In 1941, after a frustrating trip to Hollywood, the poet and activist Langston Hughes wrote to his friend Arna Bontemps with a damning assessment of American film: “Only a subsidized Negro Film Institute, or the revolution, will cause any really good Negro pictures to be made in America.” In the following years, Hughes did not wait for a political revolution to change cinema; instead, he sought to revolutionize cinema by launching a one-man protest campaign through the Black press. Based on a book project about African American writers’ engagement with film, O’Malley’s talk examines how Hughes—as well as Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Childress—used journalism to imagine film otherwise. Taking this ensemble approach, O’Malley offers new readings of Hughes’ “Here to Yonder Column” in the Chicago Defender; Hansberry’s film criticism during her college years; and Childress’s contributions to Paul Robeson’s mid-century newspaper Freedom. These three writers used journalistic platforms to advocate for changes in Hollywood movies, from plotlines to film style to casting practices. They also offered clear visions for more politically radical moving images, penning future-oriented and creative film criticism to imagine cinema to come. In so doing, they blurred the boundaries between criticism, reportage, and fiction, as they worked to produce blueprints for a new Black cinema.
In 1972, Amiri Baraka writes a critical essay that prescribes an artistic ethics for himself and his peers: “Black Revolutionary Poets Should Also Be Playwrights.” With such a provocative title, Baraka indicates that the efforts of the Black Arts movement have an intimate relationship to performance and media as ways of engaging community and cultivating political consciousness. If much of Baraka’s activism involved establishing theatrical schools and putting on community performances, what compelled him, as a playwright, to branch out to film and television as well? Examining Baraka’s play Jello and film New-Ark, Saunders’ paper seeks to reconcile Baraka’s apprehensions towards media, as seen in his poetics and dramaturgy, with his aspirational film work. While the play Jello satirizes The Jack Benny Program to launch a critique of Hollywood, it nevertheless adapts televisual aesthetic techniques for the stage. Furthermore, his film New-Ark documents political life in Newark, NJ, including work by Baraka’s theater company Spirit House and his electoral work for Kenneth Gibson. Baraka exemplifies how political life and aesthetic formation influence each other when he utilizes the transitory nature between theater and cinema in style and visual culture, showcasing what Saunders argues to be cinematic impulses within dramaturgy that had been percolating since the rise of film.
Rodriguez Fielder’s paper establishes an archive of independent and experimental media activism that emerged from the civil rights movement. Independent media initiatives—like SNCC’s filmstrips, Charlie Cobb’s mixed-media poetry collection Furrows, and the Free Southern Theater’s Nation Time broadcast—hold an uneasy position within civil rights media, a genre defined through major journalism outlets and Hollywood representations of the civil rights movement. This cultural work has been overshadowed by a critical narrative that connects visual representation with cultural memory, arguing that images of violence against Black bodies have “come to distill and symbolize a range of complex events, ideas, and ideologies” (Raiford 2007, 1130). Rodriguez Fielder reads the collaborations between activist photographers and local people as works of what Nicole Fleetwood calls “non-iconicity” to explore how collaborative art-making encourages a non-iconic approach to communication and centers intimacy-making as the pathway to social change. Rodriguez Fielder pays special attention to activist-artists’ use of filmstrips to make possible an embodied performance of story, an invitation for others to tell and retell the victory of cooperative labor and union organizing. Through this media, we get a glimpse beyond the public-facing spectacle of the struggle for equal rights and bear witness to how that work was accomplished at the community level.
Our presider Julius Fleming, Jr., equally committed to a fruitful discussion about activism, media, and performance, will then deliver a response to our papers, and lead a discussion to further investigating how activists use media and performance to generate both political fomentation and Black artistry at the same time.