Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II

Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II. By Cedric J. Robinson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xxii, 431 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3148-9. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 978-0-8078-5841-7.)

In his ambitious synthesis, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, Cedric J. Robinson charts the fluidity of racial representations in motion pictures and theatrical performances. Broad sociopolitical conditions influence his analysis of African Americans on stage and screen; indeed, the contours of modern capitalism largely determined the ways black men and women were denigrated by, and alternatively resisted, the dominant cultural apparatus. Beginning with a nuanced reading of Shakespeare's Othello by mapping the "invention" of black inferiority by the late eighteenth century, Robinson illustrates the political expethence of racism when...