Mixed Race Cinemas

Using critical race theory and film studies to explore the interconnectedness between cinema and society, Zélie Asava traces the history of mixed-race representations in American and French filmmaking from early and silent cinema to the present day. Mixed Race Cinemas covers over a hundred years of filmmaking to chart the development of (black/white) mixed representations onscreen. With the 21st century being labelled the Mulatto Millennium, mixed bodies are more prevalent than ever in the public sphere, yet all too often they continue to be positioned as exotic, strange and otherworldly, according to ‘tragic mulatto’ tropes. This book evaluates the potential for moving beyond fixed racial binaries both onscreen and off by exploring actors and characters who embody the in-between. Through analyses of over 40 movies, and case studies of key films from the 1910s on, Mixed Race Cinemas illuminates landmark shifts in local and global cinema, exploring discourses of subjectivity, race, gender, sexuality and class. In doing so, it reveals the similarities and contrasts between American and French cinema in relation to recognising, visualising and constructing mixedness. Mixed Race Cinemas contextualizes and critiques raced and ‘post-race’ visual culture, using cinematic representations to illustrate changing definitions of mixed identity across different historical and geographical contexts.

Zélie Asava's Mixed Race Cinemas: Multiracal Dynamics in America and France is an important contribution to mixed race studies, because representation is treated as the source of identity, rather than its effect. Asava focuses on female black-white mixed race in film, from the tragic mulatta figure, through passing, over the 20th c, and shows how these earlier tropes continue into our own "post-binary" times. Fascinating, seductive, suffering, passive, and triumphant, these racially ambiguous actors and their characters timelessly reflect and create broad human conditions of provincialism, cosmopolitanism, oppression, liberation, grief, and joy. Mixed Race Cinemas should be required reading for all students of race and gender, as well as those who appreciate film., Zélie Asava makes an important contribution with this smartly researched study of mixed race representation in U.S. and French films. Her analysis of relevant films and the mixed racial politics of these two national cinemas is cogent and sharply illuminating., Zélie Asava is a bold new voice in cinematic and mixed-race studies. She follows up her path-breaking first book, The Black Irish Onscreen, with Mixed Race Cinemas, a trenchant examination of mixed-race figures in nearly a century of French and American film, from the movies of Oscar Micheaux to mixed-race scifi. Her writing is grounded in but not burdened by theory and offers a fine-grained gender analysis. In offering sometimes startling insights, she deepens our understandings of the different racial systems that have evolved in each of these countries. This is a terrific book.

Zélie Asava is an Assistant Film Classifier at the Irish Film Classification Office and lectures on Film Studies at University College Dublin. Her monograph The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television (2013) examines racial representations in Irish screen culture from the 1990s to the present day. She is the co-author of ‘Race and Cinema’ in Oxford Bibliographies Online: Cinema and Media Studies (2013), and has published many essays on race, gender and sexuality in American, Irish, French and Francophone African cinemas in a wide range of journals and edited collections, including: Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tiger’s Tales (2014); World Cinema Directory: Africa (2014); Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts (2013); Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic (2013); France’s Colonial Legacies: Memory, Identity and Narrative (2013); World Cinema Directory: France (2013); Contemporary Irish Film: New Perspectives on a National Cinema (2011).