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Southern History on Screen: Race and Rights, 1976–2016 ed. by Bryan M. Jack

2020; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 86; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2020.0050

2325-6893

Kathryn B. McKee,

Race, History, and American Society

Reviewed by: Southern History on Screen: Race and Rights, 1976–2016 ed. by Bryan M. Jack Kathryn B. McKee Southern History on Screen: Race and Rights, 1976–2016. Edited by Bryan M. Jack. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019. Pp. vi, 234. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-7644-4.) Southern History on Screen: Race and Rights, 1976–2016 goes a long way toward filling what the volume’s editor, Bryan M. Jack, identifies as “a lacuna in the scholarship regarding contemporary films about the historical South” (p. 6). As Jack rightly points out, film “has been particularly powerful in creating the South in the American imagination,” most especially in terms of shaping “public discourse about southern history” (p. 1). Beginning in the mid-1970s, when the people of the United States celebrated the nation’s bicentennial, elected a southerner to the White House, and sat down before their television sets to watch a miniseries about “roots,” filmic representations of the South entered a new, post–civil rights movement phase. Essays in the volume consistently suggest that the context in which a film is made both affects its rendition of the past and shapes how contemporary viewers will link to its subject matter. Events of recent years, Jack suggests, make it imperative that we continue to connect the dots between past and present iterations of racism in the United States. [End Page 237] Although the organization is not evident in the table of contents, Jack reveals in the introduction that he considers the volume’s ten essays to be thematically grouped. Oliver Gruner’s “‘It’s Now That Counts’: The South in Hollywood’s Sixties Films” leads off the volume, Jack explains, because it sets the stage for the essays to follow, establishing the filmic South of the 1960s as a reliable explanation for racism that depended on the white working class, typified by uneducated southerners, not the systemic power of national institutions. The volume’s strongest contributions appear in the grouping about slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction that follows Gruner’s opening. Daniel Farrell questions any pretensions on the part of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) to historical accuracy, instead pointing out the filmmaker’s repeated concessions to genre conventions (especially westerns) that obscure possibilities for black agency. In his essay, Jack explores a noticeable shift in films about Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War, which includes a movement away from the protagonists of the Lost Cause to an investment in everyday white southerners, who are portrayed as caught up in a war not of their making and absolved of any need to mend the conflict’s causes or consequences. In The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), for instance, Clint Eastwood’s character is ostensibly motivated by revenge, not racism, and the protagonists of Ride With the Devil (1999) are likewise drawn into guerrilla warfare because they are, first, victims. Erik B. Alexander ultimately praises Free State of Jones (2016) for focusing on the long-misunderstood and underdiscussed era of Reconstruction. Caroline Schroeter’s excellent analysis of black and white bodies in her essay links D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation to Nate Parker’s 2016 film of the same name, but she does more than contextualize Parker’s version within the context of Black Lives Matter; Schroeter critiques the later film’s portrayal of the black female body whose “‘rebellion [is] virtually nonexistent in a film about revolt and freedom,’” in the words of New York Times critic Salamishah Tillet (p. 110). Todd Simpson’s “Roots Reimagined” rounds out this first constellation of essays, offering a series of provocative observations about why television has been more adept at absorbing and confronting the nation’s conflicts around diversity than has the film industry, concluding with praise for the still imperfect 2016 Roots that “carefully enriches the African setting” (p. 135). The next four essays are uneven in quality and cohere less well. They are loosely grouped around “sexuality, religion, generational conflicts, and personal reflections on ‘home’” (p. 8). Kwakiutl Dreher intersperses a discussion of Down in the Delta (1998) with a personal family migration story. Megan Hunt’s “Hollywood’s Southern Strategy: Portraying...