The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts [Hardcover]

In The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts, Barbara Tepa Lupackexplores the rampant racial and gender stereotyping depicted in early cinema, demonstrating how those stereotypes helped shape American attitudes and practices. Using social, cultural, literary, and cinema history as a focus, this book offers insights into issues of Othering, including discrimination, exclusion, and sexism, that are as timely today as they were a century ago. Lupack not only examines the ways that dominant cinema of the era imprinted indelible and pejorative images of womenincluding African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and New Women/Suffragistsbut also reveals the ways in which a number of pioneering early filmmakers and performers attempted to counter those depictions by challenging the imagery, interrogating the stereotypes, and re-politicizing the familiar narratives. Scholars of film, gender, history, and race studies will find this book of particular interest.Barbara Tepa Lupack is former professor of English at Wayne State College and academic dean at SUNY.Barbara Lupack's incisive analysis of pejorative female stereotypes common during cinema's earliest decades brilliantly illuminates the broader workings of American popular and political cultures of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Considering our own moment, when malignant media distortions and untruths have become all the more difficult to discern, and are routinely proclaimed at the highest levels of power, Lupack's corrective history couldn't be more relevant, or urgent. Ken Fox, Head of Library and Archives, George Eastman Museum

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Note on Terminology and Usage
Introduction
Chapter 1: African Americans
Chapter 2: African Americans: Race Films
Chapter 3: Native Americans
Chapter 4: Native Americans: Native Responses
Chapter 5: Latins
Chapter 6: Asians
Chapter 7: The New Woman
Chapter 8: Sul30