What is the relation between film, race and culture? How does the cinema reproduce and challenge myths of racial segregation and discrimination? In this elegant and insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, an area strangely under-played in publications on race and ethnicity. Denzin argues that: * the cinema reflects the creed of treating all persons as equal but, along with the rest of society, struggles to define and implement diversity, pluralism and multiculturalism * Hollywood's cinema of racial violence, the so-called ghetto action film cycle, contributes to the production of new racial discourses which twin race with a culture of violence * the cinema needs to honour racial and ethnic difference He relates the cinema of racial violence to the civil rights movement. The politics of difference means definining race in terms of both an opposition to, and acceptance of, the media's interpretations and representations of the American racial order. Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination. It combines the concrete with the theoretical with deft aplomb.
Norman K. Denzin is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Communications, College of Communications Scholar, and Research Professor of Communications, Sociology, and Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. One of the world's foremost authorities on qualitative research and cultural criticism, he is the author or editor of more than 30 books, including The Qualitative Manifesto; Qualitative Inquiry Under Fire; Reading Race; Interpretive Ethnography; The Cinematic Society; The Alcoholic Self; and a trilogy on the American West. He is past editor of The Sociological Quarterly, co-editor of six editions of the landmark SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, co-editor (with Michael D. Giardina) of 18 books on qualitative inquiry, co-editor (with Yvonna S. Lincoln and Michael D. Giardina) of the methods journal Qualitative Inquiry, founding editor of Cultural Studies?Critical Methodologies and International Review of Qualitative Research, editor of four book series, and founding director of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.
PART ONE: READING RACE Introduction PART ONE: READING RACE The Cinematic Racial Order PART TWO: RACIAL ALLEGORIES: THE WHITE HOOD A Grand Canyon Race, Women and Violence in the Hood Lethal Weapons in the Hood PART THREE: RACIAL ALLEGORIES: THE BLACK AND BROWN HOOD Boyz N Girlz in the Hood Zoot Suits and Homeboys (and Girls) Spike's Place PART FOUR: A NEW RACIAL AESTHETIC Screening Race
