Library Catalog

Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation : Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race /

Courtney, Susan

Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation : Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race / Susan Courtney. - 1 online resource (400 p.) : 142 halftones.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION. What Happened in the Tunnel and Other Open American Secrets -- PART ONE: Exhuming the Silent Bodies -- CHAPTER ONE. The "Agony" of Spectatorship at Biograph -- CHAPTER TWO. The Mixed Birth of "Great White" Masculinity and the Classical Spectator -- PART TWO. Color Coding Identity and Desire -- CHAPTER THREE. "The Un-doable Stories," the "Usual Answers,' and Other "Epidermic Drama [s]": Coming to Terms with the Production Code -- CHAPTER FOUR. Picturizing Race: On Visibility, Racial Knowledge, and Cinematic Belief -- PART THREE. Rebirthing a Nation? -- CHAPTER FIVE. Out of the Plantation and into the Suburbs: Sensational Extremes in the Late 1950s -- CHAPTER SIX. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner with Eldridge Cleaver and the Supreme Court, or Reforming Populär Racial Memory with Hepburn and Tracy -- Notes -- Index

restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation analyzes white fantasies of interracial desire in the history of popular American film. From the first interracial screen kiss of 1903, through the Production Code's nearly thirty-year ban on depictions of "miscegenation," to the contemplation of mixed marriage in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), this book demonstrates a long, popular, yet underexamined record of cultural fantasy at the movies. With ambitious new readings of well-known films like D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation and of key forgotten films and censorship documents, Susan Courtney argues that dominant fantasies of miscegenation have had a profound impact on the form and content of American cinema. What does it mean, Courtney asks, that the image of the black rapist became a virtual cliché, while the sexual exploitation of black women by white men under slavery was perpetually repressed? What has this popular film legacy invited spectators to remember and forget? How has it shaped our conceptions of, and relationships to, race and gender? Richly illustrated with more than 140 images, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation carefully attends to cinematic detail, revising theories of identity and spectatorship as it expands critical histories of race, sex, and film. Courtney's new research on the Production Code's miscegenation clause also makes an important contribution, inviting us to consider how that clause was routinely interpreted and applied, and with what effects.


Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.


In English.

9780691240220

10.1515/9780691240220 doi


Miscegenation in motion pictures.
PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / History & Criticism.

Amiri Baraka. An Affair. Anathema. Anthropomorphism. Anti-Catholicism. Anti-clericalism. Anti-miscegenation laws. Assassination. Brazen bull. Caricature. Castration. Censorship. Classical Hollywood cinema. Complicity. Controversy. Counterculture. Cowardice. Crime. Criticism of capitalism. Decolonization. Decoy (TV series). Disparagement. Exhibitionism. Exoticism. Falsity. Film criticism. Folly to Be Wise. Forced marriage. Frantz Fanon. Great Disappointment. Hamlet's Father. Harold and Maude. Hegemonic masculinity. Horror film. Hypocrisy. Incest. Incubus. Interdiction. Interracial marriage. Intruder in the Dust. Knockouts. Ku Klux Klan. Libido. Loving v. Virginia. Marilyn Monroe. Marlon Brando. Masculinity. Melodrama. Miscegenation. Misogyny. Monster's Ball. Motion Picture Production Code. Nativism (politics). Oppression. Persecution. Phallocentrism. Populism. Pornography. Power Hungry (Fringe). Pre-Code Hollywood. Premarital sex. Pseudonym. Pseudoscience. Psychoanalysis. Racial segregation. Racialism. Racism. Radicalism (historical). Rape. Ridicule. Sadomasochism. Sentimentality. Sex comedy. Sexual Desire (book). Sexual Politics. Sexual assault. Sexual fantasy. Sexual harassment. Sexual obsessions. Sexual racism. Sexual violence. Slavery. Stunting (broadcasting). Subversion. Supercouple. Swinging (sexual practice). The Interpretation of Dreams. The Offence. The Political Unconscious. To Kill a Mockingbird. Touch of Evil. Uncle Tom. Undoing (psychology). Verisimilitude (fiction). Verisimilitude. War Paint. White people. Xenophobia. Yellow Peril.

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