Friday, 7 January 2022: 3:30 PM-4:45 PM
Maya Angelou spent much of her life in the public eye, from her frank discussion of childhood trauma in her first memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to her poetry reading at the presidential inauguration in 1993 to her friendship with Oprah Winfrey. She is an artist we think we know. Early in her career, however, Angelou pursued a far less widely known and fundamentally radical set of aesthetic and political experiments, which she channeled through the medium of the moving image and which she reflected on in both contemporaneous personal correspondence and in later published memoirs. Emerging from her experiences working with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. and living in post-colonial Ghana, Angelou spent the late 1960s and early 1970s seeking to mobilize film and television for mass movement politics, experimenting with ways to fuse literary and cinematic aesthetics, and envisioning and trying to build an alternative global Black film culture. In this paper, I read Angelou’s published writing about living in post-colonial Ghana and learning filmmaking in Sweden alongside newly available archival materials and her long-overlooked 1968 public television show Blacks, Blues, Black! in order track the robust dialogue between her autobiographies, early-career media projects, and Black radical politics.
Angelou wrote, hosted, and produced Blacks, Blues, Black!, and I contend that the show functioned as a form of life writing for the screen – providing an opportunity to experiment with rhetorical strategies that she would later use in her autobiographies – and offered her an opportunity to test the politically radical possibilities of the moving image. In her opening monologue in the first episode Angelou echoes Countee Cullen and asks, “What is Africa to me?” The show sets out to examine that question, and the form of the show itself, I argue, echoes a number of media projects and discourses that Angelou encountered while living in Ghana. By reading across media forms, I show how Angelou used life writing – on the page and for the small screen – as a means to advance and reformulate the Black liberation struggle and to speak authentically about – and to – the African diaspora.
Organizer:
Joycelyn K. Moody
Presider:
Joycelyn K. Moody
