Militant Visions
286 pages, 6 x 9
7 photographs
Paperback
Release Date:01 Aug 2016
ISBN:9780813572574
Hardcover
Release Date:01 Aug 2016
ISBN:9780813572581
Militant Visions
Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema
Rutgers University Press
Militant Visions examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. In the process, Elizabeth Reich reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and black filmmakers. Contextualizing the figure in a genealogy of black radicalism and internationalism, Reich shows the evolving images of black soldiers to be inherently transnational ones, shaped by the displacements of diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of black artistry and performance.
Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, black internationalism, and American militarism. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, but also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself.
Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, black internationalism, and American militarism. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, but also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself.
Reich's book is always informed, and its value is enhanced by 32 pages of footnotes and 6 pages of bibliography … Recommended.
Militant Visions is an engaging and welcome contribution to a vibrant field of emerging scholarship on African American film and media.
Militant Visions uncovers a crucial, previously hidden dimension of American filmmaking, and of African American film spectatorship and response, showing how cinematic representations of black masculinity from the Forties to the Seventies contributed to the larger social movement for black emancipation.
In this revelatory revisionist history of twentieth-century American film, Reich demonstrates that the figure of the black soldier has served as a lightning rod for a welter of national anxieties around race, masculinity, and allegiance.
ELIZABETH REICH is an assistant professor of film studies at Connecticut College in New London. She is the coeditor of Film Criticism’s special issue on “New Approaches to Cinematic Identification.”
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Historicizing and Internationalizing the “Baadasssss” or Imagining Cinematic Reparation
Part I“We Return Fighting”: The Integration of Hollywood and the Reconstruction of Black Representation
1 The Black Soldier and His Colonial Other
2 Resounding Blackness: Liveness and the Reprisal of Black Performance in Stormy Weather
3 Remembering the Men: Black Audience Propaganda and the Reconstruction of the Black Public Sphere
Part II“Fugitive Movements”: Black Resistance, Exile, and the Rise of Black Independent Cinema
4 Psychic Seditions: Black Interiority, Black Death, and the Mise-en-Scène of Resistance in Cold War Cinema
5 Toward a Black Transnational Cinema: Melvin Van Peebles and the Soldier
6 The Last Black Soldier: Performing Revolution in The Spook Who Sat by the Door
Conclusion: After Images
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Related Titles
The Blacker the Ink
Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art
Edited by Frances Gateward and John Jennings
Warring over Valor
How Race and Gender Shaped American Military Heroism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Edited by Simon Wendt
The Blacker the Ink
Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art
Edited by Frances Gateward and John Jennings
Warring over Valor
How Race and Gender Shaped American Military Heroism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Edited by Simon Wendt
