Imaging Blackness: Race and Racial Representation in Film Poster Art from the Allan Rogg Collection is the Featured Book for February.
Compiled, edited and curated by Audrey Thomas McCluskey, Associate Professor of African-American and African Dispora Studies, this book draws upon Prof. McCluskey’s years of experience and expertise when she was formerly the director of the Black Film Center Archive at Indiana University. The book presents a series of movie posters for the ‘race movies’ that were a part of cimatic history from the late 1920s through the early 1940s when African-Americans were largely barred from mainstream Hollywood productions (except for stereotypical roles as maids, butlers, and comic relief characters), necessitating independent and small budge productions featuring African-American casts.
Posters were a widespread means of advertising and promotion, designed to persuade members of the public to buy a ticket and see the film publicized by the images depicted in the poster material. Imaging Blackness shows the steady evolution of how African-American men and women were pictured on those posters in incremental changes that paralleled the discrimination and slow progress of change of the broader American culture. ~ Midwest Book Review, June 9, 2007
To see Imaging Blackness: Race and Racial Representation in Film Poster Art, come to Special Collections, located on the second floor of the Bartle Library (off of the North Reading Room and ask for SPEC COLL ROGG PN1995.9.P5 I45 2007. This book is also availabe in the general circulating collection and can be checked out from the Fine Arts Collection Stacks (same call number).