Performing Whiteness:
Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema
"Essential . . . one of the Outstanding Academic Books of the Year." - Choice
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster - Author
SUNY series in Postmodern Culture
$65.50 Hardcover
224 pages
Release Date: 2/7/2003
ISBN: 0-7914-5627-7
$21.95 Paperback
Release Date: 1/24/2003
ISBN: 0-7914-5628-5
Performing Whiteness crosses the boundaries of film study
to explore images of the white body in relation to recent
theoretical perspectives on whiteness. Drawing on such
diverse critical methodologies as postcolonial studies,
feminist film criticism, anthropology, and phenomenology,
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster examines a wide variety of films
from early cinema to the present day in order to explore the
ways in which American cinema imposes whiteness as a
cultural norm, even as it exposes its inherent instability. In
discussions that range from The Philadelphia Story to Attack
of the 50 Foot Woman, Foster shows that, though American
cinema is an all-white construct, there exists the possibility
of a healthy resistance to cultural norms of race, gender,
sexuality, and class.
"Performing Whiteness offers a different and innovative
treatment of issues of race and ethnicity from the
standpoint of examining 'the assumptions behind whiteness
as a cultural norm.' I was constantly astounded by the
breadth of cinematic texts and by the wealth of cultural
material cited to illuminate their discussion.' "- Marcia
Landy, author of The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in
the Italian Cinema, 19301943
"This book will leave no one indifferent. It is written with
force and informed by references to hundreds of films that
span the entire century, from the beginning of cinema up to
now. Its views are unremitting and timely." - Tom Conley,
author of Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Associate Professor of English
and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska. Her previous
books include Captive Bodies: Postcolonial Subjectivity in
Cinema, also published by SUNY Press, and Troping the
Body: Gender, Etiquette, and Performance.
