Despite the clunky title, Robinson's book offers a copiously researched and compelling study of what he calls ‘Black history written through the filters of film and capitalism’ (p. xv). He examines the economic and cultural forces perpetuating stereotypical representation onstage and in film during the early twentieth century, and portrays black filmmakers and performers who resisted these derogatory images. His study foregrounds the conflict between films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and images of blackface minstrelsy that reinforced racism, and black actors and filmmakers who created their own artistic value systems. Robinson's argument situates the emergence of racism in the Elizabethan period, where it surfaced simultaneously with capitalism: ‘Shakespeare drew his audience into the twisting psychological geometry of racism’ (p. 28). From this point, the author covers a wide berth of material, from D. W. Griffiths's demeaning racial characterizations to black musicals, theatre and film that defied the propagation of black inferiority.

Black artists sought to portray, in an uphill struggle, a greater complexity of African-American culture: ‘Black cinema [and theatre], an authentically oppositional cinema, required a center, a central, culturally rich terrain at which converged sufficiently vital sources of Black social and political energy and the historical, expressive, intellectual textures of Black life’ (p. 242). The book's pursuit of an anticapitalist agenda avoids, however, recognizing that many (perhaps most) black performers and filmmakers were exceptionally adroit capitalists. His remark about Booker T. Washington as a ‘conservative nationalist’ (p. 76) is obtuse; Robinson fails to acknowledge that early black performers and filmmakers embraced Washington's credo of free enterprise, aggressive entrepreneurship and patriotic zeal. Robinson notes that while ‘Black melodramas might employ referents to the social ideology of Booker T. Washington’, the one ‘anomaly was Oscar Micheaux’, who ‘boldly deployed Black discursive materials to rupture the Hollywood classical narrative’ of racist stereotypes by employing ‘jazz’ rhythms (p. 271). While Micheaux certainly deployed a resistance to exploitation, a close look at his films reveals photos of Booker T. Washington in the background. Micheaux was in fact an unapologetic Washington devotee and his salesmanship (he marketed his own novels and films) aided the development of capitalism as a whole. This caveat aside, the book is a profoundly important and elegantly written historical study of a great artistic conflict occurring during this fecund period of African-American creativity.