ABSTRACT
In this chapter the treatment of ‘race’ in the cinema, restricted here to those films set in the American South, is considered in the light of a number of factors: (i) the continually changing context of relations between blacks and whites, particularly the level and nature of struggle against oppression mounted by the former; (ii) the way in which these struggles related to the economic organization of the motion-picture industry, and to censorship; and (iii) the impact of economic and political relations between the South and other sections or regions of the United States, and the overall ‘laws of motion’ of capitalist competition and accumulation within the United States and in the capitalist world as a whole.
