The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation by Sharon Willis (review)

The cultural pervasiveness of sidney poitier is hard to underestimate. The iconic “ebony saint’s” mythic persona—a dignified, sexless man whose quiet reserve masked the anger he could never express at white racism—forever tied him to the era of civil rights. In 1950s and 1960s films like The Defiant Ones (1958), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), the Poitier image became shorthand for the assimilationist type of white-approved “safe” black masculinity that black critics would vehemently reject, along with Poitier, in the Black Power era. In her excellent and theoretically nuanced new book, The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation, Sharon Willis attempts to come to terms with this very iconicity of Sidney Poitier: the filmic and cultural work his persona was made to do during the civil rights era and the ongoing legacies of his image in today’s supposedly postracial moment.

Deftly blending work on film theory, melodrama, collective memory, racial fantasy, and the politics of whiteness, Willis combines various theoretical concepts with extensive formal analysis to argue that during the civil rights movement, Poitier’s persona, which Variety in 1967 described as “the useful Negro,” coalesced into an “archive” of film and televisual images that has continued to shape our filmic and cultural memories of that period (6). Willis claims this persona was mobilized in terms of what she defines as “the Poitier effect,” a set of narrative conventions, representational strategies, and ideological structures that updated the “magical Negro” stereotype so that Poitier was always pedagogically positioned in relation to whiteness; across his films, Poitier’s nearly identical characters all “educate well-intentioned white people to understand and accept racial equality” (4). Whites are left improved and transformed through their encounters with Poitier, who is always just “passing through” their all-white worlds, and the changes require little effort and no altering of the (white) racial order.

Thus, the Poitier effect functioned—and continues to function—as a “compensatory strategy” that appeased white guilt through fantasies of interracial reconciliation. Expertly blending historic and contemporary scholarship on melodrama with Linda Williams’s work on racial melodrama’s staging of racial suffering and innocence, Willis deftly examines Poitier’s films and their cinematic legacy through the lens of the genre that has proven particularly adept at addressing cultural crisis through the erasure of history and the privileging of individual action and affect. Thus, she compellingly argues, by engaging melodrama’s mode and formal strategies, the Poitier effect stages fantasies of interracial reconciliation that contain ideological contradiction, manage cultural trauma, and repress the realities of violence surrounding race, particularly in the mass-mediated civil rights era (and its memory).

In one of the book’s most engaging elements, Willis considers Poitier’s image in relation to both film and television, arguing that television itself shared many of these same melodramatic effects and ability to “manage social trauma” (15). While many working in the areas of TV studies, the civil rights era, and collective memory have long pointed out the centrality of television (images) to the movement, the period, and its remembrance, Willis builds on television’s well-known iconicity and pervasiveness to deepen her own analysis of a film star. TV here forms a crucial context for understanding both Poitier and television’s role in transmitting iconic images of the period / the period as iconic, and Willis rightly avoids the pitfalls of segregating one medium from the other in an era when the two became increasingly intertwined.

Willis’s book proves that the Poitier effect has not disappeared with time but has remained “stubbornly durable” in subsequent “cinematic remembrances” of the civil rights era (40, 16). So she looks productively beyond Poitier’s own films to insightfully analyze the larger cinematic and cultural investments in the “visual codes” and melodramatic strategies once mobilized around the actor and their “afterlife in our contemporary moment” (40...