Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity

by Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett (Editor), Ruth Mayer (Contribution by), Alice Maurice (Contribution by), Ellen C. Scott (Contribution by), Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett (Contribution by)

Overview

Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity explores the ways Hollywood represents race, gender, class, and nationality at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and its productive tensions. This collection of essays asks to what degree can a close critical analysis of films, that is, reading them against their own ideological grain, reveal contradictions and tensions in Hollywood’s task of erecting normative cultural standards? How do some films perhaps knowingly undermine their inherent ideology by opening a field of conflicting and competing intersecting identities?  The challenge set out in this volume is to revisit well-known films in search for a narrative not exclusively constituted by the Hollywood formula and to answer the questions: What lies beyond the frame? What elements contradict a film’s sustained illusion of a normative world? Where do films betray their own ideology and most importantly what intersectional spaces of identity do they reveal or conceal?
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813599311
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2019
Pages:	370
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

DELIA MALIA CAPAROSO KONZETT is a professor of English, cinema, and women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. She is the author of Ethnic Modernisms and Hollywood’s Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War. She has published in numerous critical journals on film, focusing on race, imperialism, and aesthetics. Her present work discusses race in Hollywood and its representation in mass culture.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett 1

Part I Hollywood Formulas: Codes, Masks, Genre, and Minstrelsy

1 Daydreams of Society: Class and Gender Performances in the Cinema of the Late 1910s Ruth Mayer 21

2 The Death of Ton Chaney: Masculinity, Race, and the Authenticity of Disguise Alice Maurice 39

3 MGM's Sleeping Lion: Hollywood Regulation of the Washingtonian Slave in The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) Ellen C. Scott 58

4 Yellowface, Minstrelsy, and Hollywood Happy Endings: The Black Camel (1931), Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), and Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937) Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett 84

Part II Genre and Race in Classical Hollywood

5 "A Queer, Strangled Look": Race, Gender, and Morality in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) Jonna Eagle 105

6 By Herself: Intersectionality, African American Specialty Performers, and Eleanor Powell Ryan Jay Friedman 122

7 Disruptive Mother-Daughter Relationships: Peola's Racial Masquerade in Imitation of Life (1934) and Stella's Class Masquerade in Stella Dallas (1937) Charlene Regester 141

8 The Egotistical Sublime: Film Noir and Whiteness Matthias Konzett 159

Part III Race and Ethnicity in Post-World War II Hollywood

9 Women and Class Mobility in Classical Hollywood's Immigrant Dramas Chris Cagle 179

10 Hawai'i Statehood, Indigeneity and Go for Broke! (1951) Dean Itsuji Saranillio 195

11 Savage Whiteness: The Dialectic of Racial Desire in The Young Savages (1961) Graham Cassano 214

12 Rita Moreno's Hair Priscilla Peña Ovalle 231

Part IV Intersectionality, Hollywood, and Contemporary Popular Culture

13 "Everything Glee in America'": Context, Race, and Identity Politics in the Glee (2009-2015) Appropriation of West Side Story (1961) Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz 249

14 Hip-Hop "Hearts" Ballet: Utopic Multiculturalism and the Step Up Dance Films (2006, 2008, 2010) Mary Beltrán 266

15 Fakin' da Funk (1997) and Gook (2017): Exploring Black/Asian Relations in the Asian American Hood Film Jun Okada 283

16 "Let Us Roam the Night Together": On Articulation and Representation in Moonlight (2016) and Tongues Untied (1989) Louise Wallenberg 301

Acknowledgments 319

Bibliography 321

Notes on Contributors 337

Index 341