Abstract
At first glance, Cleopatra Jones (1973) would seem to bear little resemblance to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. This film, set primarily in Los Angeles, is historically and geographically distanced from both Shakespeare’s England and Cleopatra’s Egypt. Indeed, one of the films selling points is its contemporaneity: car chases down gritty urban alleyways; funky afros, leather jackets and other clothing that scream “late twentieth century” and allusions to historical events specific to the late 1960s through early 1970s: the Watts uprising, the Black Panthers and COINTELPRO, the feminist movement and the development of the “blaxploitation” film genre of which it is a part.
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Notes
Marianne Novy; ed., Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, H. D., George Eliot, and Others (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 7.
Michael Neill, ed., Antony and Cleopatra (London: Oxford University Press, 1994), 65.
Mary Hamer, Signs of Cleotatra (London: Routledge, 1993), xviii–xix.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 266.
Earl Mills, Dorothy Dandridge (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1970), 221.
Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 37.
Edward Guerrero, Framing Blackness: the African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), especially 69–113.
Leonard Maltin, ed., Movie and Video Guide (New York: Signet, 1994), 228.
Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990), 67–68.
Gerald Home, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960’s (Char lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 16.
Note too that the protection and control of black women and their bodies was to central the gender dynamics of the Nation of islam, a still-influential aspect of black nationalist thought in 1973. McCalisrer quotes Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America (1965): “’The woman is man’s field to produce his nation,’ Muhammad wrote. ‘You protect your vegetable crops from worms and thieves. Is not your woman more valuable than that crop of corn, that crop of cotton, that crop of cabbage, potatoes, beans, tomatoes? … Yet you are not careful about your women. You don’t love them.’ Women’s bodies were the literal site through which the nation could be produced, but also the metaphorical land that the ‘black man’ would cultivate as his own.” See Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 96–97.
Coppelia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 113.
For a sharp analysis of homoeroticism in Cleopatra Jones and its sequel, Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975), see Jennifer Devere Brody, “The Returns of Cleopatra Jones,” in The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture, ed. Shelton Waldrep (New York: Routledge, 2000), 225–248.
Jesse Algernon Rhines, Black Film, White Money (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 45.
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© 2003 Francesca T. Royster
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Royster, F.T. (2003). Cleopatra Jones: Blaxploitation and Tactical Alliances with Shakespeare. In: Becoming Cleopatra. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07417-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07417-1_6
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