From Sweetback To Super Fly

Racial politics and capitalism found a way to blend together in 1970s Chicago in the form of movie theaters targeted specifically toward African Americans. In From Sweetback to Super Fly, Gerald Buttersexamines the movie theaters in Chicago’s Loop that became, as he describes them, “black spaces” during the early 1970s with theater managers making an effort to gear their showings toward the African American community by using black-themed and blaxploitation films. Butters covers the wide range of issues that influenced the theaters, from changing racial patterns to the increasingly decrepit state of Chicago’s inner city and the pressure on businesses and politicians alike to breathe life into the dying area. Through his extensive research, Butters provides an in-depth look at this phenomenon, delving into an area that has not previously been explored. His close examination of how black-themed films were marketed and how theaters showing these films tried to draw in crowds sheds light on race issues both from an industrial standpoint on the side of the theaters and movie producers, as well as from a cultural standpoint on the side of the moviegoers and the city of Chicago as a whole. Butters provides a wealth of information on a very interesting yet underexamined part of history, making From Sweetback to Super Fly a supremely enjoyable and informative book.

THIS RICHLY INFORMATIVE JOURNEY INTO THE 1970S CAPTURES THE EXPLOSIVE POWER OF THE BLACK PERFORMERS, MUSICIANS, FILMMAKERS, AND ATHLETES WHO IGNITED A CULTURAL REVOLUTION. WHAT SINGER/SONGWRITER WAS THE FIRST WHITE PERFORMER TO APPEAR ON SOUL TRAIN? WHAT PHILADELPHIA 76ER MADE NBA HISTORY WHEN, AGAINST THE KANSAS CITY KINGS, HIS TWO-HANDED DUNK SHATTERED THE BACKBOARD? WHAT ROCK-AND-ROLL STAR WOULD BEGIN HIS CAREER PLAYING GUITAR FOR ARTISTS LITTLE RICHARD AND THE ISLEY BROTHERS? Whether you’re a ’70s culture aficionado or these questions have you stumped, Todd Boyd’s exciting look at one of the most influential periods in popular culture will be a fun and exciting roller-coaster ride that you won’t want to miss. Dr. Boyd (known as “The Notorious Ph.D.”) delves into the personalities, passions, and politics that swept America and the world in the ’70s and introduced a style and attitude that still reverberates today with the hip hop generation. From movies like Shaft, Super Fly, and Cleopatra Jones to Richard Pryor’s edgy routines on race to the rise of Dr. J and other sports superstars, The Notorious Ph.D.’s Guide to the Super Fly ’70s mixes social insight with an all-out celebration of the contributions of a wide variety of Black icons. Covering every aspect of Black culture from the period and including a quiz that you and your friends will love answering together, Dr. Boyd’s hip writing style will educate while it entertains.

The Soundtrack Album: Listening to Media offers the first sustained exploration of the soundtrack album as a distinctive form of media. Soundtrack albums have been part of our media and musical landscape for decades, enduring across formats from vinyl and 8-tracks to streaming playlists. This book makes the case that soundtrack albums are more than promotional tools for films, television shows, or video games— they are complex media texts that reward a detailed analysis. The collection’s contributors explore a diverse range of soundtrack albums, from Super Fly to Stranger Things, revealing how these albums change our understanding of the music and film industries and the audio-visual relationships that drive them. An excellent resource for students of Music, Media Studies, and Film/Screen Media courses, The Soundtrack Album offers interdisciplinary perspectives and opens new areas for exploration in music and media studies.

Hollywood is often thought of—and certainly by Hollywood itself—as a progressive haven. However, in the decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the film industry grew deeply conservative when it came to conflicts over racial justice. Amid black self-assertion and white backlash, many of the most heated struggles in film were fought over employment. In A Piece of the Action, Eithne Quinn reveals how Hollywood catalyzed wider racial politics, through representation on screen as well as in battles over jobs and resources behind the scenes. Based on extensive archival research and detailed discussions of films like In the Heat of the Night, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Super Fly, Claudine, and Blue Collar, this volume considers how issues of race and labor played out on the screen during the tumultuous early years of affirmative action. Quinn charts how black actors leveraged their performance capital to force meaningful changes to employment and film content. She examines the emergence of Sidney Poitier and other African Americans as A-list stars; the careers of black filmmakers such as Melvin Van Peebles and Ossie Davis; and attempts by the federal government and black advocacy groups to integrate cinema. Quinn also highlights the limits of Hollywood’s liberalism, showing how predominantly white filmmakers, executives, and unions hid the persistence of racism behind feel-good stories and public-relations avowals of tolerance. A rigorous analysis of the deeply rooted patterns of racial exclusion in American cinema, A Piece of the Action sheds light on why conservative and corporate responses to antiracist and labor activism remain pervasive in today’s Hollywood.

"In the mid-1950s, rock 'n' roll amalgamated earlier black and white working-class musical traditions to displace the Great American Songbook's hegemony over Anglophone popular music. At the same time, the classic musical was both displaced and re-created in a new form of film: the rock 'n' roll musical. For the next two decades, the genre's evolution in the United States and the United Kingdom accompanied and sustained the emergence, flowering, and decay of a counterculture. Cinema was second only to records in the production of the new cultural gestalt that the music generated."--[Source inconnue].

In Black City Cinema, Paula Massood shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By the onset of the Depression, the Black population had become primarily urban, transforming individual lives as well as urban experience and culture.Massood probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an intrinsic element of African American film as Black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and more visible as historical and political subjects. Illuminating the intersections of film, history, politics, and urban discourse, she considers the chief genres of African American and Hollywood narrative film: the black cast musicals of the 1920s and the "race" films of the early sound era to blaxploitation and hood films, as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the century. As it examines such a wide range of films over much of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique map of Black representations in film.

Blaxploitation action narratives as well as politically radical films like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song typically portrayed black women as trifling "bitches" compared to the supermacho black male heroes. But starting in 1973, the emergence of "baad bitches" and "sassy supermamas" reversed the trend as self-assured, empowered, and tough black women took the lead in the films Cleopatra Jones, Coffy, and Foxy Brown. Stephane Dunn 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. Recognizing a distinct moment in the history of African American representation in popular cinema, Dunn analyzes how it emerged from a radical political era influenced by the Black Power movement and feminism. Dunn also engages blaxploitation's legacy in contemporary hip-hop culture, as suggested by the music’s disturbing gender politics and the "baad bitch daughters" of Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones, rappers Foxy Brown and Lil' Kim.

Contemporary Black American Cinema offers a fresh collection of essays on African American film, media, and visual culture in the era of global multiculturalism. Integrating theory, history, and criticism, the contributing authors deftly connect interdisciplinary perspectives from American studies, cinema studies, cultural studies, political science, media studies, and Queer theory. This multidisciplinary methodology expands the discursive and interpretive registers of film analysis. From Paul Robeson's and Sidney Poitier's star vehicles to Lee Daniels's directorial forays, these essays address the career legacies of film stars, examine various iterations of Blaxploitation and animation, question the comedic politics of "fat suit" films, and celebrate the innovation of avant-garde and experimental cinema.