Migrating to the Movies

With this book, Stewart establishes herself as the authority on early Black cinema. The historiography is meticulous, original and compelling. Stewart puts theory and history into productive conversation. An extremely important work.
–Linda Williams, author of Playing the Race Card As a child in West Virginia, I loved the movies, but I had little idea that my people’s history was being constructed (and deconstructed) as I watched them. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart’s bold new book lets us see how black history was, in part, made at the movies. The history of the Great Migration has rarely been so vivid or compelling.
–Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans Jacqueline Stewart’s Migrating to the Movies finally brings the unmistakable sparkle of brilliance to the field of racial constructions in early cinema. Part of Stewart’s magic in this book is her substantial gift for critical insight, while the other part of this inimitable brew is her uncanny grasp of this particular topic. As an avid student of silent film for the past decade, I’ve been patiently waiting for a work that would juggle the obvious sociological weight of the raw material while also grappling with the technological and aesthetic complexities at stake. Migrating to the Movies is the first book to achieve this, and it is an indispensable volume on racial constructions of vision and the scopic gaze in the early twentieth century.
–Michele Wallace, author of Dark Designs and Visual Culture