Civil Rights in the Melodramatic Imagination

这本关于美国民权时代的文化研究分析了种族、性别和政治在小说和电影中的创造性紧张和持不同政见者的结合，这些小说和电影要么被遗失、忽视或回避，要么被聚焦于美国记忆中的民权运动的讨论所忽视，要么从未在这种背景下被审查过。它阐述了地区不满和诽谤的表现，因为它们传达了民族文化。这本书将对正在进行的对该地区的重新评估做出重大贡献，因为它有助于定义国家。这本书持续地分析了W·J·卡什所说的专注于20世纪50年代和60年代的“可怕的浪漫主义”。它表明了大西洋彼岸对一种特殊的南方形式的民权美国人的迷恋。它对法国想象力中的南方的考察表明了这一点，并揭示了南方和法国想象力之间比最初想象的更多的共同点。卡什引用福克纳和考德威尔作为该地区“恐惧和仇恨情结”的代表，而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，曾经看起来边缘的叙事可能具有象征意义上的中心意义。20世纪60年代的南方经历了一个独特的“美国”时刻，在这一时刻，美国种族关系的现实被强化，就像在自由之夏，该运动试图将密西西比州带到这个国家。自由之夏的象征意义远比相对较少的参与者数量重要得多。北方中产阶级外来者--“红色尿布宝宝”和耶鲁、斯坦福等学校的学生--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的情节剧来源。这个项目既不是一次调查，也不是一系列细读，而是一种文化反思。这项研究建立在我之前对美国种族政治表现的研究基础上。它的目标是成为一种文化和物质主义的项目，涉及沃尔特·本杰明所说的“赋予约会对象相貌”。自1980年代后期以来，一直在发展民权叙述档案，并注意到他们对种族和解的千禧年关切。民权时代占主导地位的流行代表一直是一个融合主义的成功故事；电影和小说以实现愿望的方式发挥作用，涉及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数十年来正义斗争的结束，批评人士已经开始探索这种怀旧倾向。我的研究回溯到更早的文本，以便与这一趋势背道而驰。我探讨了惊悚和浪漫的公式在多大程度上为一些研究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私的禁忌破坏者中，民权挑战主要是将性和暴力戏剧化的一种手段。我问，这样的电影和小说是否开始满足帕克·泰勒所说的摄像机“最被忽视”的功能，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捆绑着一种极其保守的道德，就像在不那么戏剧化、更具创新性的现代主义形式中一样。当新闻书籍宣传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对60年代南方的现实主义反映时，厌恶女性和仇外心理往往会给人一种扭曲的地域感和时代感。我的研究将结合起来，断言民权情节剧的新范式。

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.