Description
Book SynopsisRevises American film history by recuperating the extensive and all-but-forgotten participation of black film critics during the early twentieth century. This work excavates a wealth of early critical writing on the cinema by black cultural critics, academics, journalists, poets, writers, and film fans.
Trade Review“Anna Everett moves African American film criticism and commentary from the margins to the center in this innovative, imaginative, and original book. Superbly researched and engagingly written,
Returning the Gaze shows us the necessity of placing race at the center of the history of the American cinema, while at the same time making it clear that any adequate understanding of African American identity needs to acknowledge the centrality of cinema to the practices and processes of U.S. racial formation.”—George Lipsitz, author of
The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and
Time Passages “Everett’s fine book makes an important contribution to our understanding of black cinema, from production to journalism and criticism, as a resistance practice representing every orientation of black culture, from the popular to the political and aesthetic. This one is ‘must’ reading for all interested in black cinema, its issues, and its critical discourse.”—Ed Guerrero, New York University
Compelling and of great critical importance,
Returning the Gaze makes a major contribution to film studies.”—Dana Polan, University of Southern California
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: Returning the Gaze 1
1.
The Souls of Black Folk in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Black Newspaper Criticism and the Early Cinema, 1909–1916
12
2.
The Birth of a Nation and Interventionist Criticism: Resisting Race as Spectacle 59
3. Cinephilia in the Black Renaissance: New Negro Film Criticism, 1916–1930 107
4. Black Modernist Dialectics and the New Deal: Accomodationist and Radical Film Criticism, 1930–1940 179
5. The Recalcitrant Gaze; Critiquing Hollywood in the 1940s 272
Epilogue 314
Notes 317
Works Cited 333
Index 349
