Seeing Red Hollywoods Pixeled Skins

At once informative, comic, and plaintive, Seeing Red—Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins is an anthology of critical reviews that reexamines the ways in which American Indians have traditionally been portrayed in film. From George B. Seitz’s 1925 The Vanishing American to Rick Schroder’s 2004 Black Cloud, these 36 reviews by prominent scholars of American Indian Studies are accessible, personal, intimate, and oftentimes autobiographic. Seeing Red—Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins offers indispensible perspectives from American Indian cultures to foreground the dramatic, frequently ridiculous difference between the experiences of Native peoples and their depiction in film. By pointing out and poking fun at the dominant ideologies and perpetuation of stereotypes of Native Americans in Hollywood, the book gives readers the ability to recognize both good filmmaking and the dangers of misrepresenting aboriginal peoples. The anthology offers a method to historicize and contextualize cinematic representations spanning the blatantly racist, to the well-intentioned, to more recent independent productions. Seeing Red is a unique collaboration by scholars in American Indian Studies that draws on the stereotypical representations of the past to suggest ways of seeing American Indians and indigenous peoples more clearly in the twenty-first century.

Echoing and expanding the aims of the first volume, Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art, this second volume contains illuminating global Indigenous visualities concerning First Nations, Aboriginal Australian, Maori, and Sami peoples. This insightful collection of essays explores how identity is created and communicated through Indigenous film-, video-, and art-making; what role these practices play in contemporary cultural revitalization; and how indigenous creators revisit media pasts and resignify dominant discourses through their work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Visualities Two draws on American Indian studies, film studies, art history, cultural studies, visual culture studies, women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. Among the artists and media makers examined are Tasha Hubbard, Rachel Perkins, and Ehren “Bear Witness” Thomas, as well as contemporary Inuit artists and Indigenous agents of cultural production working to reimagine digital and social platforms. Films analyzed include The Exiles, Winter in the Blood, The Spirit of Annie Mae, Radiance, One Night the Moon, Bran Nue Dae, Ngati, Shimásání, and Sami Blood.

Liza Black critically examines the inner workings of post–World War II American films and production studios that cast American Indian extras and actors as Native people, forcing them to come face to face with mainstream representations of “Indianness.”

In the decades since the passing of the Pamajewon ruling in Canada and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in the United States, gaming has come to play a crucial role in how Indigenous peoples are represented and read by both Indians and non-Indians alike. This collection presents a transnational examination of North American gaming and considers the role Indigenous artists and scholars play in producing depictions of Indigenous gambling. In an effort to offer a more complete and nuanced picture of Indigenous gaming in terms of sign and strategy than currently exists in academia or the general public, Gambling on Authenticity crosses both disciplinary and geographic boundaries. The case studies presented offer a historically and politically nuanced analysis of gaming that collectively creates an interdisciplinary reading of gaming informed by both the social sciences and the humanities. A great tool for the classroom, Gambling on Authenticity works to illuminate the not-so-new Indian being formed in the public's consciousness by and through gaming.

This work demonstrates that not everything that Disney touched turned to gold. In its first 100 years, the company had major successes that transformed filmmaking and culture, but it also had its share of unfinished projects, unmet expectations, and box-office misses. Some works failed but nevertheless led to other more stunning and lucrative ones; others shed light on periods when the Disney Company was struggling to establish or re-establish its brand. In addition, many Disney properties, popular in their time but lost to modern audiences, emerge as forgotten gems. By exploring the studio's missteps, this book provides a more complex portrayal of the history of the company than one would gain from a simple recounting of its many hits. With essays by writers from across the globe, it also asserts that what endures or is forgotten varies from person to person, place to place, or generation to generation. What one dismisses, someone else recalls with deep fondness as a magical Disney memory.

A comprehensive and insightful examination of the representation of diverse viewpoints and perspectives in American cinema throughout the 20th and 21st centuries America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, now in its third edition, is an authoritative and lively examination of diversity issues within American cinema. Celebrated authors and academics Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin provide readers with a comprehensive discussion and overview of the industrial, socio-cultural, and aesthetic factors that contribute to cinematic representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. The book incorporates several different theoretical perspectives, including film genre, auteurism, cultural studies, Orientalism, the "male gaze," feminism, and queer theory. The authors examine each selected subject via representative films, figures, and movements. Each chapter also includes an in-depth analysis of a single film to illuminate and inform its discussion of the chosen topic. America on Film fearlessly approaches and tackles several controversial areas of representation in film, including the portrayal of both masculinity and femininity in film and African- and Asian-Americans in film. It devotes the entirety of Part V to an analysis of the depiction of sex and sexuality in American film, with a particular emphasis on the portrayal of homosexuality. Topics covered include: The structure and history of American filmmaking, including a discussion of the evolution of the business of Hollywood cinema African Americans and American film, with a discussion of BlacKkKlansman informing its examination of broader issues Asian, Latin/x, and Native Americans on film Classical Hollywood cinema and class, with an in-depth examination of The Florida Project Women in classical Hollywood filmmaking, including a discussion of the 1955 film, All that Heaven Allows Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students in film, media, and diversity-related courses, the book also belongs on the shelves of anyone interested in diversity issues in the context of American studies, communications, history, or gender studies. Lastly, it's ideal for use within corporate diversity training curricula and human relations training within the entertainment industry.

This book is a cultural history of the interplay between the Western genre and American gun rights and legal paradigms. From muskets in the hands of landed gentry opposing tyrannical government to hidden pistols kept to ward off potential attackers, the historical development of entwined legal and cultural discourses has sanctified the use of gun violence by private citizens and specified the conditions under which such violence may be legally justified. Gunslinging justice explores how the Western genre has imagined new justifications for gun violence which American law seems ever-eager to adopt.

The Western in the Global South investigates the Western film genre's impact, migrations, and reconfigurations in the Global South. Contributors explore how cosmopolitan directors have engaged with, appropriated, and subverted the tropes and conventions of Hollywood and Italian Westerns, and how Global South Westerns and Post-Westerns in particular address the inequities brought about by postcolonial patriarchy, globalization and neoliberalism. The book offers a wide range of historical engagements with the genre, from African, Caribbean, South and Southeast Asian, Central and South American, and transnational directors. The contributors employ interdisciplinary cultural studies approaches to cinema, integrating aesthetic considerations with historical, political, and gender studies readings of the international appropriations and U.S. re-appropriations of the Western genre.

Artists and filmmakers in the early twentieth century reshaped our vision of the American West. In particular, the Taos Society of Artists and the California-based artist Maynard Dixon departed from the legendary depiction of the “Wild West” and fostered new images, or brands, for western art. This volume, illustrated with more than 150 images, examines select paintings and films to demonstrate how these artists both enhanced and contradicted earlier representations of the West. Prior to this period, American art tended to portray the West as a wild frontier with untamed lands and peoples. Renowned artists such as Henry Farny and Frederic Remington set their work in the past, invoking an environment immersed in conflict and violence. This trademark perspective began to change, however, when artists enamored with the Southwest stamped a new imprint on their paintings. The contributors to this volume illuminate the complex ways in which early-twentieth-century artists, as well as filmmakers, evoked a southwestern environment not just suspended in time but also permanent rather than transient. Yet, as the authors also reveal, these artists were not entirely immune to the siren call of the vanishing West, and their portrayal of peaceful yet “exotic” Native Americans was an expansion rather than a dismissal of earlier tropes. Both brands cast a romantic spell on the West, and both have been seared into public consciousness. Branding the American West is published in association with the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah, and the Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas.

"This book explores Indigenous American literature and the development of an inter- and trans-Indigenous orientation in Native American and Indigenous literary studies. Drawing on the perspectives of scholars in the field, it seeks to reconcile tribal nation specificity, Indigenous literary nationalism, and trans-Indigenous methodologies as necessary components of post-Renaissance Native American and Indigenous literary studies. It looks at the work of Renaissance writers, including Louise Erdrich's Tracks (1988) and Leslie Marmon Silko's Sacred Water (1993), along with novels by S. Alice Callahan and John Milton Oskison. It also discusses Indigenous poetics and Salt Publishing's Earthworks series, focusing on poets of the Renaissance in conversation with emerging writers. Furthermore, it introduces contemporary readers to many American Indian writers from the seventeenth to the first half of the nineteenth century, from Captain Joseph Johnson and Ben Uncas to Samson Occom, Samuel Ashpo, Henry Quaquaquid, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, Sarah Simon, Mary Occom, and Elijah Wimpey. The book examines Inuit literature in Inuktitut, bilingual Mexicanoh and Spanish poetry, and literature in Indian Territory, Nunavut, the Huasteca, Yucatán, and the Great Lakes region. It considers Indigenous literatures north of the Medicine Line, particularly francophone writing by Indigenous authors in Quebec. Other issues tackled by the book include racial and blood identities that continue to divide Indigenous nations and communities, as well as the role of colleges and universities in the development of Indigenous literary studies".