Selma Not Chicago : Hollywood's obscuring of Racism in the North

Focusing on Hollywood films, this course (and book project, co-authored by Sébastien Lefait) studies the origins, construction, dissemination and persistence of a cultural preconception – the notion that in the US, racism against African Americans belongs almost exclusively in the South. As such, the book elaborates on Jeanne Theoharis’s "A More Beautiful and Terrible History : The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History" (Boston : Beacon Press, 2018, particularly chapters 1 and 2), in a specific cultural domain with huge influence the world over. The innovation, then, is the emphasis placed on the cultural vehicles of this obfuscation of racism in the North derived from its entrenchment in the South. In particular, award-winning Hollywood films are studied for their ability to globally propagate a regionally-bounded geography of U.S. racism. Because of their widespread presence and consensually positive reception as progressive, they are considered as potent ideological instruments.

The course and book project are both a quantitative (how many films ? watched by how many people ? what awards ? what international success ?) as well as qualitative analysis, unpacking specific scenes from specific films. These are studied for their capacity to put racial issues at a triple remove: geographical (racism is relegated in the South), historical (it belongs in the past), and social (racism is the preserve of individual, Southern ‘white trash’). Throughout, the films’ political aesthetics is systematically reconnected to their national and international reception, to establish their importance as building blocks in the development of American cultural hegemony, so important in cold war times. The course and book rely partly on hitherto un- or under-explored archives (press from ten countries, Southern press, Hollywood industry archives).