Books in the A Camera Obscura book series

Catherine Russell uses the work of Walter Benjamin to explore how the practice of archiveology-the reuse, recycling, appropriation, and borrowing of archival sounds and images-by filmmakers provides ways to imagine the past and the future.

Marks a new era of feminist film scholarship. This title collects twenty essays that demonstrate how feminist historiographies at once alter and enrich ongoing debates over visuality and identification, authorship, stardom, and nationalist ideologies in cinema and media studies.

Pooja Rangan interrogates participatory documentary's humanitarian ethos of "giving a voice to the voiceless" in documentaries featuring marginalized subjects, showing how it reinforces the films' subjects as the "other" and reproduces definitions of the human that exclude non-normative modes of thinking, being, and doing.

Assembling a range of interviews, essays, and conversations, Sisters in the Life narrates the history of African American lesbian media-making during the past thirty years, thereby documenting the important and influential work of this group of understudied and underappreciated artists.

Assembling a range of interviews, essays, and conversations, Sisters in the Life narrates the history of African American lesbian media-making during the past thirty years, thereby documenting the important and influential work of this group of understudied and underappreciated artists.

Black feminist critic Ann duCille combines cultural critique with personal reflections on growing up with TV as a child in the Boston suburbs to examine how televisual representations of African Americans-ranging from I Love Lucy to How to Get Away with Murder-have changed over the last sixty years.

Through innovative readings of gay and lesbian films, Lee Wallace offers a provocative argument that queer experiments in domesticity have profoundly reshaped heterosexual marriage to such an extent that now all marriage is gay marriage.

Bakirathi Mani examines the visual and affective relationships between South Asian diasporic viewers, artists, and photographic representations of immigrant subjects, showing how empire continues to haunt South Asian American visual cultures.

Lingzhen Wang examines the work of Chinese women filmmakers of the Mao and post-Mao eras to theorize socialist and postsocialist feminism, mainstream culture, and women's cinema in modern China.