That's Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss 'Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury).

Darius James' irresponsibly hilarious debut novel Negropbobia was a funkadelicized faux screenplay for the omega blaxploitation film - a thoroughly unhinged project that could have been titled Alice in Brotherland. By ironically distilling the revenge-fantasy subtexts of the blaxploitation cycle while exploding those films' flimsy narrative conventions, James created a Buchananite's nightmare populated by murderous voodoo mammies, roller-skate posses called "Aunt Jemima's Flapjack Ninja Killers from Hell," and "ill-tempered young Negroes." Archly inflating stereotypes beyond all recognition, Negrophobia made Mandingo seem positively politically correct, while recalling the psychosexual racial grotesques of Pedro Bell's album covers for Funkadelic. All of which makes his sophomore effort, That's Blaxploitation! - Roots of the Baadasssss 'Tude, something of a disappointment.

From the disclaimer-ridden text to the typically slapdash design by St. Martin's (stills missing, amateurish layout), That's Blaxploitation! bends over backward to assure the reader that it is not an authoritative study of the subject, while James eases his Lower East Side conscience by repeatedly admitting that he's only in it for the money this time around. Indeed, the book reminds this reader of a mutant conflation of lurid psychotronic film fanzines and those fanboy picture books for '70s shows like Welcome Back, Kotter and Starsky & Hutch. This would be adequate if that were all James intended to do (after all, I read psychotronic film 'zines and owned my share of TV picture books). But by including stretches of personal and political autobiography and some excellent interviews with unjustly marginalized figures (who, as it happens, were only tangentially involved with blaxploitation - Pedro Bell, The Last Poets, Iceberg Slim, Melvin Van Peebles), James reveals that the book had higher ambitions that were thwarted by laziness. It is telling that the best (and funniest) section of the book, "The Blackman's Guide to Seducing White Women With the Amazing Power of Voodoo," reads like an outtake from Negropbobia and interrupts the flow of fanzine fluff in the surrounding pages.

That's Blaxploitation! isn't without its surprises, not the least of which is the revelation that many of the actors associated with the genre came from avant-garde theater backgrounds and aggro Black Power scenes (for instance, Jimmy "Dyn-O-Mite" Walker used to hang with The Last Poets and perform at political performance art gatherings). Antonio Fargas, best known as the jive-talking informant Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch, turns out to be an extremely eloquent man and a serious actor, belying his image as a cartoonish platformed pimp. And most shocking of all is the factoid that Disney may be producing a sequel to Cleopatra Jones, starring RuPaul as Jones' cross-dressing son.

What That's Blaxploitation! implies, and what my bookshelves are still clamoring for, is two separate tomes: a personal rumination by James on a life informed by film in the mode of Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire, and an exhaustive, anal-retentive reference book on the blaxploitation cycle in the mode of Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style. James is clearly qualified for the former, as his amusing and frequently touching trips down memory lane demonstrate. The latter project, however, would be better left to someone who commands a perverse attention to detail and the gumption to remain awake through even the most banal blaxploitation films. James seems content, by his own admission, to pass out with a roach-clip dangling from his lower lip, advising the reader to "rent the video and form your own damn conclusions."

Andrew Hultkrans is a writer living in San Francisco. He is a frequent contributor to Artforum.