Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film

This work shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the 20th century. By the onset of the Depression, the Black population had become primarily urban, transforming individual lives as well as urban experience and culture. The text probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an intrinsic element of African American film as Black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and more visible as historical and political subjects. Illuminating the intersections of film, history, politics, and urban discourse, it considers the chief genres of African American and Hollywood narrative film: the black cast musicals of the 1920s and the race films of the early sound era to blaxploitation and the hood films as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the 20th century.