Overview

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. 

Full Product Details

Author:   Elizabeth Reich
Publisher:   Rutgers University Press
Imprint:   Rutgers University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.399kg
ISBN:  

9780813572574

ISBN 10:   0813572576
Pages:   286
Publication Date:   01 August 2016
Recommended Age:   From 16 to 99 years
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

          AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Historicizing and Internationalizing the “Baadasssss” or Imagining Cinematic ReparationPart I“We Return Fighting”: The Integration of Hollywood and the Reconstruction of Black Representation1      The Black Soldier and His Colonial Other2      Resounding Blackness: Liveness and the Reprisal of Black Performance in Stormy Weather3      Remembering the Men: Black Audience Propaganda and the Reconstruction of the Black Public SpherePart II“Fugitive Movements”: Black Resistance, Exile, and the Rise of Black Independent Cinema4      Psychic Seditions: Black Interiority, Black Death, and the Mise-en-Scène of Resistance in Cold War Cinema5      Toward a Black Transnational Cinema: Melvin Van Peebles and the Soldier6      The Last Black Soldier: Performing Revolution in The Spook Who Sat by the DoorConclusion: After Images          Notes          Selected Bibliography          Index 

Reviews

Militant Visions is an engaging and welcome contribution to a vibrant field of emerging scholarship on African American film and media. --Kara Keeling author of The Witch s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of C

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. --Steven Shaviro Wayne State University

Author Information

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.”  

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