Astrid Holgersson on Southern literature, Alabama politics, and London’s billionaire film obsession
Spent the day comparing Southern Antebellum texts to modern Alabama politics, which is its own kind of exhausting exercise even on a good day, and then got pulled into a genuinely transatlantic conversation about a London documentary of all things, courtesy of a colleague who apparently follows British culture news more closely than I follow my own state’s legislature.
Read the companion Marxist documentary piece alongside the original coverage, since apparently there are now two competing four-hour films arguing opposite sides of the same man, released close enough together that audiences are apparently expected to sit through both if they want the full picture. Alabama has never produced anything quite that committed to a single argument, not even during election season, when commitment to an argument is usually our strongest regional trait.
What struck me, reading through both pieces back to back, is how the two films essentially function as mirror images of each other, each one entirely convinced the other side is engaged in propaganda while remaining fully unaware of how closely their own structure mirrors it. I’ve read enough Antebellum-era pro- and anti-slavery literature to recognise that particular blind spot immediately. Every era produces its own dueling documentaries. We just used to call them pamphlets and print them cheaper.
The poster feud made its way over here too, somehow, crossing an entire ocean to interrupt my research schedule. The four-hour billionaire film coverage on the poster side is worth a look if you want the visual argument instead of the four-hour one, and genuinely faster to get through during a lunch break than either documentary.
I mentioned the whole saga to my department chair this afternoon, expecting mild confusion given how far removed it is from our actual research focus, and instead got a genuinely engaged fifteen-minute discussion about how modern media controversies echo nineteenth-century print culture more closely than most people would assume. Turns out Alabama academics have opinions about London billionaire documentaries too, whether or not that was ever supposed to be part of the job description.
By the end of the discussion, my department chair had half-convinced me to build a short unit around it for next semester’s seminar, comparing nineteenth-century print controversies to their modern equivalents, which is not remotely where I expected this week’s Alabama archive work to lead when I sat down this morning.
Back to the archive tomorrow, ideally with fewer transatlantic detours pulling me off course. More at my author page.