Black Video Keeping the Faith

Abstract

Yo, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates . . . Step off! - X-Clan, video for Heed the Word of the Brother Jot the Afrocentric, Egyptophite hip-hop group X-Clan speaks compellingly about the importance of building black subjectivity grounded in African and African American tradition and history. need to recreate the whole structure of who we are, says Brother J in the May issue of SPIN. We've lived here so long . . . we've been brainwashed. We may have to rebuild [black culture] continuing in faith from all the Pharaohs to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King to Adam Clayton Powell. An equally impassioned rhetoric characterized On-Line '90, series of seminars on video by and about African Americans coordinated by Reginald Woolery held in New York City on three evenings in April. The seminars transcended typically essentialist categorizations of black cultural production. None of the panelists, most of whom were videomakers and media artists, felt the need to state explicitly that black art encompasses range of cultural production that draws from an enormous pool of African American strategies and themes. The message was apparent in the work presented and implied in the panel discussions that followed the screenings. Independents was sponsored by the World Institute for Black Communications (WIBC), a not-for-profit organization established to broaden the participation of African-American people in all aspects of the communications industry, according to their press release WIBC, founded in 1978, sponsors the Communications Excellence to Black Audiences (CEBA) awards for members of the marketing and advertising industry who have shown innovation and excellence in communicating messages to African-American audiences. Given this, it was not surprising that video targeted at mainstream broadcast outlets was well represented, alongside work produced by independents and community-based producers. The message was clear: there is room in the house of black video for work that reflects all aspects of the African American/African diasporic experience. There are however, some fundamental contradictions between production developed for mass broadcasting and community-based video work that were left unexamined, for the most part, in the seminars. Mainstream broadcasting doesn't simply provide larger channel of distribution than those available to independent producers; it is an exclusive arena with strict criteria for admission, which are designed to weed out unconventional or oppositonal work Black cultural production isn't necessarily compromised because it is acceptable in the mainstream arena (heaven forbid we should trash perfectly good work and valorize all noncommercial. community-based production). Nevertheless, in order to reach wider audience black producers minimize our differences from white society, filing away our rough edges. Unfortunately, many whites and blacks assume that this work represents valid African American experience. This kind of work becomes fodder for affirmative action quotas and tokens of corporate-sponsored diversity; all other cultural production by women and people of color can be dismissed because the limited slots in the traditional system of distribution have been filled by representative others. Billed as session on ways of seeing from an perspective, Videotext was thematically the broadest of the seminars' three groupings but focused on narrative work, Afrocentric storytelling. Independent videomakers Philip Mallory Jones and Ayoka Chenzira, who also works in film, set the tone for the entire series in Videotext, which was held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on April 12. Jones and Chenzira established the key issue facing cultural workers with aspirations beyond the mainstream: the need to represent ourselves in our glory and diversity, nappy edges and all, in order to reconstruct ourselves, and to supplant the dominant representations of African American life pumped out by the mainstream media. …