Expanding the Black Film Canon

Lisa Doris Alexander is associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. She is the author of When Baseball Isn’t White, Straight, and Male: The Media and Difference in the National Pastime.

• AcknowledgmentsComing Attractions1. I Ain't Fit to Live with No More: Nothing But a Man Revisited2. "Hey, Where Are the White Women at?": The Presentation of Racism and Resistance in Blazing Saddles3. Harlem Nights, Awkward Framing, and Complicated Gender Politics4. Who's the Real Gangsta?: The Glass Shield and the Politics of Black Communities and Police Relations5. "If You're Going to Tell People the Truth, Make Them Laugh": C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America as Mockumentary and Truth-Telling6. Ladies First: Ava DuVernay and Black-Female-Centered Narratives7. Who's the Hero of the Piece?: Hollywood's Representation of Jackie Robinson's Legacy8. Are We Allowed to Be Children?: Black Teen Films, Trauma, and the Race to AdulthoodPost-Credit SequenceNotesBibliographyIndex

In Expanding the Black Film Canon Lisa Doris Alexander utilizes historical contextualization and applicable theory to produce a valuable analysis of individual films and genres with African American representation of the past sixty years." - Gerald R. Butters Jr., author of Black Manhood on the Silent Screen"Expanding the Black Film Canon: Race and Genre across Six Decades by Lisa Doris Alexander offers a significant contribution to black film studies. This is the first sweeping book to cover a fifty-plus year history of black cinema. Expanding the Black Film Canon provides scholars the opportunity to scrutinize and debate black films that have been oft overlooked. Alexander provides a close textual analysis of films, characters, and genres in each decade. While she does discuss mainstream black films, her book is a significant departure from previous ones because of the scope and attention she gives to the finer points of those films that have been underrepresented in black film scholarship. Expanding the Black Film Canon not only opens the possibilities for future research on the films Alexander carefully explores but also continues a dialogue that challenges the ways scholars and others think about, view, and scrutinize black films. Her analysis is astute and insightful and makes a unique contribution to film studies in general." - Yvonne D. Sims, author of Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture