No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Alternate Archives in US Daytime TV Soap Opera Historiography Elana Levine (bio) Television history is more dependent on alternative archives than is film history. A range of factors place TV outside the parameters of conventional archival practice. The live broadcast of television in its early years and the ongoing liveness of some forms of TV have posed a technological challenge to the institutionalized archiving of programs, as have changing formats of videotape and the disintegration of tape itself. The domestic reception of TV, along with its commercial funding structure in many parts of the world, has also ranked television low in cultural hierarchies, and thereby low in priorities of preservation. The dismissal of most television for much of its history as inartistic, or as pandering to a “lowest common denominator,” has led many to devalue TV programs as historical artifacts and as objects of critical analysis. One of the clearest cases of this conventional archival neglect is the US daytime television soap opera. Soap operas transitioned to US television from radio in the early 1950s, broadcast daily episodes live into the early 1960s, and were subsequently shot on (sequential formats of) videotape. To many, the soap opera epitomizes the characterization of television as commercial, domestic, and unartful. As a result, few involved in the production, distribution, or preservation of television have found soap opera to be an object worthy of or viable for preservation. This situation is compounded by the voluminousness of soap opera texts—many daytime serials air daily for decades—as well as soaps’ associations with women and other marginalized audiences such as children, the elderly, and the unemployed, who are assumed to be home during the day with “nothing better to do.” The historiography of the soap opera may seem impossible given these constraints. [End Page 174] My own research has taught me that soap opera is an object with a rich and rewarding history but one that necessitates alternative approaches to the study of moving images and to archival resources.1 It also requires time and money, which enable access to travel, research assistance, consumer goods, and digital technologies. Despite such costs, my experience convinces me of the crucial need to embrace alternative archives and alternative research practices more broadly. This is especially urgent for the study of marginalized cultural forms, whether marginalized by medium, by funding structure, by social positioning, or by cultural status. In this essay, I focus on these alternative practices while keeping in mind the temporal and economic resources that facilitate them. I will first discuss alternative ways to approach conventional, institutionalized archives, by which I mean what questions to bring to such archives, what data to seek out, and how best to make the formal archival structure serve an inquiry into that which the archive may not highly value. I will then turn to a discussion of alternative archives, emphasizing the ways that informal, “underground,” or unconventional sources can and should feed our research. While my examples come from the history of US daytime TV soap opera, they inform other histories, especially those of television or other devalued media and those of cultural forms associated with women and other marginalized groups. In this way, my work is in dialogue with Sukhai Rawlins’s essay in this dossier, which examines the alternative archive of Instagram as a repository of Black and queer experience. Key to alternative uses of conventional institutional archives are strategies for mining their collections in ways suited to your project. As with any research endeavor, the questions we bring shape our findings. Marginalized media forms, or attention to marginalized identities and experiences within more legitimated media, may be fruitfully approached with multi-perspectival questions. By this, I mean that scholars might approach conventional moving image archives, manuscript archives, and published materials with questions that address various aspects of their cultural circulation, attending not only to textual features of audiovisual style but also to narrative and character. Such inquiries also benefit from attention to production practices and contexts. A range of forces may shape media production: the experiences of individuals, the structures and economics of institutions, the affordances and limitations of technology, and tensions within the broader society. Our research...
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.