Barry Jenkins and the Legacies of Slavery

In this book, Delphine Letort examines the plots and ploys that intermingle fiction and history in Barry Jenkins’ television adaptation of The Underground Railroad, allowing viewers to experience enslavement and flight through the eyes of the female protagonist, Cora. Letort demonstrates how the fusion of imaginary and real elements underlies a poetic visual and narrative style to guide viewers’ emotional and epistemological understanding of the past. She posits that another imagery of enslavement can be created—one that does not position the black woman at the margins of slavery cinema and history—as the mise-en-scène of the underground as a symbolic space representing the hidden and the repressed opens new fictional possibilities for imagining the intimate life of the enslaved. Ultimately, this book reveals how the serial format proves instrumental in transforming the gaze on the racial subject, using repetition and difference from one episode to the next to prompt new ways of seeing. Scholars of film and television studies, popular culture, history, and critical race theory will find this book of particular interest.