Hollywood and the Black Stickup : Race and the Meaning of the heist on the Big White Screen
- Submitting institution
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The University of Lancaster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 237198901
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- The Best Laid Plans : Interrogating the Heist Film
- Publisher
- Wayne State University Press
- ISBN
- 9780814342244
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This chapter is the first to consider the significance of the heist in the history of black-themed American cinema since 1959. It was published in a volume that breaks new ground in the study of the crime film, a major area of film production and academic enquiry. The chapter contributes an innovative identification and analysis of films that have not been subject to rigorous and serious study before in the field. It reveals how the heist film has been and continues to be a significant dramatic vehicle in raising and demystifying issues of race discrimination through its capacity to expose relationships between capitalism and race prejudice, and rationalises the motivation to rob as a function of disenfranchisement. The chapter makes a significant contribution to film theory, through its exploration of the principles of surveillance that are so critical to black-themed heist films. The success of the robbery in black-themed heist films depends on indulging the racist tenets of our film reading practices. In connecting the black heist to the trope of ‘hiding in plain sight’ and practices of racial profiling and suspect identification, the chapter reveals and then questions the underlying prejudice that informs accepted understandings of how the ‘gaze’ operates in cinema—providing a productive way to refine this key theoretical concept in film studies. The chapter was based on a funded presentation delivered at a major international conference financed by the German Research Council (DFG), Black America and the Police, at the University of Bamberg in 2016 (http://www.black-america-and-the-police.com/) an original initiative that brought prominent academics in the area of African American Studies into conversation with African-American artist-activists.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -