Black Popular Culture--Soul Cinema (AAAS 132) Mark Anthony Neal Summer Session 1 Perkins LINK 2-060 classroom 1 M/T/TH 12:30-2:35pm
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the term Soul came to represent the essence of "Blackness," particularly within the realms of music and popular culture. One of the places where "Soul" was particularly pronounced was in the film industry, where Black independent film makers and Hollywood (via Blaxploitation) created timeless and controversial moving images of Black life and culture. The course will examine so called "Soul Cinema" of the 1970s and its impact on contemporary American culture. Possible films include Sweet Sweetback´s Badass Song (1971), Killer of Sheep (1977), Ganja and Hess (1973), A Piece of the Action (1977), and The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1973).
From the Reelblack vault comes this exclusive clip of actress/singer/author NICHELLE NICHOLS from the press room at the 2008 EAST COAST BLACK AGE OF COMICS CONVENTION in Philadelphia, PA. Journalist RAYMOND TYLER asks Ms. Nichols about working in film during the Blaxploitation era and the role her character LT. UHURA played in advancing the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
WASHINGTON-Pam Grier let out a hearty chuckle when asked to assess her impact on the 1970s, action-packed, "they-have-a-plan-to-stick-it-to-The-Man" film genre known as blaxploitation.
"There were quite a few formulaic films before mine with male leads from Jim Brown to Fred Williamson and Issac Hayes with the same formula of fighting crime, thugs and pimps," she said. "As soon as a woman does it, it's blaxploitation, but it wasn't blaxploitation when men were doing it."
Such is the straight talk Grier delivers in conversation and in her new memoir, "Foxy, My Life in Three Acts," a recount of her rise to fame as the queen of B-movies that were geared towards black audiences, the setbacks in her romantic, and her career resurrection through director Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown," a 1997 blaxploitation homage he wrote specifically for her.
In addition to her book, she has a role in Queen Latifah's new romantic comedy "Just Wright" and is shooting another movie with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.
She played straight club owner Kit Porter on Showtime's lesbian-themed series "The L Word" and was a cast member in the CW's Superman series "Smallville."
All of this from a shy girl from Colorado, who didn't set out to be an actress, let alone a pinup queen, and marvels at the staying power of her popularity today.
"Every day I go: 'What, really?' I was surprised, I was amazed, I was taken aback by so much interest in what I did," Grier said during a telephone interview from her Colorado ranch. "Too bad it wasn't any rich or historical work ..."
Still, blaxploitation films were revered by audiences who were hungry to see black actors in leading roles taking on wrong-doing blacks and evil whites.
The genre was reviled by some in the black community as overly-simplistic tales from the 'hood that played into stereotypes of blacks as violent pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers.
On screen, Grier was a two-fisted woman in a man's world. In films like "Coffy," "Foxy Brown" and "Sheba Baby," she was the buxom, butt-kicking action hero who could karate-chop, jump out of airplanes and into the sack as good as the guys. Oh, and the nude scenes didn't hurt, either.
"She was the reigning black female sex symbol of the 1970s," said Mark Anthony Neal, a Duke University African and African-American studies professor who specializes in black popular culture. "Had she been able to have film opportunities in the white mainstream in the 1970s, her contemporaries would have been Raquel Welch and Farah Fawcett."
Stephane Dunn, an English professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta, said Grier was the right package that arrived in Hollywood at the right time culturally.
“Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Review by Kinohi Nishikawa
In the early 1970s, blaxploitation films popularized images of black masculine brawn and bravado that American audiences had never seen before. The protagonists of these films violated a number of cultural taboos in the way they embodied the “badman” ethos—a mode of self-presentation (derived from folklore and updated for the urban scene) that reveled in black male cunning and strength. In 1971 Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback used his sexual prowess and street smarts to outrun law enforcement “by any means necessary.” The same year Richard Roundtree’s John Shaft stood tall as Harlem’s homegrown black private detective, a leather-clad avenger primed to protect his community by taking on the mob. And in 1973, in the highest grossing blaxploitation film of its time, Max Julien starred in The Mack as Goldie, the pimp whose wide-brimmed hats and sweet-talking raps transformed the ghetto anti-hero into a mainstream icon. Although blaxploitation films reached the height of their popularity in the early 1970s, their larger-than-life male protagonists inspired a generation of hip hop artists and continue to incite debates about African American gender politics.
Given this familiar narrative of the rise of blaxploitation cinema, Stephane Dunn’s “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas offers a refreshing counterpoint to what scholars and critics have long assumed to be an exclusively male-oriented genre of filmmaking. By focusing on the less-recognized subgenre of the black female action movie, Dunn is able to illuminate some surprising features of blaxploitation’s investment in “fantasies” of black womanhood. Specifically, in her analyses of Cleopatra Jones (1973), Coffy (1973), and Foxy Brown (1974), Dunn identifies a tradition of black heroines who call into question their status as passive objects of male heterosexual desire. The protagonists of these films express their sexual agency in problematic but also deeply political ways, and Dunn is interested in recovering the meaning behind their widespread popularity during the Black Power era. “Baad Bitches” is thus notable for being the first book-length, black feminist response to the cultural assumptions about gender that subtend “masculine criticism” of the genre (3).
Dunn’s reading of Cleopatra Jones is particularly effective in challenging the prevailing consensus that black women occupied a static position in blaxploitation cinema. In the film, Tamara Dobson plays a sexy and streetwise federal agent charged with foiling domestic and global drug-trafficking networks. Sporting a Black Power afro and wielding a shotgun (a resonant symbol of phallic authority, if there ever was one), Jones tackles her assignment with stereotypically “masculine” bravado but in a style that is self-consciously “feminine.” Dunn makes it clear that Dobson’s embodiment of sexual agency courts the kind of heterosexual male gaze that would delight in her beauty and voluptuous physique. At the same time, Dunn shows how that gaze itself is interrogated within the film’s narrative. Jones’s desirability, for example, provokes white male anxiety when she approaches her colleagues with “cool professionalism” (97). These men are forced to tarry with the fact that Jones intends to both wear her desire on her sleeve and remain professionally distanced from their advances. Equally revealing is how this expression of feminine cool inflects representations of black manhood in the film. In one case, that ballyhooed icon of streetwise masculinity, the pimp, is undone by Jones’s cinematic presence. The wannabe badman Doodleburg, played by Antonio Fargas with sashaying verve, is feminized not only in light of the righteousness of Jones’s cause but also against the backdrop of the “phallic” agency of her character.
Dunn’s analyses of the Pam Grier vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown reveal the more problematic ways in which blaxploitation cinema appropriated female sexual agency to serve patriarchal ends. Unlike Cleopatra Jones, Grier’s protagonists reflect “the pornographic treatment of their star, a tendency that the prostitute guise motif in both films dramatizes” (111). According to Dunn, something of value is lost in Grier’s having to masquerade as a prostitute in order for her characters to infiltrate organized crime syndicates. Dunn expands on this point by emphasizing that in both films the trajectory of the heroine’s actions is framed as a revenge narrative. If Cleopatra Jones’s feminine cool is expressed in relatively autonomous terms, Coffy’s and Foxy Brown’s vigilantism stokes the fantasy that black women’s sexual agency can only be called forth through its violation by an external force. This reinscription of feminine passivity is what Dunn finds most objectionable about Grier’s oeuvre, in which “[her] body functions as a narrow image of ghettoized black female sexuality” (115). The logic of passivity is taken to the extreme in Foxy Brown, when in a disturbing sequence the heroine’s experience of having been raped is glossed over in the narrative’s drive to represent Foxy “avenging her man’s murder” (127). By not dwelling on the “physical or emotional signs of Foxy’s ordeal” (127), the film manages to deprive the heroine of any characterological complexity. Dunn observes that the resulting vacuum in Foxy’s consciousness effectively subordinates her desire to patriarchal authority.
Despite their problematic gendering of Grier’s characters, black female action movies give Dunn access to a new way of historicizing Black Power’s relationship with blaxploitation cinema. She proposes that even the avowedly political valences of blaxploitation were premised on the subordination of black women to a male fantasy of revolutionary vitality. In her readings of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)—arguably the touchstones of Black Power-inspired cinema—Dunn contends that popular representations of “black political and social empowerment” relied on “conservative models of gender” to achieve their radical import (84). Yet the problem of gender in these two films was not only a matter of affirming black patriarchy under the sign of revolution. It was also, more profoundly, a matter of negotiating black men’s increasingly precarious socioeconomic realities in the post-civil rights era. In this regard, Dunn’s assessment of “political” blaxploitation outlines the unnerving degree to which competing forms of masculinity were projected onto a figure like Sweetback. Presented with the option of either “liv[ing] the castrated existence of a sexual ‘freak’” or realizing “the potential for revolt” (69), Sweetback was, in this account, a fraught hero—as much a product of male anxiety as he was an expression of revolutionary desire.
In addition to resituating our understanding of male-centered blaxploitation, Dunn’s analysis of black female action movies has the salutary effect of shedding light on contemporary embodiments of sexual agency among female hip hop artists. As many scholars have noted, hip hop culture is the natural heir to blaxploitation’s heady mixture of radical politics, vernacular flair, and representations of racial pride. Yet as with her readings of blaxploitation heroines, Dunn is careful to point out how black women occupy a tenuous position in hip hop’s gendered imaginary. Even when they are not being explicitly objectified as “video vixens” or backstage groupies, women in hip hop, like Pam Grier before them, sometimes have to hew to gendered stereotypes in order to get ahead in the culture industry. Artists like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown (a stage persona taken up as an homage to Grier’s iconic heroine) have wielded their sexual agency with feckless daring, and their music challenges certain male artists’ constant valorization of the phallus. At the same time, Kim’s troublesome devotion to the late Notorious B.I.G., her well-known legal troubles, and her array of cosmetic enhancements give pause to the notion that her persona constitutes a radical departure from the patriarchal script. Coupled with Brown’s “excessive sexualization of her body onstage and off” (31), Kim’s travails leave Dunn wondering whether these female rappers can be seen as “icons of true empowerment” (34).
The question of exactly what a black female icon of empowerment would look like in popular culture today is left invitingly open at the end of “Baad Bitches.” Dunn recognizes that popular expressions of female sexual agency, whether in blaxploitation or in hip hop, are bound up with the culture industry’s historical denigration of black women’s bodies. The hypervisibility of heroines’ and rappers’ bodies may defy stereotypes of passive femininity, but they may also play into deep-seated, racist assumptions about black women’s hypersexuality. This complex double-bind is captured in Dunn’s description of blaxploitation as offering “radical and conservative fantasies of the status quo” (xiv).
In attempting to move beyond this double-bind, Dunn speculates on how black women’s bodies might serve as radical sites of pleasure for black female identification. Throughout “Baad Bitches,” Dunn recounts watching black female action movies with friends, students, and family members. In the spirited conversations that follow the screenings, Dunn notices how Dobson’s and Grier’s characters are as much appreciated for their beauty and toughness as they are critiqued for their gendered stereotyping. According to Dunn, the way spectators, and particularly black women, relate to these characters allows them to make strides toward realizing “an autonomous public sexual imaginary” of black female desire (xiv). This poignant insight may be the first step in imagining how black women can claim sexual agency for themselves without needing to apologize for it.
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Kinohi Nishikawa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Programs in Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University. His dissertation analyzes the pulp fiction of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines in the context of the black urban experience during the civil rights and Black Power movements.
This lively study unpacks the intersecting racial, sexual, and gender politics underlying the representations of racialized bodies, masculinities, and femininities in early 1970s black action films, with particular focus on the representation of black femininity. Stephane Dunn explores the typical, sexualized, subordinate positioning of women in low-budget blaxploitation action narratives as well as more seriously radical films like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and The Spook Who Sat by the Door, in which black women are typically portrayed as trifling "bitches" compared to the supermacho black male heroes. The terms "baad bitches" and "sassy supermamas" signal the reversal of this positioning with the emergence of supermama heroines in the few black action films in the early 1970s that featured self-assured, empowered, and tough (or "baad") black women as protagonists: Cleopatra Jones, Coffy, and Foxy Brown.
Dunn offers close examination of a distinct moment in the history of African American representation in popular cinema, tracing its emergence out of a radical political era, influenced especially by the Black Power movement and feminism. "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas also engages blaxploitation's impact and lingering aura in contemporary hip-hop culture as suggested by its disturbing gender politics and the "baad bitch daughters" of Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones, rappers Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown.
It took me five years to finally tell my conservative religious mother and my pastor stepfather the title of my book, which at that time was "Baad Bitches" & Sassy Supermamas: Race, Gender, & Sexuality in Black Power Action Fantasies. I figured it was unfair to wait until I sent it to her in the mail or she strolled past it in Barnes & Noble, or, even worse, some concerned church folk called her on the phone about it. Now, my mother was a woman once known to backhand-slap bad words and cussin' right out of your mouth. So I sat across from them at the dining-room table, giggling nervously, and hurriedly blurted out the first two words of the title. Mama looked at me, her left eyebrow raised way too high. My stepfather looked at her, then glanced at me and took over the nervous grinning.
I rambled on some more about how it was a study about race and gender, underlining women's representations in some 70s action movies associated with the blaxploitation genre.("Blaxploitation" was a controversial label for these movies aimed at black audiences; the genre emerged after the commercial success of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971.) Mama rescued me: "Well, they used that word all the time in them movies. Mmmmph, guess we won't be taking it to church. We'll just say the second part and people can look it up." My mother loved the actress Pam Grier back in the day, when Coffy and Foxy Brown came out, but she found them disturbing for the same reasons that I did. I exhaled.
A year later, I received a seemingly innocuous e-mail message from my editor with a line about possibly shortening the book's title. The press was squeamish about the B-word in the wake of the Don Imus scandal last spring, when Imus called the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos." What were my thoughts? I sent a reply, trying to explain why the title fit. But I was so pleased that my book was finally on its way to publication that I suggested a compromise: What about bleeping the letters following an uppercase B and substituting asterisks or dashes, as is often done with words deemed profane? I didn't even like my own suggestion. Until then there'd never been a hint of distaste for the title from the press or readers; I'd heard only how much people liked saying, "How's the 'baad bitches' project going?"
Imus's careless and racist, and sexist reference to Rutgers' black basketball players infuriated me; it was personal and political. The controversy turned up the heat about the use of racialized words. I was surprised, though, to find myself debating my book's title with my publisher. I've always loved those 70s films, which have become so much a part of our cultural fabric, and been fascinated with their problematic portrayals of women and with the connections between the hip-hop and blaxploitation subcultures, particularly in how they use the word "bitch." While the word "bitch" — and its variants — has long been a derogatory reference to "difficult" women and femininity generally, it has been flipped and claimed by women to signify female empowerment and to celebrate tough women who don't accept subordinate positions easily.
Unavailable for nearly three decades, the original motion picture soundtrack for Come Back Charleston Blue was recently released. The re-issued recording not only serves as a reminder of the era of Blaxpolitation--the moment in the late 1960s that marks the beginning of mainstream America's fascination with under/other-worldly blackness--but highlights the work of an often overlooked genius of black expressive culture, Chester Himes.
