Man And The Shadow

The Keys of Power

This book, first published in 1932, demonstrates how the control of certain ‘-isms’ has for long moulded the interpretation of Indian belief and ritual by Western writers particularly. In every chapter there is some new coordination, often iconoclastic of then-accepted theory, whilst the new wealth of customs carefully recorded is astonishing. Long disputed problems such as that of the Maratha ‘devak’, or that of the ceremonial sowing of seedlings known to Western scholars as the ‘gardens of Adonis’, have at last been settled through careful research.

The Cinema and Its Shadow

The Cinema and Its Shadow argues that race has defined the cinematic apparatus since the earliest motion pictures, especially at times of technological transition. In particular, this work explores how racial difference became central to the resolving of cinematic problems: the stationary camera, narrative form, realism, the synchronization of image and sound, and, perhaps most fundamentally, the immaterial image—the cinema’s “shadow,” which figures both the material reality of the screen image and its racist past. Discussing early “race subjects,” Alice Maurice demonstrates that these films influenced cinematic narrative in lasting ways by helping to determine the relation between stillness and motion, spectacle and narrative drive. The book examines how motion picture technology related to race, embodiment, and authenticity at specific junctures in cinema’s development, including the advent of narratives, feature films, and sound. In close readings of such films as The Cheat, Shadows, and Hallelujah!, Maurice reveals how the rhetoric of race repeatedly embodies film technology, endowing it with a powerful mix of authenticity and magic. In this way, the racialized subject became the perfect medium for showing off, shoring up, and reintroducing the cinematic apparatus at various points in the history of American film. Moving beyond analyzing race in purely thematic or ideological terms, Maurice traces how it shaped the formal and technological means of the cinema.

The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condion of Man