La séance du 13 février 2025 (14h-16h, salle L265) est consacrée à une communication de Claire Dutriaux (Sorbonne Université), intitulée « ‘So-called Southern Speech:’ the Racial Politics of Southern Accents in Hollywood Cinema, 1927-1964. »
Vous trouverez ci-dessous un aperçu de son intervention, ainsi que le programme du séminaire et les informations pour nous rejoindre en visioconférence.
The advent of the talkies created a major upheaval for the cinema industry, as well as for its audiences. When sound appeared, fan magazines were suddenly flooded with letters from Southern movie fans, who were irate at Hollywood’s use of Southern speech. In the first half of the 20th century, the movie fans and film censors of the South vigorously protested against Southern accents, which they judged “phony. » This talk will uncover the methods that white Southerners used to forward their view of an acceptable, white, upper-class South on screen through language – by protesting to Hollywood but also by supporting their own Southern actors and actresses and by directly addressing their Southern allies in Hollywood. To do so, I will study the reactions of this specific audience, through fan mail, newspaper articles, and motion picture censor reports. The reaction of another type of audience, that of African American movie critics and fans, will provide a useful counterpoint, as this audience identified Southern accents with a “Negro dialect” which stultified African American characters and prevented them from overcoming stereotypes. Through language, the racial politics of the South made its way onto the silver screen, in an increasingly racially-conflicted Hollywood – a fact that Southerners in Hollywood were aware of but which some tried to interrogate in their own works.
Captation de la séance accessible en ligne : https://scalelite-conf.univ-rennes2.fr/playback/presentation/2.3/f847f2dec7a8b9e35fcf82e1bf8e53c1e767644b-1739450468363