Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation : : Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race / / Susan Courtney.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Courtney, Susan,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2022]; ©2005
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (400 p.) :; 142 halftones.

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.

Table of Contents

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