Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-2019
Abstract
In 2018, forty-five years after the high-profile abduction of Patricia Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, CNN returned her captivity narrative to mass media in the documentary series The Radical Story of Patty Hearst. A year later, Netflix brought to a close the narrative of Kimmy Schmidt, the ever optimistic and resilient survivor of childhood abduction and fifteen years of captivity in a bunker. Tales of captivity have dominated the digital streaming universe in recent years even as the captivity narrative has proven to be a malleable genre: from the dark dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale which powerfully depicts the horrors of survival in a world in which women are reproductive slaves, to WestWorld, set in a virtual game park recreation of captivity narratives past, a bleak commentary on the fascination narratives of the American western hold for eager guests who are unaware of the rebellion brewing among captive hosts, to the 1980s world of Stranger Things, whose first season focuses on the tale of two abducted children, and Orange is the New Black a show devoted to America’s largest captive population, the mass incarcerated, and in its last season, the detainees of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This special issue of NANO is devoted to examining the cultural significance of contemporary captivity narratives and the ways they both defy and reify the cultural and political logic of early American narratives that originated the genre.
Comments
This article was published open access with NANO: New American Notes Online by https://nanocrit.com, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Behrent, M. (2019). "Introduction." NANO: New American Notes Online, 14.