AAST498P

This online course explores a century of representations of race and racism in US cinema, both via Hollywoods studio system and through more marginalized (independent) productions. We examine film and identity through multiple methodological and theoretical lenses, including film history, formalist critique, audience reception analysis, and film and media theory. Our focus will be the politics and poetics of racial exclusion and inclusion, power and resistance, and integration and separatism in shaping and defining the national "imagined community", but we will also pursue intersectional analyses, asking where, when, and how ideas about class, sexuality, gender, and disability have informed and been informed by ideologies concerning race and national identity.