Black mirror : the cultural contradictions of American racism /
Eric Lott
- Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, (c)2017.
- 1 online resource (xxv, 262 pages) : illustrations
Black mirror: states of fantasy and symbolic surplus value -- Our blackface America: Mr. Clemens and Jim Crow -- The mirror has two faces: white ethnic semi-mojo -- House of mirrors: the whiteness of film noir -- White like me: racial trans and the culture of civil rights -- Tar baby and the great white wonder: Joni Mitchell's pimp game -- All the king's men: Elvis impersonators and white working-class masculinity -- Just like Jack Frost's blues: masking and melancholia in Bob Dylan's 'Love and theft'
Black Mirror explores the ways U.S. cultural institutions--classic American literature, Hollywood film, pop musical artistry, venturesome social commentary--have relied insistently and repeatedly on racial symbolic capital, including and above all blackface, to reproduce white cultural dominance. In the process these forms have threatened to betray the racial hegemony that generated them and that they exist in order to maintain. Hence the subtitle, The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism. In a series of chapters addressing such arts and artists as Mark Twain, film noir, Joni Mitchell, Elvis impersonators, Bob Dylan, and Barack Obama, Black Mirror locates the symbolic surplus value that accrues to white cultural producers and institutions whenever they traffic in "blackness"--A political economy of the sign that can sometimes surprise us (not least by producing a black president).--
9780674981478
Racism in mass media. Racism in popular culture--United States. White people--Attitudes.--United States Black people--Public opinion.--United States African Americans in the performing arts--United States.