Product Description: Written and directed by two white men and performed by an all-black cast, Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964) tells the story of a drifter turned family man who struggles with the pressures of small-town life and the limitations placed on him and his community in the Deep South, an area long fraught with racism...read more

Militant Visions examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. In the process, Elizabeth Reich reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and black filmmakers. Contextualizing the figure in a genealogy of black radicalism and internationalism, Reich shows the evolving images of black soldiers to be inherently transnational ones, shaped by the displacements of diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of black artistry and performance. Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, black internationalism, and American militarism. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, but also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself. 

Product Description: In this bold study of cinematic depictions of violence in the south, Deborah E. Barker explores the ongoing legacy of the “southern rape complex” in American film. Taking as her starting point D. W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation, Barker demonstrates how the tropes and imagery of the southern rape complex continue to assert themselves across a multitude of genres, time periods, and stylistic modes...read more

The Walt Disney Company offers a vast universe of movies, television shows, theme parks, and merchandise, all carefully crafted to present an image of wholesome family entertainment. Yet Disney also produced one of the most infamous Hollywood films, Song of the South. Using cartoon characters and live actors to retell the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, SotS portrays a kindly black Uncle Remus who tells tales of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the "Tar Baby" to adoring white children. Audiences and critics alike found its depiction of African Americans condescending and outdated when the film opened in 1946, but it grew in popularity—and controversy—with subsequent releases. Although Disney has withheld the film from American audiences since the late 1980s, SotS has an enthusiastic fan following, and pieces of the film—such as the Oscar-winning "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah"—remain throughout Disney's media universe.Disney's Most Notorious Film examines the racial and convergence histories of Song of the South to offer new insights into how audiences and Disney have negotiated the film's controversies over the last seven decades. Jason Sperb skillfully traces the film's reception history, showing how audience perceptions of SotS have reflected debates over race in the larger society. He also explores why and how Disney, while embargoing the film as a whole, has repurposed and repackaged elements of SotS so extensively that they linger throughout American culture, serving as everything from cultural metaphors to consumer products.

Product Description: Employing innovations in media studies, southern cultural studies, and approaches to the global South, this collection of essays examines aspects of the southern imaginary in American cinema and offers fresh insight into the evolving field of southern film studies...read more

Product Description: Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from WWII to the Present charts how the dominant white and black binary of American racial discourse influences Hollywood s representation of the Asian. The Orientalist buddy film draws a scenario in which two buddies, one white and one black, transcend an initial hatred for one another by joining forces against a foreign Asian menace...read more

Product Description: Crash Politics and Antiracism argues that race and racism continue to script the social fabric in Euro-North America. While dominant discourses claim that we have made significant progress away from racial bigotry, there is no shortage of evidence that inequitable ideologies of race prevail...read more

Product Description: What do the Hollywood 'school films' of the 1980's and 1990's communicate about education and race? This book looks at The Graduate , Blackboard Jungle , The English Patient , Dead Poets Society , Pulp Fiction , Ghost , The Wizard of Oz , Top Gun and Forrest Gump to answer the question...read more

Product Description: How do political conflicts shape popular culture? This book explores that question by analyzing how the Planet of the Apes films functioned both as entertaining adventures and as apocalyptic political commentary. Informative and thought provoking, the book demonstrates how this enormously popular series of secular myths used images of racial and ecological crisis to respond to events like the Cold War, the race riots of the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the Vietnam War...read more

'This work analyzes the interracial relationships, the heterosexual masculine roles within the films and the various genres in which the buddy film has surfaced. The book is arranged in six chapters, each focusing upon a particular chronological era in the development of the interracial buddy film'--Provided by publisher.

"Reversing the Lens" brings together noted scholars in history, anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies and film studies to promote film as a powerful classroom tool that can be used to foster cross-cultural communication with respect to race and ethnicity. Through such films as "Skin Deep," "Slaying the Dragon," and "Mississippi Masala," contributors demonstrate why and how visual media help delineate various forms of critical visual thinking and examine how racialization is either sedimented or contested in the popular imagination. Not limited to classroom use, "Reversing the Lens" is relevant to anyone who is curious about how video and film can be utilized to expose race as a social construction that-in dialogue with other potential forms of difference-is subject to political contestation. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Screen Saviors studies how the self of whites is imagined in Hollywood movies―by white directors featuring white protagonists interacting with people of another color. This collaboration by a sociologist and a film critic, using the new perspective of critical 'white studies,' offers a bold and sweeping critique of almost a century's worth of American film, from Birth of Nation (1915) through Black Hawk Down (2001)...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Choice Outstanding Academic TitleExplores how whiteness is culturally constructed in American films.Performing Whiteness crosses the boundaries of film study to explore images of the white body in relation to recent theoretical perspectives on whiteness...read more

There has never been any doubt that the Adams family was America's first family in our politics and memory. This research-based and insightful book is a multigenerational biography of that family from the founder father John through the mordant writer Brooks. (view table of contents)

Product Description: A lively exploration of the Planet of the Apes films as racial allegory. In 1968, Planet of the Apes became a megahit movie both in the US and abroad, inspiring four film sequels, two TV series, several comic series, and hundreds of millions of dollars in worldwide merchandising...read more

Product Description: Soils and Geomorphology, now in its third edition, remains popular among soil scientists, geomorphologists, geologists, geographers, and archaeologists. While retaining the useful "factors of soil formation format," it has been extensively revised, incorporating a considerable amount of new research and offering a greater number of topics and examples -- particularly in the chapters "Weathering and Soil Development with Time" and "Topography: Soil Relations with Time in Different Climatic Settings...read more

Tropical Multiculturalism provides a major study of race in Brazilian culture through the most complete critical analysis of Brazilian cinema in any language. Focusing on representations of multicultural themes involving Euro- and Afro-Brazilians, other immigrants, and indigenous peoples in the rich tradition of Brazilian fictional feature film, Robert Stam puts Brazilian culture at the center of a wide-ranging analysis of race, representation, history, and film. Drawing parallels between the histories of colonialism, slavery, and immigration in Brazil and the United States, he also contends that questions of ethnic and racial representations are best viewed within the larger context of a comparative analysis of racially plural societies.Stam examines the broad historical and cultural links that connect Brazil and the United States before considering multicultural imagery in Brazilian film as it has changed from the silent era to the present. His analysis moves through the comic chanchadas of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Hollywood-style films from Sao Paulo in the 1950s, and the diverse phases of Cinema Novo beginning in the 1960s. He explores a wealth of subjects, including the submerged "blackness" of Carmen Miranda, the anti-racist agenda of Orson Welles’s never-released Brazilian film It’s All True, the international background behind Black Orpheus, the career of Grande Otelo (Brazil’s greatest black film star), the allegorical "cannibalistic" films like How Tasty Was My Frenchman, and "indigenous media"—the attempt by Brazilian "indians" to use camcorders and VCRs for their own cultural and political purposes. Tropical Multiculturalism is simultaneously a history of Brazilian cinema from the standpoint of race, a history of Brazil itself through its cinematic representations, a comparative study of racial formations in Brazil and the United States, and a theorized analysis of racialized representations.

Product Description: As indelible components of the history of the United States, race and racism have permeated nearly all aspects of life: cultural, economic, political, and social.  In this first anthology on race in early cinema, fourteen scholars examine the origins,  dynamics, and ramifications of racism and Eurocentrism and the resistance to both during the early years of American motion pictures...read more

Product Description: How do political conflicts shape popular culture? This book explores that question by analyzing how the Planet of the Apes films functioned both as entertaining adventures and as apocalyptic political commentary. Informative and thought provoking, the book demonstrates how this enormously popular series of secular myths used images of racial and ecological crisis to respond to events like the Cold War, the race riots of the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the Vietnam War...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Focusing upon Hollywood's portrayal of Asian races, this study describes how social taboos concerning Orientals helped to perpetuate social and racial inequality in the USA. The author's discussion covers early silent films, later classics such as "Shanghai Express" and the recurring geisha movies...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)