Southern Slavery, Italian Style: Italian-American Exchange, International Networks, and Global Exploitation Film in the Slaverysploitation Cycle

Abstract

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.