Whose Tale Gets Told? The Whitewashing of Homelessness and Mobility

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6December 7, 2021<December 9, 2021

Whose Tale Gets Told? The Whitewashing of Homelessness and Mobility

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Arguing that mobility has to be understood intersectionally, Pamela Robertson Wojcik shows how Hollywood genres about tramps, hitchhikers, and "street people" overwhelmingly privilege white characters even as film and television have started to pay more attention to female homelessness.

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6December 6, 2021<December 6, 2021

Home: An Impossible Pursuit?

Anna Viola Sborgi

Anna Viola Sborgi's introduction to the second round explores intersectionality and social mobility as it relates to home.

no. 5, Roundtables, vol. 6November 12, 2021<November 14, 2021

Is the Home Ever Not Precarious? The Long Arc of Genres of Precarity

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Tracing the historical roots of the current cinema of precarity via the image of the tramp, Pamela Robertson Wojcik argues that narratives about the unhomed have always been central to American film.

Commentary, no. 2, vol. 6April 12, 2021<April 29, 2021

“It’s not your loss. It’s San Francisco’s”: Black Movement, Displacement, Home/lessness, and Gentrification in The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

Jacqueline Pinkowitz

Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco is an elegy to the displacement of minority communities from the gentrifying city. Jacqueline Pinkowitz discusses the film’s images of movement, dislocation, and loss and the legacy of racial inequality in the Bay Area.