The Construction Of Black Masculinity In Blaxploitation And Hood Movies

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,7, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine", language: English, abstract: In this term paper the construction of black masculinity and black male characters in Blaxploitation movies and Hood Movies will be compared to analyze if the two periods of filmmaking have created another view on the black masculine. To make the two genres comparable in such a limited scope I will focus on two movies, each of which can be regarded as prototypical for its genre. Considering the ‘Blaxploitation’ genre I will focus on the movie Shaft (1971) by Gordon Parks. The Hood movie I chose is John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood (1991), which will be called Boyz in the rest of this term paper. Anybody who has seen movies featuring black male protagonists in major roles – like Bad Boys or Django Unchained – might have noticed that often those black male characters are depicted in certain and often clichéd ways. This depiction can be described by another term which is ‘construction’. What those films actually do is a construction of a black masculinity through means of acting, filming techniques or even the choice of the actor, especially with regard to his outward appearance. The black male character has been a very central figure in American literature and movies for a long time. Considering movies it can be argued that for roughly one century there have been constructions of African-American males in American cinema starting with the highly racist film The Birth of a Nation. Nowadays virtually everybody will know movies that feature black masculine main protagonists. Two periods which can be considered as highly influential with regard to the construction of black masculinity are the early seventies and the early nineties because they originated two important genres. These two genres will be referred to as ‘Blaxploitation’ and ‘hood movie’ throughout this text.

Boys, Boyz, Bois concerns questions of ethics, gender and race in popular American images, national discourse and cultural production by and about black men. The book proposes an ethics of masculinity, as ethnics refers to a system of morality and valuation and as ethics refers to a care of the self and ethical subject formation. The texts of analysis include recent films by black/African American filmmakers, gangsta rap and hip-hop and black star persona: texts ranging from Blaxploitation and New Black Cinema to contemporary music video to autobiography and the public image of Sidney Poitier. The book is a significant contribution to cultural studies and gender studies and critical race theory. What is distinctive about the book is the question of ethics as a question of race and gender.

This book offers a critical survey of film and media representations of black masculinity in the early twenty-first-century United States, between President George W. Bush’s 2001 announcement of the War on Terror and President Barack Obama’s 2009 acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. It argues that images of black masculine authority have become increasingly important to the legitimization of contemporary policing and its leading role in the maintenance of an antiblack social order forged by racial slavery and segregation. It examines a constellation of film and television productions—from Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day to John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side to Barry Jenkin's Moonlight—to illuminate the contradictory dynamics at work in attempts to reconcile the promotion of black male patriarchal empowerment and the preservation of gendered antiblackness within political and popular culture.

This information pack is produced for the Cambridge Media Studies A Level (Syllabus A, Paper 3). It contains an annotated bibliography, a list of annotated journal references, newspaper articles and reviews.

In my view, The Negro Problem in 2008 is part law, part politics, part oppression, part internalized oppression and part ideology. As America becomes more polarized into red states and blues states, into liberals and conservatives, into right, left, and even further into black and white, racism has become even more pronounced if not more difficult to identify. The Negro Problem of 2008 is helped along willingly by blacks whose sense of inferiority and internalized oppression so blind them that they too deal in oppressive and denigrating images for profits. Working hand in hand with the white executives who profit from those images and the white liberals who justify this denigration, they too add grist to the mill of oppression and exclusion. Members of the American media have moved from reporting the news to advancing their opinions and discussing race in a roundabout way, which they claim is race neutral, but which is in fact race conscious. How has their unfettered power defined the coverage of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary? What role does rap music, with its revival of the most vile and base stereotypes of black men from slavery and the Jim Crow era and its attendant culture of debauchery, play in stoking racial subordination and domination? Does the fact that so many rap artists are black provide them with the veritable black pass to lyrically and virtually debase and defile black women and themselves that whites, by virtue of their whiteness, are denied?

Beyond Blaxploitation, the first book-length anthology of scholarly work on blaxploitation film, sustains the momentum that blaxploitation scholarship has recently gained, giving the films an even more prominent place in cinema history. This volume is made up of eleven essays employing historical and theoretical methodologies in the examination of spectatorship, marketing, melodrama, the transition of novel to screenplay, and racial politics and identity, among other significant topics. In doing so, the book fills a substantial gap that exists in the black cinematic narrative and, more broadly, in film history. Beyond Blaxploitation is divided into three sections that feature original essays on a variety of canonical blaxploitation films and others that either influenced the movement or in some form represent a significant extension of it. The first section titled, “From Pioneer to Precursor to Blaxploitation,” centers on three films—Cotton Comes to Harlem, Watermelon Man, and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song—that ignited the African American film cycle. The second section, “The Canon and the Not so Canon,” is dedicated to forging alternative considerations of some of the most highly regarded blaxploitation films, while also bringing attention to lesser-known films in the movement. The final section, “Was, Is, or Isn’t Blaxploitation,” includes four essays that offer significant insights on films that are generally associated with blaxploitation but contest traditional definitions of the movement. Moreover, this section features chapters that address industrial factors that led to the creation of blaxploitation cinema and highlight the limitations of the term itself. Beyond Blaxploitation is a much-needed pedagogical tool, informing film scholars, critics, and fans alike, about blaxploitation’s richness and complexity.

Exploring the depiction of violence and related issues in Hollywood productions, this book focuses on the motivations and cultural politics of violence on the big screen, as well as its effects on viewers and society as a whole.

In early-twentieth-century motion picture houses, offensive stereotypes of African Americans were as predictable as they were prevalent. Watermelon eating, chicken thievery, savages with uncontrollable appetites, Sambo and Zip Coon were all representations associated with African American people. Most of these caricatures were rendered by whites in blackface. Few people realize that from 1915 through 1929 a number of African American film directors worked diligently to counter such racist definitions of black manhood found in films like D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 epic that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. In the wake of the film's phenomenal success, African American filmmakers sought to defend and redefine black manhood through motion pictures. Gerald Butters's comprehensive study of the African American cinematic vision in silent film concentrates on works largely ignored by most contemporary film scholars: African American-produced and -directed films and white independent productions of all-black features. Using these "race movies" to explore the construction of masculine identity and the use of race in popular culture, he separates cinematic myth from historical reality: the myth of the Euro American-controlled cinematic portrayal of black men versus the actual black male experience. Through intense archival research, Butters reconstructs many lost films, expanding the discussion of race and representation beyond the debate about "good" and "bad" imagery to explore the construction of masculine identity and the use of race as device in the context of Western popular culture. He particularly examines the filmmaking of Oscar Micheaux, the most prolific and controversial of all African American silent film directors and creator of the recently rediscovered Within Our Gates—the legendary film that exposed a virtual litany of white abuses toward blacks. Black Manhood on the Silent Screen is unique in that it takes contemporary and original film theory, applies it to the distinctive body of African American independent films in the silent era, and relates the meaning of these films to larger political, social, and intellectual events in American society. By showing how both white and black men have defined their own sense of manhood through cinema, it examines the intersection of race and gender in the movies and offers a deft interweaving of film theory, American history, and film history.