include equal racial representation as part of its mission. She argues that media workers at TV da Gente extended the field of racial politics from the state and NGOs to the mediated arena of commercial television by producing images of Afro-Brazilians that deviated from and opposed mainstream public representations of blackness. Overall, her dissertation contends that commercial television acts as a new site of and resource for black cultural politics in Brazil. Her work is published in Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences (Rutgers University Press 2013) and in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.