Benedict Stork 

TTH 6:00pm-8:05pm 

This course focuses on the representation of race and class in American cinema in order to consider the ways film shapes our understanding of, and helps reproduce, the dominant U.S. social order. Inseparable from, yet also irreducible to, one another, “Race and Class in American Cinema” looks to unpack the relationship between “race” and “class” by studying its appearance in American film. Since Hollywood, and the entertainment industry generally, are historically invested in the construction of race and, as capitalist enterprises, structurally committed to the reproduction of a class society, film is an apt site for exploring the contradictions endemic to a society whose self-conception celebrates freedom and equality, but whose history testifies to inequality and domination. This course, then, explores American cinematic representations of “race” and “class” as contestations over the meaning of identity, equality, and liberation within the constraints of the existing status quo. Students will study examples from throughout the history or American cinema, including “landmark” films like The Birth of a Nation), contemporary popular movies such as Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians, as well as independent, documentary, and experimental films from outside the mainstream commercial cinema.