Don't Use Your Words! by Juffer Jane A.;

Author:Juffer, Jane A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press

5

TV’s Narratives for Emotional Management

Karen Chau’s web site of animated characters inspired by her Chinese American childhood attracted the attention of a Nickelodeon producer in 2003; it was an opportune moment for the freelance artist to develop her Hello Kitty–inspired characters into a series because they spoke to two goals of the network. One, Nickelodeon was looking to expand its repertoire of shows with diverse characters, and two, the network loved the fact that Chau’s story ideas focused on emotions. Initially, the network planned to call it Downward Doghouse, playing on the protagonist’s “mind-body” connection and use of yoga as a coping mechanism. Then, however, the network picked up another show, Lazy Town, that emphasized fitness and nutrition and opted to “‘pull back on the yoga and focus on emotional intelligence’” (quoted in Hayes 2008, 26). They called the show Ni Hao, Kai-Lan (Hello, Kai-Lan).

The series as it developed into a popular Nick Jr. program illustrates the appeal of both emotional intelligence and diversity—two discourses that coincide around the management of difference. Six-year-old Kai-Lan speaks frequently in Mandarin, translating for her audience, and with her grandfather Ye-Ye embraces Chinese cultural traditions. She also frequently negotiates disputes between her friends—Rintoo the tiger, Tolee the koala, and Hoho the monkey; at the successful resolution of the conflict at the end of each episode, Kai-Lan says, “You make my heart feel super happy!” Similarly, Nick Jr., Disney Jr., and PBS all feature shows with a wide range of racially and culturally diverse characters, from the Latina/o protagonists of Nick Jr.’s Dora the Explorer and Go, Diego, Go to the African American stars of Disney’s Doc McStuffins and Jake and the Neverland Pirates to the diverse casts of almost all PBS shows. Managing cultural differences is linked to managing emotional differences, leading to the multiculturally integrated classroom and, eventually, the tolerant nation.

The goal of all this management is to help kids become adept and independent problem solvers, as I argued in chapter 4. The “problem” is the emotional outburst—and the “solution” is the management of the emotion. Television programming embeds these solutions in a narrative geared especially for kids between the ages of three and six, the period during which their cognitive skills are presumably developing such that they can follow a story with a cause-and-effect trajectory. In this normative view, their skills include the “understanding of storylines and narratives, including the ability to reconstruct events, understand sequence, distinguish between central and incidental information, connect causes to consequences; the understanding of characters such that they are able to describe characters not only by exterior appearance, but also by personality traits, motivations, feelings, personal history, and social orientation, as well as the contexts in which they interrelate with others” (Lemish 2008, 157).

This combination—the ability to follow a story and identify with a character—leads us back to Massumi’s description of the way in which emotion enters into narratives. Recall his point (as explained in chapter 1) that “the qualification of an emotion is quite often, in

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