Hollywood has devoted big budgets and established stars to films about controversial issues in the last ten years. Identities considered marginal have come into prominence on the big screen. The authors of this title look at the issues raised by these developments, bring together debates in identity politics with film studies, and launch an innovative theorization of the cinematic representation of identity.
Movies from "Forrest Gump" to "Philadelphia," from "Malcolm X" to "Falling Down" have been specifically concerned with multiculturalism and identity politics. This book is concerned with the meanings put into circulation by these mainstream films and audiences' reactions to them. It provides an accessible introduction to issues such as arguments over positive and negative images and the relationship between cultural representation and political power in American life.

Theodore Dreiser staked his reputation on fearless expression in his fiction, but he never was more outspoken than when writing about American politics, which he did prolifically. Although he is remembered primarily as a novelist, the majority of his twenty-seven books were nonfiction treatises. To Dreiser, everything was political. His sense for the hype and hypocrisies of politics took shape in reasoned but emphatic ruminations in his fiction and nonfiction on the hopes and disappointments of democracy, the temptations of nationalism and communism, the threat and trumpets of war, and the role of writers in resisting and advancing political ideas. Spanning a period of American history from the Progressive Era to the advent of the Cold War, this generous volume collects Dreiser's most important political writings from his journalism, broadsides, speeches, private papers, and long out-of-print nonfiction books. Touching on the Great Depression, the New Deal, and both World Wars as well as Soviet Russia and the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, these writings exemplify Dreiser's candor and his penchant for championing the defenseless and railing against corruption. Positing Dreiser as an essential public intellectual who addressed the most important issues of the first half of the twentieth century, these writings also navigate historical terrain with prescient observations on topics such as religion, civil rights, national responsibility, individual ethics, global relations, and censorship that remain particularly relevant to a contemporary audience. Editor Jude Davies provides historical commentaries that frame these selections in the context of his other writings, particularly his novels.

The city has long been an important location for film-makers. Visually compelling and always "modern," it is the perfect metaphor for man's place in the contemporary world.
In this provocative collection of essays, a diverse range of films are examined in terms of the relationship between cinema and paradigmatic urban experience in Europe and North America since the early twentieth century. Moscow, Leningrad, Berlin, Prague and Warsaw--sites of dramatic upheaval in the 1920s-1930s, and again in the 1970s-1980s--feature strongly in the first part of the book. In the cinematic representation of these cities, modernist experimentation combined with social and political change to produce such memorable films as "The Man with the Movie Camera," " Berlin: The Symphony of a Great City," " Berlin Alexanderplatz" and, more recently, the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jan svankmajer and the Brothers Quay. The different but comparable space of the North American city since World War Two provides the primary focus for the second part of the book. Here, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto provide the settings for an investigation of the relationship between cinema and race, and cinema and postmodern global capitalism, in a comprehensive range of films from "Point Blank," " Medium Cool," " Network "and" Annie Hall "in the 1960s and 1970s, to "Boyz N the Hood," " Falling Down," " Pulp Fiction," " Safe]," " Crash "and" The End of Violence" in the 1990s.
Throughout the book, the cinema's artistic encounter with the city always intersects with a social and political engagement in which urgent issues of class, race, sexuality, the environment, liberty, capital, and totalitarianism are everywhere at stake.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.