This talk explores A Natural Born Gambler (1916), a predominantly black-cast production featuring Caribbean American blackface superstar Bert Williams. By paying particular attention to film form and archival evidence, I reclaim the importance of Williams’s first Biograph comedy for moving image media projects that reflect on the production of racial difference and anti-blackness, and that critique the policing and incarceration of black men in the US. I argue that through its attention to modes of policing and strategies of avoiding detection, A Natural Born Gambler simultaneously interrogates the discursive production of black masculinity and the limits of black performativity.
Althea Wasow is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UCSC. Her current book project tentatively titled, Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives, analyzes the ways in which the emerging institutions of modern policing and motion pictures corroborated and subverted each other’s projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Date | Time
February 16, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Please note: this event will be entirely remote, with no in-person attendance.
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 16th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
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