Cinema, Black Suffering, and Theodicy
eBook - PDF

Cinema, Black Suffering, and Theodicy

Modern God

  1. 243 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Cinema, Black Suffering, and Theodicy

Modern God

About this book

This book explicates how many films intersect black suffering and God-talk in ways that instantiate secular limitations to divine efficacy. The book's concept of a modern God introduces a new method of analysis that reimagines theodical discourses as mechanisms of modern identities and filmmakers as skillful exegetes who recalibrate divine attributes to the sensemaking cadences of their contemporaries. Shayne Lee demonstrates how cinematic theodicy navigates a happy medium between affirming divine benevolence and sidelining supernatural activity and that filmic characters, like their real-world counterparts, are quite clever at triangulating rationality, faith, and tragedy. In addition to positing synergistic links between theodicy and secularity, Lee offers critical insights into cinema's relevance to the sociology of evil by specifying how films code and narrate malevolent actions and outcomes, demarcate clear lines of distinction between victims and perpetrators, clarify societal dynamics driving inequality and oppression, and transform individual episodes of suffering into collective and memorialized identities of trauma. This book illuminates how filmic treatments of theodicy construct evil and suffering in calculated ways that connect specific acts, effects, and institutions to greater structures of meaning.

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Yes, you can access Cinema, Black Suffering, and Theodicy by Shayne Lee in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Film History & Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Introduction
  4. Theodical Secularity
  5. Tactical Deists
  6. Cinema and American Slavery
  7. Ousmane Sembène
  8. Contemporary African American Films
  9. Africa
  10. Filmography
  11. References
  12. Index
  13. About the Author