Wil Haygood in conversation with Simone C. Drake discussing Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World

Wednesday, November 3, 2021 - 7:00pm

Virtual Event

 

Wil Haygood in conversation with Simone C. Drake discussing Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World

Wednesday, November 3 at 7pm ET

Virtual Event on Zoom

Join us for Wil Haygood in conversation with Simone C. Drake discussing Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World.  Purchase the book or sign up below to receive a link to the event via email the day before the event.

This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies—from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther—using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. From the acclaimed author of The Butler and Showdown.

Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster—Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes.

He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves—including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others.

An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.

 

Wil Haygood is a former Boston Globe (where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist) and Washington Post reporter. Haygood has received writing fellowships from the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Alicia Patterson Foundations. His biographies of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall have been widely acclaimed. Haygood also wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Butler: A Witness to History, which was adapted into an award-winning movie. Haygood is currently serving an appointment as Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at his alma mater, Miami University, Ohio.

 

Dr. Simone Drake is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor of the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. Her interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on how people of African descent in the Americas negotiate the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation through the lenses of critical race, gender, and legal studies.

Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World By Wil Haygood Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9780525656876
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Knopf - October 19th, 2021

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