Militant visions : black soldiers, internationalism, and the transformation of American cinema / Elizabeth Reich.

"Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism and the Transformation of American Cinema offers the first book-length study of the figure of the black soldier in film. Providing a new history of the cinema's engagement with race, the book explores the unusual collaborations between the U.S. government, the Hollywood studios and the black independents that at once led to the black soldier's creation and resulted from its success. It identifies in the moving images of this patriotic, mid-century soldier the lasting influence of the militant internationalists of the earlier New Negro movement. And it also finds in the films of black soldiers the representational origins of the renegades of the Blaxploitation film cycle to come. Tracing the transformation of the figure alongside the political and cultural changes of the thirty-year period of civil rights struggles beginning with WWII, Militant Visions argues that the cinematic black soldier became central to the reconstruction of American cinema after the war; the development of new public spheres and modes of spectatorship; and the progress of the civil rights movement itself"-- Provided by publisher

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Historicizing and Internationalizing the "Baadasssss" or Imagining Cinematic Reparation -- "We Return Fighting": The Integration of Hollywood and the Reconstruction of Black Representation -- The Black Soldier and His Colonial Other -- Resounding Blackness: Liveness and the Reprisal of Black Performance in Stormy Weather -- Remembering the Men: Black Audience Propaganda and the Reconstruction of the Black Public Sphere -- "Fugitive Movements": Black Resistance, Exile and the Rise of Black Independent Cinema. Psychic Seditions: Black Interiority, Black Death and the Mise-en-Scène of Resistance in Cold War Cinema -- Toward a Black Transnational Cinema: Melvin Van Peebles and the Soldier -- The Last Black Soldier: Performing Revolution in The Spook Who Sat by the Door -- Conclusion: After Images.

Print version record.

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