232041 Nerds, Drug Dealers, Dancers, Baseball Players: Images that Injure on Film (S) (SoSe 2011)

From a comparative perspective, we will study films about/by African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latin@s (also called Hispanics) to establish the ways film makers engage with U.S. American codes of whiteness. Media analysis will help us understand how films tell members of the abovementioned ethnic minorities (and others) the way these groups fit into the pattern of the US American fabric as the nation continues to struggle with unresolved issues of race and ethnicity at the beginning of the 21st century. With the help of theoretical texts students will trace how essentializing images of ethnic minorities have been embodied in U.S. American entertainment in order to control and monitor the growth of racial and ethnic diversity which too often have been portrayed as “the” national problem par excellence. The course will also take a look at self fashioning attempts by minority members to reclaim a contingent identity which is dependent on social praxis and lived reality.

Literaturangaben

A Reader will be made available in the first session.