Black Film and Television

This book illuminates Hollywood's practice of capitalizing on the Africanist aesthetic at the expense of Black lived experience. Through close examination of the musicals made during this period, this book shows how Hollywood utilized a series of covert "guises" or subterfuges-complicated andfurther masked by a film's narrative framing and novel technology to distract both censors and audiences from seeing the ways in which they were being fed a nineteenth-century White narrative of Blackness.

Cinema Civil Rights presents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era.

Leading scholars address the myriad ways in which America's attitudes about race informed the production of Hollywood films from the 1920s through the 1960s. Covers race in general in Classic Hollywood films, with sections about Black representation.

Disintegrating the Musical tracks and analyzes this history of musical representations of African Americans, from blacks and whites in blackface to black-cast musicals to jazz shorts, from sorrow songs to show tunes to bebop and beyond.

Cedric J. Robinson analyzes theater and film of the early twentieth century. He argues that economic, political, and cultural forces present in the eras of silent film and the early "talkies" firmly entrenched limited representations of African Americans. Covers race films, silent film, and Golden Age films.

In Framing the South, Allison Graham examines the ways in which the media, particularly television and film, presented Southerners during the period of the civil rights revolution. Covers both film and television.

In Sidney Poitier's characters' restrained responses to white people's ignorance and bad behavior, Poitier represented racial reconciliation and reciprocal respect--the "Poitier effect" that Sharon Willis traces through cinema and television from the civil rights era to our own. The Poitier effect, in Willis's account, is a function of white wishful thinking about race relations. Willis demonstrates how Poitier's embodiment of such a fantasy figures in the popular cinema of the civil rights era--and reasserts itself in recent melodramas.

During the late nineteenth century, magazines, newspapers, novelists, and even historians presented a revised version of the Civil War that, intending to reconcile the former foes, downplayed the issues of slavery and racial injustice, and often promoted and reinforced the worst racial stereotypes. The Reel Civil War tells the history of how these misrepresentations of history made their way into movies.

Susan Delson highlights the women performers, like Dorothy Dandridge, who helped shape Soundies, while offering an intimate look at icons of the age, such as Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole. Using previously unknown archival materials--including letters, corporate memos, and courtroom testimony--to trace the precarious path of Soundies, Delson presents an incisive pop-culture snapshot of race relations during and just after World War II.

Stealing the Show is a study of African American actors in Hollywood during the 1930s, a decade that saw the consolidation of stardom as a potent cultural and industrial force. Petty focuses on five performers whose Hollywood film careers flourished during this period--Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Lincoln "Stepin Fetchit" Perry, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and Hattie McDaniel--to reveal the "problematic stardom" and the enduring, interdependent patterns of performance and spectatorship for performers and audiences of color.

This book includes the entire 20th century through black images in film, from the silent era to the unequaled rise of the new African American cinema and stars of today. From Gone with the Wind and Carmen Jones to Shaft, Do the Right Thing, and Bamboozled, Donald Bogle reveals the way the image of blacks in American cinema has changed--and also the shocking way in which it has often remained the same.