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Black mirror : the cultural contradictions of American racism / Eric Lott.

Van Pelt Library P94.5.A372 U559 2017
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Format:
Book
Author/Creator:
Lott, Eric, author.
Language:
English
Subjects (All):
Racism in mass media.
Racism in popular culture--United States.
Racism in popular culture.
White people--United States--Attitudes.
White people.
African Americans in the performing arts.
Black people.
Public opinion.
United States.
Black people--United States--Public opinion.
African Americans in the performing arts--United States.
United States--Race relations.
Race relations.
Black people--Public opinion.
White people--Attitudes.
Physical Description:
xxv, 262 pages ; 22 cm
Place of Publication:
Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017.
Summary:
Black Mirror explores the ways U.S. cultural institutions--classic American literature, Hollywood film, pop musical artistry, venturesome social commentary--have relied insistently and repeatedly on racial symbolic capital, including and above all blackface, to reproduce white cultural dominance. In the process these forms have threatened to betray the racial hegemony that generated them and that they exist in order to maintain. Hence the subtitle, The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism. In a series of chapters addressing such arts and artists as Mark Twain, film noir, Joni Mitchell, Elvis impersonators, Bob Dylan, and Barack Obama, Black Mirror locates the symbolic surplus value that accrues to white cultural producers and institutions whenever they traffic in "blackness"--a political economy of the sign that can sometimes surprise us (not least by producing a black president).-- Provided by publisher.
Contents:
Black mirror: states of fantasy and symbolic surplus value
Our blackface America: Mr. Clemens and Jim Crow
The mirror has two faces: white ethnic semi-mojo
House of mirrors: the whiteness of film noir
White like me: racial trans and the culture of civil rights
Tar baby and the great white wonder: Joni Mitchell's pimp game
All the king's men: Elvis impersonators and white working-class masculinity
Just like Jack Frost's blues: masking and melancholia in Bob Dylan's 'Love and theft'.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:
9780674967717
0674967712
OCLC:
982089197

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