The Representation of African Americans in 12 Years A Slave and Antebellum Films

Abstract

Cinemas are often used as an element of escapism and a representation of reality to the audience. Cinema also plays a crucial part in developing and sustaining racial cultural ideas and attitudes in the United States of America and globally. Since the 1830s, African Americans have appeared in film as either shown unfavorably or as small-minded people in comparison to their white peers. In a famous film in America, “Birth of Nation”, a white actor who acted as African American was portrayed as savagely violent who seized on Caucasian women. Despite the inaccurate portrayal of African Americans in the film, identical tropes have continued to emerge in the film industry since the 1920s. Therefore, this paper studies the representation of African Americans in Hollywood films using Critical Race Theory. Two Hollywood films will be used as a comparative case study namely Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave (2013) and Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum (2020) respectively. The result shows the importance of race and racism in society, several common types of racial prejudice have been detected in the films. Pathological stereotypes have also been presented through the films and the white characters show their power and control towards the African Americans who once had equal privilege with them.

Keywords

• representation
• african-americans
• hollywood films
• antebellum