African American Film and the Legacy of Violence (1/4/03; ASA, 10/16/03-10/19/03)

CFP: "African American Film and the Legacy of Violence" (1/4/03; ASA 10/16-19/03)

Call for papers for a proposed panel, "African American Film and the Legacy of Violence," for the annual meeting of the American Studies Association (Hartford, CT; October 16-19, 2003). The blaxploitation period of the seventies has become the most common reference point for discussions of violence in contemporary black film. Like discussions of Hollywood cinema as a whole, which have tended to cite the dissolution of the Production Code as the formative period for American screen violence, films like Boyz N the Hood (1991) are most commonly linked back to Shaft (Gordon Parks, Sr.) and Superfly (Gordon Parks, Jr.). Yet violence is not new to American film, nor is it new to the African American cinematic image, which from almost its very beginnings has been characterized either by its potential for violence or for the atrocities experienced by black people on screen. We have only to examine D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) to see this duality exemplified, for in Gus, the sexually rapacious black brute who drove innocent Flora Cameron to her death, a specific form of historical violence was enacted. Gus was driven by a lust for white flesh, and his attempted rape of Flora defined African American cinematic masculinity for decades. In the diegesis, Gus' actions were punished, and his lynching and castration was a graphic warning against black male transgression in a white patriarchal world. In understanding that African Americans (filmmakers, spectators) have always had a fraught relationship with American cinema, this panel argues that what has been increasingly referred to as "new violence" to "characterize a range of films and other media productions, including rap music and popular fiction" is not all that new. American cinema has always been violent, and even more so when focusing on African American subject matter. Often, as the legacy of cinematic lynchings suggests, this violence has been related to gender. This panel session will consider the ways in which African American film has been effected and inflected by either specific acts of brutality or more pervasive institutional violence over history. Papers can either address a specific theme, such as lynching, or a specific film or films, such as Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates. Papers focusing on a variety of genres and time periods-early gangster films, blaxploitation, hood films-will be considered, but discussions that expand the historical scope from the contemporary moment are preferred. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): the relationship between gender and violence onscreen; explorations and/or representations of lynching; violence and urban space; violence presented as a "revolutionary act"; or cinematic violence as a refraction of sociological problems (for example, in gangster or "gangsta" films).

Please e-mail abstracts (500 words) and short vitas (one-page ) by January 4, 2003 to:

Paula J. Massood
Department of Film
Brooklyn College/CUNY
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11210
E-mail: pjmbg@mindspring.com

Assistant Professor
Film Department
Brooklyn College/CUNY
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11210
718-951-5664 (office)
718-951-4733 (fax)