Self-Defense and the Surround in Finally Got the News (1970)

Abstract

Abstract: Drums and DRUM, percussion and organization: these are prominent motifs in Finally Got the News (1970), the documentary that chronicles the activities of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and their struggle against the exploitative labor practices of the Big Three automakers in late 1960s Detroit. One hears the drums immediately in Finally Got the News , playing over a montage of images that trace the history of exploitation and oppression of Black workers in the United States from the plantation to the factory floor. While Finally Got the News explicates the calculable dimensions of the history of racial capitalism in Detroit, positioning the DRUM and the League at the intersection of revolutionary Black nationalism and revolutionary Marxism, the beat of the drums during the film's opening montage signals another dimension of resistance against or over which these intersecting trajectories of social struggle play out, one that defines the limit of the dialectical narrativization of resistance and progress articulated in the film. Drawing on the work of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, this essay argues that the beat of the goblet drums in the film's opening montage signals the presence of the blackness that surrounds the structures of racial capitalism in US-American society. It is against this backdrop, the essay argues, that Finally Got the News improvises and stages its own political intervention.