African-American Stereotypes in Movies

Since the 1820s and until the 1950s, American society has promoted, in the form of stereotypes, images of African Americans who entered American culture through comics, movies, songs, advertisements, TV shows or household objects. This was particularly the period following the Civil War which reached an extreme proliferation of images based on perceived racial inferiority. African Americans were portrayed as lazy, stupid, happy and patronized. This condition of perpetual happiness, stigmatized by a broad smile and white teeth, was a fundamental component of this imagery (Dash, 135-142).

In literature, a similar process came to light in the opposition between good sometimes caricatured Black, faithful and loyal servant being rewarded by his emancipation, Black and more threatening to seize its freedom, which is an inalienable right and whose pronouncements undermine the racial hierarchy. Jim's Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the tension is expressed both in the representation of blacks in their perception of themselves and their relations with white society. This struggle for self-definition is expressed, beyond the identity crises in the search for a specific writing in that language is the American one Black and one White. Only medium and commonplace of American writers regardless of their color, language that conveys its own categories, its ambivalences, as it provides opportunities for formal, metaphorical and rhythmic as likely to materialize beyond the divisions stereotyped (Jones, 247-256).

However it begs the question of how a number of artists and writers, often African-Americans themselves, have appropriated the racist stereotyping for anti-discrimination or assertiveness. Thus, this issue of the journal LISA will focus on various areas of use and "reclaiming" of African American stereotype. The literary and art works based on this re-appropriation, depending firmly established the existence of images and symbols whose deconstruction remains a major issue, it will be interesting to define the possible implications of "recapture" of alienating stereotypes. We may well wonder if, for example, to defuse a stereotype in the caricature can be approached at various levels interpretative, which may be ideologically opposed, so give visibility to the stereotypes can not contribute to trivialize them and blur the boundaries between historical fact of racism and denunciation of racism: In the era of questioning on what basis the value of the work of art, this approach does not reflect it in all their ambiguity, dynamics and interactions binding ideology and artistic creativity, aesthetics and consumerism?

It would be interesting to focus on analyzing the parameters of the commoditization of stereotypical imagery of African Americans in a society that sells ultra-publicized cultural identities in the form of popular culture, often degrading and objectifying and attempts to build of another culture, both conscious of racial issues and able to divert or to transcend them (Trinh, 85).

In Cabin in the Sky, Lena Horne gives life to temptress Georgia Brown, represented by the ideal of white beauty and built, physically and morally, as opposed to Petunia (Ethel Waters), the good wife Joe Jackson, who is described ...