Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Thoroughly engaging, Our Gang makes historically and politically clear the discriminations of the Jim Crow south and the ways the series softened, and in many cases contradicted, the virulent studio and audience racism of the day."—Ed Guerrero, New York University
"Like the series it traces, Julia Lee’s book is a gem."—Henry Louis Gates Jr.
"A wonderfully inviting study."—Publishers Weekly
"[An] agile and insightful cultural history."—The Atlantic
"Julia Lee gives a degree of depth and context to these four talented performers and their work in Our Gang: A Racial History of the Little Rascals. By foregrounding the stories of the black actors in the series, she uncovers how black America’s attitude towards its representation by Hollywood evolved throughout the 20th Century."—PopMatters.com
"Our Gang is not one of those academically written film books clogged with jargon, but a fully fleshed-out and colorful pop-culture history: of Hal Roach, of the Roach Studios lot and both early Hollywood and L.A. culture."—LA Weekly
"An engaging new book."—Pasatiempo/Santa Fe New Mexican
"An impressive study of how the US’s racial history reverberated in the series and how it became an integral part of American history."—CHOICE
"An excellent work of scholarship on an important part of America’s twentieth-century popular culture."—Studies in American Humor
"The book provides an insightful and coherent resource for students and scholars, as well as general readers, who are interested in film history, American media, and cultural studies."—The Journal of African American History
Table of ContentsContents
Foreword
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Introduction: All of Us
1. The Eternal Boy
2. A Boy and His Gang
3. 100% American
4. Sambo’s Awakening
5. Everyman
6. The New Negro
7.Movie-Made Children
8.The Good Soldier
9.The Little Rascals
10. The Good Old Days
Epilogue: Coming Home
Acknowledgements
Bibliographic Essay
Notes
Index
