Theorizing Race and Slavery in HBO's "True Blood"

A good deal of the blogsphere’s discussion of the first season of HBO’s “True Blood” has swirled around the puzzling representations of race on the show. What are we to make of the rapid images of civil rights sit-ins and black church worship, intercut with shots of the Klan, in the dazzling opening montage? How are we to interpret the suggested analogy between the struggle for vampire equality and the civil rights and gay rights movements (the latter signaled in the opening sequence’s roadside sign, “God Hates Fangs”, only one letter removed from a homophobic slur)? What is the status of the various cross-racial and cross-species liaisons and romances in the show? Is the “blood” in the show’s title an alibi for American racism’s obsession with the supposed “truth” of blood and bloodlines?

Considerable discussion centers on the African-American characters played by the remarkable Nelsan Ellis (Lafayette) and Rutina Wesley (Tara): are they stereotypical sidekick characters rendered as secondary to the white protagonists or do they in fact dominate the dramatic crux of the show?

For examples of the blogged conversations on race in the show, see:

http://www.racialicious.com/2008/09/24/true-blood-tired-stereotypes/

and a response:

http://www.racialicious.com/2008/10/13/scattered-thoughts-on-true-blood/

Among the comments to the latter post is a mini-debate over the “good” vampire character Bill’s lack of apology for his father’s slave-owning, a brief moment as the former confederate soldier speaks to a nearly all white crowd of southern Civil War enthusiasts. Yet, I wonder if the problem of slavery and its legacies, rather than only a passing concern, is in fact at the center of the entire series. Tara rages against her mother for having named her for Margaret Mitchell’s mythical plantation, the summation of white cultural denial of the horrors of slavery. What precisely is being exorcised from Tara and from her mother? Might it be, among other things, the enduring violent echoes of enslavement?

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to untangle the shifting master/slave dynamics embedded in the show’s mortal/vampire relationships. In a manifest sense the vampires, campaigning for equal rights, are equated to the descendants of slaves struggling for full inclusion in civil society. But in the show’s tangled underworld, vampires themselves are generally figured as masters, “glamming” their susceptible, frail human subjects and draining the life force out their subordinated mortal “pets.” In turn, Jason and his dangerous girlfriend Amy attempt to enslave the nascent vampire Eddie as a permanent source of intoxicating vampire blood. In some respects, Jason himself is enslaved, to Amy, his libido, and his addictions, even at the moment when he longs for a degree of reciprocal equality with the temporarily enslaved Eddie. The African-American gay man Lafayette (named for the anti-slavery foreign hero of the American Revolution) subordinates and subjects himself in prostitution and yet maintains that only he is truly free.

Presumably, the impossibility of determining the precise analogues of slave-owner and slave in "True Blood" is precisely the point. Claude Levi-Strauss, whose birthday anthropologists and students of culture around the world celebrated last week, has long argued that myth is not so much the fixed statement of a solution as it is the dynamic, shifting articulation of an insolvable problem. Polynesian mythology, for instance, centers on the vital (if irresolvable) cultural problem of determining how the relationship between brother and sister is like and unlike the relationship between husband and wife. If “True Blood” is a contemporary American exercise in mythology, is it a comparably dynamic, unstable exploration of the core American cultural conundrums: Who is truly enslaved and who is truly free? Can Master and Slave every exist without one another? And are there mysterious traces of the Free and the Unfree in each and every one of us?

Cultural Production Center in Southern Sudan

The M.A. Program in Cultural Production is developing a partnership with the planned Jonglei State Cultural Production Center in Bor town, Jonglei state, Southern Sudan. The Center is directed by Cultural Production graduate student Atem Aleu, who is an accomplished visual artist and cultural performer

The Cultural Production Center in Bor will be devoted to celebrating, supporting and documenting the rich cultures of the Southern Sudan, with a special emphasis on the regions of Jonglei State. The Center seeks to train a new generation of artists, musicians, writers and dramatists committed to the artistic and cultural vitality of New Sudan. The Center will encourage traditional and modern arts, including painting, poetry, music, song, dance, video-making and digital arts. Their first goal is to build a physical Center for the Arts and Culture in Bor town. Their training and cultural enrichment programs will be open to young men and women from 16 to 30 years old. Most of their instruction will be in English. Atem plans to return to Bor in Summer 2009 to hold more community arts worskhops and plan for the construction of the Center.

We are exploring the possibility of graduate students in the Cultural Production Master's program at Brandeis undertaking practicums and internships at the new Center, working with young people in traditional and pop music, Hip Hop, video production, creative writing, creative non-fiction, choreography, digital arts, and community-building. Atem is eager to train local young people to be cultural interpreters, archivists, and documenters of the dynamic cultural scene in the region.

In the meantime, we are working closely with Atem as he develops his overall conception of the Center and its programming. I'm especially fascinated by Atem's commitment to bringing together former adversaries, across lines of ethnicity and religion, to work together to develop the artistic and cultural resources of the region.

The photograph above shows Atem's student Samuel Ajok applying primer to a painting, in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya in 2005. Samuel is currently living in Bor, Sudan.

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Those interested in efforts by the "Lost Boys" to do reconstruction and development work in Sudan should be sure to see (and support) Jen Marlowe's remarkable, nearly completed film, "Rebuilding Hope."