Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms

Frank B. Wilderson III is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Drama at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of "Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid," winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the American Book Award. He is also the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

"I have not read anything as striking as Red, White & Black in some time. In this unsettling work, Frank B. Wilderson III theorizes the singularity of anti-Blackness as he refines our understanding of how political economy, popular culture, and law are shot through with identification and desire, pleasure and pain, sexuality and aggression. Anti-Blackness, which is carefully distinguished here from White supremacy, is not only an ideology and an institutional practice; it is also a structure of feeling with pervasive effects. This last, crucial point is glossed over by too many authors in their haste to provide rational analyses of and challenges to racism."oJared Sexton, author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism "Red, White & Black challenges scholars of film, race, ethnicity, American studies, and cultural studies to rethink many of the assumptions that animate our work. Pairing analyses of film representations of U.S. racial antagonisms animated by images of Blacks with those that work through images of Indians provides a new and exciting critical framework. Red, White & Black provokes scholars to reckon with the political implications of Frank B. Wilderson's call to think structures of Blackness, Whiteness, and Redness in the United States both in conjunction with and in contradistinction to each other."oKara Keeling, author of The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense "Red, White & Black is unique, incisive, and thought-provoking. The analytic frameworks that Frank B. Wilderson III develops surpass the conventional paradigms for exploring theory, race, power, and film in U.S. culture."oJoy James, editor of Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy