Jordan Peele’s Get Out and the Mediation of History

Abstract

In its attention to the undead state of American slavery, Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017) appears to fulfill Stephen Best’s diagnosis of a “melancholy historicism” in recent Black cultural production. But instead, the film draws viewers into a virtual experience—and potential analysis—of the roles of both technological and environmental media (from TV, film, and cellphones to housing, ceramics, and cotton) in perpetuating, or disrupting, Black captive kinship to a state of originary loss.