For the student or scholar of Black film, this volume provides a compendium of approximately 3,000 film items with Black themes or subject matter (even before Black actors appeared in them); films featuring substantial participation by Blacks as writers, actors, producers, directors, musicians, and consultants; and films in which Blacks play…

A reference guide on African American film professionals, this book is a companion volume to the earlier "Frame by Frame I." It focuses on giving credit to African Americans who have contributed their talents to a film industry that has scarcely recognized their contributions, building on the aforementioned "Frame by Frame I,"…

This case study chronicles the lives of 20 inner-city adolescents and their experiences in and out of school. It explores the social construction of reality among these seventh and eighth graders and refutes the myth that these disadvantaged students suffer from cognitive deficits. The chapters are: (1) "Introduction"; (2) "The…

Building on the author's groundbreaking work in "Building Superheroes," this book traces the influence of a wide-ranging set of "textual toys" from children's lives--church and hip-hop songs, rap music, movies, TV, traditional jump-rope rhymes, the words of professional sports announcers and radio deejays--upon school learning…

Critical debates about black expressive culture and black cultural productions within television are examined as a means of exploring processes by which questions about the American racial order, and blackness itself, are constructed, reproduced, and challenged. The central thread of the argument is that commercial culture operates as both a site…