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?
Introduction
Hollywood Formulas: Codes, Masks, Genre, and Minstrelsy
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 Konzett
Genre and Race in Classical Hollywood
“A Queer, Strangled Look”: Race, Gender, and Morality in The Ox-Bow Incident
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
Race and Ethnicity in Post-World War II Hollywood
Women and Class Mobility in Classical Hollywood’s Immigrant Dramas
Chris Cagle
Orientalism, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Go for Broke! (1951)
Dean Itsuji Saranillio
Savage Whiteness: The dialectic of racial desire in The Young Savages (1961)
Graham Cassano
Rita Moreno’s Hair
Priscilla Peña Ovalle
Intersectionality, Hollywood, and Contemporary Popular Culture
“Everything Glee in ‘America’”: Context, Race, and Identity Politics in the Glee Appropriation of West Side Story
Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz
Hip Hop “Hearts” Ballet: Utopic Multiculturalism and the Step Up Dance Films
Mary Beltrán
Fakin da Funk (1997) and Gook (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
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
DELIA MALIA CAPAROSO KONZETT is a professor of English, cinema, and women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. She is the author of Ethnic Modernisms and Hollywood’s Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War. She has published in numerous critical journals on film, focusing on race, imperialism, and aesthetics. Her present work discusses race in Hollywood and its representation in mass culture.
