Includes bibliographical references (pages 321-336) and index.
Contents:
Daydreams of society: class and gender performances in the cinema of the late 1910s / Ruth Mayer -- The death of Lon Chaney: masculinity, race, and the authenticity of disguise / Alice Maurice -- MGM's sleeping lion: Hollywood regulation of the Washingtonian slave in The gorgeous hussy (1936) / Ellen C. Scott -- Yellowface, minstrelsy, and Hollywood happy endings: The black camel (1931), Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), and Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937) / Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett -- "A queer, strangled look": race, gender, and morality in The Ox-Bow incident (1943) / Jonna Eagle -- By herself: intersectionality, African American specialty performers, and Eleanor Powell / Ryan Jay Friedman -- Disruptive mother-daughter relationships: Peola's racial masquerade in Imitation of life (1934) and Stella's class masquerade in Stella Dallas (1937) / Charlene Regester -- The egotistical sublime: film noir and whiteness / Matthias Konzett -- Women and class mobility in classical Hollywood's immigrant dramas / Chris Cagle -- Hawai'i statehood, indigeneity, and Go for broke! (1951) / Dean Itsuji Sananillio -- Savage whiteness: the dialect of racial desire in The young savages (1961) / Fraham Cassano -- Rita Moreno's hair / Priscilla Peña Ovalle -- "Everything Glee in 'America'": context, race, and identity politics in the Glee (2009-2015) appropriation of West Side Story (1961) / Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz -- Hip-hop "Hearts" ballet: utopic multiculturalism and the Step up dance films (2006, 2008, 2010) / Mary Beltrán -- Fakin' da funk (1997) and Good (2017): exploring black/Asian relations in the Asian American hood film / Jun Okada -- "Let us roam the night together": on articulation and representation in Moonlight (2016) and Tongues untied (1989) / Louise Wallenberg.
Summary:
Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity explores the ways Hollywood represents race, gender, class, and nationality at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and its productive tensions. This collection of essays asks to what degree can a close critical analysis of films, that is, reading them against their own ideological grain, reveal contradictions and tensions in Hollywood's task of erecting normative cultural standards? How do some films perhaps knowingly undermine their inherent ideology by opening a field of conflicting and competing intersecting identities? The challenge set out in this volume is to revisit well-known films in search for a narrative not exclusively constituted by the Hollywood formula and to answer the questions: What lies beyond the frame? What elements contradict a film's sustained illusion of a normative world? Where do films betray their own ideology and most importantly what intersectional spaces of identity do they reveal or conceal?
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