All in the Family

Possession movies are sleight of hand. While questions of good versus evil, the devil versus god, seem to be what their narratives are about, what they really posit are the things that imperil a society. For William Friedkin's The Exorcist, what’s at stake is the body of a rich white girl, a representation of purity...

Death Becomes Her

  Toni Morrison in her book Playing in the Dark:Whiteness in the Literary Imagination offers an interesting instructional guide to readers of early american fiction with its cursory depiction of characters of color. She stresses reading not just the caricature or absence of characters of color, but in fact to analyze what the color-coded notion...