Shaping the Terrain: Racing the Movies 2011-2015
Humanities
Senior Seminar 190O: Slavery, Race and Nation in the Americas, Literature Major
This submission is my senior thesis written for the senior seminar Slavery, Race, and Nation in the Americas taught by Susan Gillman within the literature major speculating the purpose of modern-day slavery movies, such as Glory (1989) and 12 Years a Slave (2013), through the context of Walter Benjamin, Barbara J. Fields, and ending with a bit of W. E. B. Du Bois. The goal of this paper was to use film analysis and literary study to understand ideology as a means of labeling and avoiding the responsibility of the present for the past. It is about understanding that race-slavery a creation and a specific event we, in the present, prefer to contain to the past, emphasized and reinforced by movies through violence.
