Скачать или смотреть Survey of Racial Tropes in Modern Media Derived from African Slave Stereotypes

Presented by Linda Yager
Meredith College CSA Day 2020
#Meredith CSA
View the 2020 CSA Program Booklet at https://tinyurl.com/CSAProgramBooklet

Abstract:
Racist tropes and stereotypes were an early feature of Hollywood films. Beginning with Birth of a Nation, people of color were ridiculed and portrayed in ways that were demeaning, oppressive, and racist. While the depiction of people of color and other marginalized groups has improved, racist tropes and attitudes are still a part of contemporary American cinema. Comparing and contrasting symbols and tropes from different eras in American cinema reveals that these stereotypes are still deployed, albeit in more subtle ways. Beginning with Stuart Hall’s notion of encoding and decoding, and drawing from material culture theorists Glassie and Miller, this paper will consider how these images are encoded for and decoded by audiences, and how the presence of racist stereotypes continues to shape attitudes towards members of marginalized communities. Given this problematic past and the social stigma attached to racist ideologies and images, the presence of racist symbols and images in contemporary media raises questions about what meaning can be assigned to their continued use relative to the obviously racist meaning from early the early days of American cinema. This paper explores these questions by locating racism in the use of attitudes, symbols, and stereotypes derived from African slave stereotypes which became associated with the Confederacy as the material objects associated with the Confederacy are easily identifiable and have been used as a shorthand for a particular type of racism directed at people of color. The films to be considered include Birth of a Nation (1915), The Littlest Rebel (1935), and the recent film The Martian (2015).