The Northbrook Public Library is sponsoring this fascinating event in partnership with RAIN (Racial Awareness in the North Shore) and the League of Women Voters of Glenview-Glencoe.
Adrien Sebro will examine the history of Black representation in sitcoms and explain how shows like Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, and Living Single have addressed social issues.
Professor Sebro teaches at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Radio-Television-Film. His scholarship specializes in critical media studies at the intersections of television, film, comedy, gender, and African Diaspora studies. Dr. Sebro writes and teaches on U.S. Black television sitcoms, television history, filmmakers of the African Diaspora, and the media’s role in initiating social change and activism. In the classroom, he aims to instruct his students on the roles, responsibilities, and powers (social and political) of media over time as a reflection of its temporal moment.
He is currently writing his first book manuscript, To Scratch and Survive: Hustle Economics, Gender Politics, and Creative Dissent at Tandem Productions, which explores a production history and the representation of racial identity formation in the all-Black cast sitcoms of Tandem Productions: Sanford and Son (1972-1977), Good Times (1974-1979), and The Jeffersons (1975-1985).