Race on the road: from de periphery to the centre in Jonathan Kaplan's "Love Field"

Abstract

Following a general cinematic trend, the road movie genre in its beginnings relegated the representation of non-whites to the periphery. After analysing the general state of affairs of racial representation in the genre, we witness in the 1990s a timid but remarkable trend to produce "racial" road movies which vindicate the rights of central representation of racial minorities. This paper analyses a representative racial road film, Jonathan Kaplan's Love Field (1992), in an attempt to show that the road movie's generic conventions and traditional liberal pedigree may provide a context where the depiction of racial minorities and race relations may finally reach a central status.In the road movie we have an ideogram of human desire and the last ditch search for self, and who is more plagued for hunger and lostness than the socially disenfranchised? (Atkinson 1994:14).