Friday, April 7, 2017

Monday, January 30, 2017

The Eyegiene Chapter on Mandingo and Blaxploitation: A Work in Progress



I am in the middle of composing and revising a brief chapter on blaxploitation movies and paperbacks for the Eyegiene book with UT Press.  In the process of spelunking the internets for material on the 1975 film "classic" Mandingo directed by Richard Fleischer--which itself derives from the novel Mandingo by Kyle Onstott and a stage version of the book by Jack Kirkland--I chanced across these screaming semiotic, pulp wonders.  Let's see how many of these I can squeeze into the book!  The source for the images is an Etsy vendor.  I love that the book is an "uncensored" abridgment, meaning, I imagine that bulky scenes of description and dialogue have been excised in the interest of featuring the delights of "scandalous" miscegenation in the old South.





Sunday, January 8, 2017

Eyegiene and Pulp Fiction: Saucy Detective Stories, v1 #5, August 1937 | Norman Saunders Cover Art

Norman Saunders cover, below, will have its day in Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race. Saunders' clever semiotic deconstruction (the pinup woman, object of the magazine purchaser's eye, is, herself, a camera operator, her cutting edge film camera--for then--more prominent in a way than either her shadowy pursuer or her own naked torso) signals a pre-post-structuralist understanding of the technology / representation / subjectivity matrix.  The image, contemporary with Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (actually Benjamin's opus comes out a year previous) augurs ideas that will see full development in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.


  • Saucy Detective Stories [v1 #5, August 1937] (25¢, 1-96+65b-128b, pulp, cover by Norman Saunders
  • Title page reads Saucy Stories. Details taken from a scan of a (partial) Table of Contents, supplemented by information from Nichole Rounds.
{source: William G. Contento's Homeville Fiction Magazine, main: http://www.philsp.com/homeville/   ||| specific issue info: index: http://www.philsp.com/homeville/cfi/t650.htm#A13253}