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Preface In 1973,when I was seven years old, Get Christy Love premiered on television. It lasted only one brief season, but I never forgot Christy, played by pretty Teresa Graves. I was an avid television watcher who, like a lot of other kids, knew the theme song to ἀ e Brady Bunch by heart and loved action series like Police Woman and later ἀ e Six Million Dollar Man and Charlie’s Angels. Yet, as much as I loved the groovy, blonde- and brown-haired, perfectlooking Brady family, I had a bit of Claudia in me—the Shirley-Temple-andBarbie -doll-hating narrator in Toni Morrison’s ἀ e Bluest Eye. As a young black girl consuming popular media imagery and internalizing cultural thinking about the relationship between skin color and perceptions of feminine beauty, I wasn’t hip to the historical implications of whitened aesthetics of beauty and glamour or to the power signified by the control of representations. However, I was hungry, like many black folk, to see more of an array of blackness, black people and black culture, to see me, vivid and central on that screen that so held my attention. My television-watching childhood was punctuated by the relatively few significant black TV presences —the sitcom Good Times, the miniseries Roots, and the rare movies where young black girls were the center of the story, such as the book-based I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Roll of ἀ under, Hear My Cry. Going to the movies, especially the drive-in, was a unique family event. The big screen presented such intense color, animation, and thrilling action that I sat terrified, gleefully so, in the backseat of our Pontiac, watching Jaws and King Kong. I saw that whether beast or human, bodies within that huge screen space became intense visual spectacles, often through the intensify- xii . preface ing inscriptions of masculinity and femininity, whiteness and blackness, “sameness” and “otherness.” Since the days of Christy, I’ve been enthralled by the heightened sense of entertainment that action films offer. I can still see pretty, chocolate-skinned Christy smiling and kicking butt. I remember one episode in particular where Christy went to a park disguised as a prostitute to catch a serial killer. Sure enough, the rapist-killer showed up and was soon martial arts–whipped by Christy: “You under arrest, Suugah.” Of course, now through the prism of my developing critical spectatorship, I see that while the character signified the public visibility of a feminist and black liberation aesthetic, Christy’s sexy, tough black woman cop role also demonstrated the continued influence of historical dominant inscriptions of black femininity. Throughout the era of the technologically advanced action blockbuster, from Rambo and ἀ e Terminator to the racial buddy Die Hard–type movies, action cinema has remained a distinctly white masculine power–oriented fantasy arena. Looking at turn-of-the-twenty-first-century action film, we see the emergence of black male action stars like Will Smith and Wesley Snipes, crossover martial arts action heroes such as Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and a new generation of tough women in television and film, including Xena the Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sydney of Alias, Tomb Raider Angelina Jolie, and Kill Bill’s female assassins. Perennially cast in secondary roles or not at all, black women are virtually unheard of in the arena of action film stars. In the summer of 2004, Oscar winner Halle Berry—the preeminent “black” Hollywood movie actress, beauty icon, and rare black woman costar of mainstream dramatic and action films (the James Bond movie Die Another Day and X-Men and its two sequels)—starred in Catwoman, a critical and commercial flop. Action film is predominantly still a fantasy arena in which black people—both men and women, but especially women—are too often absent, peripheral, symbolic signifiers, comedic relief, and/or exotic objects. Such a presence reveals much about the operation of racial, gender, and economic power within the cultural fabric of the United States. The last period when there was a noticeable black female action hero presence on-screen occurred during that 1973 Christy Love era when blaxploitation films were being churned out by Hollywood. The birth of sassy supermama heroines Cleopatra Jones and Foxy Brown came into being because radical political activism—the Black Power and feminist movements especially—helped to disturb the American cultural sense of the stability of traditional racial and gender power relations. The issue of black film...

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