This book offers a thorough analysis of how romantic love between Black men and women (referred to here as Black Love) is portrayed in Hollywood films, specifically from the perspective of Black female filmmakers. Using historical and contemporary images of Black female representation in the media as a foundation, the main themes of this text focus on the male gazes’ influence on Hollywood narratives, the necessity for the Black female perspective in Hollywood, and that perspective’s influence on ideologies and narratives.

Black women have long recognized the power of film for storytelling. For far too long, however, the cultural and historical narratives about film have not accounted for the contributions of Black women directors. This book remedies this omission by highlighting the trajectory of the culturally significant work of Black women directors in the United States, from the under-examined pioneers of the silent era, to the documentarians who sought to highlight the voices and struggles of Black women, and the contemporary Black women directors in Hollywood. Applying a Black feminist perspective, this book examines the ways that Black women filmmakers have made a way for themselves and their work by resisting the dominant cultural expectations for Black women and for the medium of film, as a whole.

This volume examines the use of Black popular culture to engage, reflect, and parse social justice, arguing that Black popular culture is more than merely entertainment. Moving beyond a focus on identifying and categorizing cultural forms, the authors examine Black popular culture to understand how it engages social justice, with attention to anti-Black racism. Black Popular Culture and Social Justice takes a systematic look at the role of music, comic books, literature, film, television, and public art in shaping attitudes and fighting oppression. Examining the ways in which artists, scholars, and activists have engaged, discussed, promoted, or supported social justice – on issues of criminal justice reform, racism, sexism, LGBTQIA rights, voting rights, and human rights – the book offers unique insights into the use of Black popular culture as an agent for change. This timely and insightful book will be of interest to students and scholars of race and media, popular culture, gender studies, sociology, political science, and social justice.

This book considers the ways in which Black directors, screenwriters, and showrunners contend with the figure of the would-be White ally in contemporary film and television. White Lies and Allies in Contemporary Black Media examines the ways in which prominent figures such as Issa Rae, Spike Lee, Justin Simien, Jordan Peele, and Donald Glover centralize complex Black protagonists in their work while also training a Black gaze on would-be White allies. Emily R. Rutter highlights how these Black creators represent both performative White allyship and the potential for true White antiracist allyship, while also examining the reasons why Black creators utilize the white ally trope in the wider context of the film and television industries. During an era in which concerns with White liberal complicity in anti-Black racism are of paramount importance, Rutter explores how these films and televisions shows, and their creators, contribute to the wider project of dismantling internal, interpersonal, ideological, and institutional White hegemony. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Film and Media Studies, Television Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, and Popular Culture.

Now in its sixth edition, this essential guide for students provides accessible definitions of a comprehensive range of genres, movements, world cinemas, theories and production terms. This fully revised and updated book includes new topical entries that explore areas such as film and the environmental crisis; streaming and new audience consumption; diversity and intersectionality; questions related to race and representation; the Black Lives Matter movement; and New Wave Cinemas of Eastern European countries. Further new entries include accented/exilic cinema, border-cinema, the oppositional gaze, sonic sound and Black westerns. Existing entries have been updated, including discussion of #MeToo, and more contemporary film examples have been added throughout. This is a must-have guide for any student starting out on this fascinating area of study and arguably the greatest art form of modern times.

Some of the most iconic images of the twentieth century are of children: Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, depicting farm worker Frances Owens Thompson with three of her children; six-year-old Ruby Bridges, flanked by U.S. marshals, walking down the steps of an all-white elementary school she desegregated; Huỳnh Công Út’s photograph of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing a South Vietnamese napalm bombing. These iconic images with their juxtaposition of the innocent (in the sense of not culpable) figure of the child and the guilty perpetrators of violence (both structural and interpersonal) are ‘arresting’. The power of the image of the child to arrest the spectator, to demand a response from her has given the representation of children a central place in the history of visual culture for social reform. This book analyses a range of forms and genres from social reform documentary through feature films and onto small and mobile media to address two core questions: What difference does it make to the message who the producer is? and How has the place of children and youth changed in visual public culture?

Black women filmmakers not only deserve an audience, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts, but it is also imperative that their voices be heard as they struggle against Hollywood’s constructions of spectatorship, ownership, and the creative and distribution aspects of filmmaking. Foster provides a voice for Black and Asian women in the first detailed examination of the works of six contemporary Black and Asian women filmmakers. She also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitled "Other Voices," documenting the work of other Black and Asian filmmakers. Foster analyzes the key films of Zeinabu irene Davis, "one of a growing number of independent Black women filmmakers who are actively constructing [in the words of bell hooks] ‘an oppositional gaze’"; British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah and Julie Dash, two filmmakers working with time and space; Pratibha Parmar, a Kenyan/Indian-born British Black filmmaker concerned with issues of representation, identity; cultural displacement, lesbianism, and racial identity; Trinh T. Minh-ha, a Vietnamese-born artist who revolutionized documentary filmmaking by displacing the "voyeuristic gaze of the ethnographic documentary filmmaker"; and Mira Nair, a Black Indian woman who concentrates on interracial identity.

EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.

EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.

An absorbing portrait of a groundbreaking Black woman filmmaker. Kathleen Collins (1942–88) was a visionary and influential Black filmmaker. Beginning with her short film The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy and her feature film Losing Ground, Collins explored new dimensions of what narrative film could and should do. However, her achievements in filmmaking were part of a greater life project. In this critically imaginative study of Collins, L.H. Stallings narrates how Collins, as a Black woman writer and filmmaker, sought to change the definition of life and living. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker's Search for New Life explores the global significance and futurist implications of filmmaker and writer Kathleen Collins. In addition to her two films, Stallings examines the broad and expansive and varying forms of writing produced by Collins during her short life time. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins showcases how Collins used filmmaking, writing, and teaching to assert herself as a poly-creative dedicated to asking and answering difficult philosophical questions about human being and living. Interrogating the ideological foundation of life-writing and cinematic life-writing as they intersect with race and gender, Stallings intervenes on the delimited concepts of life and Black being that impeded wider access, distribution, and production of Collins's personal, cinematic, literary, and theatrical works. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins definitively emphasizes the evolution of film and film studies that Collins makes possible for current and future generations of filmmakers.