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11%OFFArthur Knight - Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film - 9780822329633 - V9780822329633
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Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film

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Description for Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film paperback. The history of African Americans in film musicals and their reception by Black audiences and critics. Num Pages: 352 pages, 68 b&w photos, 5 figures. BIC Classification: 1KBB; APF; JFSL3. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 5969 x 3963 x 31. Weight in Grams: 730.
From the earliest sound films to the present, American cinema has represented African Americans as decidedly musical. Disintegrating the Musical tracks and analyzes this history of musical representations of African Americans, from blacks and whites in blackface to black-cast musicals to jazz shorts, from sorrow songs to show tunes to bebop and beyond.

Arthur Knight focuses on American film’s classic sound era, when Hollywood studios made eight all-black-cast musicals—a focus on Afro-America unparalleled in any other genre. It was during this same period that the first black film stars—Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge—emerged, not coincidentally, ... Read more

Disintegrating the Musical covers territory both familiar—Show Boat, Stormy Weather, Porgy and Bess—and obscure—musical films by pioneer black director Oscar Micheaux, Lena Horne’s first film The Duke Is Tops, specialty numbers tucked into better-known features, and lost classics like the short Jammin’ the Blues. It considers the social and cultural contexts from which these films arose and how African American critics and audiences responded to them. Finally, Disintegrating the Musical shows how this history connects with the present practices of contemporary musical films like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Bamboozled.

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Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2002
Publisher
Duke University Press United States
Number of pages
352
Condition
New
Number of Pages
352
Place of Publication
North Carolina, United States
ISBN
9780822329633
SKU
V9780822329633
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Arthur Knight
Arthur Knight is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William & Mary. He is coeditor of Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, published by Duke University Press.

Reviews for Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film
“African American influence on American music is legendary, but not until Arthur Knight’s Disintegrating the Musical have African American contributions to the Hollywood musical been put in the spotlight. Finally, we have a first-rate book offering a new slant on everything from blackface and Paul Robeson to the film version of Porgy and Bess.”—Rick Altman, University of Iowa “Knight’s fine ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film


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