![]() ![]() In this way.What exactly was the moment when Dr. But instead of looking at how black identity, one based largely in nationalism, was involved in a dialectical process with Hollywood, this essay examines the heterogeneous identity at play within the genre's black spectators. It is commonly agreed upon that African Americans were the main spectators for blaxploitation in the 1970s. (1) Scholars have overlooked this topic entirely in recent writings about the genre. While many of these materials marketed films with black nationalist tropes of violence and ultrasexuality, a good number of them sold blaxploitation as a genre concerned with black class relationships. Given this, blaxploitation advertisements offer an interesting case study. Perhaps other documents mobilized different influences on black identity to shape the meaning of these films for their audiences. We need to examine how items other than reviews structured the historical reception of blaxploitation in the 1970s. While Reid and Guerrero avoid essentializing the identity of the blaxploitation spectator, they also fixate on nationalism as the driving force behind black identity. These arguments are thoroughly researched and politically necessary, but their limited archive of reception documents has narrowed our understanding of the genre's complexity. Consequently, because many of the writings are based in black nationalist ideologies, much of our current understanding of blaxploitation and its audience has only been seen through the lens of this political movement. ![]() Reid and Guerrero largely turn to polemics about and reviews of blaxploitation. To account for the interaction Bennett puts forth, reception scholars have turned to film reviews, advertisements, posters, lobby cards, and so on to examine discourses about films circulating in culture. ![]() Such an interaction would be conceived of as occurring between the culturally activated text and the culturally activated reader" (12). While Reid and Guerrero incorporate a black cultural studies approach to theorize issues of racial subordination and resistance, both writers nicely demonstrate Tony Bennett's founding words of historical reception studies: to approach texts by looking at the "reading formations that concretely and historically structure the interaction between texts and readers. As more African Americans drew on nationalist discourses to protest the stereotypes in these films, Hollywood recovered economically and found it unnecessary to produce the controversial pictures (Guerrero 69-70). Ed Guerrero argues that a rise in African American identity politics in the late 1960s, a near economic collapse in Hollywood, and the various responses of studios to a growing black film audience offered a dialectic that led to the rise of blaxploitation films. ![]() For Reid, there is no monolithic black spectator each can resist, assimilate, or appropriate a text's message (69). Mark Reid, for example, contends that while black nationalist organizations and writers voiced their disdain for the genre, most black filmgoers, influenced by black nationalism yet unaware of its critique of blaxploitation, assumed the films to be authentically black and a source of pride (90). Recent critical treatments of blaxploitation films offer nuanced readings of the discourses structuring the genre's historical reception. ![]()
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