Postgraduate Course: Jim Crow at the Box Office: Cinema, Race, and Segregation during the Civil Rights Era (PGHC11626)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course charts the significant intersections between cinema, culture, and the African American civil rights movement in the middle decades of twentieth century. It encourages students to consider the cinema as a both historically segregated space and a site of onscreen racial representation, with vital significance for the United States' ideological position during the Cold War. |
| Course description |
The course assesses the relationship between African Americans and the cinema during the high point of the African American civil rights movement (c. 1940s-1970s). It examines concerns about representation onscreen as motivation for civil rights protest, and how cinemas proved an integral battle within wider efforts to desegregate public spaces in the United States. Meanwhile, the course will also explore how Americans used cinema to project a liberal image of racial progress around the world during the Cold War, charting efforts to disseminate Hollywood films at international film festivals and through the development of worldwide cinema chains.
The course documents Hollywood as a site of representation, but also a major employer, with a labour and civil rights history of its own. It also assesses Hollywood's role in developing and upholding key ideologies that hinder further racial progress in the United States, including the myth of 'colorblindness.'
Please note that students on this course will be expected to attend timetabled film screenings (fortnightly) as well as weekly seminars.
The study of History inevitably involves the study of difficult topics that we encourage students to approach in a respectful, scholarly, and sensitive manner. Nevertheless, we remain conscious that some students may wish to prepare themselves for the discussion of difficult topics. In particular, the course organiser has outlined that the following topics may be discussed in this course, whether in class or through required or recommended primary and secondary sources: racist ideas and stereotypes. While this list indicates sensitive topics students are likely to encounter, it is not exhaustive because course organisers cannot entirely predict the directions discussions may take in tutorials or seminars, or through the wider reading that students may conduct for the course.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting students should have at least 3 History courses at grade B or above (or be predicted to obtain this). We will only consider University/College level courses. Applicants should note that, as with other popular courses, meeting the minimum does NOT guarantee admission.
** as numbers are limited, visiting students should contact the Visiting Student Office directly for admission to this course ** |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Critically examine the intersections between the civil rights movement and Hollywood cinema
- Demonstrate wide reading and critical engagement with primary sources
- Organise and execute an independent research project on course themes
- Develop and produce a historically-sensitive work of film criticism
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Reading List
Jenny Woodley, Art for Equality: The NAACP's Cultural Campaign for Civil Rights (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014).
Francis G. Couvares (ed.), Movie Censorship and American Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
Ellen C. Scott, Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
Justin T. Lorts, 'Hollywood, the NAACP and the Cultural Politics of the Early Civil Rights Movement,' in Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011).
Stephen Tuck, 'You can sing and punch, but you can't be a soldier or a man': African American Struggles for a New Place in Popular Culture,' in Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement, edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Emilye Raymond, Stars for Freedom: Black Celebrities and the Civil Rights Movement (University of Washington Press, 2015).
Ross Melnick, Hollywood's Embassies: How American Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia University Press, 2022).
Christopher Sieving, Soul Searching: Black-Themed Cinema from the March on Washington to the Rise of Blaxpoitation (Wesleyan University Press, 2011).
Eithne Quinn, A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post-Civil Rights Hollywood (Columbia University Press, 2020).
Justin Gomer, White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Fluent written and verbal expression of ideas
Ability to read widely and engage critically with a variety of texts
Ability to identify historical salience of popular media
Independence of thought |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Megan Hunt
Tel: (0131 6)50 9110
Email: Megan.Hunt@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | |
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