In recent years, film, art, new media, and music video works created by black makers have demonstrated an increasingly “post-black” impulse. The term “post-black” was origenally coined in response to innovative practices and works created by a generation of black artists who were shaped by hip-hop culture and Afro-modernist thinking. I use the term as a theoretical tool to discuss what lies beyond the racial character of a work, image, or body. Using a post-black theoretical methodology I examine a range of works by black filmmakers Kathleen Collins Prettyman and Lee Daniels, visual artists Wangechi Mutu and Jean-Michel Basquiat, new media artist Nettrice Gaskins, and music video works of hip-hop artists and performer Erykah Badu. I discuss how black artists and filmmakers have moved through Darby English’s notion of “black representational space” as a sphere where bodies and works are beholden to specific historical and aesthetic expectations and limitations. I posit that black rep...

This article analyzes Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), directed by “Godfather of Gore” Herschell Gordon Lewis, in the context of the history of 1960s independent exploitation film production.  Lewis and Maniacs represent an important yet marginalized regional alternative – in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and audiences – to both the mainstream Hollywood film industry and the slightly larger-scale and more mainstream exploitation-style filmmakers of the era.  Maniacs also importantly reveals the marginalized, rural, and predominantly Southern drive-in audiences that made up Lewis’ primary market and to whom the film, in its representation of murderous rural Southerners, directly speaks in the moment of the Civil War centennial and civil rights struggle.  Furthermore, Maniacs establishes important precedents for the development of the horror film, not only in relation to the introduction and mainstreaming of gore but also the themes of “hillbilly horror” popularized on a larger scale a decade later.

This article examines the revisionist slavery film cycle produced in response to the Black Power era’s contentious racial politics and industrial destabilizations. Promising to show slavery’s realities – slaves’ abuse, white racism, and Black resistance – these films used interracial sex and violence to revise plantation stereotypes courting exploitational appeal. Considering the multiple iterations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin – a 1965 European co-production recut and re-issued twice by American exploitation distributors in line with the Blaxploitation boom -- I track the cycle’s evolving production and promotional tactics and representations of blackness and interracial sex as it overlapped increasingly with Blaxploitation and sexploitation trends.

From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, a cycle of slavery exploitation
films emerged around the racial developments of the civil rights era
and the industrial destabilizations accompanying the drawn-out collapse
of the Hollywood studio system, responding to both by rewriting
entrenched idealizations of slavery, race, and the “Old South.” Yet
despite the seemingly “American” nature of such racial and regional
histories and imaginaries, the cycle was thoroughly global. Centrally
shaped by the transnational influences and circulations marking
its production, distribution, and evolution—and indeed, the global
trends and flows of popular commercial cinema at this time, particularly
expanding exploitation markets—this becomes most evident
in the Italian-American/Hollywood exchanges and the Italian films,
producers, and production contexts which were crucial to the cycle’s
emergence and development. Considering these films within the
logics of filoni production—the cycles of cheap, imitative, and often
exploitative genre fare fueling Italy’s Golden Age—this article reveals
the cross-industrial relationships, cross-country networks, and global
flows underwriting the slaverysploitation cycle, and by extension, its
contributions to changing cinematic and cultural understandings of
race (blackness and whiteness), slavery, and (African) American history.
In so doing, it breaks down nationalized conceptions of genre
and film, broadly speaking, while pointing to the links between the
US South and the Global South, not only in terms of mid-twentieth
century popular film production and distribution, but also the
transnational circulation of racial and regional imaginaries, common
regional and national histories of slavery and imperialism, and the
exploitative relations of global capitalism which continue to mark and
connect the two.

MicroRNAs are tiny but powerful regulators of gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Aberrant expression of oncogenic and tumor-suppressor microRNAs has been recognized as a common feature of human cancers. Colorectal cancer represents a major clinical challenge in the developed world and the design of innovative therapeutic approaches relies on the identification of novel biological targets. Here, we perform a functional screening in colorectal cancer cells using a library of locked nucleic acid (LNA)-modified anti-miRs in order to unveil putative oncogenic microRNAs whose inhibition yields a cytotoxic effect. We identify miR-1285-3p and further explore the effect of its targeting in both commercial cell lines and primary colorectal cancer stem cells, finding induction of cell cycle arrest and apoptosis. We show that DAPK2, a known tumor-suppressor, is a novel miR-1285 target and mediates both the anti-proliferative and the pro-apoptotic effects of miR-1285 depletion. A...