Tiffany Pollard GIFs and nostalgia for the negative

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay asks how the nostalgic attachments to particular Black women’s performances on reality television inform current uses of those images through internet GIFs and memes. Examining the usage and exchange of files depicting the mid-2000s reality television star Tiffany Pollard on Twitter, I compare appropriation of black women’s humour within digital spaces alongside appreciation of ‘bad television’ [McCoy, C.A., and Scarborough, R.C., 2014. Watching “bad” television: ironic consumption, camp, and guilty pleasures. Poetics, 47, 41–59] and the useful potentials of ‘negative’ representation [Gates, R.J., 2018. Double negative: The black image and popular culture. Duke University Press]. Debates about representational politics are complicated when circulating digital images and files that invoke nostalgic response through racialized gendered performances. What does circulation of these GIFs and memes say about nostalgia for a unique moment in reality television where ‘ratchet’ behaviour [Brock, A., 2020. Distributed blackness. New York University Press] was encouraged and the limits of respectability politics were experimented with? Examining how some have labelled exchange of these GIFs as perpetuating ‘digital blackface’ [Jackson, L.M., 2017. We need to talk about digital blackface in reaction GIFs. Teen vogue, 2], I theorize how contemporary accusations of exploiting stereotypical depictions of Black people in order to gain online social capital mirrors the history of American minstrelsy’s purported nostalgia for ‘authentic’ Black performance. As the majority of popular GIFs of Pollard present ‘ugly feelings’ [Ngai, S., 2005. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press] such as irritation, resentment and disgust, the relationship between nostalgia for so-called better times, and desire for a recent moment in cable television’s past in which the boundaries of ‘good representation’ were pushed and disregarded become entangled. By looking to animation of disembodied digital images in the use of GIFs as moving image files that are looped, refigured and circulated, I draw attention to new sites of digital racialization, popular culture criticism and examination of digital affect as it corresponds with Black diasporic cultural production.