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.

Visible and Invisible Whiteness examines the complicity between Classical Hollywood narratives or genres and representations of white supremacy in the cinema. Close readings of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation by James Agee and James Baldwin explore these authors’ perspectives on the American mythologies which ground Griffith’s film. The intersectionality of Bordwell’s theories on Classical Hollywood Narrative versus Art Cinema and Richard Dyer’s seminal work on whiteness forms the theoretical base for the book. Featured films are those which have been undervalued or banned due to their hybrid natures with respect to Hollywood and Art Cinema techniques, such as Samuel Fuller’s White Dog and Jean Renoir’s The Southerner. The book offers comparative analyses of American studio-based directors as well as European and European émigrés directors. It appeals to scholars of Film Theory, African American and Whiteness Studies. It provides insight for readers concerned about the re-emergence of white supremacist tensions in contemporary America.

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.

"It is widely understood that the modernist novel sought to escape what Virginia Woolf called the "tyranny" of plot. Yet even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of Victorian, plot-driven novels, Pardis Dabashi shows that plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner-writers known for their moviegoing affinities and connections to early film-Dabashi uses the relationship between literature and the cinema to reveal a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction. Dabashi links the moviegoing practices of Larsen, Barnes, and Faulkner to the tensions in their works, tensions between the formal properties of the novels and the characters in them. In making a distinction between what the novel is doing and what their characters desire, these authors ponder how it is one thing to withhold plot as a gesture of modernist aesthetics, and quite another to be denied the comfort of plot's architecture in one's living and breathing existence"--

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 is often thought of—and certainly by Hollywood itself—as a progressive haven. However, in the decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the film industry grew deeply conservative when it came to conflicts over racial justice. Amid black self-assertion and white backlash, many of the most heated struggles in film were fought over employment. In A Piece of the Action, Eithne Quinn reveals how Hollywood catalyzed wider racial politics, through representation on screen as well as in battles over jobs and resources behind the scenes. Based on extensive archival research and detailed discussions of films like In the Heat of the Night, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Super Fly, Claudine, and Blue Collar, this volume considers how issues of race and labor played out on the screen during the tumultuous early years of affirmative action. Quinn charts how black actors leveraged their performance capital to force meaningful changes to employment and film content. She examines the emergence of Sidney Poitier and other African Americans as A-list stars; the careers of black filmmakers such as Melvin Van Peebles and Ossie Davis; and attempts by the federal government and black advocacy groups to integrate cinema. Quinn also highlights the limits of Hollywood’s liberalism, showing how predominantly white filmmakers, executives, and unions hid the persistence of racism behind feel-good stories and public-relations avowals of tolerance. A rigorous analysis of the deeply rooted patterns of racial exclusion in American cinema, A Piece of the Action sheds light on why conservative and corporate responses to antiracist and labor activism remain pervasive in today’s Hollywood.