CFP – Reading Black Mirror
Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2011 – 2023), has achieved an international standing for its reinvention of speculative anthology television and continues to innovate in the form (the 2018 interactive Bandersnatch for example). Throughout its six seasons, the show has offered multiple readings of technology as reconfigured through physical, personal, social and political experiences in the twenty-first century. In doing so, Black Mirror has touched on the fears, as well as some of the utopian hopes, of twenty-first century humans. Imagining the possible implications of our techno-ecology, this TV show offers a critical perspective on the entanglement of humans and machines. The implications of Black Mirror continue to resonate, with early episodes such as ‘The Waldo Moment’ (2013) reaching back to the golden years of science fiction, whilst more recent episodes (“Striking Vipers” 2019) have explored the place of race and sexuality in gaming, and episodes in the sixth season poke fun at the very platform on which they are streamed (“Joan is Awful”: 2023). As an innovative TV series, aware of its own influences and potential legacies, Black Mirror offers a productive site for investigating contemporary questions that cross disciplinary boundaries.
This project, currently under expression of interest with Palgrave, builds on the success of our other television-focused edited collection Reading Westworld (2019) and we are looking for similarly interdisciplinary and innovative work that explores topics and themeatics from across Black Mirror, in a post Covid landscape, and does so from a multi-episode perspective.
We are interested in chapters that consider any of the following, and/or offer new ways of reading Black Mirror:
Researchers at all stages and types of institutional or non-institutional status are welcomed. Abstracts of 300 words and a short biography should be submitted to Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay at blackmirrorbook@gmail.com by 15th January 2024.
