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I am reading this Book, and it is rather funny the obstacle the Hollywood racist people faced on what to do with Othello. It is a very good book and I recommend very much!! It is more than history of Blacks and Hollywood. The first chapter (The inventions of the Negro) is fantastic! The problem faced by White racists on what to do with Shakespeare’s Othello (I can’t believe Wikipedia today questions his race and skin colour) and the translation of the Bible into English (King James’ version) and Karl Marx’s affection for ancient Greek (”he queried how two societies separated by more than two millennia, by different cultures, by the appearance of a new civilization (Christians), and by untold changes in the forms of productions could share criteria of physical beauty and literary artistry-CJP”)
quote: "There is nothing like this book. At once a magnificent work of social and cultural history, an anthropology of race, and a political economy of racial capitalism and Empire, this is the most original examination of the American film industry ever published. But like all of Robinson's work, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning does much more, extending over three centuries to reconstruct the roots of modern black representation in the works of Shakespeare, scientific discourse, and early minstrelsy. And his prodigious research has uncovered celluloid gems and theater works I never knew existed."--Robin D. G. Kelley, University of Southern California
"Cedric Robinson provides us with a distinctive and distinguished intervention in discussions of race, representation, and performance in American cinema and theater before World War II. This informative and engaging study offers an array of new and unexpected insights."--Charles Musser, Yale University
"Robinson explores an impressive variety of important films, sustaining his discussion with fresh, insightful angles on the political economy of each film. This book makes a significant contribution to several interwoven, discursive currents involving race and representation, social Darwinism and scientific racism, minstrelsy and modernism, the plantation and the jungle, and black cultural and political resistance to several 'racial regimes' working themselves out in politics, media, and the cinema in America."--Ed Guerrero, New York University
A quote from the book:
quote:The purpose of racism is to control the behaviour of white people, not Black people. For Blacks, guns and tanks are sufficient.
Otis Madison, “Confronting Racism”, January 1997
Djehuti Member # 6698
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^ Perhaps to better get back to the subject of this forum, you can discuss the invention of the "negro" in Hollywood and academia and how it relates to the portrayal Egypt, espcially in how ancient accounts by 'Classical' writers from Rome and Greece are ignored, or even the descriptions from the Bible itself are ignored by the very Christian white racists who attempted to use the Bible to justify their racism.
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