The Persistence of Whiteness

The Persistence of Whiteness
Author: Daniel Bernardi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2007-09-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1135976457

The Persistence of Whiteness investigates the representation and narration of race in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Ideologies of class, ethnicity, gender, nation and sexuality are central concerns as are the growth of the business of filmmaking. Focusing on representations of Black, Asian, Jewish, Latina/o and Native Americans identities, this collection also shows how whiteness is a fact everywhere in contemporary Hollywood cinema, crossing audiences, authors, genres, studios and styles. Bringing together essays from respected film scholars, the collection covers a wide range of important films, including Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Color Purple, Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. Essays also consider genres from the western to blaxploitation and new black cinema; provocative filmmakers such as Melvin Van Peebles and Steven Spielberg and stars including Whoopi Goldberg and Jennifer Lopez. Daniel Bernardi provides an in-depth introduction, comprehensive bibliography and a helpful glossary of terms, thus providing students with an accessible and topical collection on race and ethnicity in contemporary cinema.

Reading Race

Reading Race
Author: Norman K Denzin
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2002-03-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780803975453

In this insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, examining the relationship between film, race and culture. Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination.

America on Film

America on Film
Author: Harry M. Benshoff
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2011-08-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 144435759X

America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in the Movies, 2nd Edition is a lively introduction to issues of diversity as represented within the American cinema. Provides a comprehensive overview of the industrial, socio-cultural, and aesthetic factors that contribute to cinematic representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality Includes over 100 illustrations, glossary of key terms, questions for discussion, and lists for further reading/viewing Includes new case studies of a number of films, including Crash, Brokeback Mountain, and Quinceañera

Hollywood's Hawaii

Hollywood's Hawaii
Author: Delia Caparoso Konzett
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2017-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0813587468

Whether presented as exotic fantasy, a strategic location during World War II, or a site combining postwar leisure with military culture, Hawaii and the South Pacific figure prominently in the U.S. national imagination. Hollywood’s Hawaii is the first full-length study of the film industry’s intense engagement with the Pacific region from 1898 to the present. Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett highlights films that mirror the cultural and political climate of the country over more than a century—from the era of U.S. imperialism on through Jim Crow racial segregation, the attack on Pearl Harbor and WWII, the civil rights movement, the contemporary articulation of consumer and leisure culture, as well as the buildup of the modern military industrial complex. Focusing on important cultural questions pertaining to race, nationhood, and war, Konzett offers a unique view of Hollywood film history produced about the national periphery for mainland U.S. audiences. Hollywood’s Hawaii presents a history of cinema that examines Hawaii and the Pacific and its representations in film in the context of colonialism, war, Orientalism, occupation, military buildup, and entertainment.

Black Oscars

Black Oscars
Author: Frederick Gooding
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020-05-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1538123738

A timely exploration of Oscar-nominated Black actors and the complicated legacy of the Academy Awards. In Black Oscars: From Mammy to Minny, What the Academy Awards Tell Us about African Americans, Frederick W. Gooding Jr. draws on American, African American, and film history to reflect on how the Oscars have recognized Black actors from the award’s inception to the present. Starting in the 1920s, the chapters provide a thorough overview and analysis of Black actors nominated for their Hollywood roles during each decade, with special attention paid to the winners. Historical patterns are scrutinized to reveal racial trends and open the question of whether race relations have truly changed substantively or only superficially over time. Given the Oscars’ presence and popularity, it begs the question of what these awards reflect and reinforce about larger society. In the meticulously-researched Black Oscars, we see how the Academy Awards are an indispensable guide to understanding race in mainstream Hollywood and beyond.

Images of Whiteness

Images of Whiteness
Author: Clarissa Behar
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2019-01-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 184888222X

This collection examines images of whiteness in literature, film, television, as well as ethnographic studies, and provides preliminary guidance to engage in anti-racist praxis and education.

Mixed Race Cinemas

Mixed Race Cinemas
Author: Zélie Asava
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-09-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501312480

Using critical race theory and film studies to explore the interconnectedness between cinema and society, Zélie Asava traces the history of mixed-race representations in American and French filmmaking from early and silent cinema to the present day. Mixed Race Cinemas covers over a hundred years of filmmaking to chart the development of (black/white) mixed representations onscreen. With the 21st century being labelled the Mulatto Millennium, mixed bodies are more prevalent than ever in the public sphere, yet all too often they continue to be positioned as exotic, strange and otherworldly, according to 'tragic mulatto' tropes. This book evaluates the potential for moving beyond fixed racial binaries both onscreen and off by exploring actors and characters who embody the in-between. Through analyses of over 40 movies, and case studies of key films from the 1910s on, Mixed Race Cinemas illuminates landmark shifts in local and global cinema, exploring discourses of subjectivity, race, gender, sexuality and class. In doing so, it reveals the similarities and contrasts between American and French cinema in relation to recognising, visualising and constructing mixedness. Mixed Race Cinemas contextualizes and critiques raced and 'post-race' visual culture, using cinematic representations to illustrate changing definitions of mixed identity across different historical and geographical contexts.

Sporting Blackness

Sporting Blackness
Author: Samantha N. Sheppard
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2020-06-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520307771

Sporting Blackness examines issues of race and representation in sports films, exploring what it means to embody, perform, play out, and contest blackness by representations of Black athletes on screen. By presenting new critical terms, Sheppard analyzes not only “skin in the game,” or how racial representation shapes the genre’s imagery, but also “skin in the genre,” or the formal consequences of blackness on the sport film genre’s modes, codes, and conventions. Through a rich interdisciplinary approach, Sheppard argues that representations of Black sporting bodies contain “critical muscle memories”: embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film’s plot to index, circulate, and reproduce broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society.

Mixed Race Hollywood

Mixed Race Hollywood
Author: Mary Beltrán
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2008-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0814799892

Addresses early mixed-race film characters, Blaxploitation, mixed race in television for children, and the outing of mixed-race stars on the Internet, among other issues and contemporary trends in mixed-race representation. From publisher description.