Cedric J. Robinson offers a new understanding of race in America
through his analysis of theater and film of the early twentieth
century. He argues that economic, political, and cultural forces
present in the eras of silent film and the early "talkies" firmly
entrenched limited representations of African Americans.
Robinson grounds his study in contexts that illuminate the parallel
growth of racial beliefs and capitalism, beginning with
Shakespearean England and the development of international trade.
He demonstrates how the needs of American commerce determined the
construction of successive racial regimes that were publicized in
the theater and in motion pictures, particularly through plantation
and jungle films. In addition to providing new depth and complexity
to the history of black representation, Robinson examines black
resistance to these practices. Whereas D. W. Griffith appropriated
black minstrelsy and romanticized a national myth of origins,
Robinson argues that Oscar Micheaux transcended uplift films to
create explicitly political critiques of the American national
myth. Robinson's analysis marks a new way of approaching the
intellectual, political, and media racism present in the beginnings
of American narrative cinema.