During the 1920s, sound revolutionized the motion picture industry and cinema continued as one of the most significant and popular forms of mass entertainment in the world. Film studios were transformed into major corporations, hiring a host of craftsmen and technicians including cinematographers, editors, screenwriters, and set designers. The birth of the star system supported the meteoric rise and celebrity status of actors including Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Rudolph Valentino while black performers (relegated to "race films") appeared infrequently in mainstream movies. The classic Hollywood film style was perfected and significant film genres were established: the melodrama, western, historical epic, and romantic comedy, along with slapstick, science fiction, and fantasy.

In ten original essays, American Cinema of the 1920s examines the film industry's continued growth and prosperity while focusing on important themes of the era.

Garifuna live in Central America, primarily Honduras, and the United States. Identified as Black by others and by themselves, they also claim indigenous status and rights in Latin America. Examining this set of paradoxes, Mark Anderson shows how, on the one hand, Garifuna embrace discourses of tradition, roots, and a paradigm of ethnic political struggle. On the other hand, Garifuna often affirm blackness through assertions of African roots and affiliations with Blacks elsewhere, drawing particularly on popular images of U.S. blackness embodied by hip-hop music and culture.

Black and Indigenous explores the politics of race and culture among Garifuna in Honduras as a window into the active relations among multiculturalism, consumption, and neoliberalism in the Americas. Based on ethnographic work, Anderson questions perspectives that view indigeneity and blackness, nativist attachments and diasporic affiliations, as mutually exclusive paradigms of representation, being, and belonging.

As Anderson reveals, within contemporary struggles of race, ethnicity, and culture, indigeneity serves as a normative model for collective rights, while blackness confers a status of subaltern cosmopolitanism. Indigeneity and blackness, he concludes, operate as unstable, often ambivalent, and sometimes overlapping modes through which people both represent themselves and negotiate oppression.

Hollywood has long been associated with scandal--with covering it up, with managing its effects, and, in some cases, with creating and directing it. In putting together Headline Hollywood, Adrienne McLean and David Cook approach the relationship between Hollywood and scandal from a fresh perspective. The contributors consider some of the famous transgressions that shocked Hollywood and its audiences during the last century, and explore the changing meaning of scandal over time by zeroing in on issues of power: Who decides what crimes and misdemeanors should be circulated for public consumption and titillation? What makes a Hollywood scandal scandalous? What are the uses of scandal? The essays are arranged chronologically to show how Hollywood scandals have evolved relative to changing moral and social orders. This collection will prove essential to the field of film studies as well as to anyone interested in the character and future direction of American culture. Contributors are Mark Lynn Anderson, Cynthia Baron, James Castonguay, Nancy Cook, Mary Desjardins, Lucy Fischer, Lee Grieveson, Erik Hedling, Peter Lehman, William Luhr, Adrienne L. McLean, Susan McLeland, and Sam Stoloff. Adrienne L. McLean is an assistant professor of film studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. David A. Cook is a professor of film and media studies at Emory University. He is the author of A History of Film Narrative.