Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras PDF Author: Odie Henderson
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 164700506X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A definitive account of Blaxploitation cinema—the freewheeling, often shameless, and wildly influential genre—from a distinctive voice in film history and criticism In 1971, two films grabbed the movie business, shook it up, and launched a genre that would help define the decade. Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, an independently produced film about a male sex worker who beats up cops and gets away, and Gordon Parks’s Shaft, a studio-financed film with a killer soundtrack, were huge hits, making millions of dollars. Sweetback upended cultural expectations by having its Black rebel win in the end, and Shaft saved MGM from bankruptcy. Not for the last time did Hollywood discover that Black people went to movies too. The Blaxploitation era was born. Written by film critic Odie Henderson, Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras is a spirited history of a genre and the movies that he grew up watching, which he loves without irony (but with plenty of self-awareness and humor). Blaxploitation was a major trend, but it was never simple. The films mixed self-empowerment with exploitation, base stereotypes with essential representation that spoke to the lives and fantasies of Black viewers. The time is right for a reappraisal, understanding these films in the context of the time, and exploring their lasting influence.

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras PDF Author: Odie Henderson
Publisher: Abrams Press
ISBN: 9781419758416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A definitive account of Blaxploitation cinema--the freewheeling, often shameless, and wildly influential genre--from a distinctive voice in film history and criticism In 1971, two films grabbed the movie business, shook it up, and launched a genre that would help define the decade. Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, an independently produced film about a male sex worker who beats up cops and gets away, and Gordon Parks's Shaft, a studio-financed film with a killer soundtrack, were huge hits, making millions of dollars. Sweetback upended cultural expectations by having its Black rebel win in the end, and Shaft saved MGM from bankruptcy. Not for the last time did Hollywood discover that Black people went to movies too. The Blaxploitation era was born. Written by film critic Odie Henderson, Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras is a spirited history of a genre and the movies that he grew up watching, which he loves without irony (but with plenty of self-awareness and humor). Blaxploitation was a major trend, but it was never simple. The films mixed self-empowerment with exploitation, base stereotypes with essential representation that spoke to the lives and fantasies of Black viewers. The time is right for a reappraisal, understanding these films in the context of the time, and exploring their lasting influence.

Blaxploitation Cinema

Blaxploitation Cinema PDF Author: Josiah Howard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Dazzling, highly stylised, excessively violent and brimming with sex, blaxploitation films enjoyed a brief but memorable moment in motion picture history. Never before, and never since, have so many African-American performers been featured in films, not in bit parts, but in name-above-the title starring roles. Here's a new and appreciative look back at a distinctly American motion picture phenomenon, the first truly comprehensive examination of the genre, its films, its trends and its far-reaching impact, covering more than 240 Blaxploitation films in detail. This is the primary reference book on the genre, covering not just the films' heyday (1971-1976) but the entire decade (1970-1980). Includes: film posters and ads

The Funk Movement

The Funk Movement PDF Author: Reiland Rabaka
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104017230X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Rabaka explores funk as a distinct multiform of music, aesthetics, politics, social vision, and cultural rebellion that has been remixed and continues to influence contemporary Black popular music and Black popular culture, especially rap music and the Hip Hop Movement. The Funk Movement was a sub-movement within the larger Black Power Movement and its artistic arm, the Black Arts Movement. Moreover, the Funk Movement was also a sub-movement within the Black Women’s Liberation Movement between the late 1960s and late 1970s, where women’s funk, especially Chaka Khan and Betty Davis’s funk, was understood to be a form of “Black musical feminism” that was as integral to the movement as the Black political feminism of Angela Davis or the Combahee River Collective and the Black literary feminism of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker. This book also demonstrates that more than any other post-war Black popular music genre, the funk music of the 1960s and 1970s laid the foundation for the mercurial rise of rap music and the Hip Hop Movement in the 1980s and 1990s. This book is primarily aimed at scholars and students working in popular music studies, popular culture studies, American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, critical race studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies.

The Survival of Margaret Thomas

The Survival of Margaret Thomas PDF Author: Del Howison
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
ISBN: 1625674937
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The West of the late 1800s is a lonely place. Margaret Thomas lives that loneliness. Alone, after the shooting death of her sheriff husband that she blames on herself and searches for solace in a liquor bottle. Then one day a miracle arrives in a telegram informing her that the bank robber who shot her husband has been arrested. She is invited to the trial. But that judicial proceeding is all the way across the wild United States and she’s a former easterner now living in Missouri. Margaret must make this journey for her husband’s sake and, if she is ever to live again, assuage the guilt that’s been haunting her since the day he was gunned down. Ride with Margaret Thomas as she reveals this frightening tale from her point of view. A strong woman and the bloody West meet in this unforgettable epic adventure in the tradition of True Grit.

A Gentleman's Murder

A Gentleman's Murder PDF Author: Christopher Huang
Publisher: Inkshares
ISBN: 1942645953
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Featuring a half-Chinese detective protagonist, A GENTLEMAN'S MURDER is a must for those who love mysteries and reads like a Christie-esque whodunit with a modern eye toward the historical treatment of Chinese veterans and post-war racism.

Shaft: The Original Novel

Shaft: The Original Novel PDF Author: Ernest Tidyman
Publisher: Dynamite
ISBN: 1524100196
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Who is John Shaft? John Shaft is a private eye. John Shaft is a black man made of muscle and ice, and he has no prejudices. John Shaft will kill anyone... black or white. When the cloistered daughter of Harlem's crime boss discovers the true nature of her father's work, she runs off to be as bad as Dad. By the time she disappears, she's into sex, liquor, dope, and a few other scenes. Now, Big Daddy wants Shaft to get his baby back. The tough, take-no-guff detective goes to work... and the Mafia, the Black militants, the NYPD, and City Hall go to work on him. The original and unabridged Shaft novel by Ernest Tidyman, the 1970 tour de force of hardboiled crime fiction that introduced an unsuspecting world to a cultural icon.

Urban Legendz

Urban Legendz PDF Author: Paul Downs
Publisher: Humanoids, Inc.
ISBN: 1643375555
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
A group of young vigilantes roam the streets of Brooklyn solving supernatural crimes.

Vampirology

Vampirology PDF Author: Kathryn Harkup
Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
ISBN: 1839161574
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Our fascination with the vampire myth has scarcely diminished since Bram Stoker's publication of the classic Dracula tale in 1897, but how much of the lore is based in fact and can science explain the origins of horror's most famous fiend? Vampirology charts the murky waters of the vampire myth - from stories found in many cultures across the globe to our sympathetic pop-culture renditions today - to investigate how a scientific interpretation may shed light on the fears and phenomena of the vampire myth.

Freak Out

Freak Out PDF Author: Pauline Butcher
Publisher: Plexus Publishing
ISBN: 0859657159
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 551

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Book Description
This new, completely revised and updated edition contains a wealth of new material, excerpts from the author's diaries and private letters home about life in Hollywood. In 1967, 21-year-old Pauline Butcher was working for a London secretarial agency when a call came through from a Mr Frank Zappa asking for a typist.The assignment would change her life forever. For three years, Pauline served as Zappa's PA, moving with him, his family and the Mothers of Invention, to a log cabin in Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, where the 'straight' young English girl mixed with Oscar winners and rock royalty. Freak Out! is the captivating story of a naive young English girl thrust into the mad world of a musical legend as well as the most intimate portrait of Frank Zappa ever written.