Toward a Theory of Surplus Blackness: Reception, Media Industries, and Blackness

This article theorizes surplus Blackness as a media industries concept that demonstrates how Black, Latin, Asian, female, queer, and other audiences are configured as secondary for media that presumably represents them. Existing at the intersection of reception and media industries, surplus Blackness provides a framework to understand how representational scarcity, polysemic media texts, and hailing converge. By examining distribution and marketing practices, I argue that surplus Blackness both offers an opportunity to understand the media industries’ historical marginalization and neglect of “other” audiences and a call to rethink scholars’ and audiences’ engagement with media.