This course will survey the highly contentious genre of black exploitation films, known as Blaxploitation. In a moment where black power movements were repressed, alongside the American film industry facing near collapse, a wave of independently-produced low-budget genre films coalesced in the early 1970s as a film movement that introduced black directors like Ossie Davis, Melvin van Peebles, and Gordon Parks. Blaxploitation films that featured all-black casts and strategically targeted black filmgoers were also criticized for perpetuating stereotypes and their commercial success was capitalized on and co-opted by white Hollywood producers. We will use the film movement to better understand the social, cultural, political, and economic landscape of the U.S. and to critically consider the opportunistic exploitation of black communities. The course will also explore the intermedial impact of popular music, art, comedy, and television, with special considerations for analyses that lay at the nexus of blackness, gender, and sexuality. Lastly, we will examine the resurgence of Blaxploitation films in the late 1980s and explore its contemporary resonances in (black) American popular culture. Students can anticipate bi-weekly in-class screenings; nonfiction and fiction readings, and listening exercises.