“The Past Is Never Dead”: Post-Civil Rights Colorblindness and the Plantation Present in Antebellum

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article explores how Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz's Antebellum reworks Octavia Butler's Kindred into an “inverted time-travel chronotope,” collapsing the distance between slavery and the post-civil rights present not through speculative time travel but through the literal reconstruction of the plantation inside contemporary United States. Drawing on critical race theory, this article reads hotels, restaurants, television studios, and corporate spaces in the film as laboratories of post-civil rights racism, where civility, meritocracy, and microaggressions render structural domination invisible. Drawing on Du Bois's “double consciousness” and Carbado and Gulati's “working identity,” this article shows how Veronica's carefully managed public persona embodies the racialized labor of self-presentation demanded of Black professionals. The revelation of the Civil War Reenactment Park run by elite white supremacists spatializes colorblind ideology, revealing slavery's afterlife as both heritage and ongoing captivity. Read alongside Kindred, Antebellum demonstrates how Black horror and speculative cinema can function as theoretical interventions that map the shifting forms of “new racism” in a neoliberal, ostensibly post-racial order.