Race and Popular American Culture

In this course we will explore the racial politics of popular American cinema. Beginning with John Ford’s classic The Searchers and concluding with the Hughes Brothers’ powerful and provocative urban gangsta film, Menace II Society, the course probes one central question: how do popular film narratives reflect and influence societal ideas and beliefs about race, culture, and difference? We will explore a wide spectrum of U.S. feature films‹westerns, black and Mexican American cinema, animation films like Disney’s Pocahontas (1995), as well as computer driven special effects event movies like The Phantom Menace (1999). The course views popular media industries like cinema as a site of social and political power that facilitates how we define, understand, watch, and perform “race.” Combining ideas from film criticism, the study of race and ethnicity, and gender studies this course explores how popular films reproduce and challenge dominant cultural assumptions about race, gender, and class.