Melvin Van Peebles is best known for Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and that film’s role in inspiring the Blaxploitation cycle of films of the early 1970s. However, it was in France, where he had emigrated like other black creatives in the 1960s, that Van Peebles became a filmmaker. Drawing on biographical research and a close reading of his films, I connect Van Peebles to the institutions and aesthetics of the French New Wave. Van Peebles radicalizes New Wave techniques by employing them to illuminate issues of racism. I generate a new reading of Sweetback which connects the experimental aesthetics and the political stance of the film to cinematic innovations of the French New Wave and the militant politics of the black power movement. By categorizing Sweetback as Blaxploitation film, critics often misread the Sweetback character’s class position. By using the framework of the lumpenproletarian folk hero, I reframe Sweetback’s differences with Blaxploitation protagonists. Finally, I read the film within the traditions of Brechtian theatrical theory by introducing the concept of popular realism and the language of black power, imperfection, absurdity, and militancy. Enormously popular with a younger black audience, Sweetback’s release coincided with a new black power movement and a shift in a self-consciousness political and aesthetic awareness for African-Americans. Sweetback played a role in dispersing and invigorating representations of black independence and new aesthetic norms through a connection with a mass political organization, the Black Panther Party - a singular achievement in U.S. film history.

Out of the Shadows: The Mezzotints of Graeme Peebles investigates Victorian printmaker Graeme Peebles' engagement with the mezzotint medium since the early 1970s. Over fifty works from the artist's oeuvre of nearly 300 mezzotints are examined to demonstrate Peebles' high quality technical skills and his unique approach to subject matter. This has ranged from enigmatic, surrealist-inspired subject matter to landscapes of the Lake Eucumbene region in the Kosciusko National Park, which range from the ominous and foreboding to the romantic and sublime. In this thesis I explore the intellectual groundwork on which much of Peebles work is based. In doing so I am redressing the imbalance between the popularity of Peebles' work and the lack of critical writing about his art. While his work has been widely collected (see for instance the list of Public Collections that contain holdings of Peebles' work, on page 96), to date his work has not received the attention as deserved by a master of their chosen medium. In reviewing his work in such a manner I believe that Peebles deserves greater recognition in contemporary Australian Art. In conjunction with this thesis I have curated an exhibition bearing the same title, which was displayed at the QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, 12 March - 30 May 2004. It then toured to the Latrobe Regional Gallery, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Geelong Gallery, Gold Coast City Art Gallery and Perc Tucker Regional Gallery. A 16-page colour catalogue was also produced to accompany the exhibition.

Excerpt: This article argues that that transnational movement of Melvin van Peebles is crucial in ending the dearth in African American feature film production in the United States after Oscar Micheaux’s The Betrayal (1948).

After a long struggle, the State of Mississippi founded and funded the Industrial Institute and College in 1884. The school, located in Columbus, Mississippi, was the first state-supported institution of higher education for women in the United States, and it quickly became a model for similar schools in many other states. The Industrial Institute and College was distinguished from other women’s colleges in the nineteenth century by the fact that its graduates were expected to be fully prepared to support themselves. This curriculum required students to complete coursework in both liberal arts and vocational training. There was much conflict and controversy between factions that wanted the school to focus exclusively on either vocational training or liberal studies. Pauline Van de Graaf Orr served as Mistress of English from 1884-1913. Under her leadership, the Department of English set a high standard for its students. While there was considerable attrition among the students, many of whom were as young as fifteen and most of whom had no adequate secondary preparation, the Industrial Institute and College also graduated students, such as Blanche Colton Williams and Rosa Peebles, who went on to distinguished academic careers. Frances Ormond Jones Gaither was the best fiction writer the school graduated. After finding some success as a writer of children’s books in the 1930s, Gaither wrote a trilogy of novels about the Old South in the 1940s. Follow the Drinking Gourd (1941) follows the establishment and development of the Hurricane Plantation in Alabama. The Red Cock Crows (1944) addresses the then-unexplored topic of a slave revolt in antebellum Mississippi. In Double Muscadine (1949), a best-seller, Gaither explores the causes and consequences of miscegenation.