E74: Jordan Peele and the Speculative Fiction of Blackness (w/ Dr. andré carrington)

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For this year’s Halloween special, we wanted to take a journey through the filmography of one of our favorite film directors, Jordan Peele. From the breakout success of his 2017 thriller Get Out, to 2019’s creepy and horrifying tour-de-force Us, to this year’s action-packed monster movie Nope, Jordan Peele is becoming arguably one of the most important American directors working today. His films not only bend and play with the ostensible genre conventions he works within, they also deliver substantial, semiotically rich critiques of racial politics, class struggle, and media in American society and culture. Not to mention, his films are just immensely entertaining - equal parts deeply cerebral, outrageously funny, and heart-stoppingly terrifying.

To help us discuss this topic, we’re very excited to be joined by Dr. andré m. carrington, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. carrington is a scholar of race, gender, and genre in Black and American cultural production. His first book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minnesota, 2016) interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres through studies of science fiction fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts.

We use concepts from Dr. carrington’s (and other scholars’) work to discuss all three of Peele’s films, charting the salience of “paraspaces” and “Otherhoods” in each as spaces where speculative imaginaries of trauma and alterity can become bone-chillingly real (such as “the sunken place” in Get Out, or the subterranean tunnel dwellings of the tethered in Us). In addition, we cover the various ways Peele incorporates “fanservice” into his films, tipping a cap to fans of horror and sci-fi and providing moments of cathartic release amidst the deluge of dread, and playing with the various conventions of speculative fiction genres to create unique and cerebral insights against a tableau of terror.

Follow Dr. andré m. carrington on Twitter, find links to more of his work on his UC-Riverside faculty profile, and check out his book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction.

Be sure to follow UC-Riverside’s Mellon Sawyer Seminar (which Dr. carrington is participating in this year), entitled “Unarchiving Blackness: Why the Primacy of African and African Diaspora Studies Necessitates a Creative Reconsideration of Archives.”

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Dash, J., & Baker, H. A. (1992). Not without my daughters. Transition, (57), 150-166.

Delany, S. R. (2012). Shorter views: Queer thoughts & the politics of the paraliterary. Wesleyan University Press.

Tananarive Due’s course on The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and Black Horror

Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. U of Minnesota Press.

Lavender, I. (2011). Race in American science fiction. Indiana University Press.