Post-Plantation Nation: Manderlay and C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America
Plantation slavery, largely absent from film since the 1970s, suddenly reappeared at the beginning of the 21st century, though now significantly removed from both its context in U.S. history and the genres through which it had, in the past, predominantly been represented. In 2004, Kevin Wilmott's faux documentary" C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America depicted a United States in which the Confederacy had won the Civil War, such that plantation-era norms and hierarchies permeate contemporary U.S. society and culture. One year later, Lars von Trier's misplaced-gangster drama Manderlay staged a plantation in which slavery essentially shapes the desires of Depression-era black and white southerners, disrupting and thwarting purported American ideals. Though they experiment in very different ways generically, the thematic and even political similarities in these two projects effectively constitute a new way of viewing U.S. slavery, which becomes, through their chronological displacement, a social arrangement that could help to illuminate contemporary sociopolitical dynamics. Where such plantation romances as Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) romanticized slaveholding society in a way that encouraged, in W. E. B. Du Bois's words, embrace and worship [of] the color bar as social salvation," C.S.A. and Manderlay argue that the pervasive racism and discrimination in U.S. social and political practice as depicted under the sign of slavery belie the nation's democratic rhetoric. These films also stand out, however, for the intensity with which they demand that audiences grasp the realthrough, for example, Wilmott's closing historical postscript, as well as von Trier's closing series of photographs while overtly displacing it. Thus these films reveal the difficulties that emerge from compressing, through metaphor, two distinct problems widely recognized as urgent in political discourse concerning the U.S. that of comprehending the historical experience of plantation slavery and that of understanding the relationship between past and present injustice.Leigh Anne Duck, University of Memphis