#x98;The#x9C; subject of film and race retheorizing politics, ideology, and cinema

## Acknowledgments ix Younger. My corner is overpopulated with friends and colleagues who offered support in many forms and at all hours. Thank you, Andy Brodie, Scott, Kristin, and Jack Christopherson, Emily Light, Carol Schrage, Jesse Sheedy, and Sophia and Dhelia, partners in crime. Peter Sim once mused that tobacco taxes are effectively a levy on the poor because "the rich don't have the kind of problems that smoking provides relief for. They don't need to smoke, but poor people do. " My father smoked a packa-day from boyhood. The habit did his pulmonary health no favors, but to this day secondhand smoke smells like memories. His ruminations on tobacco policy represent my first and abiding lesson in class-consciousness. Looking back, I have to think that my worldview was shaped by the profundities that cut through those plumes. No one taught me more about alienated labor, use and exchange value, and species being more than he, not with those words but no less plainly. I will forever remember the lessons that his face imparted on the sublimities of Hitchcock, Tashlin, and Donen, on how to enjoy political rallies like stand-up comedy, how to treat every moment as parody, and the advice said and unsaid about how important it is to live happy. Figure I.1 Django (Jamie Foxx) and his white savior, King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Is it racist? (Django Unchained, 2012). other responsible for the movement's atrophy, it becomes especially urgent for us to understand these ideas that are playing an outsized role in radical politics. Nevertheless, this is "just" a book on film theory. It will not make someone suddenly care about class issues, nor will it change the mind of anyone not already predisposed or at least open to the idea of a materialist approach to understanding race. The sociological work published by those such as Max Weber, William Julius Wilson, and more recently Walter Benn Michaels's The Trouble with Diversity, would be far more convincing on that score. 24 But if this book enhances understanding of film, media, and theory, it should hopefully add to the critical discourse on race, which would not be insignificant since so much of that discussion nowadays takes place about the media and in the media. This book proceeds in two-stages. The first examines the main ideas underwriting critical race film theory, and reveals key contradictions. The second is more reconstructive. The initial four chapters locate specific knots in critical race film scholarship's theoretical and political musculature. These theoretical paradoxes initially uncovered actually provide a motive force later on. Chapter 1 historicizes the major developments in critical race film studies, highlighting the origins of seminal principles and undertaking close readings of important contributions to the field by Steve Neale, Robert Stam and Louise Spence, Manthia Diawara, and Homi Bhabha. I historicize two key approaches that the field has long been identified with: a first generation of work I associate with image studies and a second generation of theory that introduced discursive analyses. As often as critical race film scholarship avows its intentions to move beyond these early methods, little progression or movement occur in practice, as my survey of the last 30 years indicates. Along the way, I pause to deliberate from a historical materialist perspective, particularly on the positions that these poststructuralist theories take on the unified subject. With these asides, momentum picks up toward eventually forming a Neo-Marxian methodology. As it were, the book's historical materialism is not an alien interjection, but an attempt to reveal Marxian ideas, including important ones governing subjectivity, that are previously either latent or elided. Following that direction leads partly to increased sensitivity to economic issues, whose mandate includes placing greater importance on class-centered analyses of form and narrative, as well as production histories that explain the film industry's power to define images of the working-class. The field of workingclass studies could be involved in this part of the project because of its mission The Subject Of Film And Race Is The First Comprehensive Intervention Into How Film Critics And Scholars Have Sought To Understand Cinema's Relationship To Racial Ideology. In Attempting To Do More Than Merely Identify Harmful Stereotypes, Research On 'films And Race' Appropriates Ideas From Post-structuralist Theory. But On Those Platforms, The Field Takes Intellectual And Political Positions That Place Its Anti-racist Efforts At An Impasse. While Presenting Theoretical Ideas In An Accessible Way, Gerald Sim's Historical Materialist Approach Uniquely Triangulates Well-known Work By Edward Said With The Neo-marxian Writing About Film By Theodor Adorno And Fredric Jameson. The Subject Of Film And Race Takes On Topics Such As Identity Politics, Multiculturalism, Multiracial Discourse, And Cyborg Theory, To Force Film And Media Studies Into Rethinking Their Approach, Specifically Towards Humanism And Critical Subjectivity. The Book Illustrates Theoretical Discussions With A Diverse Set Of Familiar Films By John Ford, Michael Mann, Todd Solondz, Quentin Tarantino, Keanu Reeves, And Others, To Show That We Must Always Be Aware Of Capitalist History When Thinking About Race, Ethnicity, And Films. Introduction: What Is Critical Race Film Studies? -- Key Developments In Critical Race Film Studies -- Theorizing Race With A Wide Open Text: The Searchers -- Poststructuralism And The Neo-marxian Subject -- Postcolonial Hazards: Edward Said And Film Studies -- Postmodern Multiracial, Keanu Reeves -- Conclusion: A Materialist Method For Critical Race Film Studies. Gerald Sim. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. This title provides a comprehensive intervention into how film critics and scholars have sought to understand cinema's relationship to racial ideology. In attempting to do more than merely identify harmful stereotypes, research on 'films and race' appropriates ideas from post-structuralist theory. But on those platforms, the field takes intellectual and political positions that place its anti-racist efforts at an impasse. While presenting theoretical ideas in an accessible way, Gerald Sim's historical materialist approach uniquely triangulates well-known work by Edward Said with the Neo-Marxian writing about film by Theodor Adorno and Fredric Jameson