New Jack(ed) Cinema: Negotiating Race, Criminality, and Place in the Hollywood Film

This interdisciplinary course engages critically with film to examine issues of race and criminality, and to better understand our collective, spatial, and personal identities. We study a sub-genre of films, from the 1990s, and investigate how these films interact and intersect with other cultural texts and narratives of race, criminality, sexuality, gender, and the American dream. Films studied include "Colors"; "New Jack City"; "Clockers"; "Boyz 'n the Hood"; and "Menace II Society"; while readings come from film studies, sociology, history, memoir, and policy studies. Enrollment limited to 17 first-year students and sophomores.