Overview

How did the US South contribute to the development of film? And how did film shape the modern South? In Fade In, Crossroads, Robert Jackson tells the story of the relationships between southerners and motion pictures from the silent era through the golden age of Hollywood. Jackson reveals the profound consequences of the coincidence of the rise and fall of the American film industry with the rise and fall of the South's most important modern product and export: Jim Crow segregation. He considers southern historical legacies on film, from popular Civil War films and comparably popular lynching films emerging in a time of prolific lynching in the South, to the resilient race film industry whose African American filmmakers forged an independent cinematic movement in defiance of the racial restrictions of both the South and Hollywood. He also traces the influence of film on future participants in the Civil Rights Movement, from prominent leaders such as Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall to film-industry veterans like Lena Horne and Paul Robeson to the millions of ordinary people, black and white, who found themselves caught up in the struggle for racial equality in the modern United States.

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9780190660215

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Reviews

"""An extremely fascinating work on southern cinema that extends from actors, literary figures, and industry workers who influenced popular representations of the South to filmmakers who built homes emulating southern mansions to actors who brought their own interpretations of the South to the screen. Jackson intricately interweaves the contributions of African American cinema into this discussion, making it integral to rather than tangential to this engaging, thoughtful, and well researched examination of the South's influence on Hollywood.""-- Charlene Regester, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill ""Covering both the famous and the obscure, Jackson's exciting and often surprising volume shows how integral southern topics and southern people were to filmmaking through the 1940s."" --Ted Ownby, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi"

Author Information

Robert Jackson is an James G. Watson Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, where he is also affiliated with programs in Film Studies and African American Studies. Specializing in cultural studies of the modern United States, he works at the intersection of literature, film and media studies, and social history. Among his prior publications is Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture: Modernity, Dissidence, Innovation (2005).

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