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⡘ 336 Revamping the South Thoughts on Labor, Relationality, and Southern Representation Tara McPherson During the 2006 Oscar telecast, Academy Awards president Sid Ganis commented on Hollywood’s efforts to help rebuild New Orleans postKatrina , citing the production of several films in the region. Subsequently, a good deal of film and television production moved to Louisiana, particularly to Shreveport. While the rise of “Hollywood South,” as Louisiana is now sometimes known, might seem an act of good will on the part of the film industry toward a storm-ravaged region, the seeds for this change were planted before Katrina wreaked havoc along the coast. In July 2005 Louisiana State House Bill 731 took effect, providing healthy incentives for media production companies to move to the state.1 Production numbers for film, television, and commercials made in Louisiana increased dramatically, with the Bayou State emerging as second only to the Los Angeles area for total annual film production in the United States.2 A case in point is True Blood, one of several media projects at least partially produced in the South, part of what many in Hollywood lament as “run-away” production. This essay takes up this morphing pattern of production alongside other southern-tinged shifts in the global economy, including the Walmart empire, to query the very stakes of studying representation . Although my education trained me to produce close textual readings—that is, at the level of narrative and image—I have come to wonder if such readings sometimes distract us from analyzing the workings of capital, particularly in moments of intense economic reorganization . While True Blood exhibits an interesting reworking of several standard southern myths, might the real action actually be taking place offscreen, as capital reconstitutes itself in an era of networked globalization ? Tweaks on southern imagery might actually be part and parcel of this new economy, offering a little something for everyone in keeping with the logics of niche marketing and mass personalization. Revamping the South 337 ⡘ In fall 2008 I experienced some trepidation as I cued up the first episode of True Blood on my TiVo. I had enjoyed executive producer Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under a great deal, but here Ball was trudging not only into southern territory but also into vampire tales. The threat level for cliché and stereotype seemed enormously high. I feared the worst. As the series opens, we see a speeding suv swerve into a “GrabbItKwik” mart, unloading a drunken college couple seeking to spice up their white fraternity lives with a little bit of the forbidden—in this case, a taste of something vampirish. They encounter a black-clad, goth-y convenience store clerk who seems exactly what one might expect as he scowls at the pair and threatens to bite them, while the whole minidrama is observed by a character in camouflage lingering at the beer coolers, clearly meant to signify “redneck.” Yet these comfortable clichés are almost immediately undone by the viewer’s realization that the clerk is a fraud. The real vampire is none other than the redneck, perhaps the first vampire in hunting gear to ever grace the genre. From this opening sequence of the first episode, something feels a bit different in points south. True Blood is southern gothic gone more than a little goth, with heavy doses of sex, sensuality, blood, and gore. While the show revels in its soapy sentimentality, taking up television’s recent turn to the serialized and melodramatic with a vengeance, it does so with a smirk and a wink. In adapting Charlaine Harris’s series of southern vampire novels, Ball takes several familiar stereotypes firmly in hand, reworks conventions of the southern gothic, and unfolds both new and tired patterns of representing sexuality, class, and race in the region. The southern imaginaries mapped by True Blood point to an emerging shift in televisual representations of race and other markers of difference. True Blood and recent serialized dramas such as The Wire map distinctive figurations of human relations, staging scenarios that would not have been imaginable on television in the 1990s and pointing toward nascent forms of sociality. I am intrigued by these changes as shifts at the textual level, but I am perhaps more interested in how we might reconcile these seemingly new tales with broad changes in the production contexts of an increasingly global media market. Revamping the South: Beyond Lenticular Logics In the opening of True Blood, we learn a good deal more about...

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