Table of Contents

Part 1 Black Aesthetics; Chapter 1 Black American Cinema, Manthia Diawara; Chapter 2 “Twoness” In the Style of Oscar Micheaux, J. Ronald Green; Chapter 3 Fire and Desire, Jane Gaines; Chapter 4 Oscar Micheaux, Thomas Cripps; Chapter 5 The Black Writer in Hollywood, Circa 1930, Phyllis Klotman; Chapter 6 Is Car Wash a Musical?, Richard Dyer; Chapter 7 The Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, Ntongela Masilela; Chapter 8 Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye, Toni Cade Bambara; Chapter 9 Spike Lee at the Movies, Amiri Baraka; Chapter 10 Spike Lee and the Commerce of Culture, Houston A. Jr. Baker; Chapter 11 The Ironies of Palace-Subaltern Discourse, Clyde Taylor; Chapter 12 Looking for Modernism, Henry Louis Jr. Gates; Part 2 Black Spectatorship; Chapter 13 Black Spectatorship, Manthia Diawara; Chapter 14 The Harlem Theater, Dan Streible; Chapter 15 The Black Image in Protective Custody, Ed Guerrero; Chapter 16 The Construction of Black Sexuality, Jacquie Jones; Chapter 17 Race, Gender and Psychoanalysis in Forties Film, Michele Wallace; Chapter 18 Reading through the Text, Jacqueline Bobo; Chapter 19 The Oppositional Gaze, Bell Hooks;

About the Author

Manthia Diawara is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

"Manthia Diawara's Black American Cinema shows how refreshingly far away from decorous consensus the field of Black cinema study is today, in a varied and provocative montage of opinions, personal histories, position statements, and historical criticism."-- Journal of Communication, Summer 1995"...essays in Black American Cinema make the book a worthy addition to the small shelf of Black cinema criticism."-- Journal of Communication, Summer 1995"...In attempting to plug the vast academic gaps in my knowledge, this seminal collection of essays from the AFI [American Film Institute] readers series proved invaluable. In the preface Diawara talks about addressing both “a black film aesthetic by focusing on the black artist” and “the thorny issue of film spectatorship”. This authoritative volume covers film-makers from Oscar Micheaux to Spike Lee, and is as relevant now as it was when first published." -- Mark Kermode, The Guardian