Oprah The Woman, Oprah The Capitalist, Oprah The Humanitarian, Oprah The Profiteer

Artwork by Luna

The brief post rehashes Iyanla Vanzant’s appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss their falling out over Vanzant jumping ship from Harpo, Inc. for a deal-gone-nowhere with Barbara Walters. Vanzant, a spiritual coach and author who was quite popular in the 1990s, and Oprah have a conversation that, frankly, they could have just as easily had in Oprah’s penthouse. A clip of the interview is on the Jezebel website and it is, to quote Judge Judy, “a lot of who shot John.”

What would be more interesting to examine and track is whether, in her appearances on Oprah’s show and later in her own short-lived show, Vanzant’s message started to diverge from Oprah’s new age spiritualism. As Karlyn Crowley observes in her chapter, “New Age Soul: The Gendered Translation of New Age Spirituality on The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Oprah “translat[es] a New Age vision authenticated by African American struggle.”

Vanzant’s blend of Africanism and new age spirituality would seem to be the perfect mix for a Harpo production. Was this more than a bad business decision on Vanzant’s part? Or perhaps her particular brand of spiritual coaching was too far off the beaten path trod by Dr. Phil, Oprah’s Best Friend Gayle, and other Oprah proteges? Check out Karlyn’s chapter in Stories of Oprah and decide for yourself.

My companion and I actually left the theatre casting the film, but I can’t recall if we cast Oprah as central character, bar owner, Mama Nadi. Nonetheless, reactions across the web to Oprah taking another stab at acting are mixed…stop. I’m lying. Reactions are not “mixed”: people are pretty much uniformly asking for an Oprah-break. As I note in the introduction to Stories of Oprah, success and critical acclaim seem to evade The Queen of All Media’s grasp when it come to being a thespian.

And, as Trystan Cotten notes in his chapter, “Lost in Translation,” the process of de-politicization that happens when Harpo, Inc. gets ahold of a great novel can have not-so-great results.

Let’s hope the name of the play doesn’t become a too convenient diss because Nottage won the Pulitzer for this play for good reason: it’s dynamic, smart, moving, and intricately examines the complexity of women’s bodies as collateral in war. Quick: read the play and read Trystan’s chapter!

Her show  is winding down and hitting all of its usual high marks for, presumably, the last time—Final Favorite Things! Final Audience Giveaway of a Trip in the Worst Economy in Recent Memory! Oprah is in the news more frequently and you didn’t think that was possible, did you?

But get ready because there will be no breathing room between the end of The Oprah Winfrey Show and her network’s debut on January 1, 2011. As this happy-clappy video works to convince us: Oprah’s success is our success. Oprah’s secrets are our secrets.

Despite Winfrey’s use of the collective “we,” she still somehow manages to sound like she means the royal we. This majestic pluralism is telling because it unsuccessfully attempts to hide the fact that this era of continued media consolidation and threats to net neutrality, to act as if “we,” the people-citizens, not we the audience-consumer, have the resources to own a cable channel is a disingenuous claim.

NPR featured a rather condescending-in-its-nationalism interview with Yang Lan, one of China’s most interesting media moguls. One of Michele Martin’s opening questions was, “How sick are you of the Oprah Winfrey comparison?” Now if you have to ask that, clearly, it’s not a great question, is it?

Luckily, Lan quickly established why she has achieved as much as she has: she was quick-witted, incisive, and modest without being demur. Most notable was her observation about the nature of “power” as implied by her invitation to Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit. She questioned the definition of power and situated it in a masculinist notion of what the word means, “Well, I’m not very comfortable about the power thing because power used to describe the more, you know, male chauvinism kind of value system. I think nowadays, women are breaking the borders or the boundaries and also trying to give a new interpretation in terms of impact you can have to the society. It’s not about the manner of the scalability or the massiveness of how many people you employ or how much money you can decide on, but rather it’s the new thinking that you can bring to other women or to the society as a whole.”

Want more on Oprah, power, and gender? See Jennifer Rexroat’s chapter, “I’m Everywoman: Oprah Winfrey and Feminist Identification,” in The Stories of Oprah (now available for your Kindle or iPad!).

Ted continues with the idea of Oprah as a platform from which to launch. The notion of Oprah O/S worth contemplating, but from a layperson’s viewpoint (merely gadget addict), I’m loath to go too far with that.

Monday, February 8, 2010 – Kimberley Springer (Williams College) presents: “Stories of O: Oprah’s Culture Industries”

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 – Janice Peck (University of Colorado at Boulder) presents: “Too Big to Fail?”

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 – John Howard (King’s College London) presents: “For the Sake of the Children”

Thursday, February 11, 2010 – Vanessa Jackson (Independent Scholar) presents: “I’ve been Rich and I’ve Been Poor: The Economics of Oprah”

Friday, February 12, 2010 – Kimberley Springer (Williams College) presents: “Oprah’s Got Beef?: Alleged Matriarchies & Masculinist Rhymes”

And not a moment too soon! The Oprah news has been fast and furious lately.

Oprah pushes the 160 character message system Twitter into mainstream consciousness by entering the tweet-0-sphere. For some wise-and-otherwise media hipsters Oprah’s presence, as well as other “uncool” latecomers, signals Twitter’s jump the shark moment. It was Oprah’s second tweet, after the one about it truly being her at the keyboard and not an assistant, that lead to the second big O news story…

Sporting a daring red Alice band and no makeup, Oprah let her hair flow free and denied wearing a weave. She engaged the age-old black obsession/white fascination with black women’s hair. How do black women take care of their hair? What does it feel like? To go natural, press it, “relax” it, or insert weave? While Stories of O doesn’t have a chapter on Orpah’s hair choices, we can recommend one of the best books on the historical and social politics of black women’s hair, Professor Noliwe Rooks’ Hair raising: beauty, culture, and African American women (Rutgers University Press, 1996).

And demonstrating the convergence of Oprah, television, the internet, and American’s unsatiable appetite for all things at the price of $free.99, NPR blogs on The Great Free-Chicken Fiasco of 2009. Apparently, Oprah sponsored a downloadable coupon for free factory-plumped grilled chicken from KFC to get Americans to choose a healthy fastfood option—oxymoron, much? The result? Maos and chayhem (that’s “chaos and mayhem” x 20!) at KFC locations around the country, including civil disobedience and staged protests when KFC locations balked at honoring the coupons.

World financial crisis? Global warming? H1N1 flu pandemic? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Anway, according to one hard-hitting Baltimore journo, “This is not a good things to do for people who are especially hungry—tell them, ‘No, you can’t have chicken.’” Indeed, we concur: it is never a good thing to tell hungry people they can’t have chicken.

I am now starving. No one better tell me I can’t have chicken…