Pedagogies of Slavery: Race, Media, and Citizenship

Abstract

There has been a recent resurgence in media depictions of U.S. chattel slavery, including more than seven films released in 2013 and the History Channel's 2016 release of an updated version of Roots, the 1977 television miniseries that traced an enslaved family over generations. This media interest has accompanied wider debates about slavery's relation to contemporary racial disparities in poverty, incarceration, housing, and education. My dissertation analyzes five key historical moments since the 1960s when popular media have produced narratives about slavery. Despite significant moments when media produce programming on slavery, media studies has rarely taken up the question of slavery's depiction and further, the uses to which depictions have been put. Pedagogies of Slavery: Race, Media, and Citizenship shows how U.S. media from the 1960s to the present play an important and ongoing role in teaching viewers how to be what I term post-civil rights citizens: citizens who know how to think, act, and feel in accordance with new racial norms in an era defined by the supposed end of legal racism. Emotion plays a crucial role in the constitution of post-civil rights citizenship. Given the immense shifts of the postwar era vis-à- vis race and racial formation, I contend that emotion, produced by the pedagogical use of the history of slavery, is a powerful site through which to shape and manage race. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as political and social theory, I consider the role of news and entertainment television, video games, curricula, and digital apps in educating the American public about slavery in order to navigate post-civil rights citizenship. These media - alongside policy, political discourse, consumer culture, curricula, and institutions such as prisons and schools - provide templates for racialized citizenship in the post-civil rights era, yet these guides change with shifting historical and economic contexts. Despite repeated efforts to locate U.S. chattel slavery as firmly in the past, I document how media cannot fully ignore or erase the ongoing legacies and effects of slavery in the present.