Book Launch: Alice Maurice and Stephen Johnson
The Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, The Cinema Studies Institute and The Centre for the Study of the United States,
University of Toronto are pleased to invite you to a
Book Launch
for
Alice Maurice's The Cinema and Its Shadow
&
Stephen Johnson's Burnt Cork
All Welcome
Please join us for a cinq-à-sept to celebrate the release of these two works on the performance of race in theatre and film
at
Elle M'a Dit
35 Baldwin St.,Toronto ON
5 – 7 pm
Friday April 12
The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
Alice Maurice, Associate Professor, English
The Cinema and Its Shadow argues that race has defined the cinematic apparatus since the earliest motion pictures, especially at times of technological transition. In particular, the book explores how racial difference became central to the resolving of cinematic problems: the stationary camera, narrative form, realism, the synchronization of image and sound, and, perhaps most fundamentally, the immaterial image—the cinema’s “shadow.” Maurice demonstrates how the rhetoric of race repeatedly embodies film technology, endowing it with a powerful mix of authenticity and magic. In this way, the racialized subject became the perfect medium for showing off, shoring up, and reintroducing the cinematic apparatus at various points in the history of American film.
Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012)
Edited by Stephen Johnson, Professor and Director,
Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies
A collection of original essays that brings together prominent scholars of blackface performance to reflect on a complex and troublesome tradition. Essays consider the early relationship of the blackface performer with American politics and the antislavery movement; the relationship of minstrels to the commonplace compromises of the touring “show” business and to the mechanization of the industrial revolution; the exploration and exploitation of blackface in the mass media, by D. W. Griffith and Spike Lee, in early sound animation, and in reality television; and the recent re-appropriation of the form at home and abroad. In addition to the editor, contributors include Dale Cockrell, Catherine Cole, Louis Chude-Sokei, W. T. Lhamon, Alice Maurice, Nicholas Sammond, and Linda Williams.
This collection was inspired by a University of Toronto Interdisciplinary Symposium, co-sponsored by the Drama Centre, the Cinema Studies Institute, the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and the Faculty of Music. For more information on the book, and the author/editor's other research/practice on blackface minstrelsy, The Juba Project, see http://burntcorkthebook.com/
* For inquiries or further details, please contact Jenn Cole at jenn.cole@utoronto.ca