The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema - Paperback

by Gerald Sim (Author)

The Subject of Film and Race is the first comprehensive intervention into how film critics and scholars have sought to understand cinema's relationship to racial ideology. In attempting to do more than merely identify harmful stereotypes, research on 'films and race' appropriates ideas from post-structuralist theory. But on those platforms, the field takes intellectual and political positions that place its anti-racist efforts at an impasse. While presenting theoretical ideas in an accessible way, Gerald Sim's historical materialist approach uniquely triangulates well-known work by Edward Said with the Neo-Marxian writing about film by Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson. The Subject of Film and Race takes on topics such as identity politics, multiculturalism, multiracial discourse, and cyborg theory, to force film and media studies into rethinking their approach, specifically towards humanism and critical subjectivity. The book illustrates theoretical discussions with a diverse set of familiar films by John Ford, Michael Mann, Todd Solondz, Quentin Tarantino, Keanu Reeves, and others, to show that we must always be aware of capitalist history when thinking about race, ethnicity, and films.

Author Biography

Gerald Sim is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Florida Atlantic University, USA. His writing on topics ranging from national cinema to digital cinematography, financial television, and film music theory appears in Film Quarterly, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Projections, Rethinking Marxism, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Discourse, and other venues.