Civil Rights in the 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.