Depicting Race in film literature and media

DEPICTING RACE

If race is a fiction then how is it we are so given to assuming Blackness has certain constituent elements which define its difference? Racial depictions are an important tool in maintaining the myth of difference and inferiority. We are educated in the books we read, the media we watch and the images we see to understand and define bodies in certain ways based upon the colour of their skin. In other words, we are subtly brainwashed by a variety of forms to understand that skin difference actually means specific things about the bearer. Below you will find an array of scholarship related to depictions of Black people and constructions of whiteness in film, literature, and media. This list is by no means exhaustive; it only offers a sample of the scholarship available on the subject

Barker, Deborah, and McKee, Kathryn B. American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Bernardi, Daniel (ed). Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Bernardi, Daniel. The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge, 2008.

Bourne, Stephen. Black in the British Frame: Black People in British Film and Television, 1896-1996. London: Cassell, 1998.

Butters, Gerald R. Black Manhood on the Silent Screen. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002.

Campbell, Edward D. C. The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981.

Coleman, Robin R Means. Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present. London: Taylor and Francis, 2022.

Coleman, Robin R. Means and Harris, Mark H. The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar. Simon & Schuster: 2023.

Diawara, Manthia (ed). Black American Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Erigha, Maryann. The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry. New York: New York University Press, 2019.

“Eric Foner Discusses the Accuracy of the Film 'Amistad'.” Fresh Air. NPR. 15 Jan. 1998.

Fighting a Vicious Film: Protest against "The Birth of a Nation." Boston: Boston Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1915.

Foner, Eric. “The Amistad Case in Fact and Film”. History Matters. March 1998.

Gabbard, Krin. Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Gonder, Patrick. “Race Gender and Terror: the Primitive in 1950s Horror Film". Genders 1998-2013, Special Issue 40, 2004.

Graham, Allison. Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race During the Civil Rights Struggle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

Alternate link via Internet Archive.

Hunt, Darnell, and Ana-Christina Ramón. Hollywood Diversity Report 2020: A Tale of Two Hollywoods. UCLA College of Social Sciences, 2020.

Lawrence, Novotny. Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Lehman, Christopher P. The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.

Mask, Mia. Contemporary Black American Cinema: Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Nesteby, James R. “Blackfacing and Film Shorts.” in Black Images in American Films, 1896 – 1954: The Interplay between Civil Rights and Film Culture. Lanham M.D.: University Press of America, 1982. Pp. 11–26.

Ortner, Sherry B. “Social Impact without Social Justice: Film and Politics in the Neoliberal Landscape.” American Ethnologist 44.3 (August 2017): 528–39.

Ramanathan, Geetha. “Black/White Looking Powers.” in Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women's Films. London: Wallflower, 2006. Pp. 45-76.

Richards, Larry. African American Films Through 1959: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Filmography. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 1998.

Smith, Valerie. Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Film and Television

“White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood…..But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them….. It was the jungle white folks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. …. until it invaded the whites who had made it.”

Toni Morrison

Literature

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness". Chancellor’s Lecture at University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1975. Reprinted in Hopes and Impediments (1988).

Anolik, Ruth Bienstock and Howard, Douglas L. (eds). The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination. Jefferson/North Carolina/London: McFarland & Company, 2004.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.

Buck-Morss, Susan. Haiti, Hegel and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2009

Carey, Brycchan. British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment,and Slavery, 1760-1807. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Dabydeen, David (ed). The Black Presence in English Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.

Ellis, Markman. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Khair, Tabish. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik. The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic: Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Routledge: 2010.

Morrison, Toni. The Origin of Others. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

"Pt. 1: Gothic Histories, Gothic Identities" in American Gothic Culture: an Edinburgh Companion,

eds. Joel Faflak and Jason Haslam. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

Wester, Maisha. "Et Tu, Victor? Interrogating the Master’s Responsibility to—and Betrayal of—the Slave in Frankenstein." Huntington Library Quarterly 83, no. 4 (2020): 729-748.

Wester, Maisha. "Gothic and the Black Diaspora". In The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic. Edited by Rebecca Duncan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023.

Wester, Maisha. “Rendering Minorities as Monsters in American Gothic Narratives”. British Academy Blog, 15 Jan 2021.

Boulukos, George. The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race. In Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Cottle, Simon. The Racist Murder of Stephen Lawrence: Media Performance and Public Transformation. Westport: Praeger, 2004.

Curtain, Philip D. The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.

Entman, Robert M, and Rojecki, Andrew. The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Erfani-Ghettani, Ryan. “The Defamation of Joy Gardner: Press, Police and Black Death in Custody.” Race and Class, 56.3 (2015): 102-112.

Holohan, Siobhan. The Search for Justice in a Media Age: Reading Stephen Lawrence and Louise Woodward. London: Routledge, 2005.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Law, Ian. Race in the News. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Lott, Eric. Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Malchow, Howard L. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century England. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996.

McCluskey, Audrey T. Imaging Blackness: Race and Racial Representation in Film Poster Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

Neal, Sarah. “The Scarman Report, the Macpherson Report and the Media: How Newspapers Respond to Race-centred Social Policy Interventions.” Journal of Social Policy 32.1 (2003): 55–74.

Alternate link via University of Kingston.

Roth, Sarah N. “The Politics of the Page: Black Disfranchisement and the Image of the Savage Slave”. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 134.3 (July 2010): 209-233.

Thompson, Ayanna. Blackface. Bloomsbury, 2021.

Welch, Michael, Eric A. Price and Nana Yankey. “Moral Panic Over Youth Violence: Wilding and the Manufacture of Menace in the Media.” Youth & Society 34.1, (2002): 3-30.

Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Young, Helen. “Race, Medievalism and the Eighteenth-century Gothic Turn”. Postmedieval, 11 (December 2020): 468–475.