Introduction: A Scene of New Worlds

Abstract

Introduction:A Scene of New Worlds Nicholas Forster (bio) and Michele Prettyman (bio) "Wow, New York—just like I pictured it. Skyscrapers and everything." —Stevie Wonder, "Living for the City," from the aLbum InnervIsIons This bit of spoken dialogue taken from Stevie Wonder's 1973 cautionary tale "Living for the City" provides the opening narration for a song chronicling the demise of a small-town Southern man bound for New York who, upon his arrival in the city, is entrapped and ruined by the perils of city life. Wonder evokes the familiar tropes of black life in "hard time Mississippi," painting a bleak portrait of overworked parents and children whose future is marked as much by danger as it is by any imaginative possibility. Despite these challenges, Wonder's dystopic vision is saved for New York, a far more dangerous place. In the song's climactic sonic montage the unsuspecting man arrives in New York on a bus, where he immediately finds himself out of his element. It isn't long before the environment ensnares him into drug deals, aggressive policing, and an eventual conviction and sentence of ten years in jail. This judicial decree is emblematic of a longer stint, where the man is forced to live his remaining days "walking the streets of New York City," a "place [that] is cruel, nowhere could be much colder." Wonder ends the seven-minute opus with the warning that "if we don't change, the world will soon be over." This scene, powerfully staged by Wonder, captures the anxieties of black migration alongside the inevitabilities of incarceration, despair, and a loss of selfhood. The North, once tentatively seen as an escape from the suffering and racial violence of the South and as the site of imagined freedoms and possibilities, becomes a scary, complicated place capable of stealing one's liminal freedoms, agency, and soul. Wonder's warning was not hyperbole in the 1970s as New York's fractured economic, sociopolitical, and cultural infrastructures threatened to implode. The city had long been an epicenter for radical black art, culture, and politics, but by the mid-1970s, it had [End Page 52] become a site of violence, crime, and sociocultural disenfranchisement in the national and cinematic imaginary. Images of black criminality and violence in films like The French Connection (dir. William Friedkin, 1971) and early Blaxploitation projects, spurred by a resurgence of film production in the city, belied the challenges faced by black people interested in getting films made or of even finding work in the industry. New York City on screen was not very pretty; industrial machinations and popular representations threatened to flatten the vibrant potential of black independent film and cultural production happening in New York. Beyond the filmic universe black and Latino youth, planting the seeds of early hip-hop culture, claimed parts of uptown Manhattan and the South Bronx explicitly, naming and reclaiming parts of the city left in ruins. Downtown and the Village were left to bands of rogue artists and filmmakers, what Fab Five Freddy would call "lost personalities" who were creating their own "downtown scene." And while Wonder's clarion call is not without hope, New York would have a contested relationship with its black and brown inhabitants, whose lives, aspirations, and filmic footprint were but a footnote in the broader cinematic imaginary. Building upon Wonder's migration elegy, we pose another scene of sorts, one that also exposes the ruptures, aspirations, and promise of urban and rural space, cultural reimagining, and spatial mobility. What we have termed "The New York Scene" is an attempt to describe a series of years in the late 1960s through the early 1980s that define an era demarcated by the end of the civil rights movement and the emergence of hip-hop cultural forms, but which exists before the Spike Lee era and the "New Black Aesthetics" of the 1980s. Characterized by independent, often experimental, narrative and documentary film production, innovations in writing styles creating hybrid genres of script and creative writing, and the convergence of poetic and political discourse, this scene was collaborative in nature, encompassing a network of figures. Some would be loosely affiliated, others...