Poitier Revisited : Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age

Ian Gregory Strachan is Associate Professor of English at the College of The Bahamas. He is the author of Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (2002), and recently co-edited an issue of the University of Miami's journal of Caribbean studies, Anthurium dedicated to Bahamian literature. He has also recently contributed a chapter to Routledge's forthcoming anthology Black Cinema Reconsidered entitled "The Measure of Men: Legacies of Sidney Poitier's A Piece of the Action."

Mia Mask is Associate Professor of Film at Vassar College, USA, where she teaches courses on African American cinema, documentary film history, celebrity and power, and seminars on special topics. She also teaches feminist film theory, African national cinemas, and genre courses. She is the author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film and the editor of Contemporary Black American Cinema. She has written film reviews and covered festivals for IndieWire.com, The Village Voice, Film Quarterly, Time Out New York, and The Poughkeepsie Journal. Her criticism was anthologized in Best American Movie Writing, 1999. Her scholarly essays are published in the African American National Biography, Screen Stars of the 1990s, Film and Literature, and American Cinema of the 1970s. She is on the editorial board of The Black Scholar. Her cultural commentary has been heard on National Public Radio.