MAD MEN'S POSTRACIAL FIGURATION OF A RACIAL PAST KENT ONO Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." -Don Draper ("The Wheel," 1.13) To think of Mad Men as nostalgic, as desirous of the past, might strike faith- ful viewers of the show as counterintuitive, because the show's embrace of the past is not merely a loving but also an uncomfortable one. As such, Mad Men's nostalgia is both like and not like Hollywood films such as Pleasantville ( 1998). Like Pleasantville it has a largely white cast and its narrative functions by way of whiteness. Yet unlike Pleasantville, Mad Men does not promise audiences secure, white, suburban domestic spaces, or loving white families with rebuilt home lives (Dickinson). Even as Mad Men is more dystopic in its imagining of the suburbs, it does not reject suburbia entirely. The show draws a dichotomy between city life, where one can encounter people of color and pot smokers, and the less daring suburbs, where one can always return, where people of color are subservient domestics, and where alco- hol and cigarette consumption top the list of quotidian vices. In short, Mad Men's vision renders the lives of its characters "more meaningful through nostalgic invocations of the past and more tantalizing with just the slightest hint of racialized or sexualized danger, or both" (Dickinson, 218 ). To conceive of nostalgia as psychological as well as romantic-as "the pain from an old wound," in Don Draper's turn of phrase-helps to explain the show's representation of the racial past. Mad Men's account of the past uses demographic realism: in other words, the show documents the actions of characters through the lens of white society, from a vantage point resonant with contemporary logics of whiteness. The focus of this chapter, therefore I is not past but present-day racism- especially Mad Men's racist representa- tional strategies, which are made possible through its construction of past racism. To understand Mad Men's representation, it is necessary to elucidate racial politics' distinct rhetorical strategy in contemporary postracial cul- ture. Less often discussed than postfeminism, postracism's analogous cul- tural condition is premised on the assumption that race and racism are of little importance in modern life (if they ever were significant) and are there- fore passe. For RalinaJoseph, postracism assumes "that the civil rights move- ment effectively eradicated racism to the extent that not only does racism no longer exist but race itself no longer matters" (239). In his discussion of whether Barack Obama's presidency signifies the end of racism in the United States, Thomas F. Pettigrew describes postracism as a "national hunger for racial optimism" and a moment when "race has substantially lost its spe- cial significance" ( 2 79). Postracism is characterized by a discomfort with, and related desire to forget, race and racism, which enables them to oper- ate beyond ordinary thresholds of popular consciousness through deferral, repression, and forgetting. Popular culture tends either to absent racism al- together, or to demonstrate progress by staging overt racism that is magically cured by good white people. 1 Typically, narrative representations of race in- directly (and perhaps inadvertently) juxtapose a mature and modern post- racial present against the no longer relevant-and backward and archaic- racial past. Mad Men is self-conscious about race and racism, as it is about gender and sexual politics, history, and, thus, its production values. Because of its self-reflective mode of representation, Mad Men may appear to operate out- side of traditional racial logics. It may seem extraracial or transracial, or even (from a perspective of reflective white people) antiracist- which, of course, fits the definition of postracial. Furthermore, the show's lack of major char- acters of color and lack of complex perspectives of characters of color- including point-of-view shots, narrative development, and home or family settings- construct a white racial perspective. The series also displays long- standing racially exclusionary practices in televisual and popular culture? Because actors of color play such a minor role on the show, making Mad Men a typical "white show," studying its representation of race may appear to be an obvious exercise. There are certainly things about Mad Men that MAD MEN'S POSTRACIAL FIGURATION 301