The Afro-Asian Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation in Pam Grier’s Coffy and Foxy Brown

In the early 1970s Pam Grier became the first American woman action star. Her films Coffy (dir. Jack Hill, 1973) and Foxy Brown (dir. Jack Hill, 1974) inspired a generation of young women to assert themselves and declare their liberation. Through a close rhetorical analysis of her two iconic films, I argue that Grier’s characters in Coffy and Foxy Brown are manifestations of an Afro-Asian rhetoric espoused by the women of the Black Panther Party (BPP). They were inspired by the heroic Vietnamese women guerilla fighters known as “the long-haired warriors.” In both Coffy and Foxy Brown, Grier enacts the Afro-Asian influences that helped give rise to the women’s liberation movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I focus on how the women members of the BPP drew inspiration from Vietnamese women and how this combination of influences, through Grier’s films, exposed the world to the Afro-Asian rhetoric of women’s liberation.