Film Review: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, by Grace Lee

Abstract

Grace Lee American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, 2013, LeeLee Films. It is difficult to reconcile the opening images of Grace Lee's film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs with its opening monologue. As a seemingly fragile old woman pushes a walker past the desolate ruins of Detroit's Packard plant, we hear her say, 'I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit.' The initial temptation is to read the opening ironically, as in Mark Binelli's (2012) Detroit City is the Place to Be, or any of the other versions of Detroit as urban dystopia that plague our popular consciousness. This sense of irony is reinforced by the filmmaker's frequent use of dissolves that juxtapose images of Detroit's past as a bustling, thriving, racially segregated metropolis with its present as a partially deserted majority black city. However, irony is not a trope to describe the life of activist, thinker and revolutionary Grace Lee Boggs. And as the film unfolds, it is clear that Grace Lee the filmmaker loves Grace Lee Boggs, her subject and namesake, too much to simply impose such an irony. Lee Boggs loves her adopted hometown, and that love is the very antithesis of irony: it is passionate, committed, and frequently, it seems from the backdrops of gutted homes and burned-out businesses that texture this film, unrequited. And so viewers are left to ponder: if not irony, then what does Lee Boggs mean when, in surveying the devastation, she remarks, and this is a symbol of how giants fall'? The giants Grace Lee Boggs has seen fall are many. As a testament to a life lived at the intersection of every radical movement and revolution that has come to define the 20th century, American Revolutionary traces a life that embodies all of the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the project of revolutionary change. Born Grace Lee in 1915, she trained as a philosopher but was unable, as a Chinese-American woman, to find academic employment due to the racism and sexism of the 1930s. Lee Boggs found her way to Marxism through her work in Chicago's black community, where she came under the influence of C.L.R. James. Arising out of her experience in Chicago and the influence of James, she came to see the black community as the lynchpin to building an American revolutionary movement. However, she also became convinced that James and fellow Trotskyite Raya Dunayevskaya were mired in patterns of thinking inherited from the Russian Revolution, and so she came to Detroit, then ground zero of working-class politics and therefore revolutionary politics, to edit the socialist newspaper Correspondence. It was to be written by the social forces she saw as being at the forefront of a new American Revolution: blacks, women and youth. And it was in Detroit that she met the revolutionary autodidact and Chrysler line worker, James 'Jimmy' Boggs, and began an enduring life partnership with him, committed to thinking through, and perhaps fomenting, the next American Revolution. Inspired by Malcolm X, black nationalism and the black power movements, Grace and Jimmy became instrumental in organising the African-American community in what was then, and remains, the most racially segregated city in the USA. …