The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era

Janice Peck teaches media studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of a book on religious television and has published work on media theory, television and the family, cultural studies, TV talk shows, advertising, and representations of race in media. She also worked as a journalist and editor for newspapers, magazines and radio.

"Oprah Winfrey has been influencing American political life since long before she opted to endorse Barack Obama for the presidency. In her meticulously researched and captivating account, Janice Peck shows us how Winfrey has wielded the discourse of personal empowerment to amass her own considerable personal power while tightly controlling a brand that stands for individual rather than collective attainment. To understand the Oprah-effect, read The Age of Oprah." --Micki McGee, author of Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life"In this wonderfully original and insightful book, Janice Peck explains that Oprah Winfrey is not merely a talk show host and entertainer but the voice of our era, the logical product of the unresolved contradictions of our time." --George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the Dark"The Age of Oprah is absolutely fantastic. It's a reminder of what cultural studies and American studies could be and the promise it once held out. It's exciting, theoretically rich and well grounded (which means with the 'theory' woven unpretentiously into and driving the substantive analysis), historically deep, meticulously researched, politically and analytically sharp. It brings to mind the best work that people like the Ewens and Russel Jacoby and others did in the '70s in the Frankfurt School tradition and that people like Leach have done more recently. It should be a very important intervention in our civic understanding.Peck nails Oprah, Clinton, and this period's mind cure/self-help therapies as linked expressions/engines of neoliberal ideological consolidation. In doing so, she examines the key missing link that careful cultural analysis can provide that neither opinion-sampling nor 'resistance' studies can't-the complex ways that popular ideologies emerge and evolve as symbolic systems that make sense of the lived social order while evading its contradictions and asymmetries of power and the very concrete ways they operate as the glue that helps to