Returning the gaze : a genealogy of Black film criticism, 1909-1949 / Anna Everett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Everett, Anna, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African American press.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (365 pages)

Other Title:

Returning the gaze

Place of Publication:

Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 2018.

Summary:

In Returning the Gaze Anna Everett revises American film history by reviving the extensive and all but forgotten participation of black film critics during the early twentieth century. While much of the existing scholarship on blacks and the cinema focuses on image studies and stereotypical representations, this work excavates a wealth of early critical writing on the cinema by black cultural critics, academics, journalists, poets, writers, and film fans. Culling black newpapers, magazines, scholarly and political journals, and monographs, Everett has produced an unparalleled investigation of black critical writing on the early cinema during the era of racial segregation in America. Correcting the notion that black critical interest in the cinema began and ended with the well-documented press campaign against D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, she discovers that as early as 1909 black newspapers produced celebratory discourses about the cinema as a much-needed corrective to the predominance of theatrical blackface minstrelsy. She shows how, even before the Birth of a Nation controversy, the black press succeeded in drawing attention to both the callous commercial exploitation of lynching footage and the varied work of black film entrepreneurs. The book also reveals a feast of film commentaries that were produced during the "roaring twenties" and the jazz age by such writers as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as additional pieces that were written throughout the Depression and the pre- and postwar periods. Situating this wide-ranging and ideologically complex material in its myriad social, political, economic, and cultural contexts, Everett aims to resuscitate a historical tradition for contemporary black film literature and criticism. -- from back cover.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Returning the Gaze

The Souls of Black Folk in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Black Newspaper Criticism and the Early Cinema, 1909-1916

The Birth of a Nation and Interventionist Criticism: Resisting Race as Spectacle

Cinephilia in the Black Renaissance: New Negro Film Criticism, 1916-1930

Black Modernist Dialectics and the New Deal: Accomodationist and Radical Film Criticism, 1930-1940

The Recalcitrant Gaze; Critiquing Hollywood in the 1940s

Epilogue

Notes

Works Cited

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.