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.