Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism

Paula Rabinowitz

Published by Columbia University Press 2002

Black & White & Noir

America's Pulp Modernism

Paula Rabinowitz

https://doi.org/10.7312/rabi11480

Overview
Contents

About this book

The first book to treat issues of race and ethnicity as related to noir, offering a cultural history of twentieth-century America through episodic readings of films, photographs, and literature.

Black & White & Noir explores America's pulp modernism through penetrating readings of the noir sensibility lurking in an eclectic array of media: Office of War Information photography, women's experimental films, and African-American novels, among others. It traces the dark edges of cultural detritus blowing across the postwar landscape, finding in pulp a political theory that helps explain America's fascination with lurid spectacles of crime.

We are accustomed to thinking of noir as a film form popularized in movies like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and, more recently, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. But it is also, Paula Rabinowitz argues, an avenue of social and political expression. This book offers an unparalleled historical and theoretical overview of the noir shadows cast when the media's glare is focused on the unseen and the unseemly in our culture. Through far-ranging discussions of the Starr Report, movies such as Double Indemnity and The Big Heat, and figures as various as Barbara Stanwyck, Kenneth Fearing, and Richard Wright, Rabinowitz finds in film noir the representation of modern America's attempt to submerge and mask its violent history of racial and class anatagonisms. Black & White & Noir also explores the theory and practice of stilettos, the ways in which girls in the 1950s viewed film noir as a secret language about their mothers' pasts, the extraordinary tone-setting photographs of Esther Bubley, and the smutty aspect of social workers' case studies, among other unexpected twists and provocative turns.

Author / Editor information

Paula Rabinowitz is professor of English at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America and They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary.

Reviews

Robert Miklitsch:
...this povacative, wide-ranging study...

Dan Flory:
Black and White possesses a philosophical dimension, forcing its readers to reconsider their presuppositions about noir. Rabinowitz constantly pushes against the boundaries of the concept, inviting us to contemplate its significations and how they are valuable or important.

William Field:
Black & White & Noir draws our attention to the connections between history, cinema and crime fiction and the range of viewpoints inhabiting their respective underworlds. It deserves wide readership.

Rabinowitz's analysis yields provocative insights.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface and Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction: on Pulp Modernism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part 1. Black Rooms and Rage
Chapter 1. Already Framed: Esther Bubley Invents Noir Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
Chapter 2. Domestic Labor: Film Noir, Proletarian Literature, and Black Women’S Fiction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	60
Chapter 3. Double Cross: Wri(Gh)Ting as the Outsider Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	82
Part 2. White Work And Memory
Chapter 4. Blanc Noir: Rural Pulp And Documentary Modernism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	105
Chapter 5. Melodrama/Male Drama: The Sentimental Contract of American Labor Films Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
Chapter 6. Not “Just the Facts, Ma’Am”: Social Workers as Private Eyes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
Part 3. Noir Household Objects
Chapter 7. Barbara Stanwyck’s Anklet Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Chapter 8. Medium Uncool: Avant-Garde Film and Uncanny Feminism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
Chapter 9. Mapping Noir Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	295

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 288
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 40
- Other: 40 photos

eBook

Published: June 20, 2002
ISBN: 9780231506144