Table of Contents

Introduction
David Garrett Izzo
Part I: Resonance from the Past: Experience Is Learned Backward But Must Be Lived Forward
Chapter 1 - “I Really Need a Maid!” White Womanhood in The Help
Kwakiutl L. Dreher
Chapter 2 - Gwendolyn Brooks’s Bronzeville and Tate Taylor’s Jackson: “Art hurts. Art urges voyages—and it is easier to stay at home.”
Blake G. Hobby
Chapter 3 - If Django and Lincoln Could Talk: James Baldwin Goes to the Movies
Robert McParland
Chapter 4 - The Exceptional N*gger: Redefining African American Identity in Django Unchained
Rodney M. D. Fierce
Chapter 5 - Blaxploitation in the Age of Obama: Black Dynamite, Django Unchained, Racial Reasoning, and Racial Capitalism
Brian E. Butler
Chapter 6 - Between The Butler and Black Dynamite: Servility, Militancy, and the Meaning of Blaxploitation
Andrew Grossman
Chapter 7 - Rednecks, Racism, and Religion: King and Darabont’s Precarious Prophecy of Obama’s Coming
Victoria McCollum
Part II: The Present Is an Eternal Now Connecting Past and Fut

About the Author

David Garrett Izzo is professor of English at Shaw University. He is the author or editor of several books, including Bruce Springsteen and the American Soul (2011) and Huxley’s Brave New World: Essays (2008).

Reviews

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 as the US's first African American president was a remarkable historic event. In the euphoria of the moment certain pundits imagined that the US had entered a postracial age, and racism was over. The deaths of Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin soon shattered the myth of a new golden age in race relations. The films that have emerged in the supposed postracial 'age of Obama' show that the US is still haunted by the ghost of racism, and that the land is troubled by issues of class and corporate excess. It is profoundly ironic that in an era that imagines we have transcended race the film industry produced Django, 12 Years aSlave, The Help, The Butler, and Fruitvale Station. Popular discontent with the great recession and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1 percent is reflected in futuristic films such as TheHunger Games. Rebellion against tyranny can be inferred in the success of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Izzo has put together a superb, compelling collection of film criticism. Atour de force. Summing Up: Essential. All readers.
*Choice Reviews*

The years of the Barack Obama presidency have seen a resurgence of 'black cinema' akin to the rise of the Blaxploitation movement of the 1960s. The present collection of 18 essays by a varied collection of academic scholars reviews a number of recent popular films, including The Help, Django Unchained, The Blind Side, 12 Years a Slave, to consider not only their popularity among non-black audiences but also how they fit into the current cultural and political milieu. Of special interest are those essays that address films that are not specifically black-oriented, such as The Great Gatsby and The Hunger Games. Even films such as these, argue their authors, speak to the changing cultural landscape that has developed since 2008. As editor Izzo notes in his introduction, the coalescence of minority, traditional Democrat, and other like-minded voters in the presidential election came about in part from the recognition of Obama’s Otherness -- voters saw in his person the outsider that they also felt because of the economic recession. This new crop of films thus deals together with the past, present, and future and especially forces black artists to think about representations. . . .Izzo’s collection deserves a place in comprehensive academic libraries for its currency.
*American Reference Books Annual*