African Americans - Mass Media, Racial Discrimination, United States - Ethnic & Race Relations, African Americans - General & Miscellaneous, Media - General & Miscellaneous, Media - Theory & Philosophy, Popular Culture - United States, Women - United Stat
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Overview
The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans' understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O.J. Simpson's criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theatre, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization.
The racial sympathies and hostilities that surfaced during the trial of the police in the beating of Rodney King and in the O.J. Simpson murder trial are grounded in the melodramatic forms of Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Birth of a Nation. Williams finds that Stowe's breaten black man and Griffith's endagered white woman appear repeatedly throughout popular entertainment, promoting interracial understanding at one moment, interracial hate at another. The black and white racial melodrama has galvanized emotions and fueled the importance of new media forms, such as serious, "integrated" musicals of stage and film, including The Jazz Singer and Show Boat. It also helped create a major event out of the movie Gone with the Wind, while enabling television viewers to assume new moral purpose with the broadcast of Roots. Williams demonstrates how such developments converged to make the televised race trial a form of national entertainment.
When prosecutor Christopher Darden accused Simpson's defense team of "playing the race card," which ultimately trumped his own team's gender card, he feared that the jury's sympathy for a targeted black man would be at the expense of the abused white wife. The jury's verdict, Williams concludes, was determined not so much by facts as by the cultural forces of racial melodrama long in the making. Revealing melodrama to be a key element in American culture, Williams argues that the race images it has promoted are deeply ingrained in our minds and that there can be no honest discussion about race until Americans recognize this predicament.
Editorials
Jonathan Rieder
Williams's achievement is to recapture the complexity of our tangled racial history without sanitizing racism....In clarifying our racial past, Williams suggests one way to illuminate our present: refusing to let foolish notions of difference obscure the lively entanglement that still links blacks and whites, and the vital mixed-up cultural life it continues to sustain.— New York Times Book Review
Lisa Kennedy
Wherever melodrama lands, it brings the same set of concerns, and Playing the Race Card is at its protean best when it is tracing these from medium to medium.— Village Voice
Publishers Weekly
It seems like a long leap "from Lillian Gish to... Leonardo DiCaprio and from Uncle Tom to Rodney King," but in this dazzling, benchmark work, noted cultural historian and critic Williams makes it with panache and enormous insight. Investigating contemporary racial strife embodied in the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson trials, Williams (Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible) argues that centuries-old racial and sexual myths and representations are central to U.S. culture and politics. Exploring with acuity and empathy the many permutations of racial stereotypes (e.g., the black sexual predator and the white female victim in Birth of a Nation and elsewhere, and their social and political meanings over the past 150 years), Williams navigates a maze of American popular culture from Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Jazz Singer and Show Boat to Roots and Bill T. Jones's Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin. Always provocative, Williams eschews simple explanations and easy liberal or conservative platitudesas in her complicated analysis of the relationship between Jewish assimilation and blackface in The Jazz Singer and of the marketing for Gone with the Wind in Southern states (at age 10, Martin Luther King Jr. performed as a "slave" at a gala celebration of the film). Williams's astounding range of sources and attendant critical literature (she is professor of film studies at UC-Berkeley) is as impressive as her ability to synthesize and interpret so much information without undermining its emotional and artistic impact. This is a vital contribution to American studies as well as film and race studies. Photos and illus. (May) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences
Williams makes the best theoretical case for descriptive representation for marginalized groups to achieve democratic equality. Her review of democratic theory is both exhaustive and masterful.
— Katherine Tate
Village Voice
But the real elegance is in her thinking. . . . [Williams's writing impresses] wherever melodrama lands, it brings the same set of concerns, an Playing the Race Card is at it protean best when it is tracing these from medium to medium.— Lisa Kennedy
New York Times Book Review
[Williams] dispenses with the cant and silliness that tangles much academic talk about racial matters. . . . Steeped in the details of text and context, she invites the reader to see familiar works in fresh ways. Williams's achievement is to recapture the complexity of our tangled racial history without sanitizing racism.— Jonathan Rieder
Choice
Williams offers a fresh and insightful exploration of some of the roots of the American racial dilemma. . . . Well written and persuasively argued.H-Net Reviews
A work that is extremely valuable to historians who wish to enhance the sophistication of their own thinking about teaching with film and other visual media. . . . I believe the author succeeds at what she sets out to do. In such a large, sweeping, and ambitious book as this, that is high praise indeed.— Alecia P. Long
American Literature
This book would be valuable just for its scholarly insights, sharp contextual readings, well-selected illustrations, and imaginative genealogy of melodramatic practices across various eras. What gives it special urgency is that by locating those moments when new media (print, film, TV, video) were shaping new ways of conceiving race, Williams creates a moving picture of racial melodrama in the United States that manages to connect the polemic of Uncle Tom's Cabin to the . . . televised O. J. Simpson murder trial— Kurt Eisen
The Boston Globe
In her intellectually rousing book, Playing the Race Card, Williams find the root of [melodramatic] characterizations throughout American popular culture. . . . Such images, she argues, continue to feed attitudes of racial empathy and enmity. . . . With its thought-provoking analysis and textbook scholarship, Playing the Race Card is a . . . passionately crafted book. But Williams greatest contribution may be liberating a discussion of race from the incendiary rhetoric and polemics that accompany such a discourse. She creates a new dialogue about how popular entertainment has fostered racial sympathy as well as mistrust, and how those images still shape us today.— Renee Graham
The Historian
Broad and brilliant, a combination rare in serious books these days, Playing the Race Card argues persuasively that melodrama has profoundly affected American attitudes toward race over the last century and a half. . . . Williams's success is to spell out exactly how the melodramatic imagination of our popular culture shapes how we live and understand race in America and how these stories make as well as narrative history.— Grace Elizabeth Hale
Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Sciences
Williams makes the best theoretical case for descriptive representation for marginalized groups to achieve democratic equality. Her review of democratic theory is both exhaustive and masterful.— Katherine Tate
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences
Williams makes the best theoretical case for descriptive representation for marginalized groups to achieve democratic equality. Her review of democratic theory is both exhaustive and masterful.Village Voice
But the real elegance is in her thinking. . . . [Williams's writing impresses] wherever melodrama lands, it brings the same set of concerns, an Playing the Race Card is at it protean best when it is tracing these from medium to medium.The Boston Globe
In her intellectually rousing book, Playing the Race Card, Williams find the root of [melodramatic] characterizations throughout American popular culture. . . . Such images, she argues, continue to feed attitudes of racial empathy and enmity. . . . With its thought-provoking analysis and textbook scholarship, Playing the Race Card is a . . . passionately crafted book. But Williams greatest contribution may be liberating a discussion of race from the incendiary rhetoric and polemics that accompany such a discourse. She creates a new dialogue about how popular entertainment has fostered racial sympathy as well as mistrust, and how those images still shape us today.New York Times Book Review
[Williams] dispenses with the cant and silliness that tangles much academic talk about racial matters. . . . Steeped in the details of text and context, she invites the reader to see familiar works in fresh ways. Williams's achievement is to recapture the complexity of our tangled racial history without sanitizing racism.H-Net Reviews
A work that is extremely valuable to historians who wish to enhance the sophistication of their own thinking about teaching with film and other visual media. . . . I believe the author succeeds at what she sets out to do. In such a large, sweeping, and ambitious book as this, that is high praise indeed.American Literature
This book would be valuable just for its scholarly insights, sharp contextual readings, well-selected illustrations, and imaginative genealogy of melodramatic practices across various eras. What gives it special urgency is that by locating those moments when new media (print, film, TV, video) were shaping new ways of conceiving race, Williams creates a moving picture of racial melodrama in the United States that manages to connect the polemic of Uncle Tom's Cabin to the . . . televised O. J. Simpson murder trialThe Historian
Broad and brilliant, a combination rare in serious books these days, Playing the Race Card argues persuasively that melodrama has profoundly affected American attitudes toward race over the last century and a half. . . . Williams's success is to spell out exactly how the melodramatic imagination of our popular culture shapes how we live and understand race in America and how these stories make as well as narrative history.Book Details
Published
May 16, 2001
Publisher
Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2001.
Pages
408
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780691058009