Race, Ethnicity, and American Film

This course asks what a study of selected American films offers to our understanding of “race,” “ethnicity,” “power” and “resistance.” We ask how cinema participates in shaping our collective sense of race and ethnicity, of racialization, and of racial and ethnic identity. We seek to answer our questions by attending to cinematic productions that offer insights in the history and contemporary situations of African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos and Latinx, Native Americans, and European Americans. An aim is to work towards a comparative analysis of racialization that reveals not only differences between these groups, but also commonalities among them.