Description
Book SynopsisMichael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, seeing it not as the representation of the black experience, but as the visual negotiation between film as art and the social construction of race, as well as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture.
Trade Review"This astonishingly comprehensive, compact book does nothing less than synthesize nearly the entirety of thought to date on black cinema, blackness in the cinema, and scholarship in this vital area of film studies. . . . Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals."
-- G. A. Foster * Choice *
“A necessary book.
Film Blackness gives us an inspired sense of a much-needed analysis of race in film, an analysis that has so far—true to form—eluded us.” -- Courtney R. Baker * Cinema Journal *
“This book blew my mind.... Michael Boyce Gillespie’s
Film Blackness sparks a necessary conversation about the art of Black film and its indefinable quality. He invites the reader to challenge themselves to perceive all Black film and art as individually distinct pieces of an endless puzzle of Blackness. Reader Meter: Five Stars." -- Mercedes K. Milner * Write or Die Chicks *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. We Insist: The Idea of Black Film 1
1. Reckless Eyeballing:
Coonskin and the Racial Grotesque 17
2. Smiling Faces:
Chameleon Street and Black Performativity 51
3. Voices Inside (Everything is Everything):
Deep Cover and Modalities of Noir Blackness 83
4. Black Maybe:
Medicine for Melancholy, Place, and Quiet Becoming 119
Coda. Destination Out 157
Notes 161
Bibliography 203
Index 223
