Tag Archives: Race

Mel Gibson, Apocalypto

Mel Gibson is clearly fascinated by violence and blood. Just as, even if implicitly, The Passion of the Christ showed how civilization was born in blood, so does Apocalypto show how civilization dies in blood.
The film opens with a quote: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” […]

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Living the Alien: Afrofuturism

In much the same way, people can use these narratives to understand themselves, particularly in opposition to a dominant culture in which they are not openly acknowledged. An example of this is the cultural movement of afrofuturism, exisiting primarily at the website afrofuturism.net and its corresponding Yahoo listserv, established by Alondra Nelson in 1998 (Nelson, […]

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Melvin Van Peebles, Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song

Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song is a peculiar film alternately hailed as the first blaxploitation film and criticised for its reductive images of the black man. I, however, believe that there is a reason to view the film not from a specific genre viewpoint, nor to regard it as having to conform to perceived notions […]

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