Looking Back, Angry and Otherwise: Popular Media, Dissent, and Historiography

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

In the wake of November’s election, one common recommendation circulating in liberal media publics is to look to past iterations of activism in order to gain insights into how to embody dissent now. Media commentators, for instance, point to films like Ava Duvernay’s Selma (2014), casting film viewership as a pedagogic practice that can aid in the larger, ongoing project of resistance. In such calls to “look back,” popular media is designated as a conduit, a means through which history is accessed and made into a template for the future. The goals of this panel are to denaturalize that gesture, explore the feelings that motivate it, and generate alternative ways of relating history, popular media and activism.

Building on recent interventions in historiography informed by feminist, queer and subaltern studies, this panel examines the limits of historical inquiries that work backward from a contemporary epistemological frame, a method that Laura Doan has described as “ancestral,” and attends to the specificities and exclusions of the archives at our disposal, treating those structural components as part of the stories we seek to tell. Mimi White’s paper analyzes the historiographic practices of journalists and other viewers of Mad Men, paying particular attention to what feminist critics want from the show’s representations of women and the different iterations of feminism that inform those desires. Using The Feminine Mystique as a case study, Leigh Goldstein explores the ambivalent politics of general history, that is, histories addressed to a popular audience and generated by those who are located outside of disciplinarity. Her paper attends to the kinds of relations that such “undisciplined” looks are able to discern and to the political ramifications of refusing specialization. Meenasarani Linde Murugan examines the desire for everyday-ness that fuels the historiographic efforts of the creators of the popular Netflix TV series Master of None, unpacking the history of South Asian American representations on film articulated by the show and putting it in conversation with histories offered by contemporary scholars and archivists. Finally, Aubrey Anable’s paper interrogates the project of enlisting popular media in the service of mobilizing dissent. Treating as case studies two recent videogames, Papers, Please and Sunset, that simulate the positions of enabling authoritarian rule and witnessing political unrest, Anable attends to the political critiques articulated by these texts, but also reflects on the liabilities of the technological form through which these critiques are accessed. Victoria Hesford has agreed to serve as chair and her expertise in feminist cultural studies, affect studies and American studies will guide the session and inform a stimulating commentary.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Victoria Hesford, Stony Brook University

Individual Presentations

• Women, Feminism, and Genre in Mad Men - Mimi White, Northwestern University

• History in General: Undiscipline, Survival and the Politics of Popular Historiography - Leigh Goldstein, Northwestern University

• “Indians on TV”: Master of None and TV History’s Mundane South Asian Idols - Meenasarani L Murugan, Fordham University