The PhD Colloquium Series is excited to invite you to join us for the next event with Alison Landsberg, who will discuss her fascinating analysis of race, “horror vérité” and Jordan Peele’s film "Get Out."
Landsberg proposes that certain cinematic conventions of the horror film — a specific set of formal and narrative strategies — are uniquely suited to surface every day, endemic and chronic horror that many in U.S. society refuse to see. She calls this “horror vérité” or truthful horror. Jordan Peele’s 2017 film "Get Out" is an example of “horror vérité,” precisely because it uses the clunky and often artificial mechanics of the horror genre in order to expose actually existing racism, to render newly visible the very real but often masked racial landscape of a professedly liberal post-racial America. This radical form of history writing, she argues, is not relegated to the ivory tower, but is disseminated through mass culture and to the masses.
Alison Landsberg is an associate professor in the Department of History and Art History and the Department of Cultural Studies at George Mason University. Her most recent book is Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge.
As always, we thank the Sevellon-Brown Fund for its continuous support.
