"Shaft"

Paper Summary:

In 1971, a new type of movie hero appeared on the screen. "Shaft" was the first Hollywood production that capitalized on a growing black audience who had demonstrated their box office clout with a strong response to Van Peebles's "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song". The paper questions whether the main character, John Shaft, was just another iteration of the 'big, bad black buck' or whether he constituted a new black persona.

From the Paper:

"To understand the cultural context of a Black superhero, it's important to appreciate the political climate of the time. Black Power and Black Nationalism were political movements expressing a new racial consciousness among blacks in the United States in the late 1960s. Black Power represented both a logical outcome of the decade's civil rights movement and an impatient reaction to persisting racism that continued to resist the efforts of black activists during the early 1960s. Black Power was influential mainly in the late 1960s. Black Power meant different things to different people."

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