This special session expands scholarship on the Black Arts Movement by foregrounding its engagements with media beyond print. Recent archival initiatives, including the digitization of Amiri Baraka’s audiovisual materials, have made newly visible a range of Black Arts and adjacent media projects, challenging the longstanding emphasis on poetry, theater, and print culture in accounts of the movement. In keeping with the call for work on “Black Arts Media Emancipations,” this panel approaches Black Arts as a multimedia, transmedial, and transnational formation whose aesthetic and political commitments took shape not only on the page or stage but also through experiments in film, radio, television, and sound recording. The session asks what happens when the Black Arts Movement is situated within the broader media ecologies of the late twentieth century and when its formal and political ambitions are traced across sound, screen, and the infrastructures that shaped their circulation.

The rationale for the session is both scholarly and archival. While scholarship on the Black Arts Movement has increasingly emphasized the movement’s formal range, print-centered accounts still predominate, and the full significance of Black Arts engagements with film, radio, recording, and related media remains underexamined. This panel builds on new and existing scholarship by bringing newly available materials into conversation with work on Black cultural production, political economy, and transnational Black aesthetics. It argues that Black Arts media work should be understood not as supplementary to literary production but as central to the movement’s aesthetic and political orientations.

At the same time, the session argues for a broader understanding of the Black Arts Movement as a cultural formation whose energies exceeded its most canonical figures and institutions. While core Black Arts figures and their multimedia experiments remain central to the panel, the session also traces how Black Arts aesthetics and political commitments circulated outward into adjacent formations, including Black Panther media production, L.A. Rebellion cinema, and British Black Arts film. Rather than treating the movement as a fixed national canon organized around a small set of U.S. literary figures, this session emphasizes its wider intermedial, collaborative, and transnational reach. The result is not simply an expanded archive of Black Arts media, but a reframing of the movement itself as a mobile set of practices, affiliations, and experiments in Black cultural production.

The panel presentations trace overlapping questions of voice, mediation, institutionality, audience, and Black cultural production across the long 1960s and its afterlives. Kinohi Nishikawa examines LPs released through Amiri Baraka’s Jihad Productions in order to rethink the transition from LeRoi Jones to Baraka; focusing on avant-garde jazz recordings and A Black Mass, he argues that Black-directed sound experiments were crucial to Baraka’s artistic and political transformation and to the imagining of new audiences for Black Arts work. Richard Purcell then turns to the Black Panther Party’s investment in film production and media management through Stronghold Consolidated Productions and The Murder of Fred Hampton, showing how cinema and mass media became central to the Party’s “art of survival,” even as those efforts exposed tensions between revolutionary politics and the political economy of media industries. Jellisa M. Ricketts examines how the L.A. Rebellion, particularly in Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, resists the historical “thingification” of Black life by centering intimacy, disability, labor, tenderness, and the quotidian. James Smethurst concludes by turning to British Black Arts film, arguing that filmmakers such as John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Isaac Julien, Maureen Blackwood, Martina Attille, and Horace Ové used sonic montage to challenge “the law of enunciation” and reconfigure who could speak in Black public culture.

The session will be organized around four short presentations of approximately 10–12 minutes each, preceded by a brief introductory framing and followed by at least 15 minutes of discussion moderated by the respondent. The selection of participants incorporates a diversity of voices across career stage, institutional location, disciplinary training, and interpretive approach. Taken together, these papers show that Black Arts media experiments were not secondary to the movement’s literary production but central to its efforts to develop new forms of Black cultural production, collectivity, and media infrastructure. By bringing together work on sound recording, political documentary, Black independent cinema, and British experimental film, the panel contributes to ongoing efforts to rethink the Black Arts Movement through archives, media history, and transnational comparison, while inviting reflection on what these earlier media experiments can teach us about emancipatory media practices in the present.