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White Lens on Brown Skin: The Sexualization of the Polynesian in American Film by Matthew Locey (202...

South seas fiction and later cinema as a genre, that pictures Pacific Islanders and their land, really took off as early as 1898 when the Hawaiian islands were annexed by the United States. Forerunners of the many films that would cover Polynesian culture were the magical and powerful reports of European sailors when they were […]

Projections of Passing: Postwar Anxieties and Hollywood Films, 1947-1960 by N. Megan Kelley (2021)

The debatable term of “passing,” initially used to describe a basically 19th and 20th century strategy of African-Americans to pass for white (and avoid Jim Crow laws, absurd segregationist rules and social exclusion), in the mid- 1950s took on other forms and meanings. Actually, then it depicted new ways of passing/acting out or incorporating somebody […]