Black Manhood on the Silent Screen Gerald R. Butters, Jr. October 2002 296 pages, 12 photographs, 6 x 9 CultureAmerica Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1197-3, $35.00 In early-twentieth-century motion picture houses, offensive stereotypes of African Americans were as predictable as they were prevalent. Watermelon eating, chicken thievery, savages with uncontrollable appetites, Sambo and Zip Coon were all representations associated with African American people. Most of these caricatures were rendered by whites in blackface. Few people realize that from 1915 through 1929 a number of African American film directors worked diligently to counter such racist definitions of black manhood found in films like D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 epic that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. In the wake of the film’s phenomenal success, African American filmmakers sought to defend and redefine black manhood through motion pictures. Gerald Butters’s comprehensive study of the African American cinematic vision in silent film concentrates on works largely ignored by most contemporary film scholars: African American–produced and –directed films and white independent productions of all-black features. Using these “race movies” to explore the construction of masculine identity and the use of race in popular culture, he separates cinematic myth from historical reality: the myth of the Euro American–controlled cinematic portrayal of black men versus the actual black male experience. Through intense archival research, Butters reconstructs many lost films, expanding the discussion of race and representation beyond the debate about “good” and “bad” imagery to explore the construction of masculine identity and the use of race as device in the context of Western popular culture. He particularly examines the filmmaking of Oscar Micheaux, the most prolific and controversial of all African American silent film directors and creator of the recently rediscovered Within Our Gates—the legendary film that exposed a virtual litany of white abuses toward blacks. By showing how both white and black men have defined their own sense of manhood through cinema, Butters illuminates the intersection of race and gender in the movies and offers a deft interweaving of film theory, American history, and film history. “A defining work that fills in significant gaps in our knowledge of early African American cinema and its critical discourse.”—Ed Guerrero, author of Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film “Butters’s analysis of a large body of important films that are rarely discussed is a significant contribution to the field of film studies.”—J. Ronald Green, author of Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux “A meticulously researched work that contributes to our understanding of a vastly underrepresented area in film studies.”—Paula J. Massood, author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film “Performs an invaluable service to early American film studies and the overall study of gender and race in popular entertainment.”—Mark A. Reid, author of Redefining Black Film GERALD R. BUTTERS, JR., is assistant professor of history at Aurora University whose articles have appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly and the Journal of Multimedia History.   Home | About the Press | Recent Awards | Contact Us | Order New Books: | By Author | By Subject | By Title | By Series Books in Print: | By Author | By Subject | By Title | By Series ©2007 University Press of Kansas 2502 Westbrooke Circle, Lawrence, KS 66045-4444 Phone (785) 864-4155; Fax (785) 864-4586