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Beyond Blaxploitation ed. by Novotny Lawrence and Gerald R. Butters

2018; Saint Louis University; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/afa.2018.0040

1945-6182

Yvonne D. Sims,

History of Science and Medicine

Reviewed by: Beyond Blaxploitation ed. by Novotny Lawrence and Gerald R. Butters Yvonne D. Sims Novotny Lawrence and Gerald R. Butters, Jr., eds. Beyond Blaxploitation. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2016. 272 pp. $34.99. Novotny Lawrence and Gerald R. Butters, Jr.'s collection Beyond Blaxploitation is part of the scholarship emerging on a film genre that from its inception to its demise was a misunderstood historical moment in the 1970s' film industry. When some film scholars think of African American films, blaxploitation movies are not at the top of list to critique. Yet, over time, many film scholars have been reexamining a category of movies that historically have been defined as cheap, exploitative, and advancing less-than-positive images of African Americans. To be sure, there is an extensive body of work, whether it appears in articles, chapters of anthologies, or full-length works, that represents the literature on blaxploitation. [End Page 244] Beyond Blaxploitation is yet another contribution to this scholarship. Lawrence and Butters's anthology is divided into three parts that focus on distinct aspects of the genre. The first section, "Pioneer to Precursor to Blaxploitation," is devoted to looking at specific movies, such Cotton Comes to Harlem, Watermelon Man, and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. In her essay on Cotton Comes to Harlem, Vivian Halloran analyzes the significance of the Black Arts Movement and Harlem. As the center of culture for socially, culturally, and politically conscious African Americans, Harlem has always served as the place where artists could create a rich body of work through art, music, literature, or, in Halloran's case, film. In the second essay, Charles E. Wilson, Jr. critiques Watermelon Man, which asks the question, "What happens one day if a person wakes up as an African American?," and as the main character, actor Godfrey Cambridge answers this question. Wilson uses the movie to suggest that Watermelon Man functions as a metaphor for racial anxieties and angst about race in the 1960s before delving into how the election of the first black president, Barack Obama, stirs up racial anxieties in the twenty-first century. In the third essay, Butters returns to the seminal Sweetback to discuss the reception of the movie to Chicago audiences especially. Butters discusses how African American audiences traveled from all over the state to see this movie and the many more that followed. The second part of the anthology, entitled "The Canon and the Not So Canon," is comprised of three essays that examine some well-known blaxploitation movies such as Shaft, Ganja and Hess, and Detroit 9000. Eric Pierson's "In the Beginning There was Shaft" examines how John Shaft, derived from Ernest Tidyman's character, underwent a metamorphosis from the pages of a book as an anti-Semitic, homophobic private detective to a sleek, cool African American detective. The second essay, "The Blood of the Thing (Is the Truth of the Thing): Viral Pathogens and Uncanny Ontologies in Ganja and Hess" by Harrison M. J. Sherrod has a highly interesting premise, casting the figure of the vampire as a metaphor for disenfranchised and marginalized African Americans by using "germ theory" (14). The last essay in this section is Joseph S. Valle's "As Foxy as Can Be: The Melodramatic Mode in Blaxploitation Cinema," in which Pam Grier's character and movie are examples of the melodramatic mode used to demonstrate how blaxploitation movies deal with the frustrations of racism and how heroes/heroines are able to remove the racial specters in their quests. The last section of Beyond Blaxploitation, "Was, Is, or Isn't Blaxploitation," consists of four essays that push the boundaries of blaxploitation movies in another direction altogether. Allyson Nadia Field's "Stomping on Stepin Fetchit: Historicizing 'Blackness' in African American Film Culture of the 1970s" dissects blackness and the stereotypes associated with African American actors in Watermelon Man, Amazing Grace, and Car Wash. Field argues that blaxploitation movies are far more sophisticated than they may appear, and she disrupts negative criticism of blaxploitation by using these three examples as a positive critique of the genre while suggesting that there is something more to blaxploitation than can be gained from mere surface-level reading. Alfred...