ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the fundamental nature of the political economy of the 70s blaxploitation cycle. Key issues such as alienation, underemployment, exploitation, and institutional racism within the American commercial film industry are critical sites of investigation in order to understand the cycle. Additionally, the resulting effect of powerlessness and the quantitatively heightened exploitation of the Black audience and the further marginalization of Blackness in the motion picture industry is explored with a discussion of the most aesthetically and politically influential and popular films of the cycle. This chapter outlines the key aspects and issues associated with the political economy of the blaxploitation period in particular and the argument that blaxploitation was a necessary predecessor to the Black film renaissance that begins in the late 1980s; I argue that without blaxploitation, there would be no Do the Right Thing, Boyz N the Hood, or Daughters of the Dust.
