Anna Everett

"Learning Race and Ethnicity explores the intersection of race and ethnicity with post-9/11 politics, online hate-speech practices, and digital youth and media cultures. It examines universal access and the racial and ethnic digital divide from the perspective of digital media learning and youth. The chapters treat such subjects as racial identity in the computer-mediated public sphere, minority technology innovators, new methods of music distribution, digital artist Judy Baca's worth with youth, Native American digital media literacy, and minority youth technology access and the pervasiveness of online health information."--BOOK JACKET.

In Returning the Gaze Anna Everett revises American film history by reviving the extensive and all but forgotten participation of black film critics during the early twentieth century. While much of the existing scholarship on blacks and the cinema focuses on image studies and stereotypical representations, this work excavates a wealth of early critical writing on the cinema by black cultural critics, academics, journalists, poets, writers, and film fans. Culling black newpapers, magazines, scholarly and political journals, and monographs, Everett has produced an unparalleled investigation of black critical writing on the early cinema during the era of racial segregation in America. Correcting the notion that black critical interest in the cinema began and ended with the well-documented press campaign against D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, she discovers that as early as 1909 black newspapers produced celebratory discourses about the cinema as a much-needed corrective to the predominance of theatrical blackface minstrelsy. She shows how, even before the Birth of a Nation controversy, the black press succeeded in drawing attention to both the callous commercial exploitation of lynching footage and the varied work of black film entrepreneurs. The book also reveals a feast of film commentaries that were produced during the "roaring twenties" and the jazz age by such writers as W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as additional pieces that were written throughout the Depression and the pre- and postwar periods. Situating this wide-ranging and ideologically complex material in its myriad social, political, economic, and cultural contexts, Everett aims to resuscitate a historical tradition for contemporary black film literature and criticism. -- from back cover.