3.0

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The course will investigate American cinematic representations of African Americans, slavery (and more specifically its absence), the Civil War, and racial formation along the United States’ southwestern frontier in films produced from the 1950s through the contemporary period. The course closely examines American cinematic fantasies of the western frontier, frontier violence and the desire to escape or erase the tensions of race and slavery that have deeply permeated the American cultural consciousness, strongly shaping the production of American masculine ideals. The course will also take decided note of the national shift from liberal “Great Society Programs” of the 1960s to the conservative “neoliberal” social and cultural ideals in the 1980s and 1990s. Our purpose is to consider the organization and reformation of hegemonic power by way of the complex morality play the western film evokes, typically considering the interstitial geographies between blackness and whiteness, civilization and savagery, belonging and alienation, and metropolis and colonial outpost. We will privilege in our discussions the contested frontiers of racial dominion. Films include “Buck and the Preacher,” “The Battle of Algiers,” “Sgt. Rutledge,” and “Django Unchained.”