Hollywood's Invisible Men: Black Soldiers and the Transformation of American Cinema

FAIN: FT-229609-15

Elizabeth Reich
Connecticut College (New London, CT 06320-4125)

Summer research and writing on African American Studies, Film History and Criticism and U.S. History.

"Hollywood's Invisible Men" offers the first book-length study of the cinematic black soldier. The book traces the transformation of racial representation and politics in American cinema over the thirty years of the long Civil Rights Movement, focusing on this iconic figure. Following this filmic figure alongside the shifting political imperatives of the Cold War and civil rights struggles, "Hollywood's Invisible Men" argues that the cinematic black soldier became central to the development of a new practice of film spectatorship, one that changed along with the images and meanings of the soldier itself. Bringing together the black soldier films of three decades and film industries, this book project makes three distinct contributions to scholarship in the fields of cinema studies, African American studies, and history: it identifies and analyzes a new cinematic archive; it offers a new history of American cinema; and it proposes a new theory of spectatorship practices.

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