Playing the Race Card

Finalist for the Theatre Library Association Award for Outstanding Book in Recorded or Broadcast Performance "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 "It seems like a long leap to make 'from Lillian Gish to ... Leonardo Dicaprio and from Uncle Tom to Rodney King,' but in this dazzling, benchmark work ... Williams does it with panache and enormous insight... This is a vital contribution to American studies as well as film and race studies."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "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, Village Voice "For any honest discussion about race relations in America, [Williams] argues, we must first acknowledge the indeterminate influence of melodrama. Conscientiously researched ... this insightful book is essential for academic libraries and students in film studies."--Library Journal "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 Boston Globe "[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, New York Times Book Review "Williams offers a fresh and insightful exploration of some of the roots of the American racial dilemma... Well written and persuasively argued."--Choice "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, H-Net Reviews "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, American Literature "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, The Historian

Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Film Studies Program. She is the author of "Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible" and "Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film". Her edited volumes include "Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film" and, with Christine Gledhill, "Reinventing Film Studies".

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