Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video / Edition 1

by Valerie Smith

Overview

The essays in this collection provide a variety of perspectives on black representation and questions of racial authenticity in mainstream as well as African American independent cinema. This volume includes seminal essays on racial stereotypes, trenchant critiques of that discourse, original essays on important directors such as Haile Gerima and Charles Burnett, and an insightful discussion of black gay and lesbian film and video.

The contributors include Donald Bogle, Thomas Cripps, Jane Gaines, Nathan Grant, Stuart Hall, Tommy L. Lott, Wahneema Lubiano, Mike Murashige, Valerie Smith, James Snead, and David Van Leer. This volume is an important contribution to the Depth of Field series and should be indispensible for courses and individual scholars in film and multicultural studies. The book contains a mix of original and previously published pieces.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813523149
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	04/01/1997
Series:	Rutgers Depth of Field Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

VALERIE SMITH is a professor in the English department at UCLA, where she also teaches film. She is the author of Self Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative and editor of New Essays on Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon".

Table of Contents

Introduction 
Black Beginnings: From Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Birth of a Nation
Spectatorship and Capture in King Kong: The Guilty Look
"Race Movies" as Voices of the Black Bourgeoisie: The Scar of Shame
The Scare of Shame: Skin Color and Caste in Black Silent Melodrama
A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema
But Compared to What?: Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse
What Is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture?
Innocence and Ambiguity in the Films of Charles Burnett
Visible Silence: Spectatorship in Black Gay and Lesbian Film
Haile Gerima and the Political Economy of Cinematic Resistance
Telling Family Secrets: Narrative and Ideology in Suzanne Suzanne
Annotated Bibliography
Contributors
Index