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Guest Editors: Eva Illouz, Eitan Wilf
The cultural significance of Oprah Winfrey can hardly be overstated. Lee Seigel, a senior editor at the New Republic, wrote recently that “Oprah Winfrey is to television what Bach is to music, Giotto to painting, Joyce to literature.” Time magazine hit the nail on the head when it recently voted her one of the world's handful of "leaders and revolutionaries." Oprah Winfrey has indeed radically transformed the medium of television. But just what exactly she has transformed in it, and how she has done so, remains to be clarified. The proposition which this special issue would like to explore is that Oprah Winfrey has transformed the mode of insertion of TV within the nooks and crannies of civil society, understood, following the Hegelian tradition, as that space existing between the State, the market, and the family within which actors get freely organized to pursue their values and interests. These propositions may seem surprising especially in light of the fact that in many intellectual traditions (critical theory, communitarian thought, feminism) television is deemed to corrode the spirit of civil society. Television presumably transforms citizenship into an audience, fragments the public sphere, makes active political participation into passive spectatorship, and distracts us from participating in those organizations most likely to infuse society with democratic values and social trust.
At face value Oprah Winfrey preempts these critiques. Oprah Winfrey’s talk show has given voice to the voiceless and made an important contribution to the politics of visibility. It has called on women to empower themselves and to question their traditional social roles, and most spectacularly, has induced viewers to engage in a wide variety of philanthropic actions. For example, in 1998 Oprah began the Oprah's Angel Network, a charity aimed at encouraging people around the world to make a difference in the lives of underprivileged others. Oprah Winfrey has not only been herself an indefatigable philanthropist, but through television she has induced viewers to participate in forms of collective action (e.g., the 2004 show geared toward helping poverty-stricken and AIDS-affected children in Africa). Yet Oprah Winfrey’s cultural enterprise also challenges our current understanding of civil society. For one, it is firmly embedded in the market and part and parcel of the commodification of private life. Second, where Hegel conceived of civil society as the space opened between the state and the family, the Oprah Winfrey Talk Show has drawn a straight line between the family and the public sphere, seeming to make the latter ancillary to the former. Finally, Oprah Winfrey mixes together the collectively important issues with the frivolous, thus threatening to render the public sphere cacophonic and civil society meaningless. Any attempt to account for Oprah’s success in upsetting such deep-seated notions calls for a close analysis of her talk show as a site of performance in which, to use Richard Bauman’s and Charles Briggs’s words, “the use of heterogeneous stylistic resources, context-sensitive meanings, and conflicting ideologies” is moved “into a reflexive arena where they can be examined critically” [(1990) “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 19:59-88]. Oprah has induced both her audience and cultural critics to rethink traditional distinctions through the construction of her talk show as a site of a marked and heightened behavior that indexes conflicting meanings, ideologies and spheres and then subjecting them and the logic that dissociates them from one another into a reflexive analysis. While critics have occasionally taken note of Oprah’s unique style, there’s a need for its detailed analysis as a real-time phenomenon.
We are soliciting papers which can reflect on the multiple and contradictory aspects of Oprah Winfrey’s insertion in civil society and on the ways in which it is embedded within performativity. Submission Guidelines Please submit manuscripts electronically as email attachments in Microsoft Word. All emails should be addressed to Eva Illouz, at illouz@mscc.huji.ac.il , and Eitan Wilf, at ewilf@uchicago.edu . Essays should be double-spaced, with 1-inch margins; articles should not exceed 10,000 words. Please follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. All manuscripts should be submitted with a 500 word abstract. Submissions due no later than May 15, 2007.
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Calls for Papers 
