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Baylor BU English Faculty Publications A Long, Long Way
  • Publications
    • Literacy in a Long Blues Note
    • Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
    • A Fire to Light Our Tongues
    • Hollow Palaces
    • Haunted Property
    • American Literary Cultures
    • Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America
    • Modernism in the Green
    • A Long, Long Way
    • Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
    • The Courage to See
    • The Evil Twins of American Television
    • Harvest Bells
    • Letters of a Long Name
    • Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion
    • Reforming Women
    • Thomas Hoccleve
    • Mark Twain Under Fire
    • Building Natures
    • Understanding Marilynne Robinson
    • Living with the Living Dead
    • The Life Group
    • Then Winter
    • Building Jerusalem
    • The Divine Face in Four Writers
    • Seamus Heaney: An Introduction
    • Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print
    • Housework and Gender in American Television
    • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
    • Entertaining Judgment
    • Seamus Heaney's Regions
    • Elegy on Kinderklavier
    • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
    • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
    • The Tulip-Flame
    • The Glyph and the Gramophone
    • The Prodigal
    • Beyond the Pulpit
    • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
    • Sylvia Plath's Fiction

A Long, Long Way

Hollywood's Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation

 Greg Garrett, Professor of English

From the beginning, American cinema has been both a powerful mythmaker and a social critic. D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, arguably the first feature film, shows us just how early in its history cinema had established its influence. In 1915 it was the first movie to be screened at the White House. After the screening, President Woodrow Wilson is rumored to have said, "It's like history writ with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all terribly true." Birth of a Nation famously portrayed the Klu Klux Klan in a favorable light, a portrayal that contributed to the modern resurgence of the group and brought racist depictions of African Americans imported from the minstrel show to the silver screen. Such white fantasies of black American life have played out on our movie screens for the last century. In response, filmmakers of color have created nuanced and indelible portraits of race, as in Ava DuVernay's Selma or Barry Jenkin's Moonlight. Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman shows us just how far into our culture Birth of a Nation has reached.

In this powerful new book, Greg Garrett brings his signature brand of theologically motivated cultural criticism to bear on this history. After more than a century of cinema, he argues, movies have altered our cultural perspectives in the same way that religious narratives have. And in fact, religious traditions offer powerful correctives to our cultural narratives. A Long, Long Way incorporates both cinematic and religious truth-telling to the subject of race and reconciliation. In acknowledging the racist history of America's national art form, Garrett offers the possibility of hope for the future.

Oxford University Press, 2020

ISBN 9780190906252

English

College of Arts & Sciences

Carroll Science 106

Department of English
One Bear Place, #97404
Waco, TX 76798-7404

(254) 710-1768
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Baylor BU English Faculty Publications A Long, Long Way
  • About Us
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    • Beall Poetry Festival
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      • Degree Plan
    • Linguistics
      Back
      • Career Possibilities
      • Courses Offered
      • Degree Plan
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    • Professional Writing & Rhetoric
      Back
      • Courses Offered
      • Degree Plan
      • Internships
    • Creative Writing Minor
    • Scholarships
    • Student Awards
      Back
      • Past Winners
  • Graduate
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    • M.A. Policies and Procedures
    • Ph.D. Policies and Procedures
    • Certificate in Literature & Religion
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      • Past Winners
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  • Faculty
    Back
    • Publications
      Back
      • Literacy in a Long Blues Note
      • Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
      • A Fire to Light Our Tongues
      • Hollow Palaces
      • Haunted Property
      • American Literary Cultures
      • Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America
      • Modernism in the Green
      • A Long, Long Way
      • Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
      • The Courage to See
      • The Evil Twins of American Television
      • Harvest Bells
      • Letters of a Long Name
      • Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion
      • Reforming Women
      • Thomas Hoccleve
      • Mark Twain Under Fire
      • Building Natures
      • Understanding Marilynne Robinson
      • Living with the Living Dead
      • The Life Group
      • Then Winter
      • Building Jerusalem
      • The Divine Face in Four Writers
      • Seamus Heaney: An Introduction
      • Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print
      • Housework and Gender in American Television
      • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
      • Entertaining Judgment
      • Seamus Heaney's Regions
      • Elegy on Kinderklavier
      • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
      • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
      • The Tulip-Flame
      • The Glyph and the Gramophone
      • The Prodigal
      • Beyond the Pulpit
      • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
      • Sylvia Plath's Fiction
  • Organizations
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    • 20CRS
    • House of Poetry
    • Linguistics Club
    • Literary Society
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