Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender & Race, 1903-1967 (review)

In Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender & Race, 1903–1967, Susan Courtney explores the visualization of black and white sexual relations in film—showing, at times, how the gender of the parties depicted shapes perceptions of meaning. These Hollywood fantasies of miscegenation—as Courtney defines them—appear and disappear in film according to the social relations within a given historical moment, which impacts the politics of the cinema. "When cinematic energy has not been expended on showing [fantasies of miscegenation] to us," writes Courtney, "it has been spent in equally meaningful ways on withholding [interracial pairings] from view" (5). The history of the enslavement of Africans in America and continuing strife in race relations since has spurred rectifications to discrimination ranging from legal legislation to ongoing social experiments. Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation reveals how the film industry has acted in kind. The Production Codes, for example, which were in effect between the years of 1930–1956, acted as an arm of Jim Crow segregation, by mandating filmmakers not illustrate or make suggestions to sexual relationships between black and white people. Courtney thus presents readers with a fascinating and densely described study of the intertwinement of history and the cinema, with the latter acting as an apparatus of racial and sexual hegemony, and the former acting as a social map of race and gender boundaries. By pursuing the obfuscation and construction of interracial pairings in film, Courtney argues that the retraction of such pairings and later the exploitation of them significantly informs how difference and identity is constituted in the U.S. In so doing, Courtney's text provides provocative questions and answers concerning the cinema's spectacular narratives of race, gender, and sex in the first half of the twentieth century.

Films, court documents, film executive's memos, literature, periodicals, and polemical autobiographies of Black nationalists such as Eldridge Cleaver serve as only a few examples of the source material that Courtney employs for this finely crafted theoretical explication of the triangular relationship between the cinema, it's films, and spectators. The book's thesis is organized around the significant impact of the Production Codes. Courtney shows how from the turn of the century to the mid-twentieth century, filmmakers upheld and circumvented cinema's racialized mandate. By showing white actors in blackface, for example, early twentieth century filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith could "flirt" with the idea of interracial sexual unions between blacks and whites in order to titillate spectators and simultaneously instill fear concerning sexual crossings across constructed racial categories. Griffith's pathological construction was more than a remnant of slavery and the Reconstruction era's fantasy of the black male rapist. Such filmic distortions helped to encourage the creation of the Production Codes, by linking white female suffering on the silver screen at the hands of so-called "black brutes," to the imagined material suffering that white spectators and therefore the white populace believed to experience in the post emancipation era. Silent white women—literally and figuratively—became the cinematic sign and the signifier for America's very real system of racial apartheid.

After the passing of the codes, spectators became ever more equipped and trained to see race within the terms of society's and the cinema's purposeful racial segregation of black and white bodies. While Courtney uses the usual filmic suspect, Griffith's Birth of a Nation as a textual example, the author introduces lesser-discussed filmic texts of Griffith's that explore class and ethnic biases. In so doing, she provides a fresher discussion to well-known territory in ethnic and film studies. Films such as The Adventures of Dollie, The Lonely Villa, A Woman Scorned, and Unseen Enemy, argues Courtney, attempt to visually mark the assumed threat of difference to white bourgeois womanhood, and her re-readings of the more familiar racialized narratives of The Girls and Daddy and Birth of a Nation seek to address—to borrow phrasing from George...