Reading Race: Hollywood and the Cinema of Racial Violence (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)

In this insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, examining the relationship between film, race and culture. Norman K Denzin argues that the cinema, like society, treats all persons as equal but struggles to define and implement diversity, pluralism and multiculturalism. He goes on to argue that the cinema needs to honour racial and ethnic differences, in defining race in terms of both an opposition to, and acceptance of, the media's interpretations and representations of the American racial order. Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination. Like all writing, biographies are interpretive. They require no less than organizing into text the chaos of human existence. In Interpretive Biography Denzin combines one of the oldest techniques in the social sciences and humanities with one of the newest. Bringing in elements of postmodernism and interpretive social science, he re-examines the biographical and autobiographical genres. In addition, the book outlines a new way in which biographies should be conceptualized and shaped Norman Denzin argues that the cinema, like society, treats all persons as equals but struggles to define and implement diversity, pluralism and multiculturalism. This is manifested in American cinema by its treatment of racial issues in films