In Returning the Gaze Anna Everett revises American film history by
recuperating the extensive and all-but-forgotten participation of
black film critics during the early twentieth century. While much
of the existing scholarship on blacks and the cinema focuses on
image studies and stereotypical representations, this work
excavates a wealth of early critical writing on the cinema by black
cultural critics, academics, journalists, poets, writers, and film
fans. Culling black newspapers, magazines, scholarly and political
journals, and monographs, Everett has produced an unparalleled
investigation of black critical writing on the early cinema during
the era of racial segregation in America. Correcting the notion
that black critical interest in the cinema began and ended with the
well-documented press campaign against D. W. Griffith’s Birth of
a Nation, she discovers that as early as 1909 black newspapers
produced celebratory discourses about the cinema as a much-needed
corrective to the predominance of theatrical blackface minstrelsy.
She shows how, even before the Birth of a Nation controversy, the
black press succeeded in drawing attention to both the callous
commercial exploitation of lynching footage and the varied work of
black film entrepreneurs. The book also reveals a feast of film
commentaries that were produced during the “roaring twenties”
and the jazz age by such writers as W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes,
and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as additional pieces that were
written throughout the Depression and the pre– and post–war
periods. Situating this wide-ranging and ideologically complex
material in its myriad social, political, economic, and cultural
contexts, Everett aims to resuscitate a historical tradition for
contemporary black film literature and criticism. Returning the
Gaze will appeal to scholars and students of film, black and ethnic
studies, American studies, cultural studies, literature, and
journalism.
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