Description
Book SynopsisFeatures how the "dark continent" of blues and jazz provided Hollywood with a resonant resource to construct and negotiate the boundaries of American cultural identity. This book contains new work on blackface minstrelsy in early sound movies, racial representation and censorship, torch singers and torch songs, burlesque and strippers, and more.
Trade Review"This is a unique volume in that the author confirms the overlap of American cultural forms and racial and gender practices. . . . Appealing as much to cultural historians as to students and scholars of film and musicology, this volume is a must read for those interested in US cultural studies. Essential."--
Choice"[An] absorbing and convincing account of white America's fraught, imitative, fascinated, repressive and denial-ridden relationship with black culture."--
The Wire"
Body and Soul is [Stanfield's] incisive report back from the field of Hollywood films - melodramas, crime films, musicals, comedies - that use, sometimes centrally but more often in crucial but taken-for-granted ways, jazz and blues-inflected music to figure and probe American identity."--
Film Quarterly
