Tommy Lott | theory

Tommy L. Lott

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Currently, very little information is available on Dr. Tommy L. Lott, PhD. He is currently on staff at San Jose University, in the College of Humanities and the Arts.

His books include:

The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation (Blackwell, 1999).
Editor, African-American Philosophy: Selected Readings (Prentice- Hall, 2002).
Co-editor with Robert Bernasconi, The Idea of Race (Hackett, 2000).
Co-editor with Julie K. Ward, Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays (Blackwell , 2002).
Co-editor with John Pittman, A Companion to African-American Philosophy (Blackwell, 2003).

For the purposes of engaging film as an academic practice, and as a cultural artifact, Dr. Lott is known for his work in racial and cultural definition of black film, and his arguments for representation. Contending that the ultimate goal of black film theory is to contaminate the “whiteness” of the dominate cinema, subvert and redefine its foundations, and to build a new racially inclusive cinema that contests and/or exposes all race, class, and gender iniquities at every opportunity, in the pleasurable context of filmed entertainment.

While Lott is best defined as a film philosopher, his essay, "A No-theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema" is especially important in placing black film within a workable theoretical framework. This essay makes valid points regarding the establishment of blackness in film as visible and defensible through their relationship to whiteness in classical film.

MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS

Questions the nature of black cinema and who has the right to define it, while looking at the logical reasons for creating a definition.

Questions the political context in which black film has been developed.

Questions Thomas Cripps notion that black film is limited to theater films about the black experience, that are produced written, directed, and performed by black people for a primarily black audience.

Argues for the "rules" of contemporary black film in which story and narrative cognition are attributable to the informal reasoning processes of two distinct racial groups:

1) white Story Cognition- which is particular to white films and the audiences to which such films appeal.

2) black Story Cognition- which is particular to black films and the audiences to which such films appeal.

RELATED STUDY TERMS

Aesthetics -- a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art.

Audience centering -- communication (re. film) where narrative content, language usage and listener expectations are tailored to generate spectator response.

Cognition -- the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.

Critical Theory -- a philosophical approach to culture that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and oppress it.

Critical Race Theory -- a theoretical social sciences framework that uses critical theory to examine society and culture as they relate to categorizations of race, law, and power.

Culture -- the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.

Intertextuality --the process of creating references to any kind of media text via another media text.

Narrative theory -- distinguishes between the theme of a story and the form used for telling the story.

Narrative psychology -- can be determined in contexts where narrative is proposed as a way of understanding cognition.