HOLLYWOOD AT THE INTERSECTION OF RACE AND IDENTITY, EDITOR 2019
"WIDE RANGING AND CRITICALLY DEEP, HOLLYWOOD AT THE INTERSECTION OF RACE AND IDENTITY ADDRESSES THE PERSISTENCE OF RACE IN HOLLYWOOD FILM WITH CONSIDERABLE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE INTERSECTION OF RACISM, MISOGYNY, AND IDENTITY WE SEE TODAY ON BIG AND SMALL SCREENS ALIKE." --DANIEL BERNARDI, EDITOR OF RACE IN AMERICAN FILM: VOICES AND VISIONS THAT SHAPED A NATION
"THIS IS A TIMELY COLLECTION - FORTHRIGHT, EXPANSIVE, AND RIGHT UP TO DATE. COMMONLY SITUATED AT THE MARGINS OF DISCUSSIONS OF RACE AND IDENTITY, INTERSECTIONALITY HERE IS PLACED AT THE CENTER, CRUCIAL TO UNDERSTANDING HOLLYWOOD'S UNEVEN ENGAGEMENT WITH RACE, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND ETHICS. THESE RIGOROUS AND GENEROUS READINGS OF KEY MOMENTS ACROSS CINEMA HISTORY REVEAL HOLLYWOOD ENCOUNTERING AND MARKING MORE FLUID SENSES OF IDENTITY THAN USUALLY CREDITED TO POPULAR FILM. IN ALL THIS BOOK SHOWS HOW, IN BELL HOOKS'S TERMS, HOLLYWOOD CAN 'MAKE CULTURE' IN PROBLEMATIC, REVEALING, AND SURPRISINGLY ANTICIPATORY WAYS." --JEFFREY GEIGER, AUTHOR OF AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY FILM: PROJECTING THE NATION
"KONZETT DESERVES THANKS FOR CURATING ANOTHER MUST-HAVE BOOK ON CINEMA STUDIES. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED." --CHOICE
This anthology explores the ways Hollywood represents race, gender, class, and nationality at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and its productive tensions. The essays ask to what degree can a close critical analysis of films, that is, reading them against their own ideological grain, reveal contradictions and tensions in Hollywood’s task of erecting normative cultural standards? How do some films perhaps knowingly undermine their inherent ideology by opening a field of conflicting and competing intersecting identities? The challenge set out in this volume is to revisit well-known films in search for a narrative not exclusively constituted by the Hollywood formula and to answer the questions: What lies beyond the frame? What elements contradict a film’s sustained illusion of a normative world? Where do films betray their own ideology and most importantly what intersectional spaces of identity do they reveal or conceal?
HOLLYWOOD'S HAWAII: RACE, NATION, AND WAR, 2017
"THIS BOOK COVERS AN ENTIRE HISTORY OF 'HOLLYWOOD HAWAII' AND DOES IT IN A SUPERLATIVE, UTTERLY INCLUSIVE MANNER—IN A TEXT THAT IS CLEAR, CONCISE, AND DEEPLY INFORMATIVE. THIS IS A MODEL OF ACCESSIBLE, YET RELIABLE SCHOLARSHIP." --WHEELER WINSTON DIXON, THE JAMES RYAN PROFESSOR OF FILM STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA, AUTHOR OF BLACK AND WHITE CINEMA: A SHORT HISTORY
"A MARVELOUSLY COMPREHENSIVE GAZE AT CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF HAWAI`I, THIS INSIGHTFUL STUDY SHOWS HOW THOSE FICTIONS CONSTITUTE AND ARE CONSTITUTED BY US IMPERIALISM, CHRISTIAN CAPITALISM, AND WHITE NATIONALISM. MOREOVER, THE IMAGINED SOUTH PACIFIC IS NOT A DISTANT, FLEETING PLEASURE BUT AN IMMINENT, DURABLE PRESENCE." --GARY Y. OKIHIRO, PROFESSOR AND FOUNDING DIRECTOR OF CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY AND RACE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF ISLAND WORLD: HAWAI`I AND THE UNITED STATES
Whether presented as exotic fantasy, a strategic location during World War II, or a site combining postwar leisure with military culture, Hawaii and the South Pacific figure prominently in the U.S. national imagination. Hollywood’s Hawaii is the first full-length study of the film industry’s intense engagement with the Pacific region from 1898 to the present.
Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett highlights films that mirror the cultural and political climate of the country over more than a century—from the era of U.S. imperialism on through Jim Crow racial segregation, the attack on Pearl Harbor and WWII, the civil rights movement, the contemporary articulation of consumer and leisure culture, as well as the buildup of the modern military industrial complex. Focusing on important cultural questions pertaining to race, nationhood, and war, Konzett offers a unique view of Hollywood film history produced about the national periphery for mainland U.S. audiences. Hollywood’s Hawaii presents a history of cinema that examines Hawaii and the Pacific and its representations in film in the context of colonialism, war, Orientalism, occupation, military buildup, and entertainment.
ETHNIC MODERNISMS, 2002
"DELIA KONZETT PRESENTS A COMPELLING ARGUMENT FOR THE NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF ETHNIC MODERNISMS. OFFERING ORIGINAL READINGS OF TEXTS BY ANIA YEZIERSKA, ZORA NEALE HURSTON, AND JEAN RHYS, SHE DEMONSTRATES THE IMPORTANCE OF THEIR TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES FOR MODERNIST AESTHETICS. IN ITS ARGUMENT FOR THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NARRATIVE DISPLACEMENT IN OUR UNDERSTANDING OF MODERNISM, THIS BOOK PUSHES CURRENT DEBATES ABOUT ETHNICITY, RACE, NATIONAL CULTURE, AND MODERNIST WRITING IN NEW AND PRODUCTIVE DIRECTIONS." --MARY LOU EMERY, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, AUTHOR OF MODERNISM, THE VISUAL, AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURE AND JEAN RHYS AT “WORLD'S END”: NOVELS OF COLONIAL AND SEXUAL EXILE
This study explores a new understanding of modernism and ethnicity as put forward in the transnational and diasporic writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. In its selection of three modernists from apparently different cultural backgrounds, it is meant to make us rethink the role of modernism in terms of ethnicity and displacement. Konzett critiques the traditional understanding of the monocultural 'ethnic identity' often highlighted in the studies of these writers and argues that all three writers are better understood as ironic narrators of diaspora and movement and as avant-garde modernists. As a result, they offer an alternative aesthetics of modernism which is centered around the innovative narration of displacement. Her analysis of the complexities of language and form and impact of the complex and ambiguous formal styles of the three writers on the history of their reception is a model of the effective integration of formalist, historicist, and theoretical perspectives in literary criticism.