Table of Contents

Introduction-- Mia Mask 1. Paul Robeson and the End of His "Movie" Career-- by Charles Musser 2. The Burden of the Beautiful Beast: Visualization and the Black Male Body-- by Keith M. Harris 3. Reckless Eyeballing: Coonskin, Film Blackness and the Racial Grotesque-- by Michael B, Gillespie 4. The Measure of Men: Legacies of Poitier’s A Piece of the Action-- by Ian Gregory Strachan 5. Bamboozled: In the Mirror of Abjection-- by Ed Guerrero 6. Between Documentary and the Avant-Garde: Exploring the Visual Poetics of Ruins in Christopher Harris’s still/here-- by Terri Francis 7. Who’s Behind that Fat Suit?: Momma, Medea, Rasputia and the Politics of Cross-Dressing-- by Mia Mask 8. Disney’s Improvisation: New Orleans' Second Line, Racial Masquerade and the Reproduction of Whiteness in The Princess and the Frog-- by Sarita McCoy Gregory 9. Shadowboxing: Lee Daniels's Nonrepresentational Cinema-- by Alessandra Raengo 10. "I'm a Militant Queen": Queering Blaxploitation Films-- by Angelique Harris 11. Street Girls With No Future?: Black Women Coming of Age in the City-- by Paula Massood

About the Author

Mia Mask, Associate Professor of Film at Vassar College, is the author ofaDivas on Screen: Black Women in American Film.aShe has written film reviews and covered festivals foraCineaste, IndieWire.com,aThe Village Voice,aFilm Quarterly,aTime Out New York,aandaThe Poughkeepsie Journal. Her criticism was anthologized inaThe Best American Movie Writing (1999), and her cultural commentary can be heard on National Public Radio. Her essays have been published in theaAfrican American National Biography,aFilm and Literature, andaAmerican Cinema of the 1970s.

Reviews

'Appropriate for any collection of texts dealing with African American studies, cultural studies, and film or media studies, Contemporary Black American Cinema is a fascinating and diverse collection of essays...it is undoubtedly a valuable asset for any library striving to maintain a collection of current and significant works on race and representation.'Cate Blouke, English and Third World Literatures Review of Books