Towards a transnational aesthetics of Blackness: Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the 2016 documentary from Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro. The film’s opening credits claim it was written uniquely by James Baldwin. Yet Peck repeatedly cuts between Baldwin’s speeches or interposes his voiceover with contemporary footage related to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. My reading privileges Peck’s form over content to argue that Peck’s Francophone voice, spoken through Baldwin, not only denounces ‘American’ racism as existing, in some form, on a global level, but also indicts France for its history of colonization and own racist structures. Moreover, through the overlap of Peck’s own and Baldwin’s voices as well as the inclusion of non-U.S. artists and the Black female experiences, this article contends that Peck’s aesthetics serve to dissolve borders around Blackness and the African diaspora, offering what I term a transnational Black consciousness. In this consciousness, each iteration of the African diaspora and of Black identities can speak its own (hi)stories to and through one another, thereby creating a space for justice and contrapuntal responses to anti-Blackness narratives that exist on a transnational level.