Racist commercials from an alternate history
I was impressed by the pseudo-documementary C.S.A.: Confederate States of America, which was recently released on DVD. Filmmaker Kevin Willmott put together a dark and funny snapshot of what U.S. television would look like if the South had won the Civil War, complete with creepy ads for the “Slave Shopping Network” and mood-altering pills that make “servant control” easier. The meat of the film, however, is a BBC mockumentary history of the C.S.A., which charts 150 years of U.S. history in which slavery was never abolished.
Here’s what I said about C.S.A. in my column:
What’s sheer genius about this alternate history is how much of it is drawn from actual US history. We hear about Native Americans being rounded up and put into orphanages, which actually happened; and the fake commercials advertising things like “Darkie Toothpaste,” “Niggerhair Cigarettes,” and “Coon Chicken” are all based on real products sold long after the abolition of slavery.
More chilling are ads for a TV show based on “Cops†called “Runaway.†The message may be heavy-handed, but it nevertheless rings true enough to be thought-provoking: US popular culture is only one degree removed from being that of a slave-owning nation.
The same goes for US political culture. Historical figures and events in CSA also remain virtually unchanged. Kennedy is elected president and calls for abolition right before being assassinated, and the Watts Riots are portrayed as a “slave uprising.” Reagan’s presidency heralds a new spike in the slave trade . . .
Read more.
November 6th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
hey annalee,
the discussion over at alternet about this film is interesting. i think the point of the film is to uncover the racism hidden in our contemporary society by comparing an outrageous alternative to reality—not to create a realistic alternate world.
because, of course, the world depicted here is completely unrealistic. slavery would have died around the turn of the 19th/20th century for purely economic reasons. the us became a world power by adjusting (somewhat late) to and adapting the industrial revolution, and, as anyone knows who’s studied this, urban industrial development is only economically feasible using wage slavery, not chattel slavery.
chattel slavery as it was practiced in the south was primarily a way of enabling agricultural mass production of products for foreign trade: tobacco, cane sugar/molasses, cotton, etc.
in the predominantly agriculturally-based culture of the american south, families with only one or two slaves to help domestically and in the fields, viewed and treated their slaves (economically speaking) as “one of the family.” they had to weigh and balance the economy of having children against buying slaves. this culture was on its way out for other reasons, and soon enough, small farmers with only one or two slaves would have begun to find it economically impossible to keep slaves either because of cheaper machines they could buy to do the same work, or because they began losing their farms to consolidation, or their children to the better jobs in the cities.
another issue that is completely buried (because history is written by the victors) is that there was a powerful debate going on in the antebellum south about the future of slavery and the near consensus was that slavery couldn’t have continued indefinitely. the debate was about what to do about it: gradual emancipation was popular. some thought slaves should be deported back to africa (gradually). but there was so much pressure from the north that the debate never really had a chance to develop. any realistic alternate history about a triumphant south would have had to take this strange debate into account and played out some “gradual emancipation” scenario.
if slavery could have been maintained for any reason, the us’s economic development would have been slowed, but that doesn’t mean that economic development elsewhere in the world would have slowed to any degree as a result. the us simply would have been a much more backward, much less powerful nation at the dawn of the 20th century.
by that point, however, a number of things would have happened: 1) 40 years after the civil war era, some “gradual emancipation” policy would be bearing fruit; 2) the us would be falling behind european nations in development so noticeably, that immigration might be reversing itself; 3) any responsible or savvy government would be taking steps to remedy the situation by creating a labor system more akin to wage slavery to help spur industrial growth. 4) westward expansion would either have become impossible because of the us’s industrial backwardness (industry -> greater militarization -> quicker settling of the west) or would have distorted (as it actually did) the us’s agricultural and pastoral development to the extent that keeping slaves would have become economically impossible in the west, even if the new states *were* slave states.
(i’ve been thinking about all this stuff a lot in the past few years because my novel is an alternate history where the civil war never happened and slavery is in the process of petering out around the turn of the century.)
November 6th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
I completely agree with you that the discussion on alternet really missed the point. CSA is an allegory — not a good-faith effort to create a realistic alternative history. I also agree very strongly that slavery would have petered out for economic reasons. Wage slavery is much cheaper than chattel slavery! You don’t have to pay for upkeep if you hire wage slaves, after all.
I can’t wait to read your book.
November 8th, 2006 at 8:38 am
claire, i am working on a novel about an alternate timeline in which there were not one but two cases of letters: the normal ‘lower case’ you and i know, but then augmented with a so-called ‘upper-case’ version of the alphabet. this ‘upper-case’ alphabet would be used to indicate proper nouns and initialisms, as visual cues to mark the beginning of sentences, or even just to indicate emphasis! imagine the social implications of such technology if it could be developed.