Cross-listed with USLT480. Credit only granted for USLT498C, USLT480 or AMST498P.

Explores a century of representations of race and racism in US cinema, both via Hollywood s studio system and through more marginali (independent) productions. We examine film and identity through multiple methodological lenses, including film history, formalist critique, audiereception analysis, and film and media theory. Our focus will be the politics and poetics of racial exclusion and inclusion, power and resistance, and integration and separatism in shaping and defining the national imagined community.