This course examines the modern African American experience through an analysis of film culture, broadly defined as the production,
dissemination, and reception of motion pictures by the wider American public. Film was and remains a primary medium of cultural norms, mores and attitudes regarding race -specifically blackness- in America. From the emergence of the medium in the early twentieth century through to the present day, cinematic representations of blackness have been crucial in shaping American racial consciousness. Analyses of African Americans in film -as both subjects and producers- reveals shifting understandings of racial identity and ideology and its attendant intersectional dynamics of gender, class and sexuality. From the virulent anti-blackness of Birth of a Nation, to the black made race films of the Harlem Renaissance, through to the respectability politics of the Civil Rights era films, the anti-establishment ethos of Blaxploitation cinema to the present-day resurgence of black film making in multimillion IPs such as the MCU, the histories of black lives on film provides unique insight into what it means to be black in America.