Immigrant Generations, Media Representations, and Audiences

Omotayo O. Banjo is Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati, USA. As a researcher, she focuses on representation and audience responses to racial and cultural media. Her work has been published in several peer reviewed journals, including among them Race and Social Problems and Communication Theory. She is the editor of Media Across the African Diaspora: Content, Audiences, and Influence and, with Kesha Morant Williams, co-editor of Contemporary Christian Culture: Messages, Missions, and Dilemmas.

This anthology examines how immigrants and their US-born children use media to negotiate their American identity and how audiences engage with mediated narratives about the immigrant experience (cultural adjustments, language use, and the like). Where this work diverges from other collections and monographs is the area is its intentional focus on how both first- and second-generation Americans' complex identities and hybrid cultures interact with mediated narratives in general, alongside the extent to which these narratives reflect their experience. In a three-part structure, the collection examines representations, "zooms in" to explore the reception of these narratives through autoethnographic essays, and concludes in a section of analysis and critique of specific media.

One of the first volumes to concentrate on both foreign-born Americans and U.S. born children of immigrants in relation to representation in film and media

1. Becoming Black: An introduction to Immigrant Generations, Media Representation, and Audiences
Part I: Representation: Foreign Realities Onscreen2. Stages of Being Foreign as Portrayed in The Citizen and Moscow on the Hudson3. First-generation Korean American Women's Mobility: Intersections of Ethnicity/Race, Class, and Gender4. "Then We Show Ourselves:" Resisting Immigration in Party of Five Reboot5. Contested Citizenship: The Representation of Latinx Immigration Narratives in One Day at a Time6. Immigrants Make America Great: An Analysis of Bob Hearts Abishola
Part II: Content Creation: Industry Concerns and Constraints7. Ambivalence & Contradiction in Digital Distribution: How Corporate Branding and Marketing Dilute the Lived Experiences in Ramy8. Un Puente a la Mesa: The Role of Cultural Translators in the Production of Disney/Pixar's Coco
Part III: Audience Reflections and Responses9. Yvonne Orji's Docuseries, First Gen: First-Generational Narratives and the Impact on Audiences' Community Cultural Wealth10. Am I an All-American Girl? An autocritography of ethnicity, gender, and acculturation via Margaret Cho's All-American Girl (1994-1995)11. Between a Banana and a Coconut: Reflections on Being Second-Generation American on the Periphery12. Language, telenovelas, and citizenship: A Mexican immigrant's exploration of first generation American narratives in Jane The Virgin13. Mixing and re-making: the identity of second-generation Bangladeshis in the United States.14. "Strega Nona: The Spell On Identities" 15. Rebuilding the American Dream.