Description
Book SynopsisIf the sheer diversity of recent hits from
Twelve Years a Slave to
Get Out, to
Black Panther tells us anything, it might be that there's no such thing as ""black film"" per se. This book is timely, then, in expanding our idea of what black films are and, going back to the 1960s, showing us new ways to understand them.
Trade ReviewIn
Expanding the Black Film Canon Lisa Doris Alexander utilizes historical contextualization and applicable theory to produce a valuable analysis of individual films and genres with African American representation of the past sixty years." - Gerald R. Butters Jr., author of
Black Manhood on the Silent Screen"
Expanding the Black Film Canon: Race and Genre across Six Decades by Lisa Doris Alexander offers a significant contribution to black film studies. This is the first sweeping book to cover a fifty-plus year history of black cinema.
Expanding the Black Film Canon provides scholars the opportunity to scrutinize and debate black films that have been oft overlooked. Alexander provides a close textual analysis of films, characters, and genres in each decade. While she does discuss mainstream black films, her book is a significant departure from previous ones because of the scope and attention she gives to the finer points of those films that have been underrepresented in black film scholarship.
Expanding the Black Film Canon not only opens the possibilities for future research on the films Alexander carefully explores but also continues a dialogue that challenges the ways scholars and others think about, view, and scrutinize black films. Her analysis is astute and insightful and makes a unique contribution to film studies in general." - Yvonne D. Sims, author of
Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular CultureTable of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Coming Attractions
- 1. I Ain't Fit to Live with No More: Nothing But a Man Revisited
- 2. "Hey, Where Are the White Women at?": The Presentation of Racism and Resistance in Blazing Saddles
- 3. Harlem Nights, Awkward Framing, and Complicated Gender Politics
- 4. Who's the Real Gangsta?: The Glass Shield and the Politics of Black Communities and Police Relations
- 5. "If You're Going to Tell People the Truth, Make Them Laugh": C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America as Mockumentary and Truth-Telling
- 6. Ladies First: Ava DuVernay and Black-Female-Centered Narratives
- 7. Who's the Hero of the Piece?: Hollywood's Representation of Jackie Robinson's Legacy
- 8. Are We Allowed to Be Children?: Black Teen Films, Trauma, and the Race to Adulthood
- Post-Credit Sequence
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
