Justified's visual rhetoric: television's subtle unmasking of the myth of the south (original) (raw)
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Era(c)ing the South: Modern Popular Culture Depictions of Southern History
The Journal of American Studies of Turkey
Using race as a lens, the article argues that the end of the Civil Rights Movement has created a new period of Southern identity creation, with films exonerating the contemporary South for racism and consigning most depictions of racism to the historical South.
Critical Regionalism. Ed. Klaus Lösch, Heike Paul, and Meike Zwingenberger. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 193-213., 2016
Reality television is awash in representations of region/alisms: Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Redneck Island, Swamp Pawn, Deadliest Catch, Chainsaw Gang, Ax Men, Swamp People, My Big Redneck Wedding, My Big Redneck Vacation—the list could go on. Central to most of these is the region of the South, albeit a south vague enough to encompass even the rural areas of Pennsylvania and Michigan.1 Less a geographical place than a socio-economic and cultural space in the national imaginary, the South as represented in reality television centers around the classist, racialized, and ableist figures of the ‘hillbilly,’ the ‘redneck,’ and, a little less regionalized yet ubiquitously linked to and epistemologically informing the previous figures, poor ‘white trash.’2 Not just from an academic perspective are these figures easily contestable in their ‘othering’; their stereotypical presentation and, as others have coined it, rednexploitation,3 are also readily apparent to the lay viewer. Nevertheless, academics and journalists alike have become fond of practicing what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls ‘paranoid readings’ of these cultural sites that are informed through our ‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ as Paul Ricœur has so aptly labeled it (cf. Sedgwick 125). When we peruse the many articles that have been published—mostly in major newspapers, magazines, and in some online journals—on the topic of representations of Southernness in reality television, we come face to face with the performative nature of knowledge. These readings have much in common with traditional notions of regionalism as an epistemological project in which either the allegorical or the essentializing function of certain regions is deconstructed (cf. Jackson; Mahoney and Katz). Following Cheryl Temple Herr and Douglas Reichert Powell’s call for a new ‘critical regionalism,’ I want to move from a ‘paranoid’ inquiry of representations of Southern regionalism to a materialist, reparative reading of the cultural work that the critiques of and audience engagements with these representations perform. In his 2007 publication Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape, Douglas Powell develops a materialist pedagogy of critical regionalism in which “critical regionalism self-consciously shapes an understanding of the spatial dimensions of cultural politics in order to support projects of change” (8). Challenging the blind spot of elitist cosmopolitanism, which has, according to Powell, elided its proponents’ own locatedness—oftentimes because academics tend to ignore their own class positions and lives of mobility (20)—Powell calls for a rethinking of critical regionalism as a “transdisciplinary ethic that link[s] cultural criticism to material social change” (23). Such projects, Powell stresses, bring together local participants with academic thinkers and public intellectuals in order to transform “regional landscapes into more hospitable, generous, and just places” (23). As I argue in this chapter, critical regionalism as Powell advances it can be a productive methodology for reality television studies, especially in its focus on the locatedness of knowledge producers and the importance of a materialist perspective. Applying a materialist, critical regionalist lens to reality television can reveal the hidden classism of its production and critical reception, highlighting how that classism remains invisible to most because of its embeddedness in capitalist-ableist, regionalist, and racialized tropes.4 In the following, I will first outline the theoretical backdrop against which I perform my reading of the reception of reality television: Eve Sedgwick’s epistemology of ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ reading positions, Simon Frith’s materialist idea of ‘low theory,’ and Thomas McLaughlin’s similarly motivated ‘vernacular theory.’ While my analysis of ‘paranoid’ readings includes articles on all reality television shows that represent the South, my analysis of viewer feedback will focus on the show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (TLC). With my analysis, I hope to contribute to the larger discussion of knowledge production in cultural studies, highlighting the ways in which it is itself implicated in a neoliberal capitalist imaginary that has been theorized by David Harvey, historicized by Daniel Rodgers, and challenged by the Kilburn Manifesto editors. It has also been adopted by scholars in disability studies, such as David Goodley, whose work recasts our current paradigm as neoliberal-ableism.5 While I want to trouble the ubiquitous employment of a rhetorics of neoliberalism to explain all current forms of oppression, dispossession, and domination,6 Sedgwick’s critique of ‘paranoid’ reading practices—practices that are limited in their epistemic reach—can still be useful despite its complicity in a neoliberal logics of agency, desire, and performance. Sedgwick’s work has served mainly as an inspiration for affect theory, but I want to exemplify how her thinking can be useful in developing critical approaches that are based on a materialist approach to knowledge production in order to bring into dialogue two epistemological traditions that both offer rich archives of knowledge despite their ontological differences.
The Scourges of the South: Essays on "The "Sickly South" in History, Literature, and Popular Culture
In this book, eleven scholars “take their stand” on the controversial issue of disease as it occurs in the context of the American South. Playing on the popular vision of the South as an ill region on several levels, the European and American contributors interpret various aspects of the regional “sickly” culture as not so much southern “problems”, but, rather, southern opportunities, or else, springboards to yet another of the South’s cultural revitalizations, “health”. As Thomas Ærvold Bjerre and Beata Zawadka note in their introduction, the so-called “Healthy South” has never been an easy topic for scholars dealing with the region. One reason for this is that researchers have been taught to approach so formulated a topic no further than to the point when it turns out it is a contradiction in terms, and, indeed, there is much in southern history and the present situation that justifies such an approach. This volume, however, comprises a collective effort of southernist historians, literature experts, and culture critics to transcend the “contradictory” concept of the “Healthy South,” and does so by reinventing the notion of the southern disease and, consequently, the role of the South as a “scourge” in American culture in terms of this culture’s bountiful gift. Thomas Ærvold Bjerre is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He has published widely on southern literature and popular culture. Beata Zawadka is Associate Professor of American Culture at Szczecin University, Poland. She specializes in the US South, particularly the region’s performative potential.
Cinematic Memory and the Southern Imaginary: Crisis in the Deep South and The Phenix City Story
2016
This dissertation is a historical and theoretical study of the southern imaginary at the intersection of mass and regional culture. The focus is on two cinematic treatments of significant violent crimes in the region during the 1950s: firstly, the assassination of Albert Patterson, which prompted the clean of the “wide open” town of Phenix City, Alabama; and secondly, the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, which played a critical role in accelerating the African American freedom struggle. The Phenix City Story (Allied Artists, 1955), and Crisis in the Deep South, an unproduced 1956 screenplay written by Crane Wilbur, were both products of the media frenzy surrounding these actual events and they each involved investigation and research into local circumstances as part of their development and production. Rooted in film studies, history and cultural studies, the method of this thesis is to look backward to the foundational elements of the texts in question (e.g., the ‘raw material...
Complicit in Victimage: Imagined Marginality in Southern Communication Criticism
Rhetoric Review, 2019
Tragic twenty-first century events linked to southern identity prompt reflection on regional identification in rhetoric’s critical literature. Doing so reveals the same “imagined marginality” seen in the broader public discourse, of counterpublic rhetoric that circulates an identification of exclusion from dominant identity. Southern regional theory and critical regionalism together reveal that topoi of space, historical consciousness, and insideroutsider hierarchy create relational identity. From the Agrarians’ victimization to the still pernicious redemption of early U.S. public address critics, up to accommodation by late twentieth century and contemporary critics, the record shows the complicity of the field in southern marginality discourses.
Appalling! Terrifying! Wonderful! Blaxploitation and the Cinematic Image of the South
Polish Journal of American Studies, 2019
The so-called blaxploitation genre-a brand of 1970s film-making designed to engage young Black urban viewers-has become synonymous with channeling the political energy of Black Power into larger-than-life Black characters beating "the [White] Man" in real-life urban settings. In spite of their urban focus, however, blaxploitation films repeatedly referenced an idea of the South whose origins lie in antebellum abolitionist propaganda. Developed across the history of American film, this idea became entangled in the postwar era with the Civil Rights struggle by way of the "race problem" film, which identified the South as "racist country," the privileged site of "racial" injustice as social pathology. 1 Recently revived in the widely acclaimed works of Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained) and Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), the two modes of depicting the South put forth in blaxploitation and the "race problem" film continue to hold sway to this day. Yet, while the latter remains indelibly linked, even in this revised perspective, to the abolitionist vision of emancipation as the result of a struggle between idealized, plaintive Blacks and pathological, racist Whites, blaxploitation's troping of the South as the fulfillment of grotesque White "racial" fantasies offers a more powerful and transformative means of addressing America's "race problem."
Constructing "Deplorables": Monstering the American South
It is self-evident that popular culture, specifically visual news and entertainment media, greatly influence our perception of ourselves and others. If we are of a certain age, Hillary Clinton’s age for example, the images of racist “Deplorables” that probably occurs to us comes from newsreels seen in our youth: angry mobs of white people shouting at surrounded AfricanAmerican young people being escorted into a local high school or college building by armed troops, white police officers attacking young black people with clubs, dogs, and fire hoses, a parade of white robe and hooded men and women marching through the streets of a State capital shouting “Segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever!” And I would suggest the history of race relations in this country has conditioned Americans to associate, not without reason, racism and xenophobia with the South, particularly in its small towns surrounded by fetid swamps, dense forests or endless fields.