Book Launch: Professor Alice Mikal Craven's "Visible and Invisible Whiteness: American White Supremacy Through the Cinematic Lens"

AUP's Film department is delighted to invite you to a book launch, reading and conversation with Alice Mikal Craven in celebration of her new book, Visible and Invisible Whiteness - American White Supremacy through the Cinematic Lens. 

The book examines the complicity between Classical Hollywood narratives or genres and representations of white supremacy in the cinema. Close readings of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation by James Agee and James Baldwin explore these authors’ perspectives on the American mythologies which ground Griffith’s film. The intersectionality of Bordwell’s theories on Classical Hollywood Narrative versus Art Cinema, and Richard Dyer’s seminal work on whiteness form the theoretical base for the book. The book features film undervalued or banned due to their hybrid natures with respect to Hollywood and Art Cinema techniques, such as Samuel Fuller’s White Dog and Jean Renoir’s The Southerner. The book offers comparative analyses of American studio-based directors as well as European and European émigrés directors and provides insight for those concerned about re-emerging white supremacist tensions in contemporary America.