We’re delighted to welcome Dr Harriet Earle, Lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University, to give a Centre for American Studies research seminar:
Dark Underbellies: How American Horror Story [Re]constructs ‘America’
Friday 15th February, 2019
4pm in the E.Taylor Room, Eliot College
Abstract
America’ is a strange and amorphous term – a ‘weak brand’ in advertising speak – and ‘American’ only more so. If postmodernism gave us the freedom to think of our identity markers as fluid and arbitrary, by this reckoning is surely follows that ‘America’ contains only the meaning to which the individual will ascribe it, based on personal experiences and understandings. And yet, it remains popular to use it as a title for popular culture artefacts.
In this talk, I will interrogate the use of ‘American’ in the name of the popular television series, American Horror Story. Since its first airing in October 2011, American Horror Story has moved through eight seasons, 60 awards, over 250 nominations and a huge amount of critical debate. I will argue that the inclusion of ‘American’ in the title can be seen in one of two ways. On one hand, it is inclusivist, bringing together a collection of narratives linked geographically to think about how inter- and transnational narratives have shaped the concept of America. On the other, the inclusivist ‘melting pot’ does not allow for the richness of hyphenated Americans to be adequately represented and instead leads to hierarchy and isolationist fracturing of identity.
Using examples from across all eight seasons of the series*, I will address the following questions: According to American Horror Story, what does it mean for something to be ‘American’? What kinds of strategies are being used in this identity construction? And, perhaps most importantly, why should I care?
Speaker biography
Dr Harriet Earle is a lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University and researcher in American comics, literature, and popular culture. She has a PhD in American Comics from Keele University (completed 2014) and her first monograph about conflict trauma and comics post-Vietnam was released in July 2017 by the University Press of Mississippi. She has published across the field of comics and popular culture studies, with recent publications in The Journal of Popular Culture and Film International. Dr Earle sits on the editorial board of Comics Forum.