Colorblindness, a Life: Race, Film and the Articulation of an Ideology by Justin Daniel Gomer a Dissertation Submitted in Parti
Colorblindness, A Life: Race, Film and the Articulation of an Ideology By Justin Daniel Gomer A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Leigh Raiford, Chair Professor Ula Y. Taylor Professor Darieck Scott Professor Scott Saul Spring 2014 © 2014 by Justin Daniel Gomer All Rights Reserved Abstract Colorblindness, A Life: Race, Film, and the Articulation of an Ideology by Justin Daniel Gomer Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Leigh Raiford, Chair My dissertation, entitled, “Colorblindness, A Life: Race, Film, and the Articulation of an Ideology,” offers a political and cultural biography of the racial ideology of colorblindness from its emergence as a coherent racial ideology in the years after the civil rights movement to its dominant influence in social policy in the 1990s. Most importantly, the project reveals the manner in which colorblindness became the racial project of neoliberalism. This elaboration of colorblindness as an ideology and cultural form is best understood through an examination of film during the period of my study. Beginning in the second-half of the 1970s, Hollywood developed its own set of filmic aesthetics, narratives, and tropes that advocated colorblindness. Moreover, Hollywood was not only central to the articulation of the ideology, it also depended upon colorblindness in the New Hollywood era. In the post-civil rights era, then, colorblindness, neoliberalism, and film are constitutive of and inextricable from one another. The project illustrates three key themes.
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