Proposed Panel for Console-ing Passions Conference:

"A Post (Network) Mortem on Dixie: Televisual Tales of a Post-Racial South"

July 19-22, 2012, Boston, MA



When it occurred, numerous pundits cited the 2008 presidential election 

victory of Barack Obama as indisputable proof that in fact the U.S. had 

officially become a “post-race” society.  This post-race sensibility is 

mirrored by U.S-oriented television programming despite Southern 

Poverty Law Center statistics that demonstrate consistent increases in 

race-based hate group activity both before and after Obama’s win. Not 

surprisingly, current primetime television programming erases and 

ignores the prevalence of systematic racism in favor of narratives and 

representations that individuate race or ignore it altogether. Such 

post-race texts are produced, distributed, and exhibited in large part

within the tenuous parameters of “post-network” television.



This panel seeks to analyze how the discourses and practices of 

“post-race” and “post-network” converge in the American South. From the 

CW’s series Vampire Diaries and Hart of Dixie to TBS’s House of Payne 

and AMC’s The Walking Dead, the South offers an emergent-and 

popular-televisual universe for the dissemination of cultural and 

national fantasies about race and region. This panel seeks papers that 

engage with intersections of "post-network," "post-race," and the 

American South in some manner.



Possible topics include, but are not limited to:



“Post-race” representations of the South on network or cable programs



“Post-network” branding and the “post-race” South



Television stardom and the “post-race” South



Blind-casting practices



Reception and the “post-race” South



Intersections of the “post-race” South and other subject positions 

(ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, body normativity, etc)



Please submit an abstract of 200 words or less, a five item 

bibliography, and a brief biographical statement to Phoebe Bronstein 

([log in to unmask]) and Justin Rawlins ([log in to unmask]) 

by 5pm on December 19, 2011.



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