Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson

This is one of the greatest books I have ever read. I'm somewhat interested in film studies but more so interested in race and I found this analysis of the melodramatic depictions of race across the mediums of stage, film, and trials to be very enlightening. One of the greatest things about Linda Williams is that she does not condemn or overpraise. She analyzes everything dialectically. While one might abhor, for instance, blackface minstrelsy that denigrated African Americans, Linda Williams makes the point that it was first through blackface that whites gained a sense of the humanity of blacks, all the while making fun of them.The style of the book is readable. Linda Williams is an intellectual but she manages to make her work accessible to those who have not studied film academically. Familiarity with the concept of modernism would help with the first chapter, but is not necessary. If you have studied Morrison, Fanon, Nietzsche, Benjamin and the other thinkers Linda Williams makes brief references to, you will probably get a richer understanding of this book. However, speaking for someone who is only moderately familiar with those intellectuals, I nevertheless gained a deep understanding of the book. Linda Williams is a very competent writer.

Needed this for a class on race and diversity. Interesting, extremely poignant, even more so now than when I took the class.

This is Film Studies of the first order. Williams takes the idea of melodrama as a mode and intersects it with issues of race and its representation. According to her, in conjuction with the popularity or in the legitimization of a particular medium in American society, the representations of the black male and female bodies take on center stage and gain new significations. The book starts out with Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and shows how it stays and strays away from the conventions of the Victorian novel. It then focuses on the Stowe's characterization of the black bodies and how they elicited the sympathy of the readers. Next, it shows how Dixon, with his novel "The Clansmen,' either changes or reverses Stowe's characterizations and themes to elicit another kind of response. However, it is D.W. Griffith's adaptation of the novel, "Birth of the Nation" that had a powerful influence in the society's imagination. Not only did the film legitimize the medium as an art form, it also gave the public a new way of understanding race relations in America. The book covers both the novel and the movie adaptation of "Gone With the Wind" and other cultural texts and ends with the televised trial of O.J. Simpson while keeping on the other eye issues of representation. Linda Williams' project is both multi-disciplinary and multi-media and she weaves them together in a rich study of melodrama as a cultural mode and the ever evolving nature of race relations and representations in our society. She wittily uses Henry James' imagery of the 'leaping fish' to show how melodrama dynamically moves from one medium to the next. Each time it makes an appearance in a big way, it also entails a recasting of black and white or racial representations. Williams achievement lies in her ability to pull together a variety of texts and approaches to engage upon the central issue of race. And she does this in clear, well-written prose. Although this is more like a work of cultural criticism, the book also opens up the possibilities of film studies as a powerful lens or a way of approaching cinema-related queries and dealing with socio-historical matters.