On Victimhood

Inspiration for this volume is rooted in curiosity about the melodramatic forms that seem increasingly to characterize aspects of both the private and the public spheres in occidental and Western-oriented societies. Melodrama, it is said, has expanded beyond the borders of genre and fiction to become a pervasive cultural mode, with distinct signifying practices and interpretive codes for meaning-making that assist in determining parameters for identification throughout a variety of discourses and mediated spaces, be it the public spectacle of personal suffering, the emotive coding of consumer practices, or the sentimentalization of national politics. If melodrama is so culturally pervasive and emotionally persuasive, then what is its political potential, both within and beyond symbolic fictions, and what might its limitations be?

This initial inquiry necessarily led to a reconsideration of the present state of theory in melodrama studies. Since the publication of seminal texts by Thomas Elsaesser and Peter Brooks in the early 1970s, there has been general consensus among scholars that melodrama is an inherently modern dramatic form. Its ability to address and articulate experiences of modernity in a manner accessible to the masses in various national contexts, at different times, has contributed to its widespread prominence. As a mode of representation and sense-making (that is, as an aesthetic form), its historical durability and transportable social resonance can be attributed largely to its adaptability. However, while assessing melodrama's current status as a cultural mode in particular, it quickly became clear that the position of the victim is functioning more than ever as a paradigmatic figure for identification in myriad debates on the social practices of legitimation.