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  1. Dartmouth Libraries
  2. Research Guides
  3. Dartmouth Libraries Guides
  4. Film Studies
  5. African American diaspora

Film Studies

This guide is an introduction to the resources for Film Studies at Dartmouth. If you are interested in Television, see the separate research guide for Television.
  • Introduction
  • Basic information on film
  • Finding a specific film title
  • Streaming film services
    • Readings on streaming video
  • National cinemas This link opens in a new window
  • Course guides for Film & Media Studies
  • Starting your research ...
  • Researching early films
  • Film history through the decades
    • 1960's film history
    • 1970's film history
  • Books about film
  • Film reviews
  • Journals & magazines about film
  • Film theory
    • Feminist film theory
    • Auteur theory
  • Film criticism
    • Feminist film criticism
  • Box office information
  • Film audiences
  • Mass media Industry
  • Primary sources for historical film research
    • Cinema Pressbooks from the Original Studio Collections
    • Congressional Hearings & Communism
    • Film Daily
    • Herrick Library Digital Collections
    • Hollywood and the Production Code
    • Media History Digital Library
    • Moving Picture World
  • Themes
  • Acting
  • Racial & ethnic representation on film
    • African American diaspora
    • Asian American diaspora
    • Hispanic American diaspora
    • Native American & Indigenous peoples diasporas
    • Examples on film
  • LGBTQIA+
    • Examples on film
  • Women on/in/creating Film
    • Examples on film
  • Film genres This link opens in a new window
  • Film & society
  • Screenwriting
  • Film adaptations
    • Shakespeare on film
    • Television to Film adaptations
  • Color in film
  • Film music
  • Film festivals
    • A short list of film festivals
  • Film awards
  • Disney
  • Hitchcock
  • Internet resources
  • Future of Media
  • Back to Film & Media
  • Scholarly communication This link opens in a new window
  • Video Help

Internet resource(s)

  • Wikipedia logo
    African-American film festivals
    • Link
    A list of African-American film festivals around the United States from Wikipedia.
  • Diverse Representation
    • Link
    Diverse Representation provides a comprehensive database of African-American agents, attorneys, managers and publicists working in the sports and entertainment industry throughout the country. Discussions surrounding diversity in the sports and entertainment industry need to be all-encompassing and include conversations about racial discrepancies when it comes to the representation of talent and professional athletes.
  • Black Film Space logo
    Black Film Space
    • Link
    Their mission is to provide education, community building experiences and pipeline programs in the film industry for people of African descent. ...
  • Foundation for the Augmentation of African Americans in Film logo
    The Foundation for the Augmentation of African-Americans in Film (FAAAF)
    • Link
    The Foundation’s mission is to identify, inspire and prepare the next generation of African-American filmmakers as they continue to influence, craft and develop the evolving images of African-American people in cinema and television.
  • Black Reel Awards logo
    Black Reel Awards (BRAs)
    • Link
    The Black Reel Awards, or BRAs, is an annual American awards ceremony hosted by the Foundation for the Augmentation of African-Americans in Film (FAAAF) to recognize excellence of African Americans, as well as the cinematic achievements of the African diaspora, in the global film industry, as assessed by the foundation’s voting membership. ...
  • Hollywood Diversity Report from UCLA
    • Link
    The reports primarily examine the relationship between diversity and the bottom line in the entertainment industry.
  • NAACP Image Awards
    • Link
    Spanning 60 categories, the NAACP Image Awards celebrates outstanding achievements of people of color in the arts—television, music, literature, and film—and also honors individuals and groups who promote social justice through creative endeavors.
  • NAACP Media Diversity
    • Link
    The NAACP has fought against negative portrayals of people of color in film and television since Birth of A Nation in 1915. Today the NAACP Hollywood Bureau deals with issues of diversity programming and minority employment in Hollywood, and oversees the production of the NAACP Image Awards.

In the library's collections

Suggested subject headings for searching the online catalog include:

  • african americans in motion pictures
    Call number range is PN 1995.9 .N4 on Baker Level 4.
  • african american women in motion pictures
    Call number range is PN 1995.9 .N4 on Baker Level 4.
  • african americans in the motion picture industry
  • african american motion picture actors and actresses
  • african american motion picture producers and directors
  • african american celebrities

Introductory reading(s)

  • Cover artHistorical dictionary of African American cinema by Torriano S. Berry; Venise T. Berry
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9781442247017
    Publication Date: 2nd ed.
    As early as 1909, African Americans were utilizing the new medium of cinema to catalogue the world around them, using the film camera as a device to capture their lives and their history. The daunting subject of race and ethnicity permeated life in America at the turn of the twentieth century and due to the effect of certain early films, specific television images, and an often-biased news media, it still plagues us today. As new technologies bring the power of the moving image to the masses, African Americans will shoot and edit on laptop computers and share their stories with a global audience via the World Wide Web. These independently produced visions will add to the diverse cache of African American images being displayed on an ever-expanding silver screen. This wide range of stories, topics, views, and genres will finally give the world a glimpse of African American life that has long been ignored and has yet to be seen. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. ...
  • Cover artThe Oxford handbook of Black horror film by Robin R. Means Coleman; Novotny Lawrence, eds.
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780197624807
    Since the release of Jordan Peele's Academy Award-winning horror hit Get Out (2017), interest in Black horror films has erupted. This renewed intrigue in stories about Black life, history, culture, or "Blackness" has taken two forms. First, the history and politics of race have been centered in the horror genre. Second, Black horror has become an increasingly visible topic in mainstream discourses with scholars, critics, and fans contending that Black horror is seeing its so-called renaissance. However, critical attention to Blackness in horror has primarily focused on the U.S. and western world, despite Black stories having featured prominently in the genre-as actors, screenwriters, directors, producers-globally and across cultures. The essays in this handbook explore global Black horror cinema by interrogating Blackness and the ways in which it manifests in films across the diaspora and around the world. ...
  • Cover ArtShaping the future of African American film: color-coded economics and the story behind the numbers by Monica White Ndounou
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780813562568
    In Hollywood, we hear, it's all about the money. It's a ready explanation for why so few black films get made--no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff. But what if the money itself is color-coded? What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns? This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case. In a work as revealing about the culture of film-making as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films. ...
  • Cover ArtToms, coons, mulattoes, mammies, and bucks: an interpretive history of Blacks in American films by Donald Bogle
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .N4 B6 2016
    ISBN: 9780826429537
    Publication Date: Updated and expanded 5th ed.
    This classic iconic study of black images in American motion pictures has been updated and revised, as Donald Bogle continues to enlighten us with his historical and social reflections on the relationship between African Americans and Hollywood. He notes the remarkable shifts that have come about in the new millennium when such filmmakers as Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) and Ava DuVernay (Selma) examined America's turbulent racial history and the particular dilemma of black actresses in Hollywood, including Halle Berry, Lupita Nyong'o, Octavia Spencer, Jennifer Hudson, and Viola Davis. ...

Selected book title(s)

  • Cover artAfrican American actresses: the struggle for visibility, 1900-1960 by Charlene B. Regester
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .N4 R42 2010
    ISBN: 9780253221926
    Nine actresses, from Madame Sul-Te-Wan in Birth of a Nation (1915) to Ethel Waters in Member of the Wedding (1952), are profiled in African American Actresses. Charlene Regester poses questions about prevailing racial politics, on-screen and off-screen identities, and black stardom and white stardom. She reveals how these women fought for their roles as well as what they compromised (or didn't compromise). ...
  • Cover artLooking at the stars: Black celebrity journalism in Jim Crow America by Carrie Teresa
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780803299924
    As early as 1900, when moving-picture and recording technologies began to bolster entertainment-based leisure markets, journalists catapulted entertainers to godlike status, heralding their achievements as paragons of American self-determination. Not surprisingly, mainstream newspapers failed to cover black entertainers, whose "inherent inferiority" precluded them from achieving such high cultural status. Yet those same celebrities came alive in the pages of black press publications written by and for members of urban black communities. In Looking at the Stars Carrie Teresa explores the meaning of celebrity as expressed by black journalists writing against the backdrop of Jim Crow-era segregation. ...
  • Cover artHorror noire: Blacks in American horror films from the 1890s to present by Robin R. Means Coleman
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .H6 M43 2011
    ISBN: 9780415880206
    From King Kong to Candyman, the boundary-pushing genre of the horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture. In Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from 1890's to Present, Robin R. Means Coleman traces the history of notable characterizations of blackness in horror cinema, and examines key levels of black participation on screen and behind the camera. She argues that horror offers a representational space for black people to challenge the more negative, or racist, images seen in other media outlets, and to portray greater diversity within the concept of blackness itself. ...
  • Cover artReflections on blaxploitation: actors and directors speak by David Walker; Andrew J. Rausch; Christopher Watson
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .N4 R46 2009
    ISBN: 9780810867062
    In the early 1970s, a new breed of film emerged that would completely change the way black people were presented in movies. With their afros picked to spherical perfection and their guns blazing, big bad soul brothers and super sexy sisters lit up movie theaters across the country. Never before had black men and women appeared on screen in quite this way. In time, these films would be called "blaxploitation." And while it has long been debated exactly which film launched the blaxploitation era, the financial success of Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Gordon Parks's Shaft helped open the flood gates for the more than 200 films that are now considered blaxploitation. Reflections on Blaxploitation: Actors and Directors Speak is a collection of interviews with many of the men and women who defined the genre. ...

Other library resource(s)

  • Resource logoAfrican American cinema from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Arthur Knight
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    ISBN: 9780199791286
    The category “African American Cinema” presents important conceptual challenges for scholars, critics, and moviegoers. Before laying out those challenges, though, it is important to note that African American cinema is often thought of as part of American cinema, while at the same time, African American cinema is also often thought of as part of a global black diasporic cinema.
  • Cover ArtEncyclopedia of African American culture and history by Colin A. Palmer, ed.; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Staff
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780028658162
    Publication Date: 2nd ed.
    This is a five-volume set and supplement covering all aspects of the African-American experience from 1619 to the present day. Where the first edition concentrated on the United States, this new edition is more global in focus. ...
  • Resource logoThe HistoryMakers digital archive by The HistoryMakers
    • Video
    • On Campus or VPN
    • Database
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    The HistoryMakers is a non-profit institution whose purpose is to record, preserve and disseminate the content of video oral history interviews highlighting the accomplishments of individual African Americans and African-American-led groups and movements. The Archive aims is to provide a unique scholarly and educational resource for exploring African American history and culture. It is unique among collections of African American heritage because of its large and varied scope, with interviewees from across the United States, from a variety of fields, and with memories stretching from the 1890s to the present. Rather than focus on one particular part of a person’s life or a single subject, such as a career or participation in the civil rights movement, the interviews are life oral histories covering the person’s entire span of memories as well as his or her own family’s oral history.
  • Cover ArtMedia and the affective life of slavery by Allison Page
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9781517910402
    Amid fervent conversations about anti-racism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas about how our feelings about race are governed and normalized by our media landscape. Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism. ...

Selected film title(s)

  • Movie poster artAfro promo by Jenni Olson
    • DVD
    Call Number: Jones Media DVD #9461
    ISBN: 9780976523949
    A collection of 30 trailers for films starring, directed by, and/or marketed to African Americans from the years 1952-1976.
  • Cover artBamboozled by Spike Lee
    • DVD
    Call Number: Jones Media DVD #585
    ISBN: 9780780634060
    In a searing parody of American television, Bamboozled takes a humorous look at how race, ratings and the pursuit of power lead to a network executive's stunning rise and tragic downfall.
  • Cover ArtBlaxploitalian: 100 years of blackness in Italian cinema by Fred Kudjo Kuwornu
    • Video
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Streaming video
    Blaxploitalian is a diasporic, hybrid, critical, and cosmopolitan dimension documentary that uncovers the careers of a population of entertainers seldom heard from before: Black actors in Italian cinema starting from 1915 when the first black actor appeared in an Italian film. BlaxploItalian cleverly discloses the personal struggles classic Afro-Italian; African-American; Afro-Caribbean and African diasporic actors faced, correlating it with the contemporary actors who work diligently to find respectable and significant roles. ...
  • Cover artHollywood shuffle by Robert Townsend
    • DVD
    Call Number: Jones Media DVD #1709
    ISBN: 9780792850311
    This is a comedy about Bobby Taylor, a young black actor trying to get a foothold in Hollywood but running into problems of stereotyping at every turn.
  • Cover artMovies of color: Black Southern cinema by Tom Thurman
    • DVD
    Call Number: Jones Media DVD #9313
    ISBN: 9780794202859
    Black films of the 1920s through mid 1950s are shown as a mirror of the Black experience of the time. They developed as a reaction to the way African Americans were depicted by film makers such as D.W. Griffith. This program focuses on the innovative works of film makers Spencer Williams, Oscar Micheaux, Eloyse Gist, and Clarence Muse.
  • << Previous: Racial & ethnic representation on film
  • Next: Asian American diaspora >>
  • Last Updated: May 23, 2025 11:30 AM
  • URL: https://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/filmstudies
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Subjects: Film and Media Studies
Tags: Arts, box office, festivals, FILM, film aesthetics, film color, film criticism, film music, film reviews, film studies, future of media, genres, LGBTQIA+, media industry, primary resources, queer cinema, representation in film, screenwriting, streaming film services, themes, women in film

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