In this study of Hollywood gangster films, Jonathan Munby examines their controversial content and how it was subjected to continual moral and political censure. Beginning in the early 1930s, these films told compelling stories about ethnic urban lower-class desires to "make it" in an America dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideals and devastated by the Great Depression. By the late 1940s, however, their focus shifted to the problems of a culture maladjusting to a new peacetime sociopolitical order governed by corporate capitalism. The gangster no longer challenged the establishment;...
In this study of Hollywood gangster films, Jonathan Munby examines their controversial content and how it was subjected to continual moral and politic...
What accounts for the persistence of the figure of the black criminal in popular culture created by African Americans? Unearthing the overlooked history of art that has often seemed at odds with the politics of civil rights and racial advancement, "Under a Bad Sign" explores the rationale behind this tradition of criminal self-representation from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary gangsta culture. In this lively exploration, Jonathan Munby takes a uniquely broad view, laying bare the way the criminal appears within and moves among literary, musical, and visual arts. Munby traces...
What accounts for the persistence of the figure of the black criminal in popular culture created by African Americans? Unearthing the overlooked hi...
What accounts for the persistence of the figure of the black criminal in popular culture created by African Americans? Unearthing the overlooked history of art that has often seemed at odds with the politics of civil rights and racial advancement, "Under a Bad Sign" explores the rationale behind this tradition of criminal self-representation from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary gangsta culture. In this lively exploration, Jonathan Munby takes a uniquely broad view, laying bare the way the criminal appears within and moves among literary, musical, and visual arts. Munby traces...
What accounts for the persistence of the figure of the black criminal in popular culture created by African Americans? Unearthing the overlooked hi...
