Reel freedom: Black film culture in early twentieth-century New York City

<i>Soul</i>

Deferral and the Dream

Secret Histories and Visual Riffs, or, Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Flying Lotus Go to the Movies Charles P. "Chip" Linscott (bio) In a 2017 "Tate Talk," Arthur Jafa contended that Kahlil Joseph makes music videos that employ "music as a structure for a visual pattern."1 Jafa went on to argue that these musically founded visual patterns reveal "continuities [or] secret histories" at work in Black music and Black visual culture. Jafa's insights are teeming with acute implications for the study of Black music video and Black film, and thus I want to trace the operations of these "visual riffs on [the] music" through a brief series of notable works while suggesting that such a method is more widely applicable. For now, I focus on the relationships between music and image in William Greaves's groundbreaking Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), with music from Miles Davis's In a Silent Way (1969); Spike Lee's music video "Tutu Medley" (1986) for four tracks from Miles Davis's album Tutu (1986); and Kahlil Joseph's short film and gallery installation Wildcat (2013), which features Alice Coltrane's music as reworked by Flying Lotus. Careful analysis of the interplay of the musical works and their visual counterparts reveals the vital imbrications of Black sociality, improvisational praxis, Black arts of remixing and sampling, and the specific difficulties and triumphs of Black cultural production. Such analysis goes beyond traditional distinctions regarding form and content, extending deeply into history, theme, theoretical and philosophical positions, and notions of Black artistic praxis and cultural memory. Along with Jafa and Joseph, I mean to ask how music seeps into and across these moving images, providing opportunities for deeper understandings of both when taken together. In analyzing the complicated interrelationships shared by these particular musical and moving-image objects, we find "secret histories" that are deeply staked into Black culture, with face-value meanings doubling, tripling, and blooming exponentially into other denotations. From signifyin' to slave songs, code switching in perpetual eras of white supremacy, and the encrypted messages of hip-hop lyricism, the "secrecy" relies on close attention to what we might call underground continuities in the artworks and their contexts. [End Page 145] It is important not to fetishize the secrecy of the maps and historical continuities posited by Jafa, however. "Maps to follow" and "histories to uncover" do not imply the necessity for arcane exegesis performed only by rarified audiences.2 Instead, these concepts insist on some cultural literacy and sensitivity—that is, an awareness of Blackness and appreciation of some of its innumerable creative and historical forms. Jafa is pushing for audiences to feel the undercurrents in the work, to be sensitive to the overtones and undertones that go unnoticed during surface-level, hegemonic appreciation. In short, the music provides a map for the creation of the images, but history underpins the music and the image in toto and is essential to the deep appreciation of both. What I (following Jafa) mean is that there is a fecundity in the artworks that is best understood by carefully attending to the interplay of music and images, but comprehension—reading the map, so to speak—hinges on understanding elements of Black history and Black expressive culture that often lie buried under white hegemony. Jafa explicitly points out that although Black musicians have dominated genres such as jazz and hip-hop, Black filmmakers have struggled to achieve "broad recognition in industrial and critical spaces limited by the white imagination."3 There is great depth to be found in pieces such as those analyzed here, but to truly feel the spirits at play in the pieces requires some work. This sort of investigation entails what I would call a retroactive visibility, whereby the overlooked musical foundations of particular Black films and music videos become clear alongside the complex temporalities at work across lineages of Black filmmaking. Retrospection as a form of present-future clarification recalls Avery Gordon's poetic theoretical formulation of haunting. As Gordon so memorably argues, "The ghost or apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known to us, in its own...

African American Gay Men

668 Exhibit Review Curators’ Choice: Black Life Matters at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Exhibition on view through August 15, 2015 Review by Debra Jackson The online community is familiar with the maxim “Black Lives Matter.” The social media campaign #BlackLivesMatter was started as an emotional response to the February 2012 shooting death of seventeenyear -old Trayvon Martin. Since then, the catchphrase has resonated with groups around the country, and in recent months, it could be heard at peaceful marches and protests in Ferguson, Missouri, New York City, North Charleston, South Carolina, Baltimore, Maryland, and elsewhere in protest against police violence. Protestors wore “Black Lives Matter” t-shirts and carried signs bearing the phrase. In the United States and abroad, op-ed writers incorporated the phrase into their columns. From television news coverage to print media the expression seems to have taken on a life of its own. Whether our society is witnessing the gestation of a nascent movement that will continue to grow in strength and influence is something that time will determine. Yet, for the curators at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the voices of that movement have conveyed great power, have commanded attention, and are the inspiration for this exhibition. Curators’ Choice: Black Life Matters is an enticing glimpse into rarelyexhibited holdings chosen by the curators from each of the Schomburg Center’s five research divisions: Steven G. Fullwood, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books; Tammi Lawson, Art and Artifacts; Maira Liriano, Research and Reference; Shola Lynch, Moving Image and Recording Sound; Mary Yearwood, Photographs and Prints. The Schomburg’s Exhibit Review 669 ground-level Latimer/Edison Gallery houses “Telling the Stories of the Black Experience to Children” from Research and Reference, and shares viewing space with “Evidence of Things Un*Seen,” the selections from Moving Image and Recording Sound. The Main Exhibition Hall on the Schomburg Center’s upper level accommodates the selections from its three other divisions. There is an abundance of material that greets the visitor entering the Latimer/Edison Gallery, but this reviewer was mesmerized by projected footage from the documentary titled King: A Filmed Record . . . Montgomery to Memphis (1970). Curator Shola Lynch selected this “award-winning but little seen documentary” to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary year of the civil rights marches in Alabama. One of the documentary’s riveting features is the insight it provides into the tactics employed by black southern activists attempting to register to vote. As they positioned themselves in a line to await entry to the building, white policemen appear and they begin forcing them backwards, down the steps, and away from the entrance. The activists steadfastly reformed their line and patiently waited, only to be roughly hustled away from the entrance once again; these are classic Gandhian non-violent tactics. In those few minutes of footage there are several points conveyed to the viewer, not the least of which is the incredible dignity with which the activists conducted themselves during the entire humiliating confrontation; one that was endured because a fundamental principle was at stake. Ultimately, the viewer walks away impressed with the intense discipline needed to successfully carry out such a campaign. The footage both documents the unwavering resolve of a particular group of civil rights activists and underscores the exhibition’s theme (and differentiates it in part from the social media campaign). This exhibition highlights black life in terms of cooperative experiences, inclusive of all regions of the diaspora. The lived experience that integrates African cultural influences , directly or implicitly, is a unifying theme throughout the galleries. This theme is articulated, with particular clarity, in “Digging in the Vault,” curator Tammi Lawson’s presentation from the Art and Artifacts division. In part, Lawson selected objects in consideration of “the recent murders of young black men in this country and what their mothers go through and the universality of pain and suffering that families deal with, whether they are in Soweto, South Africa, or in the United States.” 670 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY Two works from 1998 by Jules Arthur III embody these sentiments: The Problem Within (oil and pastel on wood...

The black superhero film is an important research object for anti-racism development. Under the White supremacy framework, Black people and culture have been devalued and neglected for a long time. The all-Black lead Marvel film Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler in 2018, employs a well-defined system to present the appeals on anti-racist and reconstruct the filmic Black identity. This study explicitly analyses the approach through which the images of Black people and Black culture are represented, and it attempts to understand how this film reconstructs Black people’s sense of self-identity. This study focuses on the physical appearance of Black superheroes and material culture, the spatial narrative of Black Panther’s fictional spatial world Wakanda, and the Black spirit depicted in the film. Cultural identity, cinematic representation theory, and social identity theory are used to interpret how Black Panther reconstructs Black identity and represents Black culture. This study discovers that Black superheroes are portrayed as powerful, justice, and wise as White people, and Wakanda provides a utopia for a non-racist world. Meanwhile, Black culture is depicted elegantly and proudly to reconstruct Black people’s recognition of cultural and social identity.

In the Shadow of Slavery: Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. By Leslie M. Harris. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 380. Illustrations. Cloth, $42.50.) Stories of Freedom in Black New York. By Shane White. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 1, 260. Cloth, $27.95.)One need only reflect on the secondary sources cited in these two books to see that the history of the African-American population of early New York City has moved from the periphery to the center of historical consciousness. Once confined to specialized journals or niche-filling monographs from lesser publishers, New York's early African-American residents now appear as the topic of books on the lists of the finest scholarly presses. No longer does it matter that a once proportionately large black population in New York City was becoming ever smaller in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Instead, the various ethnic, class, ideological, political, and cultural transformations of antebellum New York are precisely what make it vitally important as a site to study the emergence from slavery of the North's largest community of Americans.By selecting a title that reflects neither his specific subject (New York's first African-American theatre and the performers it spawned) nor a specific time span (roughly the 181Os-SOs), Shane White invites the reader to see that his true story is a larger one: freedom, the quest to achieve it, and the obstacles that intrude. he aims at a broad audience, and thanks to the cleverness and vibrancy of his prose, he should certainly win it.When New York State passed gradual emancipation statutes in 1799 and 1817, it began a process of defining freedom's meaning, a process that Americans in New York City embraced enthusiastically. From newspapers, police records, manumission society documents, travel accounts, and court records White reconstructs how blacks viewed themselves and how others viewed them. Specific types of language, behavior, and dress created unease among whites but an exhilarating sense of testing limits among blacks. This was a time of experimentation. Theatre emerged as a new form of cultural expression for blacks, which, like other forms, was a proud and assertive claim to be part of the city's public life. In a chapter entitled Staging Freedom, White illustrates how the Company, which was formed in 1821, became a venue to try out Shakespeare and even to stage a play about slavery. Actor James Hewlett, after the company broke up in 1824, went on to stage one-man performances imitating Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean, among other performers, and even to sing Italian opera for racially mixed (and often rowdy) audiences. A trip to England was aborted when fellow actor Ira Aldridge went first and assumed Hewlett's African stage persona. Ultimately, Hewlett used his acting skills in ways that landed him in prison, while whites began to use the stage to parody black people in the minstrel show. White cleverly suggests the parallels between black and white cultures in the early republic as they experimented with each other's cultures and tested the limits to which they would go to experience that which was different and forbidden. Hewlett apparently ended his career in Trinidad, an indication to White that Americans had soured on the possibilities of freedom in New York City.White is a skilled writer whose credibility derives from his ability to explain and elaborate on Hewlett and other actors' actions, which are inevitably uncertain and even ambiguous, by considering them in relation to what he can discover about the larger black community. As actors, Hewlett and his confederates exhibited the same brashness as did all the newly freed as they contested for employment and social recognition on the streets of New York. White, an Australian scholar, has benefited from others who have preceded him and compiled references to Americans and the theatre in New York's myriad newspapers, but the imagination and creativity of his construction of these materials into a believable story is uniquely his. …

The 1970s saw a tremendous increase in the number of Black-themed films in the United States, including but extending well beyond Blaxploitation titles. Crucially, what critics at the time called a “boom” in Black film depended on both making more movies and creating new cinematic infrastructures, from film training programs to film festivals and film publications. This chapter examines how artists, activists, curators, and critics built those cinematic infrastructures and shaped a new Black film culture in the 1970s. Focusing on New York City, the chapter analyzes the circulation of new discourses about Black cinema, tracing how Black filmmakers utilized public television to share their perspectives; how film festival organizers created collaborative forums for discussing Black cinema; and how editors and critics used alternative print culture venues, including the university-based magazine Black Creation and the grassroots newsletter Chamba Notes, to build a “counter-public sphere” for Black film.

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. …

August Wilson/Robert Brustein debate held at the Town Hall in New York City in February, 1997, and moderated by Anna Deavere Smith, was a public performance of an old historic bind between the narrowly defined limits of legitimacy granted Black culture in the United States and the burden of speaking for a whole community. It raised issues of cultural reparation, cultural sovereignty, and the struggle for empowerment that continues for Black people--and, by extension, other minorities--within well-funded theater institutions and the broader theater culture in the United States. Most importantly, it brought to a head the question of where we are headed toward in the next century through the areas of concern the debate elided or failed to consider seriously, such as the impact of popular social movements on the theater, organized around broader political coalitions. I shall focus on the subject of cultural sovereignty, which has efficaciously been staged through Black cultural resistances in the United States, with international repercussion in both first and third world countries struggling for democratic representation in the twentieth century. Wilson's speech The Ground On Which I Stand is a provocative reminder of the struggles for cultural sovereignty that continue to inform minority artistic expression. By cultural sovereignty, I mean the ability of a group to define its cultural practices and meanings as representative expressions of the group. Wilson's position draws on the rich vein of Black Radicalism's history of revolutionary struggle and on bourgeois cultural nationalisms running from such activists and intellectuals as Elijah Mohammed, Martin R. Delany, and Marcus Garvey through the Black Arts Movement and radical Black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Stokley Carmichael, Ron Karenga, Angela Davis, and Harold Cruse, all architects of the Black discourse on cultural sovereignty (Williams 114-17). Wilson's demand for cultural ownership, the creation of Black culture by Black artists for the Black community, as well as his efforts to work within the establishment of mainstream theater should be seen in this context. As I understand Wilson, his prescription for cultural ownership of African American culture is not a suggestion of a return to a former segregationist moment, but rather a self-conscious declaration for cultural sovereignty within the watered-down rhetorics of multi-culturalism. His speech evokes a loss of faith in the way the establishment works in the interest of African American cultural sovereignty today. By framing his speech in the language of migration, diaspora, and maritime travel, Wilson invokes the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as the founding crucible of African American experience. He reiterates the trauma that distinguishes African Americans from other minorities. This is a profoundly effective act which highlights the fact that minority communities share different foundings and shaping violences; and hopes. Wilson reinforces the position that questions of cultural sovereignty and the attendant issues of cultural ownership and cultural recovery are shaped by specific minority histories. Although Wilson's historical references hint at broader coalitions that admit progressive possibilities, the fact that he frames his discussion of American theater in terms of Black and White issues distracts us from the complex, post-Civil Rights history of the American theater, which includes Chicana/os, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and other communities--such as socialists, feminists, workers, labor unionists, and communists--who have also struggled, often in conversation with each other, for forms of cultural expression in the interests of an egalitarian society. While keeping in sight the importance and relevance Black/White discourse within American cultural production, we should not lose sight of the demographic complexity through which minority cultural production is experienced in the United States today. …

I would like to try to put one of Radano's points in a different, perhaps older, context. He writes of the increasing references to African-American music in the 1840s and talks about the discourse of folk authenticity that was used to describe it. In my view at least, the 1840s and 1850s were a key time in the development of slave culture. Examining the written record for these years, one finds fewer references among whites to barbarism or the strangeness of African-American sounds. There seems an almost palpable sense that, finally, after a century and a half of living check by jowl a growing number of whites are beginning to appreciate black culture. Not only did you have whites as spectators on plantations at corn shuckings (and they are really a post-1830 development, as Roger Abrahams has shown), funerals and the like, but whites in cities such as Richmond in the 1850s actively sought out opportunities to come in contact with black culture. They observed slaves singing as they worked in the tobacco factories and, most importantly, they filled the amen benches in churches and watched and listened to blacks pray and, particularly, sing. These people were the forebears of the whites who would listen to blues and jazz in the twentieth century and this too is the line out of which John and Alan Lomax came. There is another group of whites that do not get talked about much that I find fascinating. I am particularly drawn to moments when white observers, mostly writers of some sort, despite an intense and very unpleasant racism that was a commonplace of the time, are forced, no matter how reluctantly, to concede that there was something to black life. More often than hot these occasions centered on some aspect of African-American expressive culture, most commonly music and/or dance and most commonly what moved them was a highly syncretic performance of some sort or other. On an evening in late June 1840 in New York City, the residents of Park Place were waked up, such as were asleep, by a strain of most exquisite harmony, in which the bugle predominated. last rose of summer was the air, and most beautifully was it played. If was followed by Away with melancholy, with the variations, executed by the bugle solo, such as seldom have been heard in that quiet neighborhood. The moon was just rising over the turrets and trees to the east, and many of the windows in the street were thrown open, with fair eyes peeping forth upon the night scene. From Broadway a considerable crowd was attracted to the spot where the Serenaders stood. This spot was opposite some trees opposite No. 10 Park Place. After several other strains, executed with the same exquisite beauty, the Serenaders slowly withdrew towards the College grounds below, and soon disappeared in the shades of night. (New York Herald 1840) The Serenaders were in fact Francis Johnson and seven or eight members of his band, all black. …

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: <i>Seven-Eleven</i> and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

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Reviewed by: Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C by Treva B. Lindsey Alison M. Parker Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. By Treva B. Lindsey. Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History. ( Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 182. Paper, $26.00, ISBN 978–0-252–08251-1; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978–0-252–04102-0.) In Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C., Treva B. Lindsey rethinks our periodization of the New Negro movement, which usually focuses on World War I and the Great Migration. This periodization, she argues, masculinizes the New Negro movement and centers on New York City. By focusing on the Jim Crow era of the 1890s through the 1920s and border cities like Washington, D.C., Lindsey identifies as New Negro women the members of the National Association of Colored Women and other groups who aimed "to transform themselves and their communities through demanding autonomy and equality for African American women" (p. 9). A chapter on education points to the aspirational nature of "New Negro womanhood" as symbolized by the presence in the nation's capital of premier educational institutions like M Street High School and Howard University (p. 143). Howard promised equal education but was mired in sexist ideas that privileged leadership training for black men. Lucy Diggs Slowe became the university's first dean of women in 1922. She fought for black women's equality and access to leadership positions at Howard and created a women's campus with housing for female students by 1931. Slowe lived off-campus and was in a loving relationship with another black woman, the writer Mary Burrill. The New Negro women who knew them privately, Lindsey suggests, accepted a broader range of behaviors than current narrow understandings of respectability politics allow. As a key element of New Negro womanhood, black beauty culture allowed black women, as entrepreneurs and consumers, to promote themselves as modern, urban, and beautiful in the face of a hostile, dominant white culture, Lindsey argues. Black women emulated the looks of famous race women they admired, such as the political celebrity Mary Church Terrell. Lindsey incorrectly cites Terrell's autobiography as proof that black women participated in a "modern black beauty culture" in the early 1870s by adding hair pieces to achieve the popular looks of the day (p. 73). In fact, Terrell was describing the self-adornment of elite white women who patronized her mother's hair store in Memphis. Even so, Lindsey's overall point is well taken: "Bodily adornment for New Negro women of Washington … signaled the importance of self-care within a society that repeatedly denied the humanity of black women" (p. 85). A chapter on the politics of New Negro women focuses on "the Women's Suffrage March in Washington of 1913 as a specific site of inquiry" (p. 89). Black suffragists were determined to make themselves seen, in spite of white suffragist Alice Paul's racist reluctance to let them join the march. After identifying Terrell as "the face of the African American women's suffrage activism," Lindsey concludes that Terrell, twenty-two women of Howard University's Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and other black suffragists agreed to march at the end of the parade (p. 95). Lindsey's evidence is thin, as it consists [End Page 198] of Paul's "personal recollections" and the seeming absence of black women in photographs of the march (p. 103). Paul's memories are unreliable since she repeatedly made racist statements and then evaded questions regarding her comments. W. E. B. Du Bois concluded, "an order went out to segregate them [black suffragists] in the parade, but telegrams and protests poured in and eventually the colored women marched according to their State and occupation without let or hindrance" ("Along the Color Line," The Crisis, 5 [April 1913], 267). Overall, Lindsey rightly identifies these black suffragists as courageous New Negro women who took a strong public stand for full equality and citizenship. Lindsey's final chapter evocatively captures the dynamic intellectual and cultural life of the black women playwrights who gathered at writer Georgia Douglass...

This article explores the types of racial and ethnic identities adopted by a sample of 83 adolescent second-generation West Indian and Haitian Americans in New York City. The subjective understandings these youngsters have of being American, of being black American, and of their ethnic identities are described and contrasted with the identities and reactions of first-generation immigrants from the same countries. Three types of identities are evident among the second generation – a black American identity, an ethnic or hyphenated national origin identity, and an immigrant identity. These different identities are related to different perceptions and understandings of race relations and of opportunities in the United States. Those youngsters who identify as black Americans tend to see more racial discrimination and limits to opportunities for blacks in the United States. Those who identify as ethnic West Indians tend to see more opportunities and rewards for individual effort and initiative. I suggest that assimilation to America for the second-generation black immigrant is complicated by race and class and their interaction, with upwardly mobile second-generation youngsters maintaining ethnic ties to their parents’ national origins and with poor inner city youngsters assimilating to the black American peer culture that surrounds them.