Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness

Leading scholars address the myriad ways in which America's attitudes about race informed the production of Hollywood films from the s through the s.
Table of contents

In this Book

At the core of melodrama is the drive to locate innocence, usually in the figure of a victim. In her investigations, Williams finds that two figures of innocence appear repeatedly in the American melodrama — the beaten and enslaved black man and the threatened white woman. These two figures have been tied to each other in the popular American imagination to produce a fundamentally unstable pairing.

So long as the white woman is imagined as endangered by the black man, this licenses his further oppression, which in turn produces him as the melodramatic victim.

Rather than tracing its repetitions from one instance to another, Williams pays careful attention to the specificities of each instance of its citation and recitation to note how it plays differently in different historical circumstances and with different stage and film versions of the texts in question, simultaneously serving the purposes and limiting the imaginative options of the players involved. In his introduction, Bernardi claims that despite the considerable diversity of the essays included in the volume, a common project binds them together.

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However, I will outline the main concerns of each essay to illustrate the great range of this collection, which will make it useful for classroom teaching and of interest to all scholars working on this and related topics. The book is divided into four sections, which investigate the connections between race and class, gender, war, and industry, the last referring to the institutional and industrial operations of the studio system itself. This works to allay fears that American audiences might have had about non-Anglo migrants. The second section of the anthology focuses on gender.

Three essays consider the careers of particular female stars of colour. The final section of the anthology considers the operations of the studio system itself. By moving the focus away from the usual central concern with film texts themselves that animates most discussion of race in film, I found this section to be a particularly fruitful step forward.

Taken together, these two volumes make great contributions to the rapidly growing body of exciting work on race and cinema. Here, then, the issue is not adequacy to reality but what reality is understood to be on a more fundamental level. As already indicated, both volumes share an unquestionably worthy and laudable desire to change that reality.

Classic Hollywood Classic Whiteness

This is an extremely interesting book. It's also a very hard read. The various chapters and topics are I believe academic papers.


  1. Preaching the Women of the Bible.
  2. Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness.
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Some of them use academic jargon and are really not for the non-academic reader. For example, the visual physical "misfit" that has always puzzled me in A Night at the Opera between Groucho and the fat white lady is looked at closely in the first chapter and discussed as actually the central This is an extremely interesting book.

Project MUSE - Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness

For example, the visual physical "misfit" that has always puzzled me in A Night at the Opera between Groucho and the fat white lady is looked at closely in the first chapter and discussed as actually the central point of that movie. What the author thinks the movie is at its core about, underneath the slapstick, is the way Eastern European immigrant Jews did not fit into white American society on arrival at the turn of the 20th century and that is the source of the Marx Brothers' humor.

This is to me a very fascinating train of thought.

It also looks at horror movies of the fifties as being depictions of white subconscious racist fear that was behind white flight. Think of the scenes of white people fleeing in horror from monsters coming from the deep. It's stupefying to think of. Now since I was a child at this time I can't say that these ideas are true. But boy it's a thought provoking book about our culture from the middle of the 20th century through World War II--dealing with Hollywood's depictions of Jewish Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latin Americans as well as "bad female" Americans.

Because these films are looked at as expressions of our cultural subconscious, the book says some very profound things indeed. Also what it is discussing is trends that were big enough and important enough and part of U. This is a profoundly fascinating book. I give it four stars simply because it is a slog. Gianna Spangler rated it it was amazing Mar 09, Valerie rated it really liked it Jul 25, Brian rated it really liked it May 03, Bob Cat rated it really liked it Sep 11, Brandon Petry rated it really liked it Apr 01, Marguerite Rippy rated it really liked it Aug 28, Jen rated it liked it Oct 31, Angel marked it as to-read Nov 22, Angela Perkins added it Mar 27, Wikimedia Italia added it Dec 31, Becky Brooks marked it as to-read Aug 30, Stephanie marked it as to-read Apr 14, Amar Baines marked it as to-read Aug 19, Sadie marked it as to-read May 14,