‘White is where you are’: Post-imperial Europe and white aesthetics in Atlanta season 3

This chapter engages with each of Atlanta season three’s ten episodes to explore the ways in which whiteness becomes enunciated differently according to its continental Europe setting. In so doing, I delineate the ways in which the protagonists' own sense of black subjecthood is perceived to be under threat or in thrall to white mechanisms of power; in the terms of the season’s dreamed prologue, the season demonstrates the anxiety of a black American man ‘becoming white’. Throughout the chapter, I refer to ways in which specific episodes provide a kind of self-reflexive commentary on the ways in which the show has been received, as a product both of ‘white seeing-space’ and as part of a history of black representation on US television screens.