Race and American Film

3 credits · Undergraduate

This course uses film to investigate the central role of race in American culture and history from the late 19th to the early 21st century. This class will concentrate on the history of African Americans in film, but we will also watch movies that consider how the overlapping histories of whiteness and ethnicity, American Indians, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, “multiculturalism” and “Globalization” have been represented through film. Themes covered include representing race and nation; Jim Crow and white supremacy in early Hollywood; genre and racial ideology, borderlands and immigration; passing and miscegenation; the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality; globalization and diaspora.