Reading Race—Hollywood and the Cinema of Racial Violence

Denzin (communications, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), arguing that the contemporary history of race relations in America is reflected by the representation of violent, youthful minority group members in Hollywood cinema, analyzes Hollywood's" cinema of racial violence" for what it reveals about the inability of American society to fully understand the conflict between its creed of fundamental equality and the segregationist and discriminatory realities of society. Focusing on such films as Do the Right Thing , White Men Can't Jump , Dangerous Minds , and Just Another Girl on the IRT , he contends that mainstream film in the 1990s contributed to the production of a new racial discourse that connects race to a culture of violence. The gaze of the camera thereby became aligned with the conservative laws of patriarchy and the state, making colored people the objects of a white panoptic system of social control and surveillance. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)