Reading Race: Hollywood and the Cinema of Racial Violence »

Norman K. Denzin is Professor of Communications, Sociology and Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Editor of Studies in Symbolic Interaction: A Research Journal and The Sociological Quarterly, Dr. Denzin is the author of numerous books. He is the recipient of two awards from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction: The Cooley Award in 1988, and the George Herbert Mead Award for lifetime contribution to the study of human behavior in 1997.

In this insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, examining the relationship between film, race and culture.

Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination.

Booknews

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 , , , and , 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)