title: Black Film As a Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and the African American Aesthetic Tradition
author: Gladstone L. Yearwood
description: In <i>Black Film as a Signifying Practice,</i> Galdstone Yearwood explores cinema as part of the black cultural tradition. he argues that black film criticism is best understood as a 20th century development in the history of African-American aesthetic thought, which provides a substantive and accumulative aesthetic and critical tradition for black film studies. The book examines the way black filmmakers use expressive forms and systems of signification that reflect the cultural and historica priorities of the black experience. It delineates howthe African-American expressive tradition utilizes its own vernacular space and time for story telling in the cinema and how black film narration draws on the formal structures of black experience to organize story material.
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   **Contemporary African**
  
   **American Cinema**
  
  _David J. Leonard_
  
   **PRAEGER**
  
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  Contemporary African
  
  American Cinema
  
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  VID J LEONARD
  
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   **Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data** Leonard, David J.
  
  Screens fade to black : contemporary African American cinema /David J.
  Leonard.
  
  p. cm.
  
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  
  ISBN 0–275–98361–7 (alk. paper)
  
  1\. African Americans in motion pictures. 2. African Americans in the motion
  picture industry. I. Title.
  
  PN1995.9.N4L46
  
  2006
  
  791.43'652996073—dc22
  
  2006003336
  
  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
  
  Copyright © 2006 by David J. Leonard
  
  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process
  or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher.
  
  This book is included in the African American Ex