The Cinema of Social Death: Blackhood At-Large

Forthcoming from the New Critical Humanities series at Rowman & Littlefield, this study examines the relationship between the violence underwriting the modern world and the popular representations and counter-representations of this violence.  Obscured in the #MeToo movement’s exposure of the rampant misogyny and sexually predatory behavior by men in the entertainment industries is the recognition that this violence cannot be separated from the images of race, gender, and sexuality in the films Hollywood makes.  Likewise, it is axiomatic that all film will bear the sedimented evidence of an antiblack world.  The merit of the project, then, begins with the fact that it is a study of the circulation of black images not out of a concern for aesthetics, but rather because such an inquiry facilitates a certain kind of intervention into the material violence that gains expression through such aesthetics.  Blackhood At-Large is the kind of text that teachers will use to help students broaden their capacity to use images to think through how society is held together by antiblack violence.

 

Blackhood At-Large argues that cinematic treatments of blackness which offer explicit counter-narratives to this society’s deep-seated racist culture stand apiece with, not apart from, the intractable violence black people face daily, with a potential encounter around any corner.  Both the violence of these images and the violence of the world to which they are in fee are features of antiblackness and reiterate the antagonistic relationship between black people and the modern world—all the while posing as anti-racist.  Contrary to the prevalent sentiment that black artists disrupt and unravel the suffering, lack, and pathology attached to blackness that has been fundamental to the structure of the modern world for many centuries, the visual narratives that I examine are a drag on black liberation, and thus, on human deliverance.

 

First, I examine documentary film about black subjects.  Documentary films that endeavor to simply reflect the empirical reality of black lived experience, and thereby to expose and indict antiblack racism, may be the most efficient genre for disguising contemporary culture’s reliance on blackness.  As such, Blackhood At-Large is less concerned with cinema per se, and more interested in how our efforts to unravel the problems of the world become part of the problem.  I focus here on several productions centering black subjects by the documentarian Liz Garbus. 

 

The second kind of film I study is a selection of fictional dramatic narratives by black independent film makers.  I examine Tanya Hamilton’s 2010 film Night Catches Us alongside works by the celebrated Pan-Africanist Haile Gerima and the more centrist Hollywood fare of Spike Lee.  As with my selection of Garbus’ documentaries, I am interested in what these three film makers can teach us about the difficulties in telling stories about black struggle and racial justice that do not fall into the contradictory trap of prosecuting the chaotic gratuitous violence of U.S. society for black and white alike, only to retreat from the lucid deductions such an indictment prepares.  This bind—at once a narrative conundrum, an analytical puzzle, and an enigma for social movement—has dogged black struggle across the generations. 

 

While Garbus’ documentary films articulate the leading anti-racist narrative that recording the black experience will hold America accountable to its founding ideals, the transformations in black struggle during the long civil rights era have also produced a more sober assessment of what never was and what likely never will be.  While this rejection of the so-called American dream in its varied forms has a history as long as black resistance to Western slaveholding culture, its expression as a militant blackness during the Black Power era of the late 1960s and early 1970s has left an outsized influence on both black and non-black popular imaginations into the present day.  Indeed, we might say that, opting out symbolically has become more popular today now that opting out of bourgeois institutions is less of a viable option in practice.  Certainly, the stakes remain as high as ever, with soaring rates of inequality, dispossession, and alienation across race, class, and region in the U.S.  Yet, as the small sampling of black artists studied here suggests, there remains a persistent and implicit reticence, unwillingness, or incapacity to consider the robust implications of the redirection for analysis, action, and black cultural expression posed by earlier moments in the liberation struggle.  Since black artists today stand in the shadow of a long social movement history that has dealt with this contradiction in varied ways, I suggest that the films examined in this study indicate a larger quagmire for representation and knowledge production in which we collectively remain bogged down.  History indicates that there can be an important synergy between people exploring new ways of living together and visionary artistry, but this study reveals that cinematic representations at the turn of the multicultural twenty-first century may be more hindrance than guides to what the earlier social movement agents saw as “the search for the new land.”

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Through this unique approach, Blackhood At-Large advances our understanding of the intractability of antiblack violence, and influences the direction of a variety of academic fields of study, including film studies, black studies, black performance studies, law and society, and cultural studies.