Civil Rights in the Melodramatic Imagination

戏剧化想象中的公民权利

• 批准号: AH/G009236/1
• 负责人: Sharon Monteith
• 金额: $ 3.95万
• 依托单位: University of Nottingham
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2008 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FG009236%2F1
• 关键词: Civil; Rights; Melodramatic; Imagination

This cultural study of the US civil rights era analyses the coming together of race, sex and politics in creative tension and dissidence in novels and films that have either been lost, neglected or elided from discussions that focus on the Civil Rights Movement in American memory, or that have never before been examined in this context. It addresses representations of regional disaffection and vilification as they informed national culture. The book will contribute significantly to an ongoing reappraisal of the regional as it helps define the national.This book provides a sustained analysis of what W J. Cash called the ''romantics of the appalling' focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. It speaks to a transatlantic fascination with a peculiarly Southern form of civil rights Americana. Its examination of the South in the French imagination makes this manifest and reveals more common ground between Southern and French imaginaries than might initially be supposed. While Cash cited Faulkner and Caldwell as representative of the region's 'complex of fears and hates', this study shifts the discussion to analyse neglected works that, in my reading, remind us that narratives that once appeared to be marginal may be symbolically central. The 1960s South saw a uniquely 'American' moment in which the reality of US race relations was intensified, as in Freedom Summer when the Movement sought to take Mississippi to the nation. The symbolic importance of Freedom Summer was far more significant than the relatively small number of participants. The insertion of a northern middle-class outsiders--'red diaper babies' and students from schools such as Yale and Stanford--into the 'savage' South was not only a media dream but a source of melodrama for filmmakers and writers of fiction. This project is neither a survey nor a series of close readings but a cultural reconsideration. The research builds on my previous studies of representations of American racial politics. It aims to be the kind of cultural and materialist project that involves what Walter Benjamin described as 'giving dates their physiognomy'. Since the late 1980s there has been evolving an archive of Civil Rights narratives and attention is being paid to their millennial concerns with racial reconciliation. The dominant popular representation of the civil rights era has been as an integrationist success story; movies and fictions function in wish-fulfilling ways involving the amelioration of racism and white-on-black violence. The mimetic pull on the civil rights narrative typically celebrates closure on decades of struggle for justice and critics have begun to explore the tendency towards nostalgia. My study pushes back to earlier texts in order to write against this tendency. I explore the extent to which thriller and romance formulae provided popular cover for some films which examine issues of disenfranchisement and the extent to which in sensationalist pulp and self-regarding taboo busters civil rights challenges were primarily a means to dramatize sex and violence. I ask whether such films and fictions begin to fulfil what Parker Tyler described as one of the 'most neglected' functions of the camera, invading and recording areas of taboo in contemporary US society. I argue that there is a deeply conservative morality bound up in sensationalist pulp, as in less theatrical and more innovative modernist forms. When press books market that a film 'documents' a significant about-face in the racial climate of the South, or a fiction is reviewed as a realist reflection of the South in the sixties, very often misogyny and xenophobia inform a warped sense of place and period. My research will coalesce to assert a new paradigm of civil rights melodrama.

这项对美国民权时代的文化研究分析了小说和电影中种族，性别和政治在创造性紧张和异议中的结合，这些小说和电影要么被遗忘，要么被忽视，要么被忽视，要么被忽视，要么被忽视，要么在此背景下从未被研究过。它解决了地区不满和诽谤的表现，因为它们影响了民族文化。这本书将对正在进行的对地区的重新评估做出重大贡献，因为它有助于定义国家。这本书对W·j·卡什所说的“骇人听闻的浪漫主义”进行了持续的分析，重点关注了20世纪50年代和60年代。它说明了大西洋两岸对一种独特的南方形式的美国民权的迷恋。它对法国想象中的南方的考察表明了这一点，并揭示了南方和法国想象之间的共同点，比最初想象的要多。虽然卡什引用福克纳和考德威尔作为该地区“恐惧和仇恨的综合体”的代表，但这项研究将讨论转移到分析被忽视的作品上，在我的阅读中，这些作品提醒我们，曾经看似边缘的叙事可能是象征性的中心。20世纪60年代，南方经历了一个独特的“美国”时刻，美国种族关系的现实加剧，就像自由之夏运动试图将密西西比州纳入全国一样。“自由之夏”的象征意义远比参与者人数相对较少要重要得多。北方中产阶级外来者——“红色尿布婴儿”和来自耶鲁大学和斯坦福大学等学校的学生——进入“野蛮”的南方，不仅是媒体的梦想，也是电影制作人和小说作家情节剧的来源。这个项目既不是一次调查，也不是一系列的细读，而是一次文化反思。这项研究建立在我之前对美国种族政治表现的研究基础之上。它旨在成为一种文化和物质主义的项目，包括沃尔特·本雅明（Walter Benjamin）所说的“赋予日期面相”。自20世纪80年代末以来，民权叙事的档案不断发展，人们开始关注千禧一代对种族和解的关注。民权时代的主流大众代表一直是一个融合主义者的成功故事；电影和小说以实现愿望的方式发挥作用，包括改善种族主义和白人对黑人的暴力。对民权叙事的模仿通常是为了庆祝几十年来争取正义的斗争的结束，评论家们开始探索怀旧的倾向。为了反对这种倾向，我的研究回溯到早期的文本。我探讨了惊悚片和浪漫片在多大程度上为一些探讨剥夺公民权问题的电影提供了流行的掩护，以及在多大程度上，在耸人听闻的低俗和自我关注的禁忌中，民权挑战主要是戏剧化性和暴力的一种手段。我问，这样的电影和小说是否开始履行帕克·泰勒所描述的“最被忽视”的相机功能之一，入侵和记录当代美国社会的禁忌领域。我认为，在耸人听闻的纸浆中，有一种根深蒂固的保守道德，就像在不那么戏剧化和更具创新性的现代主义形式中一样。当出版书籍宣称一部电影“记录”了南方种族气候的重大转变，或者一部小说被评论为六十年代南方的现实主义反映时，厌女症和仇外心理往往会传达一种扭曲的地点和时代意识。我的研究将结合起来，断言民权情节剧的新范式。