This article reports the findings of a pilot study of a single African-American situation comedy, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, among a small number of young viewers in the nation of Kuwait. It is intended as a first step toward investigating the popularity of black and African-American youth styles among young people from various parts of the globe, and the conclusions that the author reaches are intended to be suggestive rather than definitive. Throughout the article, the author focuses on questions that his research has raised about the pleasures and meanings that these young people derive from the series, and how the series might be implicated in the expression of distinct ethnic, generational and gender identities.
Bennett, A. (1999) `Hip Hop Am Main: The Localization of Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture', Media, Culture and Society21: 77-92.
2.
Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
3.
Cohen, P. (1999) `Through a Glass Darkly: Intellectuals on Race', pp. 1-17 in P. Cohen (ed.) New Ethnicities, Old Racisms?London and New York: Zed Books.
4.
Coleman, R. (1998) African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor. New York: Garland Publishing.
5.
Condit, C. (1989) `The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy', Critical Studies in Mass Communication6: 103-122.
6.
Crystal, J. (1992) Kuwait: The Transformation of an Oil-State. Boulder, CO and San Francisco, CA: Westview Press.
7.
Curtis, H. (1997) `Have Comedy, Will Travel?', TV WorldAugust/September: 31-36.
8.
Dwyer, C. (1998) `Contested Identities: Challenging Dominant Representations of Young British Muslim Women', pp. 50-65 in T. Skelton and G. Valentine (eds) Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.
9.
Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
10.
Fredrickson, G. (1971) The Black Image in the White Mind: the Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper and Row.
11.
Gates, H., Jr (1988) The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.
12.
Ghabra, S. (1997) `Kuwait and the Dynamics of Socio-Economic Change', Middle East Journal51: 358-372.
13.
Gillespie, M. (1995) Television, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change. London and New York: Routledge.
14.
Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
15.
Gray, H. (1995) Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for `Blackness'. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
16.
Hall, S. (1977) `Pluralism, Race, and Class in Caribbean Society', pp. 150-182 in Race and Class in Post-Colonial Society. Paris and London: UNESCO.
17.
Hall, S. (1980) `Encoding/Decoding', pp. 128-138 in S. Hallet al. (eds) Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson.
18.
Hall, S. (1988) `New Ethnicities', pp. 27-31 in K. Mercer (ed.) Black Film, British Cinema. London: Institute for Contemporary Arts.
19.
Hall, S. (1992) `What is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture?', pp. 21-37 in G. Dent (ed.) Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michelle Wallace. Seattle, WA: Bay Press.
20.
Hall, S. (1995) `Black and White in Television', pp. 13-28 in J. Givanni (ed.) Remote Control: Dilemmas of Black Intervention in British Film and TV. London: British Film Institute.
21.
Havens, T. (forthcoming) `African American Media Activism in a Global World', in S. Kumar and L. Parks (eds) Planet TV. New York: New York University Press.
22.
Jones, S. (1988) Black Culture, White Youth: The Reggae Tradition from JA to UK. London: Macmillan.
23.
Kawasaki, K. (1994) `Youth Culture in Japan', Social Justice21: 185-203.
24.
Khalaf, S. (1992) `Gulf Societies and the Image of Unlimited Good', Dialectical Anthropology17: 53-84.
25.
Lemish, D. (1998) `Global Culture in Practice', European Journal of Communication13: 539-556.
26.
Lipsitz, G. (1994) Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place. London and New York: Verso.
27.
Livingstone, S. (1998) `Mediated Childhoods: A Comparative Approach to Young People's Changing Media Environment in Europe', European Journal of Communication13: 435-456.
28.
Longva, A. (1993) `Kuwaiti Women at a Crossroads: Privileged Development and the Constraints of Ethnic Stratification', International Journal of Middle East Studies25: 443-456.
29.
Lott, E. (1993) Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
30.
Morley, D. (1992) Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge.
31.
Oswell, D. (1998) `A Question of Belonging: Television, Youth and the Domestic', pp. 35-49 in T. Skelton and G. Valentine (eds) Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.
32.
Robertson, R. (1994) `Globalization or Glocalization?', Journal of International Communication1: 33-52.
33.
Skelton, T. , G. Valentine and D. Chambers (1998) `Cool Places: An Introduction to Youth and Youth Cultures', pp. 1-32 in T. Skelton and G. Valentine (eds) Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.
34.
White, S. and G. White (1998) Stylin: African American Expressive Culture from its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
35.
Widdicombe, S. and R. Wooffitt (1995) The Language of Youth Subcultures: Social Identity in Action. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
36.
Zook, K. (1999) Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
