SMALL-SCREEN SOUTHS
Southern Literary Studies
Scott Romine, Series Editor
SMALL-SCREEN
SOUTHS
REGION, IDENTITY, and the CULTURAL POLITICS of TELEVISION
Edited by LISA HINRICHSEN, GINA CAISON, and STEPHANIE ROUNTREE
Louisiana State University PressBaton Rouge Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright 2017 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing
TYPEFACE: Whitman
PRINTER AND BINDER: Sheridan Books, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8071-6714-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8071-6715-1 (pdf) ISBN 978-0-8071-6716-8 (epub)
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Small-Screen Souths began as a conference panel sponsored by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature at the Modern Language Associations 2014 Annual Convention in Chicago, Illinois. Its journey from a call for papers, to conference panel, to edited collection is indebted to a number of individuals who have supported its varying incarnations along the way. From the start, Eric Gary Anderson, then president of SSSL, offered valuable guidance as we navigated MLAs Allied Group procedures, and his enthusiasm for the original (quite amorphous) idea of a panel about television and the South sparked the projects beginning. We received such a terrific volume of quality proposals that we felt compelled to turn the idea into an edited collection, mostly because the field seemed to beg for such a project, but also because we had such a difficult time rejecting so many outstanding projects. We are grateful to this original group of scholars who responded (many of whom are in this collection); their scholarship indeed suggested that Small-Screen Souths might be something more than a panel.
We particularly want to express our gratitude to the three individuals who presented on the original panel in Chicago, all of whom are included in this collection. Together, Robert Jacksons work on Lost Boundaries, Jennie Lightweis-Goffs work on Treme and The Wire, and Matthew Dischingers work on The Walking Dead initiated a vibrant discussion about the dynamic relations between the televisual as a medium, the South as region and myth, and the nation writ large. The conference session ended much too soon, and we left wholly convinced that if three presentations spanning a diverse televisual archive could prove that cohesive, then this Small-Screen Souths panel must surely warrant more than a 90-minute discussion. Small-Screen Souths is indebted to these folks for starting the conversation at such a high level. As we proceeded through the edited collections CFP, this initial scholarship from Jackson, Dischinger, and Lightweis-Goff was continually on our minds as a benchmark of critical rigor. Each of the essays included herein possesses the same evocative inquiry and scholarly enthusiasm that we enjoyed in that original panel. We offer heartfelt thanks to all of our authors for their ideas, professionalism, and timeliness.
As the collection came together, we benefited tremendously from the guidance of Margaret Lovecraft at Louisiana State University Press as she saw us through the book proposal stage and the first manuscript submission. James W. Long later took the helm and expertly guided us through the second half of the review process. We are grateful for the support of both of them. Additionally, the peer reviewers for LSUP offered expert advice for revisions, and we are indebted to their generous feedback. Most especially, we express our gratitude to Scott Romine for his keen critical feedback as series editor; the contours of Small-Screen Souths testify to his guiding hand.
Finally, we each owe enormous thanks to our families and loved ones, who have indulged our television habit over the past three years. They have offered us suggestions and listened patiently while we overintellectualized even the most unlikely of shows. Its not always fun to watch TV with someone who is working on a television studies project, but they have tolerated this intrusion, and this book is much better because of their love and support.
SMALL-SCREEN SOUTHS
INTRODUCTION
The Televisual South
LISA HINRICHSEN, GINA CAISON, AND STEPHANIE ROUNTREE
Television made me whole, Lewis Nordan recalls in his memoir Boy with Loaded Gun (2000), remembering the revelatory sensation of watching television for the first time in his tiny Mississippi Delta hometown of Itta Bena (26). Flush with the fascination of new technology, he felt himself simultaneously dissolved and expanded. As he remembers, there was a sense of uniform fascination with this magical new medium: Expectation of programming had not yet entered our intellectual purview. Content was unimportant. We watched the set. What the set was doing by being turned on was really all that mattered. The idea of a picture appearing there before us was far more interesting than anything we might actually see on the screen, and so no one cared what the program at any given time might happen to be (14).
The public has since become more particular about programming, but television, even in this postbroadcast era, is still a remarkably magnetic medium. With the rise of multichannel cable and global satellite delivery, changes in regulation policies, the advent of HDTV, the introduction of TiVo and DVR, Internet convergence, flat screens, and new forms of media, scriptwriting, camerawork, and audience participation, television has been stunningly resilient in adapting to a series of economic, technological, and cultural changes. As the sustained slump in Hollywoods domestic box office underscores, the continuing migration of film viewers from movie theaters to the home and the growing public devotion to popular television serials continue to make understanding televisions power and influence paramount, even if we no longer watch the set as promiscuously as Nordan. While TV is, to some degree, still an object in space, it is also, as this collection demonstrates, a medium that facilitates relationships between spaces and places, shaping our understandings of geography through a variety of scales: local and global, centered and peripheral, private and public, interior and exterior.
In contrast to dominant histories of U.S. television, which often efface regional concerns from narratives about the growth of the medium, focusing instead on national networking and programming, Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television strategically inserts regionalism back into the story of television in order to capture how it has served as a medium through which place has been contested, imagined, stereotyped, and mythologized. Against the assumption in media history and theory that region and network are incompatible, even antithetical termsa conjecture that rests upon an understanding of networking as space-binding while regions are instead place-boundour collection interrogates how physical and symbolic networks become entangled and entwined as new conceptions of time, space, and community produced through televisual technologies coexist with more traditional understandings of duration and distance.