“Imagining Revolutionaries” will discuss the representation of guerrilla warfare in several films on the American Revolution. The paper will examine, though thematic and formal analysis, how skill in unconventional warfare is presented in these films as a central element of both American and masculine identities, and will explore how those ideologies of national and gender identities are recirculated and codified through the mass medium of popular film. Tracing the origins of the American revolutionary guerrilla through myths of the frontier (via the work of Richard Slotkin, Jewett & Lawrence, and others), the paper will briefly examine how assumptions about race, nationality, and gender are presented in several key films: D.W. Griffith’s America (1924), John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), Johnny Tremain (1955), April Morning (1988), and Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot (2000).
About the presenterMatthew B. Hill
Matthew B. Hill has previously served as a MAPACA Executive Board Member (2014-2019), MAPACA Secretary (2015-2019), and MAPACA Acting President (2019). Currently he serves as the War Studies Area Chair, a position he has held since 2009. He is currently Professor of English in the Department of Humanities at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland. His work investigates the representation of war in literature and popular culture.