San Antonio College Library

Traces the evolution of the Black character from stereotype to complex individual, revealing the influences of shifting cultural values.

Set against the backdrop of the black struggle in society, Slow Fade to Black is the definitive history of African-American accomplishment in film -- both before and behind the camera -- from the earliest movies through World War II. Cripps explores the growth of discrimination as filmmakers became more and more intrigued with myths of the Old South -- the "lost cause" aspect of the Civil War, the "happy" slaves singing in the fields -- showing how...

"The Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema includes hundreds of films, everything from The Birth of a Nation to Crash. In addition to the films, brief biographies of African American actors and actresses such as Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones, Halle Berry, Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, Denzel Washington, and Jamie Foxx are also detailed. This book provides a better understanding of the role African Americans played in film history through...

"Examining painting, photographs, and other representations of black people over the past two centuries, Cutting a Figure argues that these images should be viewed as a category of portraiture distinct from depictions of people with other racial and ethnic backgrounds. The difference, Richard J. Powell contends, stems directly from the black subject's power to subvert dominant racist conventions by evincing such traits as self-composure, self-adornment,...

"In this book, artist and art historian Michael Harris traces black artists' responses to racist imagery across two centuries, from early works by Henry O. Tanner and Archibald J. Motley Jr., in which African Americans are depicted with dignity, to contemporary works by Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles, in which derogatory images are recycled to controversial effect. The work of these and other artists--such as John Biggers, Jeff Donaldson, Betye...

Here, inter-racial poets and critics join together to analyze the role that race plays in the reading and writing of American poetry, and the role that poetry plays in our understanding of race.

"Searching for photographic images of black women, Deborah Willis and Carla Williams were startled to find them by the hundreds. In long-forgotten books, in art museums, in European and US archives and private collections, a hidden history of representation awaited discovery. The Black Female Body offers a stunning array of familiar and many virtually unknown photographs. Willis and Williams show how photographs reflected Western culture's fascination...

Peter brings modern critical tools to his task, as well as a thorough knowledge of the canon of Faulkner criticism dealing with stock images in literature. Among the topics discussed are: the cultural legacy and the influence of light and dark imagery on him; his early characterizations of black existence; the historical context for black existence in the Yoknapatawpha world; the racism in this world which is a scheme of larceny designed to strip...

Edgar Allan Poe's strength as a writer lay in fabricating fantisies in settings far removed from his own place and time. This dislocation renders the attitudes embedded in his fiction open to interpretation, and over the years some readers have found Poe to be virulently racist, while others found him morally conflicted, and still others detected a subversion of racism in his works' subtle sympathies for non-white characters. As a nineteenth-century...