Stay woke: Black production and reception practices in the alleged postracial era

In February 2017, Jordan Peele’s film, Get Out, was released to theaters. Main character Chris Washington, a young Black man, visits Rose, his white girlfriend, and her family for the first time during a weekend trip. What starts off as an enjoyable, albeit a bit awkward, weekend trip, soon turns into a dire situation. Through its plot, Get Out (2017) uniquely critiques systemic racism in the alleged postracial era.

Similar themes emerged in other works: Us (2019), Antebellum (2020), Lovecraft Country (2020), and Candyman (2021) for instance. These works are sometimes called “woke horror,” films and series that critique race, gender, and class. Many existing works on woke horror focus on defining the subgenre by only analyzing the films and series themselves. While valid, I argue that societal structures, production elements, and audience reception must also be analyzed to fully understand. I use Julie D’Acci’s (1994) circuit of media study to analyze the tensions that exist among cultural artifacts, sociohistorical contexts, production, and audience reception to assert woke horror as a cultural category.

I conduct close readings, analysis of sociohistorical moments, analysis of production elements, and audience reception. Ultimately, this research shows that while genres and subgenres often seem to just appear, there is a complicated process involving production, sociohistorical factors, and audience formulation. This dissertation also shows that barriers to entry for Black creators are effectively being broken in part to sociohistorical and sociocultural changes, and audience demand.