Expanding the Black Film Canon: Race and Genre across Six Decades

If the sheer diversity of recent hits from Twelve Years a Slave and Moonlight to Get Out, Black Panther, and BlackkKlansman tells us anything, it might be that there’s no such thing as “black film” per se. This book is especially timely, then, in expanding our idea of what black films are and, going back to the 1960s, showing us new and interesting ways to understand them.

When critics and scholars write about films from the Blaxploitation movement—such as Cotton Comes to Harlem, Shaft, Supe...