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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