Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson
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"Playing the Race Card possesses all the boldness, high intelligence, and far-reaching revisionism one has come to expect from the author of the brilliant Hard Core and other path-breaking work in film studies. Linda Williams here insists on the general importance of the melodramatic mode to our understanding of the United States' ongoing racial predicament. Her arguments are extremely compelling, not least because she executes them with such thoroughgoing smartness and prodigious learning."--Eric Lott, University of Virginia"Linda Williams's book is a beautifully written, meticulously researched, and conceptually lucid engagement with the genres of painful feeling that organize racial fantasy in the United States. It joins the works of Michael Rogin, Eric Lott, and Ann Douglas as a major statement about the founding conventions of representation and cross-racial encounter in the U.S. twentieth century."--Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago"A tour de force of cultural analysis. The subject of Playing the Race Card is at once urgent and entertaining. Linda Williams's book is poised to do for film studies what Toni Morrison and others have so famously done for American literature: to reveal the ghost in the machine, the role of 'race' in the making of American popular culture."--Susan Gillman, University of California, Santa Cruz"A strikingly accessible book that makes a timely appearance, now that discussions about race and representation have developed a heightened immediacy. Elegantly written and meticulously researched, this book combines scholarly rigor with clarity and insight."--Valerie Smith, University of California, Los AngelesNew York Times Book Review - Jonathan RiederWilliams'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.
Illustrations ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: Playing the Race Card 3 Chapter One: The American Melodramatic Mode 10 Chapter Two: ''A Wonderful, 'Leaping 'Fish'': Varieties of Uncle Tom 45 Chapter Three: Anti-Tom and The Birth of a Nation 96 Chapter Four: Posing as Black, Passing as White: The Melos of Black and White Melodrama in the Jazz Age 136 Chapter Five: Rewriting the Plantation Legend: Scarlett ''Totes a Weary Load'' 187 Chapter Six: Home Sweet Africa: Alex Haley's and TV's Roots 220 Chapter Seven: Trials of Black and White: California v. Powell and The People v. Orenthal James Simpson 252 Conclusion: Our Melodramatic Racial Fix 296 Notes 311 Bibliography 369 Index 385
