{"product_id":"9781452942988","title":"The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe civil rights struggle was convulsing the nation, its violence broadcast into every living room. Against this fraught background, Sidney Poitier emerged as an image of dignity, discipline, and moral authority. Here was the picture-perfect black man, helping German nuns build a chapel in \u003ci\u003eThe Lilies of the Field\u003c\/i\u003e and overcoming the prejudices of recalcitrant students in \u003ci\u003eTo Sir with Love\u003c\/i\u003e, a redneck sheriff in \u003ci\u003eIn the Heat of the Night\u003c\/i\u003e, and a prospective father-in-law in \u003ci\u003eGuess Who’s Coming to Dinner\u003c\/i\u003e. In his characters’ restrained responses to white people’s ignorance and bad behavior, Poitier represented racial reconciliation and reciprocal respect—the “Poitier effect” that Sharon Willis traces through cinema and television from the civil rights era to our own.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Poitier effect, in Willis’s account, is a function of white wishful thinking about race relations. It represents a dream of achieving racial reconciliation and equality without any substantive change to the white world. This notion of change without change conforms smoothly with a fantasy of colorblindness, a culture in which difference makes no difference. Willis demonstrates how Poitier’s embodiment of such a fantasy figures in the popular cinema of the civil rights era—and reasserts itself in recent melodramas such as \u003ci\u003eThe Long Walk Home, Pleasantville, Far from Heaven,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Help\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom change without change to change we can believe in, her book reveals how the Poitier effect, complicated by contemporary ideas about feminism, sexuality, and privilege, continues to inform our collective memory as well as our visions of a postracial society.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Minnesota Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47134946099440,"sku":"9781452942988","price":22.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781452942988_p0.jpg?v=1763845547","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781452942988","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}