ABSTRACT
In an arresting confluence of screen persona, publicity image and star biography, in 2006 Will Smith starred in male melodrama of upwardly mobile single fatherhood The Pursuit of Happyness alongside his son (Jaden Smith), which commensurate both with the senior Smith’s A-list stardom and the cultural saleability of postfeminist fatherhood, was a massive boon to the film’s paternally oriented marketing campaign. 1 This film marked the apotheosis of Smith’s crossover stardom, articulating the key characteristics of his persona through its convergence of postracial transcendence and postfeminist fatherhood. This chapter interrogates discourses of the paternal and the postracial, which come into sharp focus in high-profile films like The Pursuit of Happyness and Daddy Day Care (2003). These films deracinate the paternities embodied by their African American protagonists (and stars: Smith and Eddie Murphy) symptomatic of their negotiation of ‘colorblind’ ideology. Postracial discourse and postfeminist culture thus coalesce, declining to confront or challenge entrenched social inequities, through recourse to the individualist rhetoric of neoliberalism. This is articulated through these films’ configurations of fatherhood, while gestures are made toward the particular social parameters required to narrate the celluloid fantasy of the good black father. They are thus frequently situated in relation to the pernicious discourse of fatherlessness that has long characterized cultural conversations and media representations of African American fatherhood.
