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"The Caucasian Persuasion Here In The 'Dale": Othering, White Normality, And Post-Racialism In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Isaiah Lee

University Honors Theses

This thesis engages the construction of race within the television landscape of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to investigate how well-meaning, progressive media either reinvents or repudiates racial stereotype. This paper also examines the figure of the Other, as it is evoked in horror, and utilizes Hazel Carby's conception of the fantasized black subject to analyze the setting and characters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with an eye towards the inherent assumptions the show makes about race. Ultimately, I argue that Buffy's representation of race assumes a white normality, flattening its non-white characters under the guise of inherent difference, even …