Irish and African American cinema : identifying others and performing identities, 1980-2000 / Maria Pramaggiore.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pramaggiore, Maria, 1960-

Series:

SUNY series, cultural studies in cinema/video

The SUNY series, cultural studies in cinema/video

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Ireland.

Motion pictures.

Ireland.

African Americans in motion pictures.

African Americans in the motion picture industry.

Physical Description:

ix, 245 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [2007]

Summary:

Focusing on two film traditions not normally studied together, Mario Pramaggiore examines more than two dozen Irish and African American films, including Do the Right Thing, In the Name of the Father, The Crying Game, Boyz N the Hood, The Snapper, and He Got Game, arguing that these films foreground practices of character identification that complicate essentialist notions of national and racial identity. The porous sense of self associated with moments of identification in these films offers a cinematic counterpart to W. E. B. Du Bois's potent concept of double consciousness, an epistemological standpoint derived from experiences of colonization, racialization, and cultural disruption. Characters in these films, Pramaggiore suggests, reject the national paradigm of insider and outsider in favor of diasporic both/and notions of self, thereby endorsing the postmodern concept of identity as performance.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Identifying Others 13

Chapter 2 Sampling Blackness: Music and Identification in the Films of Neil Jordan and Spike Lee 37

Chapter 3 "It's a Wise Child that Knows His Own Father": Pregnant Performances and Maternal Mythologies 77

Chapter 4 Culturing Violence: Masculine Identificarion in Irish and African American Gangster Films 117

Chapter 5 "Both Sides of the Epic": Identification and the Nonessentialist Western 151

Conclusion: Film Identification and Postmodern Identity Politics 191.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-237) and index.

ISBN:

0791470954

9780791470954

OCLC:

70199862