"Welcome back to the living": Twilight memories of Martin Luther King Jr. in contemporary American television

In this essay, I read the image of Martin Luther King Jr. in contemporary television as a site of anxieties about temporality, contemporary black politics, and charismatic black leadership. Reading a 2003 episode of The Twilight Zone through a black feminist analytic and in the context of a post-2000 public culture of mourning for slain black leaders, I argue that the resurrections of King in contemporary American television series reinforce normative notions of black nationhood based in inheritance and masculine authority. Extending Andreas Huyssen's notion of "twilight memories"-generational memories that fade into the horizon as the lights of a modernizing urban landscape push them out of view-I argue that postmodern, or postsoul, African American culture is driven to a large extent by the twilight memories of civil rights-era charismatic leadership.