Introduction

Abstract

At the peak of racial tensions in the United States in the late 1960s, Sidney Poitier became a top commercial draw in Hollywood with a string of films probing racism and discrimination, including the classics Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) and In the Heat of the Night (1967). These films resulted in Poitier being named the top male star in 1968 by the National Association of Theater Owners and helped him cement his place not simply as a talented actor (he had by this time already become the first black male to win an Academy Award) but also as a marketable and internationally recognizable movie star. Poitier’s popularity was rooted in his ability to navigate the turbulent racial politics that marked a cultural crisis in the late 1960s in the United States. But that ability cannot be understood outside the context of his transnational background. Born in Miami as a result of his parents’ international labor migrations but raised in the Bahamas (then a British colony), Poitier attained his distinctive vocal articulation as a result of years adapting his British-tinged Bahamian English to the United States. And it should not be forgotten that his late 1960s commercial success also came through his performance in the British film To Sir, with Love (1967), about a school teacher in 1960s London. Thus, his transnational circulation and personal history appear to resolve the impossible contradictions of national race conflict in the United States, using Poitier to critically examine structures of racism and the legacy of discrimination against African Americans but also insisting upon a certain sophisticated, international “otherness” in the celebration of Poitier and the characters he plays.