Critical Race Theory and Jordan Peele's Get Out

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by Kevin Wynter and Ryan Engley

Type

Essays

Subject

One Film > Get Out

Keywords

Jordan Peele, racial issues

Publishing date

2022

Publisher

Bloomsbury Academic

Collection

Film Theory in Practice

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 200 pages
5 x 7 ¾ inches (12.5 x 19.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-5013-5129-7

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Book Presentation:
This book provides a concise introduction to critical race theory and shows how this theory can be used to interpret Jordan Peele's Get Out. It surveys recent developments in critical race studies and introduces key concepts that have helped shape the field such as Black masculinity, white privilege, the Black body, and miscegenation. The book's analysis of Get Out situates it within the context of the American horror film, illustrating how contemporary debates in critical race theory and approaches to the analysis of mainstream Hollywood cinema can illuminate each other. In this way, the book provides both an accessible reference guide to key terminology in critical race studies and film studies, while contributing new scholarship to both fields.

About the authors:
Kevin Wynter is Assistant Professor of Media at Pomona College, USA. Articles on screen violence, horror, and pornography have appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Cineaction, and the anthology Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque. His current book project is titled Feeling Absence: Theory of the Horror Film.Ryan Engley is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, USA, where he teaches and researches the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and media studies. Along with Todd McGowan, Engley co-hosts the podcast Why Theory, which brings Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine contemporary phenomena.

Press Reviews:
"Get Out. Candyman. The Sunken Place. The "Final Brother." Wynter presents a pedagogical masterpiece that explores legacies of anti-Black violence at the intersections of horror films and critical race theory. Wynter's brilliance is on full display in this exquisitely written book. In fastening the theoretical and artistic to each other, he centers Black articulations of oppression at a time when it is most politically urgent." ―Robin R. Means Coleman, Professor of Communications Studies, Northwestern University, USA and author of Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present

"Both a primer in critical race theory and an exemplary work of cinematic close reading, Wynter makes a convincing case for Get Out as a film that short-circuits everything we thought we knew about the horror genre. Jordan Peele's film, Wynter contends, is neither speculative nor allegorical but is rather a rigorously realistic portrayal of Black experience in the "traumatic present." Critical Race Theory and Jordan Peele's Get Out offers an indispensable elaboration of the intersection between critical race theory and film." ―Scott Krzych, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Colorado College, USA

"Conceptually rich, lucid, as timely and as harrowing as Get Out itself, Kevin Wynter's compelling text puts Critical Race Theory and Peele's film in a mutually illuminating dialog that fully does justice to both. Wynter mines the tension between history and ontology with rigor and elegance, giving full weight to pessimism but also insisting on the fundamental challenge CRT and Get Out leave us with: to ask, impossibly, how could things be otherwise, in the wake of slavery and racist violence?" ―Brian Wall, Associate Professor of Cinema, Binghamton University, USA

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic

See Get Out (2017) on IMDB ...