557. Small-Screen Souths: Interrogating the Televisual Archive 1:45-3:00 p.m., 114 VCC West

Program arranged by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Presiding: Gina Caison, Georgia State Univ.

1. “Mid-Century Transition: Lost Boundaries and Early Television,” Robert A. Jackson, Univ. of Tulsa

Abstract: “We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners,” declared Martin Luther King, Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. “We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.” Yet the relationship between television and the American civil rights struggle dates back well before the most iconic images of the movement—white mobs, police dogs, fire hoses; defiant segregationist politicians railing against “outside agitators”; and King himself—of the late 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, early television was the site of contested visions of race, anticipating the long-familiar television/civil rights collaboration, in important, if less famous, ways. My paper will consider Lost Boundaries (1949), one of several post-World War II “social problem” films addressing racism. When censorship authorities in Memphis and Atlanta banned the film to prevent its theatrical exhibition, producer Louis de Rochemont attempted to buy time to air the Lost Boundaries on those cities’ television stations, over which municipal film censors had no legal authority. Thus, to some observers of this and other contemporary episodes, television at midcentury represented a new frontier in the history of the mediation of race, leading Ebony magazine to state as early as 1950 that “television is free of racial barriers.” The case of Lost Boundaries in the South, where authorities responded to de Rochemont’s surprising move with bewilderment and suspicion, reveals both the possibilities for progress and the institutional complexity of the postwar transition from the old studio model of theatrical exhibition to an emerging regime of televised programming in the private domestic realm. Lost Boundaries also provides an important link to later fictional and semi-fictional (de Rochemont’s favored term “docu-drama” seems germane here) treatments of race relations on television, including East Side/West Side (1963-64), Julia (1968-71), The Bill Cosby Show (1969-71), and Roots (1977).

2. “Solid South, Fluid Souths: Baltimore, New Orleans, and David Simon’s Urbanism,” Jennie Lightweis-Goff, Tulane Univ.

Abstract: In the years between the premieres of The Wire (2002) and Treme (2010), David Simon’s shows produced for HBO, the discipline of Southern Studies experienced the kind of rebirth that one might wish for nearly-drowned New Orleans or blighted Baltimore. Considerations of the South expanded from parochial hagiographies of traditional literary writers to more expansive treatments of the region in context with other formerly colonized and enslaved zones of the African Diaspora and Global South. The American South, long regarded as the “id of the nation” – a rhetorical quarantine for pathologies of racism and structural inequality – became a polysemic text, open to interventionist revisions and unexpected juxtapositions with the global and the postmodern: categories from which the region had long been excluded. Within American popular culture, The Wire and Treme functioned in the televisual sphere much as New Southern Studies has in the academy, rendering with greater complexity a region burdened by four centuries of ideological weight. Simon represents the urban South – a space at once ablated by longstanding associations of “Dixie” with agrarian ecologies, and functioning, as David Goldfield has argued, as “the memory of the region” – as both representative of and in resistance to national culture and post-national neoliberalism. Rendering peripheral Souths as rich interpretive sites that rhetorically resist the homogenous, recherché, white, and anti-modern typing of the region, David Simon crafted such an idiosyncratic vision that his viewers often fail to notice that they sojourned in the South. Indeed, my essay begins by adjudicating claims for each city’s (un)belonging to the region; Baltimore, after all, is further North than the national capital, and New Orleans is often regarded as closer to the Global than U.S. South. Placing Simon’s two shows in conversation with the “New” Southern Studies, I argue that his televisual intervention points both scholars and viewers toward a transformative urban paradigm that centers urbanity in resistance to still-extant Southern provincialisms. In Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (2013), cultural theorist May Joseph – native of Dar es Salaam and partisan of the Empire City – asks that contemporary global subjects re-imagine citizenship as born in water, rather than on land. The rivers of New York City, she suggests, circulate not only water, but also history, memory, and the potential for belonging in a city that has provided the end point for myriad migrations. Informed by Joseph, my conception of the urban South’s fluidity is born not only out of the relationship between land and water, but also the link between liquidity and solidity. The century-old metaphor of the “Solid South” posited the region as a stable voting and cultural bloc within and between the Gulf and the Atlantic, the mountains and the swamps. Exploring David Simon’s representations of New Orleans and Baltimore – two sites as often as not rhetorically excluded from the categorical South – will enable me to consider the porous boundaries and paradoxes of the region, as well as the ways that its iconic melodramas of race, gender, class, and sexuality are distilled in post-industrial cityscapes.

3. “The Walking Dead’s Postsouthern Crypts,” Matthew Dischinger, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge

Abstract: The Walking Dead, a television show set in what remains of Georgia after a zombie apocalypse, requires its viewers to imagine a world in which regional stereotypes are maintained after the literal collapse of the nation and region. If discourses around the postsouthern have focused on simulacra replacing the real, The Walking Dead suggests that southern simulacra will outlive even the territorial boundaries they ostensibly signify. My essay begins with the show’s paradoxically persistent South, arguing that it reveals much about contemporary attitudes toward national exceptionalism in the face of its decline. I advance the concept of the “postsouthern crypt” to theorize on the relationship between hicksploitation and contemporary viewing pleasure, arguing the show’s caricatured South creates a space where both violence and disability can be quarantined (and enjoyed) without risk of national infection. One would hardly exaggerate in calling AMC’s Sunday-night hit a national pastime. The fourth season premiere garnered 16.1 million viewers, topping the average audience for the 2013 World Series. The Walking Dead’s national popularity occasions the examination of a critical nexus point between Southern studies and Disability studies. My essay first examines the South of The Walking Dead as a space where violence appears atavistic and expected rather than gruesome or troubling. The show offers familiar southern settings: urban Atlanta, a small farm, a rural prison, and a restrictive community. These locales, combined with the show’s characters (a small-town sheriff, a farmer, and two poor-white racists, just to name a few), never allow the viewer to forget they are watching a show set in the South. The Walking Dead’s gratuitous violence becomes naturalized, fitting within the presumed (dis)order of the region. My essay’s second section investigates how this familiar configuration of the South allows the show to absorb and deploy national anxieties about able-bodiedness. We might be tempted to read The Walking Dead’s zombies as merely illustrating regional fears about late capitalist consumerism. Rather than reading zombies only as a body politic, I argue that we can also read them as political bodies. To do so, I use Robert McRuer’s instructive concept of compulsory able- bodiedness, or the idea that an always-deferred movement toward an able-bodied ideal produces the concept of disability. Given that, in The Walking Dead, people become zombies even after natural deaths, a zombie might be read through the continuum toward disability as an eventuality for every person in the series. Thus, disability masquerades as the natural order of the South in The Walking Dead, framing the disabled southern body in contradistinction to the American able-bodied citizen. The Walking Dead’s zombies mark disability as a mass condition perpetuated by endless regional violence. The space that the show occupies in the American imaginary, therefore, is like a crypt buried under a holy national ideal; both must be preserved, undead, in stark contrast, for the idea of America to live on after its literal, apocalyptic demise.