What is the relation between film, race and culture? How does the cinema reproduce and challenge myths of racial segregation and discrimination? In this elegant and insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, an area strangely under-played in publications on race and ethnicity. Denzin argues that: * the cinema reflects the creed of treating all persons as equal but, along with the rest of society, struggles to define and implement diversity, pluralism and multiculturalism * Hollywood's cinema of racial violence, the so-called ghetto action film cycle, contributes to the production of new racial discourses which twin race with a culture of violence * the cinema needs to honour racial and ethnic difference He relates the cinema of racial violence to the civil rights movement. The politics of difference means definining race in terms of both an opposition to, and acceptance of, the media's interpretations and representations of the American racial order.
Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination. It combines the concrete with the theoretical with deft aplomb.
Author Biography
Norman K. Denzin, Distinguished Emeritus Research Professor of Communications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of over 50 books and 200 professional articles and chapters. He is the past president of The Midwest Sociological Society and the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. He is the founding president of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry (2005-) and director of the International Center of Qualitative Inquiry (2005-). He is a past editor of The Sociological Quarterly, founding coeditor of Qualitative Inquiry, and founding editor of Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, International Review of Qualitative Research, and Studies in Symbolic Interaction: A Research Annual.
