Benjamin J. Robertson
Proposal for SFRA 2021
WandaVision not Television: Franchise on the Small Screen
Recent instances of franchise on the small screen, such as Marvel’s WandaVision and Star Wars’s The Madalorian, demonstrate the challenges scholars of genre and media face when analyzing franchise texts. Specifically, insofar as they participate in older/other media forms, here television but elsewhere film or video games, instances of franchise obscure their participation in franchise itself, a production model that we can trace back to at least the first James Bond films that has now evolved into something more like a narrative form. This obfuscation occurs not on the levels of production, marketing, or consumption. It occurs at the level of meaning and interpretation. As a quasi-narrative forms, franchise is difficult if not impossible to analyze and understand all at once as complete texts (and individual franchises present their own, unique difficulties to critics). At the same time, individual texts within the franchise remain difficult to understand outside of the franchise framework that conditions them whatever meaning they possess.
This paper takes WandaVision and The Madalorian as case studies of the franchise form’s new incursion into television programming in the context of streaming services such as Disney+. Previous instances of franchise on television (such as Marvel’s Daredevil or Star Wars’s The Clone Wars) follow the production models of conventional television programming. WandaVision and The Madalorian challenge such models in several ways. Most importantly, each demonstrates the potential of franchise to incorporate perhaps any aspect of cultural production into itself even as it undermines the conventional limits and affordances of various media. WandaVision remediates the American television sitcom as a container for social conflicts, one that evolves over the course of its lifespan starting with the rather banal narratives of the 1950s and moving through subsequent decades that saw the sitcom form deal with questions of race, gender, sexuality, death, and so on. At the same time, complexities and conflicts specific to the MCU cannot be contained by the sitcom at all and force WandaVision into the meta-discourse of franchise and thus destroy our capacity to understand it or interpret it as television. The Mandalorian remediates its own franchise by way of the toys that have always been at its commercial heart. Individual episodes of the show seem less concerned with advancing an overall franchise narrative (or even presenting new narrative ideas for each episode) than they do with providing backdrops against which action figures, speeder bikes, and sandcrawlers perform the set pieces at the heart of the sort of play nostalgic fans participated in as children. Taken together, and in relation to other new instances of franchise, these shows underscore our need for new interpretive frameworks, new theories of media, and a new concern for monopolies on cultural production. This last concern is no longer simply about one or two corporations that control the production, distribution, and exhibition of texts. It is now a concern that these corporations are coming to own the very forms these texts take.
Benjamin J. Robertson
Proposal for Imagining the Impossible
Afropessmism and Afrofuturism: Re-imagining Fantastika after History
The scholarly discourses on Afropessmism, by Frank Wilderson and Christina Sharpe, for example, and Afrofuturism, by Kodwo Eshun and Alondra Nelson, for example, implicitly and explicitly adopt concepts and structures that derive from the several subgenres of fantastika, especially fantasy, science fiction, and horror. However, insofar as these discourses reject progress (Afropessmism) or seek to rethink the narrative threads that connect past to present and future (Afrofuturism), they also demonstrate the limitations and problems inherent to these subgenres, including fantasy’s nostalgia for a past of plenitude, science fiction’s imagining of a truly novel future that will break with the past, progress, and horror’s dismissal of all narrative structure and meaning. These problems, I argue, derive from fantastika’s origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as described by John Clute, Fredric Jameson, and Carl Freedman, among others. Insofar as fantastika emerges in response to the advent of historical consciousness in the wakes of the bourgeois revolutions in France and North America and of industrial capitalism, it reflects on three basic understandings of history—that history is but is bad (fantasy), that history is and is good (science fiction), and that history is not (horror)—while only rarely reflecting on the historicity of history itself, on the fact that our idea of history was and is historically determined. Now, after the end of the metanarratives of the Enlightenment (Lyotard) and of history itself (Fukuyama, Flusser), fantastika continues to reflect the concerns of those who write and read it even as it undergoes transformations that challenge some of its original tendencies. This paper investigates Afropessimism and Afrofuturism as discourses that adopt, adapt, and undermine the historically conditioned “truths” of fantastika by way of points of view, concepts, and narratives structurally excluded from fantastika by way of the historical moment of its birth and the historical consciousness of that moment.
evening redness 