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Winner, Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Reference/Primary
Source Work in Popular and American Culture, Popular Culture
Association/American Culture Association, 2016 Known for their
violence and prolific profanity, including free use of the n-word,
the films of Quentin Tarantino, like the director himself,
chronically blurt out in polite company what is extremely
problematic even when deliberated in private. Consequently, there
is an uncomfortable and often awkward frankness associated with
virtually all of Tarantino's films, particularly when it comes to
race and blackness. Yet beyond the debate over whether Tarantino is
or is not racist is the fact that his films effectively articulate
racial anxieties circulating in American society as they engage
longstanding racial discourses and hint at emerging trends. This
radical racial politics-always present in Tarantino's films but
kept very much on the quiet-is the subject of Race on the QT.
Adilifu Nama concisely deconstructs and reassembles the racial
dynamics woven into Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction,
Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Death Proof,
Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained, as they relate to
historical and current racial issues in America. Nama's eclectic
fusion of cultural criticism and film analysis looks beyond the
director's personal racial attitudes and focuses on what
Tarantino's filmic body of work has said and is saying about race
in America symbolically, metaphorically, literally, impolitely,
cynically, sarcastically, crudely, controversially, and
brilliantly.
Winner, Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture
Association/American Culture Association, 2008 Science fiction film
offers its viewers many pleasures, not least of which is the
possibility of imagining other worlds in which very different forms
of society exist. Not surprisingly, however, these alternative
worlds often become spaces in which filmmakers and film audiences
can explore issues of concern in our own society. Through an
analysis of over thirty canonic science fiction (SF) films,
including Logan's Run, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Back to the Future,
Gattaca, and Minority Report, Black Space offers a thorough-going
investigation of how SF film since the 1950s has dealt with the
issue of race and specifically with the representation of
blackness. Setting his study against the backdrop of America's
ongoing racial struggles and complex socioeconomic histories,
Adilifu Nama pursues a number of themes in Black Space. They
include the structured absence/token presence of blacks in SF film;
racial contamination and racial paranoia; the traumatized black
body as the ultimate signifier of difference, alienness, and
"otherness"; the use of class and economic issues to subsume race
as an issue; the racially subversive pleasures and allegories
encoded in some mainstream SF films; and the ways in which
independent and extra-filmic productions are subverting the SF
genre of Hollywood filmmaking. The first book-length study of
African American representation in science fiction film, Black
Space demonstrates that SF cinema has become an important field of
racial analysis, a site where definitions of race can be contested
and post-civil rights race relations (re)imagined.
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