Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation

Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation PDF Author: Susan Courtney
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691240221
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation analyzes white fantasies of interracial desire in the history of popular American film. From the first interracial screen kiss of 1903, through the Production Code's nearly thirty-year ban on depictions of "miscegenation," to the contemplation of mixed marriage in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), this book demonstrates a long, popular, yet underexamined record of cultural fantasy at the movies. With ambitious new readings of well-known films like D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation and of key forgotten films and censorship documents, Susan Courtney argues that dominant fantasies of miscegenation have had a profound impact on the form and content of American cinema. What does it mean, Courtney asks, that the image of the black rapist became a virtual cliché, while the sexual exploitation of black women by white men under slavery was perpetually repressed? What has this popular film legacy invited spectators to remember and forget? How has it shaped our conceptions of, and relationships to, race and gender? Richly illustrated with more than 140 images, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation carefully attends to cinematic detail, revising theories of identity and spectatorship as it expands critical histories of race, sex, and film. Courtney's new research on the Production Code's miscegenation clause also makes an important contribution, inviting us to consider how that clause was routinely interpreted and applied, and with what effects.

Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation

Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation PDF Author: Susan Courtney
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691240221
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 399

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation analyzes white fantasies of interracial desire in the history of popular American film. From the first interracial screen kiss of 1903, through the Production Code's nearly thirty-year ban on depictions of "miscegenation," to the contemplation of mixed marriage in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), this book demonstrates a long, popular, yet underexamined record of cultural fantasy at the movies. With ambitious new readings of well-known films like D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation and of key forgotten films and censorship documents, Susan Courtney argues that dominant fantasies of miscegenation have had a profound impact on the form and content of American cinema. What does it mean, Courtney asks, that the image of the black rapist became a virtual cliché, while the sexual exploitation of black women by white men under slavery was perpetually repressed? What has this popular film legacy invited spectators to remember and forget? How has it shaped our conceptions of, and relationships to, race and gender? Richly illustrated with more than 140 images, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation carefully attends to cinematic detail, revising theories of identity and spectatorship as it expands critical histories of race, sex, and film. Courtney's new research on the Production Code's miscegenation clause also makes an important contribution, inviting us to consider how that clause was routinely interpreted and applied, and with what effects.

Hollywood's Fantasy of Miscegenation

Hollywood's Fantasy of Miscegenation PDF Author: Susan Christianne Courtney
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Miscegenation in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 748

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Book Description


Playing the Race Card

Playing the Race Card PDF Author: Linda Williams
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691201331
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans' understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O. J. Simpson's criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization. The racial sympathies and hostilities that surfaced during the trial of the police in the beating of Rodney King and in the O. J. Simpson murder trial are grounded in the melodramatic forms of Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Birth of a Nation. Williams finds that Stowe's beaten black man and Griffith's endangered white woman appear repeatedly throughout popular entertainment, promoting interracial understanding at one moment, interracial hate at another. The black and white racial melodrama has galvanized emotions and fueled the importance of new media forms, such as serious, "integrated" musicals of stage and film, including The Jazz Singer and Show Boat. It also helped create a major event out of the movie Gone With the Wind, while enabling television to assume new moral purpose with the broadcast of Roots. Williams demonstrates how such developments converged to make the televised race trial a form of national entertainment. When prosecutor Christopher Darden accused Simpson's defense team of "playing the race card," which ultimately trumped his own team's gender card, he feared that the jury's sympathy for a targeted black man would be at the expense of the abused white wife. The jury's verdict, Williams concludes, was determined not so much by facts as by the cultural forces of racial melodrama long in the making. Revealing melodrama to be a key element in American culture, Williams argues that the race images it has promoted are deeply ingrained in our minds and that there can be no honest discussion about race until Americans recognize this predicament.

Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War

Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War PDF Author: S. Brawley
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137090677
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
This book explores the expectations, experiences, and reactions of Allied servicemen and women who served in the wartime Pacific and viewed the South Pacific through the lens of Hollywood's South Seas. Based on extensive archival research, it explores the intersections between military experiences and cultural history.

Hollywood's Hawaii

Hollywood's Hawaii PDF Author: Delia Caparoso Konzett
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813587468
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
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.

Hollywood Goes Shopping

Hollywood Goes Shopping PDF Author: David Desser
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816635139
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Aggressive product placement and retail tie-ins are as much a part of moviemaking today as high-concept scripts and computer-generated special effects, but this phenomenon is hardly recent. Since the silent era, Hollywood studios have proved remarkably adept at advertising both their own products and a bewildering variety of consumer commodities, successfully promoting the idea of consumption itself. Hollywood Goes Shopping brings together leading film studies scholars to explore the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between American cinema and consumer culture, providing an innovative reading of both film history and the evolution of consumerism in the twentieth century.

Imagining "We" in the Age of "I"

Imagining Author: Mary Harrod
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000404625
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Winner, MeCCSA Edited Collection of the Year, MeCCSA Outstanding Achievement Awards 2022 In the early twenty-first century shifts in gender and sexuality, work and mobility patterns and especially technology have provoked interest in perceived threats to social bonding on a global scale. This edited collection explores the fracturing of couple culture but also its persistence. Looking at a variety of media sites—including film, television, popular print fiction, new media and new technologies—this volume’s diverse range of contributors examine how mediated scenes of intimacy proliferate, while real-life experiences are cast in a newly uncertain light. The collection thus challenges a latent but growing tendency towards perceptions of romantic decline, in a variety of cultural contexts and with attention to the impact of COVID-19. This is an accessible and timely collection suitable for scholars in gender studies, media, cultural studies and communication studies.

Female Beauty Systems

Female Beauty Systems PDF Author: Christine Adams
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443881430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Female beauty systems everywhere are complex, integrating markers of class, status, power, and sexuality to perform the fundamental function of sorting individuals into categories of “more” or “less” desirable. Heirs to the tradition of courtly love, modern western female beauty systems tend to share the norm of man as pursuer, woman as pursued, having developed around the trope of the madly-desiring poet or knight supplicating his aloof and lovely lady for her favor. The apparent longevity of the courtly love tradition raises the question of whether the way in which it structures male desire in reaction to female beauty is part of a “universal” tendency, an evolutionary adaptation, despite clear evidence that female beauty systems are also, in fact, socially constructed, and reflect enormous ambivalence about the power and performance of beauty. Although modern western female beauty systems are routinely demystified and contested today, the purveyors of culture that support them—institutional, intellectual, artistic, commercial, and popular—continue as they always have to construe women as objects of male desire. Still, within this basic structure, the systems have varied greatly across time and space, with women using beauty as a form of social capital in widely differing ways. Moreover, as individuals have begun to experience their bodies as malleable and endlessly transformable, rather than unruly and unyielding, many have begun to experience beauty less as a given and more as a project. The nine essays collected here examine a number of different Western female beauty systems over the centuries, considering how women have complied with, contributed to, profited or suffered from, and resisted them.

Empire Films and the Crisis of Colonialism, 1946–1959

Empire Films and the Crisis of Colonialism, 1946–1959 PDF Author: Jon Cowans
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421416417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I: THE PERSISTENCE OF EMPIRE: COLONIALIST FILMS IN THE DECOLONIZATION ERA -- 1 The White Woman's Burden -- 2 Heroes of Empire -- 3 Westerns -- PART II: COMING TO TERMS: CONFRONTING INSURGENCY AND DECOLONIZATION -- 4 The British Empire and Decolonization -- 5 The French Empire and Decolonization -- 6 Americans in Postwar Asia -- PART III: DANGEROUS LIAISONS: INTERRACIAL COUPLES IN FILMS -- 7 Miscegenation in Westerns -- 8 Romance across the Pacific -- 9 Black-White Couples and Internal Decolonization -- Conclusion -- Appendix A: Attitudes toward Indians and U.S. Conquest in Westerns -- Appendix B: Outcomes of Interracial Romance in Miscegenation Films -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Z.

Credit Culture

Credit Culture PDF Author: Nicky Marsh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110883647X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
The book re-reads the postmodern novel, presenting the ending of the gold standard as a moment of continuity rather than radical change.