When
Where
Dr. Derrais Carter, Assistant Professor, Department of Gender and Women's Studies at UArizona
October 21, 2020, at 12:30 PM
This talk investigates the emergence of a Civil Rights Movement era Black cultural discourse that wrestled over cinematic representation throughout the 1970s. Blaxploitation was critical to this conversation. Coined in 1972 by Junius Griffin, head of the Hollywood NAACP, the term highlights the (white) film industry’s exploitation of Black actors in the wake of its “discovery” of Black audiences as an untapped market. Rather than continue the theme of white exploitation of Black labor, however, this talk argues that the term blaxploitation also identifies lesser-known yet ongoing intraracial class conflicts among Black artists, protesters, and intellectuals.