Panel: Re-envisioning African American Film Through Get Out Deadline: 2018-09-30

[nicholasdiak]

Re-envisioning African American Film Through Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

Deadline: September 30, 2018
Contact: smooney@umass.edu
Co-chairs: Shannon Mooney and Hannah Taylor

Since its release in 2016, Jordan Peele’s debut film Get Out has attracted attention and commentary from popular audiences, film critics, and literary scholars due to its relevance within a media-driven era that is becoming increasingly conscious of overt and subtle forms of violence against black bodies. Reviewers have called attention to the film’s extensive critique of racism within our contemporary moment: for instance, the significance of cameras points to the importance of surveillance footage in capturing police brutality, and hypnosis and brainwashing serve as larger metaphors for spaces of black confinement, whether that be the slave ship, the plantation, or the prison cell, to name just a few. In other words, Peele’s film recasts or reimagines common objects, spaces, and tropes so that they take on particular political significance within a society that attempts to conceal violence against black bodies.

This panel is interested in exploring the various revisions and re-imaginings within Get Out in order to understand how contemporary African American film—and horror in particular—responds to and interacts with a contemporary society that fetishizes and appropriates blackness while simultaneously allowing for its demise. The session welcomes papers that discuss how Get Out blends, revises, or challenges existing genres or tropes within film studies, African American literature, or American film and literature more broadly. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: the deployment and revision of familiar horror tropes; suburban space as a location of horror for black bodies; contemporary forms and depictions of physical and metaphorical enslavement; the appropriation and theft of black bodies and culture; Significations (following Henry Louis Gates) upon existing forms of African American literature and film; the “post-racial” myth and the era of Trump. 

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words through NeMLA's website by September 30: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17419

Please contact Shannon Mooney (smooney@umass.edu) or Hannah Taylor (hannah.2.taylor@uconn.edu) with any questions.