Uplift Cinema

Even before The Birth of a Nation, African American filmmakers envisioned cinema as a means of presenting a new image of black culture in the USA. With peerless archaeological research, Allyson Nadia Field excavates the roots of African American film within a rhetoric of social uplift. Offering more than a prologue to later black filmmaking, Field reveals the origins of an alternative film culture based in ideological address and political rhetoric, as cinema forged an effective political voice. -- Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity A significant and remarkable book, Uplift Cinema revises African American cinematic history. Allyson Field's illuminating scholarship and close reading of primary archival sources will compel historians to reimagine how the history of black cinema is told. -- Maurice Wallace, author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideology in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 Undaunted by the profound lack of surviving films, Allyson Nadia Field deftly excavates the rich discursive history of how African Americans mobilized and fine-tuned the rhetoric of uplift in the context of visual culture. Uplift Cinema is an essential mapping of the ideological, economic, and aesthetic tensions structuring the emergence of Black American film production and exhibition, and a vital account of Black participation in the history of industrial filmmaking. -- Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity Allyson Nadia Field in Uplift Cinema has immediately established herself as a leading scholar in the study of early black film... Uplift Cinema is written in a highly accessible style for historians of all stripes. Most importantly, the volume will be seminal not only for scholars of black film but also for those working in African American history and the early Progressive Era. -- Gerald R. Butters Jr. Journal of American History