...This chapter uses pop culture to address the shift from community-based moral law that excluded LGBT people from citizenship to individual-based privacy, focusing on three films: Casablanca, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Brothers. These films reveal a shift...

...This chapter explores how American feature films about Irish-Jewish romances have conveyed varying messages from extolling the melting-pot ideal, exposing interethnic tensions, epitomizing interfaith toleration, reflecting changing gender roles, and embracing multicultural diversity. Baron traces...

...This chapter argues for a rhetorical approach and a digital future for American Sign Language (ASL) literature. In 1910, George Veditz, then president of the National Association of the Deaf, capitalized on the technology of film to produce the “Sign Masters Series” featuring ten nationally known...

... Masi Crawford Margo diaspora divas Gilroy Paul Uggams Leslie Da Silva Denise Ferreira decoloniality Golden Thelma Ligon Glenn Wynter Sylvia affect capitalism Tsang, Wu The Flawless Mother Sabrina The Queen (film) queer temporality black queer aesthetics Every word immediately becomes...

...Intervening in debates over post-humanist responses to climate change, this chapter engages black feminist and indigenous critique to explore the role afro-fabulation plays in contemporary catastrophism. Reading the play and film Beasts of the Southern Wild in relation...

...This chapter engages recent developments in black feminist theory, in particular those that emphasize the pornotroping of the flesh, in order to outline a new theory of fictive ethnicity. Noting how black ethnicity has emerged as an issue in film and performance, the chapter suggests...

...Kristen Whissel’s chapter examines what she labels “the Classical-era Hollywood prison film.” Whissel contends that scholars and critics have often approached this kind of film as a subgenre of the crime drama, the gangster film, or film noir and, as a result, critiqued it in terms of the lack...

...Austin Sarat and his coauthors begin with a discussion of a single scene in a film from the turn of the twentieth century, The Execution of Mary Stuart. This film, barely a minute long, shows an executioner holding the axe with which he will behead Mary and staring directly...

...This chapter considers how four films, Looking for Langston (directed by Isaac Julien, 1989), The Watermelon Woman (directed by Cheryl Dunye,1996), Brother to Brother (directed by Rodney Evans, 2005),and The Aggressives (directed...

...” churches, such as Baptists. These groups typically express their unique traditions through their films. The chapter provides an overview of Protestant denominational films, particularly the Methodists and the Protestant Film Commission. After sporadic ventures during the 1930s and 1940s, denominations...

...This chapter looks at how World Wide Pictures and Gateway reached beyond the evangelical ghettos. The two organizations set out to bring evangelistic and historical films to churches; each was successful in encouraging individuals to recognize God's presence. Despite staying committed...

...This chapter explains how the efforts of a new generation of Christian filmmakers to offer interesting and challenging films sparked a modest renaissance as progressive distributors searched for fresh products. This rebirth would be short-lived, however, due to the impending demise of the 16mm...

...The coda compares narrative strategies in Lee Daniels’s 2009 film Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire with those in the 1996 source work in order to show that abstractionist disruption is most critically effective in verbal versus nonverbal narrative modes, precisely...

... at Samuel Goldwyn Studios, about his impending divorce; the syndication of her column “Hedda Hopper's Hollywood”; her feud with rival columnist Louella Parsons; Hopper's contributions to the film industry; Hopper's coverage of hard news, i.e. developments in domestic politics and foreign policy; and her...

...This chapter examines the aims of sociocultural and political transformations in India that set the stage for the reimagination of the Bombay film industry as Bollywood. The Indian state implemented these reforms because of their desire to have a new and highly visible middle class. In particular...

...This chapter discusses the changing industry structures in Bombay, particularly the emergence of marketing and promotions of film marketing as a key domain in Bollywood. The television and advertising industries during the 1990s and the related loss of a readily imagined “national audience” led...

...Robert McRuer considers how the film Any Day Now (Travis Fine, 2012) may serve as a model for bringing concerns about disability and immigration into conversations about contemporary homonormativity. Queer scholars’ and activists’ critiques of homonormativity, often characterized...

... develop, the chapter also recognizes the roles played by divergent interests, human error, and reputation-based economies in disrupting such development. Within the media industries, market research occupies a more tentative and variable space. The creative nature of the film, television, or digital media...

...This chapter summarizes the main argument of the Hollywood Jim Crow. Hollywood insiders deploy economic and cultural logics that Black films will not make sufficient enough money to be viable financial investments, especially in foreign markets. This justification is used to devalue films...

... Roberts Paul Craig Robinson Sally feminism backlash against multiculturalism white male victim narratives filth heteronormativity man baby Jewface persona Perry Katy queer liberation sexuality liberated Jewish Stardom Race Minstrelsy Masculinity Gender Sexuality Film Media Queer Beware...