Lovecraft Country (2020) (with Bambi Haggins)

Episode 85 discusses the recent HBO horror television series Lovecraft Country (2020), developed by Misha Green as a continuation of Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, and places the story of 1950s racial segregation in the United States on a collision course with the science-fiction world of H.P. Lovecraft. Joining Chris and Alex for this latest episode is Dr Bambi Haggins, Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine whose work explores race, class, gender and sexuality in American comedy across media and television history. She is also the author of Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (2007), while her current book project, Still Laughing, Still Black examines how Black comedy, culture and reception in the new millennium reflect, refract and reveal the necessity and the power of Black comic discourse and survival laughter since 2008. Listen as the trio discuss structuring relationships within Lovecraft Country between identity, race and imagination; the stakes of the programme’s application and reworking of ‘Lovecraftian’ imagery within an oppressive Jim Crow setting; discourses of reconstruction and restoration within both digital VFX post-production work and post-Civil War America; the (re)centring of blackness and the ambivalent power of whiteness as it manifests across the series’ performances; the CGI Cthulu creatures (Shoggoths) that are central to the programme’s allegorical treatment of Black survival and fear; and how Lovecraft Country uses generic hybridity and the threat of fantasy to engage with a narrative of a racial reckoning.