Precious: Identity, Adaptation and the African American Youth Film

This book examines a popular, divisive, and celebrity-endorsed filmic depiction of a troubled African American girl, focusing on the concept of African American youth film and genre hybridity; the adaptation of the film from its source novel; how it deals with issues of identity such as race, gender, and body size; the film’s use of music and pop stars as spectacle; and how the film’s critical reception brought back, and moved beyond, the old debates around positive representation of race.