Episode 85 - Lovecraft Country (Misha Green, 2020) (with Bambi Haggins)
Lovecraft Country (Misha Green, 2020).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Episode 85 discusses the recent HBO horror television series Lovecraft Country (2020), developed by Misha Green as a continuation of Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, and places the story of 1950s racial segregation in the United States on a collision course with the science-fiction world of H.P. Lovecraft. Joining Chris and Alex for this latest episode is Dr Bambi Haggins, Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine whose work explores race, class, gender and sexuality in American comedy across media and television history. She is also the author of Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (2007), while her current book project, Still Laughing, Still Black examines how Black comedy, culture and reception in the new millennium reflect, refract and reveal the necessity and the power of Black comic discourse and survival laughter since 2008. Listen as the trio discuss structuring relationships within Lovecraft Country between identity, race and imagination; the stakes of the programme’s application and reworking of ‘Lovecraftian’ imagery within an oppressive Jim Crow setting; discourses of reconstruction and restoration within both digital VFX post-production work and post-Civil War America; the (re)centring of blackness and the ambivalent power of whiteness as it manifests across the series’ performances; the CGI Cthulu creatures (Shoggoths) that are central to the programme’s allegorical treatment of Black survival and fear; and how Lovecraft Country uses generic hybridity and the threat of fantasy to engage with a narrative of a racial reckoning.
Suggested Readings
Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Revised Edition. The New Press: New York.
Cashmore, Ellis. 2012. Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama’s America. London: Bloomsbury.
Dery, Mark. 1994. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery, 179-222. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Haggins, Bambi. 2007. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Izzo, David Garrett, ed. 2015. Movies in the Age of Obama: The Era of Post-Racial and Neo-Racist Cinema. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Mask, Mia ed. 2012. Contemporary Black American Cinema: Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies. London and New York: Routledge.
Sexton, Jared. 2017. Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Squires, Catherine R. 2014. The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York and London: New York University Press.