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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