We visited English 2230 Literature and Film when Dr. Trent Brown, professor of American studies, was discussing the 1971 MGM blockbuster Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree.
The film is often classified as blaxploitation, a label combining the words Black and exploitation. Coined in the early 1970s, possibly by civil rights activist and NAACP leader Junius Griffin, the term was used by critics to describe a cycle of films that capitalized on sensational portrayals of Black urban life while marketing them to audiences eager for action movies.
In film history, the “exploitation film” was already a recognized category of low-budget productions featuring provocative subjects such as crime, sex, drugs, or violence in order to attract audiences. When movies like Shaft and Super Fly became popular, critics argued that Hollywood was exploiting Black culture and urban imagery in much the same commercial way.
Brown has taught ENGL 2230 Literature and Film for many years, and it remains one of the department’s most popular courses, along with ENGL 2243 Science Fiction and ENGL 2244 Fantasy Literature.
A scholar of 20th-century U.S. cultural history and literature, Brown studies race and gender in the modern South. He is the author of Ed King’s Mississippi: Behind the Scenes of Freedom Summer (2014) and Roadhouse Justice: Hattie Lee Barnes and the Killing of a White Man in 1950s Mississippi (2022).
He is currently working on several book projects, including a narrative history of Mississippi for the University Press of Mississippi (manuscript due Summer 2026), Murder at Ole Miss: The Jean Gillies Case for the University of Tennessee Press (scheduled for publication in Fall 2026), and a volume on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors for Bloomsbury’s 33⅓ series (contracted for publication in 2027).