Join Professor Colin MacCabe as he discusses the relevance of Snead's work for historical & contemporary visual representations of race, blackness & sexuality in both British & American contexts.

Chaired by Dr Clive James Nwonka, this discussion will mark 30 years since Snead's passing and brings together academics including Snead's former PHD supervisor, Professor Colin MacCabe.

James Snead was a professor fiction writer, and film scholar whose academic work analysed literary modernism and the use of race in American film. After his death in 1989 at the age of 35, he was described by the US academic Cornel West as “among the most important Amer­i­can intellectuals in the late 20th century.”

In his essential posthumous book White Screens/Black Images, Snead interrogates Hollywood's misleading representations of black skin, representations that promote an artificially constructed mythology in place of historical fact. By exposing the methods through which racist ideology within film operates, Snead uncovered the production of a complex code for various types of white supremacist discourse within Hollywood cinema. Here, Snead's work speaks not only to the centrality of race in Hollywood films, but to its centrality in the formation of modern American culture.

Professor Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh and also Visiting Professor in English and Film at UCL. He has written extensively about literature and cinema, and produced a number of films with Derek Jarman, Terence Davies, Isaac Julien and many others.

Clive James Nwonka (@CJNwonka) is Fellow in Film Studies in the Department of Sociology, LSE.