Blackface, White Noise

Blackface, White Noise PDF

Author: Michael Rogin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0520213807

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The tangled connections that have bound Jews to African Americans in popular culture and liberal politics are at the heart of this text. It explores blackface in Hollywood films as an aperture to various broader issues.

Blackface, White Noise

Blackface, White Noise PDF

Author: Michael Rogin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1996-06-01

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780520921054

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The tangled connections that have bound Jews to African Americans in popular culture and liberal politics are at the heart of Michael Rogin's arresting and unnerving book. Looking at films from Birth of a Nation to Forrest Gump, Rogin explores blackface in Hollywood films as an aperture to broader issues: the nature of "white" identity in America, the role of race in transforming immigrants into "Americans," the common experiences of Jews and African Americans that made Jews key supporters in the fight for racial equality, and the social importance of popular culture. Rogin's forcefully argued study challenges us to confront the harsh truths behind the popularity of racial masquerade.

Jazz Age Jews

Jazz Age Jews PDF

Author: Michael Alexander

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0691187479

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

By the 1920s, Jews were--by all economic, political, and cultural measures of the day--making it in America. But as these children of immigrants took their places in American society, many deliberately identified with groups that remained excluded. Despite their success, Jews embraced resistance more than acculturation, preferring marginal status to assimilation. The stories of Al Jolson, Felix Frankfurter, and Arnold Rothstein are told together to explore this paradox in the psychology of American Jewry. All three Jews were born in the 1880s, grew up around American Jewish ghettos, married gentile women, entered the middle class, and rose to national fame. All three also became heroes to the American Jewish community for their association with events that galvanized the country and defined the Jazz Age. Rothstein allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series--an accusation this book disputes. Frankfurter defended the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Jolson brought jazz music to Hollywood for the first talking film, The Jazz Singer, and regularly impersonated African Americans in blackface. Each of these men represented a version of the American outsider, and American Jews celebrated them for it. Michael Alexander's gracefully written account profoundly complicates the history of immigrants in America. It challenges charges that anti-Semitism exclusively or even mostly explains Jews' feelings of marginality, while it calls for a general rethinking of positions that have assumed an immigrant quest for inclusion into the white American mainstream. Rather, Alexander argues that Jewish outsider status stemmed from the group identity Jews brought with them to this country in the form of the theology of exile. Jazz Age Jews shows that most Jews felt culturally obliged to mark themselves as different--and believed that doing so made them both better Jews and better Americans.

Colored White

Colored White PDF

Author: David R. Roediger

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-11

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0520240707

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"In this splendid book, David Roediger shows the need for political activism aimed at transforming the social and political meaning of race…. No other writer on whiteness can match Roediger's historical breadth and depth: his grasp of the formative role played by race in the making of the nineteenth century working class, in defining the contours of twentieth-century U.S. citizenship and social membership, and in shaping the meaning of emerging social identities and cultural practices in the twenty-first century."—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness "David Roediger has been showing us all for years how whiteness is a marked and not a neutral color in the history of the United States. Colored White, with its synthetic sweep and new historical investigations, marks yet another advance. In the burgeoning literature on whiteness, this book stands out for its lucid, unjargonridden, lively prose, its groundedness, its analytic clarity, and its scope."—Michael Rogin, author of Blackface, White Noise

A Right to Sing the Blues

A Right to Sing the Blues PDF

Author: Jeffrey Melnick

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2001-03-16

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0674040902

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

All too often an incident or accident, such as the eruption in Crown Heights with its legacy of bitterness and recrimination, thrusts Black-Jewish relations into the news. A volley of discussion follows, but little in the way of progress or enlightenment results--and this is how things will remain until we radically revise the way we think about the complex interactions between African Americans and Jews. A Right to Sing the Blues offers just such a revision. Black-Jewish relations, Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made Black music in the first few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray their natural affinity for producing Black music as a product of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness as a stable white identity. Melnick also contends that this cultural activity competed directly with Harlem Renaissance attempts to define Blackness. Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural terrain shared by African Americans and Jews.

Blackface

Blackface PDF

Author: Ayanna Thompson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-04-08

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1501374028

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A New Statesman essential non-fiction book of 2021 Featured in Book Riot's 12 best nonfiction books about Black identity and history A Times Higher Education Book of the Week 2022 Finalist for the Prose Awards (Media and Cultural Studies category) Why are there so many examples of public figures, entertainers, and normal, everyday people in blackface? And why aren't there as many examples of people of color in whiteface? This book explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. There is a filthy and vile thread-sometimes it's tied into a noose-that connects the first performances of Blackness on English stages, the birth of blackface minstrelsy, contemporary performances of Blackness, and anti-Black racism. Blackface examines that history and provides hope for a future with new performance paradigms. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895 PDF

Author: Jill Lane

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2005-06-22

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This is a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in 19th century Cuba.

The End of Cinema as We Know it

The End of Cinema as We Know it PDF

Author: Jon Lewis

Publisher: Pluto Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780745318790

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In The End of Cinema As We Know It, contributors well known in the 'movie' field talk about the movie industry and look at the variety of new ways we are viewing films. They query whether or not we are getting different, better movies?

Red Skin, White Masks

Red Skin, White Masks PDF

Author: Glen Sean Coulthard

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2014-08-15

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1452942439

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.

The Alphabet of Birds

The Alphabet of Birds PDF

Author: S J Naudé

Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa

Published: 2014-11-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1415206201

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

‘Cool and intelligent, unsettling and deeply felt, Naudé’s voice is something new in South African writing.’ – Damon Galgut From an ancient castle in Bavaria and a pre-War villa in Milan, to a winter landscape in Lesotho and the suburban streets of Pretoria, the stories in The Alphabet of Birds take an acute look at South Africans at home and abroad. In one story, a strange, cheerful Japanese man visits a young South African as he takes care of his dying mother; in another, a woman battles corrupt bureaucracy in the Eastern Cape. A man trails his lover through the underground dance clubs of Berlin, while in London a young banker moves through layers of decadence as a soul would through purgatory. Pulsating with passion, loss, and melancholia, S J Naudé’s collection The Alphabet of Birds is filled with music, art, architecture, myth, the search for origins and the shifing relationships between people.