Genre, Gender, Race And World Cinema

• A major anthology geared towards course use, which covers key concepts in film studies through analysis of important films from American, Asian, European and African cinema
• Combines formal, historical, cultural, and theoretical approaches to study
• Analyzes how film represents and influences individual and societal constructs of identity
• Uses selected readings to introduce inter-textual relations between the readings and the films they discuss
• Contains section introductions that map the themes and histories of each topic, and raise theoretical issues specific to each

General Introduction: Film and Identities.

Part I: Genres: Ever-Changing Hybrids:.

Introduction and Further Readings.

1. Conclusion: A semantic/syntactic/pragmatic approach to genre: Rick Altman.

2. Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess: Linda Williams.

3. The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother: Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz.

4. Enjoy Your Fight!--Fight Club as a Symptom of the Network Society: Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen.

5. Film and Changing Technologies: Laura Kipnis.

6. Postmodern Cinema and Hollywood Culture in an Age of Corporate Colonization: C. Boggs and T. Pollard.

Part II: Genders – More Than Two:.

Introduction and Further Readings.

7. Mobile Identities, Digital Stars, and Post Cinematic Selves: Mary Flanagan.

8. “Nothing Is As It Seems”: Re-viewing The Crying Game: Lola Young.

9. Crying over the Melodramatic Penis: Melodrama and Male Nudity in Films of the 90s: Peter Lehman.

10. Travels with Sally Potter’s Orlando: Gender, Narrative, Movement: Julianne Pidduck.

11. Body Matters: the Politics of Provocation in Mira Nair’s Films: Alpana Sharma.

12. Cowgirl Tales: Yvonne Tasker.

Part III: Race Stereotypes and Multiple Realisms:.

Introduction and Further Readings.

13. The Family Changes Color: Interracial Families in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema: Nicola Evans.

14. Black on White: Film Noir and the Epistemology of Race in Recent African American Cinema: Dan Flory.

15. Being Chinese American, Becoming Asian American: Chan is Missing: Peter X Feng.

16. The Wedding Banquet: Global Chinese Cinema and the Asian American Experience: Gina Marchetti.

17. Another Fine Example of the Oral Tradition? Identification and Subversion in Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals: Jhon Warren Gilroy.

18. Playing Indian in the Nineties: Pocahontas and The Indian in the Cupboard: Pauline Turner Strong.

19. “You Are Alright, But…”: Individual and Collective Representations of Mexicans, Latinos, Anglo-Americans and African-Americans in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic: Deborah Shaw.

Part IV: World Cinema, Joining Local and Global:.

Introduction and Further Readings.

20. Theorizing ‘Third-World’ Film Spectatorship: Hamid Naficy.

21. The Open Image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema: Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn.

22. The Seductions of Homecoming; Place, Authenticity, and Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon: Rey Chow.

23. Cultural Identity and Diaspora in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema: Julian Stringer.

24. “And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian”: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood: Tejaswini Ganti.

25. Future Past: Integrating Orality into Francophone West African Film: Melissa Thackway.

Acknowledgments