Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson

Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to 0. J Simpson. By Linda Williams. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xviii, 401 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-691-05800-8.)

Linda Williams, a film scholar, situates her highly detailed study of culturally influential, cross-media representations of race in the United States within one of the most derided of popular genres, the melodrama. Recognizing the "insidious power" of the melodramatic "form" (as she prefers to call it) to thrill, sadden, and delight mass audiences, Williams urges critical attention rather than condescension. In particular, she argues, the form should be examined "in those places where it has made a difference in the American national imaginary: in the ongoing conflicts of racial virtue and villainy that have taken place in the melodramas of black and white."

Beginning her study in the nineteenth century with...