Dr. Zachary Manditch-Prottas is a full-time lecturer in the Department of African and African American Studies and the American Culture Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His work has been featured in current and forthcoming publications in African Americanist cultural criticism, including African American Review, The Black Scholar, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Multi Ethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS).
When Abiodun Oyewole, founding member of The Last Poets, filed a copyright lawsuit against the estate the Notorious BIG (aka Biggie or BIG) it connected the nationalist bard of the 1960s to the politically ambivalent emcee of the 1990s. It also signaled both aesthetic continuity and an ideological impasse between two generations of African-American wordsmiths.
While dismissed by Hollywood as a handy trend, Blaxploitation has earned a shaky status in the history of film and Black cultural history at large. The propensity to elicit loaded for or against debates has led to equally overwrought praise and scorn for these films. A half-century after Blaxploitation’s bombastic introduction, quick rise, and equally quick fall, we would do well to revisit, and reconsider, those films that best exemplify the still prickly term.
