
Contents
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William Foster and African American Musical Theater William Foster and African American Musical Theater
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Foster’s Moving Picture Venture Foster’s Moving Picture Venture
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Coda: William Foster in Hollywood Coda: William Foster in Hollywood
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Notes Notes
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8 African American Film History Beyond Cinema: William Foster and the Legacy of Black Theatrical Comedy
Get accessAllyson Nadia Field is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (2015). She is also co-editor with Marsha Gordon of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (2019) and co-editor with Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacqueline Stewart of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (2015). Field was named a 2019 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is a member of the National Film Preservation Board.
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Published:22 February 2024
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Abstract
This chapter approaches William Foster, one of the first African Americans to produce motion pictures, through an intermedial lens, attentive to the interrelated performance milieux of popular theater and cinema in the early twentieth century. Foster’s career demonstrates how, for Black popular culture, valences of representation were contingent on the context of performance and reception. The dynamics of race, performance, and audience shaped the Black theatrical world of the end of the nineteenth century—and, in turn, informed the emerging Black cinematic landscape of the early twentieth. Foster played a crucial role in this transition and through him we gain insight into Black theatrical ambitions at a time rife with possibilities for African American creative workers, even while they were stymied by the entrenched racism of the broader culture.
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