Militant Visions : Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema

__Militant Visions__ examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. In the process, Elizabeth Reich reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and black filmmakers. Contextualizing the figure in a genealogy of black radicalism and internationalism, Reich shows the evolving images of black soldiers to be inherently transnational ones, shaped by the displacements of diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of black artistry and performance. Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, black internationalism, and American militarism. __Militant Visions__ thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, but also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself. "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 "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"-- Résumé de l'éditeur