Arguably, Negro Digest/Black World’s cultivation of this readership is made possible by the BAM’s conception and formal production of a specifically “Black” art. As Margo Natalie Crawford and Lisa Gail Collins suggest, the emergence of “Black” art is not only a product of the whole spectrum of poetry and fiction workshops, theater groups and other art collectives that emerge throughout the 1960s but also an explicit liberation politics that understands the “inseparability of the ideological and the aesthetic” (Collins and Crawford 11).

This is one way to read the hailing to the reader that happens in so many poems of the Black Arts Movement. Amiri Baraka’s “SOS,” published in Black Art in 1969 but composed between 1965 and 1966, is one of his most anthologized and reproduced poems precisely because it embodies such hailing through title, verse, allusion and form. The effect of Baraka’s “SOS” is to summon a radical, racialized aggregate that we find amongst a wide swath of works, from the dialectical “You” in Nikki Giovanni’s “True Dialogue” to Don Lee’s “for black people (and negroes too)” (Harper, 40). In all of these hails, an aggregate Black subjectivity is summoned. The “call,” the “you” or the “Black people” of these poems, however, are not offered up to as readers whose leisure time is for sale. Instead, Baraka’s SOS, as well as these other poems, use the Black aggregate “the people” hailed through a Black aesthetic to disrupt and resist the audience-commodity formed through the book and other print media forms. As Crawford argues, BAM artists engage in textual performances that create an “anti-text,” that is, writing styles that are “too action-orientated” to be contained and embodied in a conventional commodity form (193). And, with such a disruption, came the promise of the reader’s identification that halts the transformation of culture into capital and replenishes a revolutionary self.

Indeed, the 1960s marks a moment when Black publishers—and not only Black artists—recognize that the reader’s (or the watcher’s) time has use value in anticipating the development of political consciousness. The question then is how to navigate the cultivation of a Black aggregate subject through the mass media in ways that refuse the reproduction of a commodified Black audience. In this regard, Fuller seeks to position Negro Digest/Black World as a mass-produced object that is also a fugitive space where a collective Black subject can reproduce itself.

The conscientious cultivation of reading practices can be one way to understand how Fuller steers Negro Digest/Black World towards the fostering and dissemination of a Black Aesthetic, where attention capture is directed not at the creation of the audience commodity but at an attempt to use surplus time to frustrate the creation of an audience. This can be seen in the format changes that the publication undergoes during the mid-60s. Prior to that moment, early content of Negro Digest/Black World is in the conventional digest format, which means reprinting pieces from middlebrow magazines from the early 1960s such as Atlantic Monthly and Johnson’s own Ebony. However, beginning in 1964, Fuller begins to move Negro Digest away from this format, in part, by shifting the content of the magazine to feature both well-known and emerging Black

“writers, artists and intellectuals not to conspicuously display their qualifications and ‘success’ but rather to utilize and evaluate their diagnosis of American cultural ills” (Hall 198).

A prime example of these format changes that I argue cultivate an anti-audience is the January 1968 issue of Negro Digest/Black World. The issue features reviews by Don L. Lee as well as a debate between James Cunningham and Ron (Maulana Ndabezitha) Karenga about the relationship between Black Nationalism and Black artists. Most notably, thirty-four pages of the issue are given over to a “Writer’s Symposium” as well as “Negro Writers’ Conferences—The Dialogue Distorted,” a reprinted chapter from Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. The symposium is created from the written responses to a survey that Fuller sent to thirty-eight Black writers “both famous and unknown” (Negro Digest, 10). Fuller and the editorial board publish edited versions of the answers each writer provides and Fuller writes up a small introduction to the symposium title “A Survey: Black Writers Views on Literary Lions and Values” (Negro Digest, 10) In his survey, Fuller asksed writers what they think about

“the new movement toward a black aesthetic’ and the preoccupation with the ‘black experience’ aspects of the larger Black Consciousness Movement” (Negro Digest, 10).[10] [open endnotes in new window]

The respondents range from then canonical writers like Gwendolyn Brooks and Saunders Reading, to lesser known ones (at the time at least) like Alice Walker and S.E. Anderson, and key theorists of the Black Aesthetic like Larry Neal and Addison Gayle.[11] Given the wide range of authors and responses, it is impossible to discern anything like political consensus on the critical question about a Black aesthetic as well as the relation between Black experience and art, which is what primarily motivated Fuller. While there was general agreement that something called a “Black Aesthetic” exists, nothing remotely approaching a collective definitional consensus can be determined from the symposium. For every Larry Neal, who suggests that a Black aesthetic already exists but rejects its “formalization,” and for every less sanguine observation, like those of Alice Walker and Saunders Redding, who make more universalist and less racialist claims about the literary imagination, most responses are like that of John O. Killens, who provides less of a definitive answer than a suggestion that

“the materials of most Black writers come out of the Black experience, it would seem that a Black aesthetic would be a most viable and fruitful one for the Black artist”(31).

The collective radical assertion of a Black aesthetic returns us, at best, to the universalist conundrum of the relation between aesthetics and experience. Hoyt Fuller, whose commentary on the writer’s responses is formatted so that it weaves throughout the symposium section of the issue recognizes this lack of consensus. Fuller writes that there is an “alternating desire for assimilation and separation” amongst the polled writers, who, on the one hand

“are committed to the truth as reflected through the prism of their own experiences…and those who have adjusted their vision…to the guidelines established by people who…are historically and culturally placed in a position which demands that the validity of the unshared experiences be denied” (23).

As Kinohi Nishikawa suggests, perhaps Fuller’s balancing act in Negro Digest/Black World is his attempt to present, within the pages of John H. Johnson’s mass circulation periodical, the radical energy of Black radical aesthetics within the garb of middlebrow “literariness” (Nishikawa, 156). This is very different than the intimate, local Chicago readership of Nommo, a smaller journal Fuller edited at the same time he was working for Negro Digest/Black World in the late 1960s.

Through his efforts to present radical ideas in the 1968 issue, Fuller is attempting to use Negro Digest/Black World to create a “counter-mood” for the masses through the mass medium of the print magazine.[12] In so doing, Fuller attempts to usurp an already commodified mass media outlet and repurpose its material function within the broader corporate capitalist structure of Johnson Publishing. Yet Fuller’s efforts are perilous and uncertain, balancing between the contemporaneous political emergence of Black radicalism and cultivating a readership that can meet the critical demands of aesthetic experimentation at the same that he has no sense of how his readers/audience are using the space, ideas, or “mood” he is creating for them.All of this unfolds within the context of a magazine that, while avoiding the compromises that come with advertising-driven audience formation, nevertheless is constrained by the limited resources Johnson has provided in order to maintain Negro Digest/Black World’s “prestige” place in the Johnson Publishing empire.

Sweetback as the “answer to the
oppressor’s technology”?

If BAM writers and critics see print media imbricated in the emergence of late capital’s media apparatus and position a Black Aesthetic against the audience commodity, the growing, racialized audience-segmentation of U.S. film and television means that cinema is an even more intensely fraught medium for Black Power-aligned media-makers. As Kevin Bell, Armand Towns, Lars Lierow and Whitney Strub have shown, there are discernable ties between post-68 BAM artists and theorists to media philosophy, telecommunications critique, and filmmaking. BAM artists have been, since the mid-1960s, engaged with the connection between film and “the Black cultural revolution.”[14] It is for this reason that the incredible popularity of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (1971), Melvin Van Peebles’ concerted embrace of “Black aesthetic” discourse, and the subsequent emergence of “Blaxploitation” become focal points for the contradictions that artists and activists are feeling within their struggles over Black audiences within the attention economy.

It is hard not to read into the origin story of Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweetback the looming and vexed political and aesthetic debates that would accompany the film’s release. Van Peebles publishes the shooting diary for Sweetback, entitled Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song in 1971, not long after the film’s premier in March.[15] The original publisher, Lancer Books, specializes in genre fiction, mostly science-fiction, soft-core pornography and queer erotica. The film, he tells his readers “was about a brother getting the Man’s foot out of his ass,” “ENTERTAINMENT WISE. A MOTHERFUCKER,” and “couldn’t be a didactic discourse which would end up playing…to an empty theatre” (68).

At the time, Sweetback was Van Peebles’ latest yet his most radical attempt in the U.S. to represent Black life on screen that resonated with the emergent energies of Black Power and the Civil Rights Movements and against the Hollywood social problem film of the 1950s and 1960s. The director subsequently distances himself from the very Blaxploitation cycle of films that Sweetback inaugurated. Yet Van Peebles uses many of the very same financial, distribution, and promotional strategies employed by grindhouse and exploitation film producers to produce Sweetback—techniques subsequently adopted by the New Hollywood; these include merchandise preselling, four-walling, and producing films based on taboo or highly politicized themes. At the center of this is Van Pebbles’ appropriation of the imagistic discourses of Black Nationalism in his film. These strategies raise important questions about the translation of Black Power content into an industrial mode of communication integral to white supremacy. They also raise questions about the possibility of mass-distributing “revolutionary” cinema in the late-1960s and 70s that embody a “Black aesthetic.”[16]

Announcing its political proclivities, Sweetback begins with a flash-forward freeze frame of Van Peebles running out of a long tunnel with an intertitle announcing,

“This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man.”

Van Peebles plays the role of protagonist Sweetback, a sexual wunderkind who works at a stag show hosted at a brothel in Los Angeles. After witnessing the brutal beating of a Black militant by two white police officers, Sweetback attacks the police officers and spends the rest of the film on the run from the police with intermittent episodes where he gets assistance and shelter from Black (and some white) characters. Van Peebles’ film ends after Sweetback evades the authorities and escapes to Mexico with the infamous intertitle:

“BAADASSS NIGGER IS COMING BACK TO COLLECT SOME DUES.”

Throughout, Sweetback’s allegiance to a Black community is signaled through the aid he receives from the diverse spectrum of community members he encounters (from sex workers to Black preachers).

The politics that inhabit Sweetback have been endlessly debated. Some critics and viewers interpret the film as a radical embodiment of Black Power with its focus upon Black self-determination and community support. In contrast, others see it as politically reactionary for its endorsement of a brutal sexism where women serve as sexual vehicles for Black cis-gendered, heterosexual men’s political liberation. While the film’s mise-en-scène and narrative contains Black Power redefinitions of Black male sexuality, as well as critiques of policing and police brutality, Amy Onigiri writes that the film

“virtually invented the ‘superspade’ narrative formula that almost all later Blaxploitation films would follow” (172).

Meanwhile, Ed Guerrero considers Van Peebles’ film as bringing to the surface

“the subtle fissures and cracks of class tension, ideological conflict, and aesthetic arguments…simmering in the black social formation since the winding down of the civil rights movement” (87).

The critical reception of Sweetback since the 1970s only reinforces the desire for those of us who engage with the film to focus on the ideological conflict that Guerrero sees forever haunting Van Peebles’s film (Onigiri; Wiggins, 29).

Given Van Peebles’ own vacillations and hedges regarding his film’s explicit connection to Black Power, it is unclear how close of a connection he wanted to draw between Sweetback and Black Power politics.[17] The story of the film’s production embody the contradictions of Van Peebles, whose decision to turn away from Hollywood and attempt to better represent Black working-class women and men in film clash with the labor and financial practices he embraces for the sake cinematic independence.

The production of Sweetback’s soundtrack, which was eventually released on Stax Records, displays his rather canny and problematic attempts to avoid employing union musicians or license trademarked film music. Peebles famously uses a pre-fame Earth, Wind & Fire for the soundtrack of the film, which he produces by showing the band rough cut clips of the film before Peebles is done with principle shooting of his film. Van Pebbles then releases Sweetback’s soundtrack months before the national release of the film, where it cracks the Billboard Top 20 in 1971 and ushers in one of the most crucial components of Blaxploitation cinema’s cultivation of a Black audience: the use of contemporary Soul and Funk for the purposes of marketing. And as Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White reveals in his memoir, Peebles never pays the band for their work. Pre-releasing a soundtrack is just one strategy used in New Hollywood to drum up promotion but also help finance production.

Van Peebles engages in other, hyper-capitalist strategies: setting up a limited liability corporation; using offshore banks to channel funds; and, perhaps his most infamous strategy, Van Peebles tells local unions that he is filming a pornographic film (an industry that does not require union labor) so he can retain full autonomy over whom he hires rather than using union labor and paying higher wages (Wiggins, 31). Producing and distributing Sweetback under the guise of a pornographic film then leads to the most powerful marketing tool Van Peebles can wield, that Sweetback is rated “X” by an “all-white jury.”[18]

This context is crucial because it indicates the caution with which one should approach Van Peebles’ strategic engagement with the discourses already present in Black radical thought, media critique, and revolutionary filmmaking. In May of 1971, two months after Sweetback premieres in Detroit, embroiled in censorship debates because of the racialized “X” rating and on the cusp of broader national distribution and media attention, Van Peebles gives an interview to the Associated Press where he describes Sweetback as a film derived from “the Black aesthetic,” a direct reference to Fuller’s concept. Van Peebles states,

“The film was made from the black aesthetic. It doesn’t come soft and I don’t act as an ambassador of goodwill. The film doesn’t make concessions to the audience, so the audience has to come to it” (Sterling, 28).[19]

Rather than explicate what he means by a “black aesthetic,” Van Peebles suggests to the interviewer that whatever the “black aesthetic” means it requires producing films that do not cater to an “American white audience.” In fact, Van Peebles claims that Sweetback ignores white audiences completely, a claim only bolstered by his fight against Jack Valenti and the MPAA. Furthermore, he dismisses the critical furor as well as the censorship and distribution battles regarding Sweetback as a consequence of his decision to evade white Hollywood entirely, an oft-repeated claim throughout his promotion of the film (Sterling 28). In interviews, Van Peebles also makes explicit and implicit references to the intersection of race, class ,and audience in determining the negative reception of Sweetback, suggesting, fo instance, that Sweetback is a film made for “street people”[20] or, in an interview with The New York Times, purposefully highlighting the bourgeois nature of Black middle- and intellectual-class pretentions by declaring that “the Black media was very insulted that I didn’t choose a more respectable segment of the black condition” (Gussow 19). The inference here is that Van Peebles’ audience represents an “authentic” Black working-class constituency.

Van Peebles’ mix of shrewd political agitprop and marketing genius comes out in these promotional interviews where he addresses his “audience,” which he asserts is neither White nor Black and bourgeois. However, it is in his aforementioned shooting diary for the film where he engages, albeit briefly, with the political economy of audience formation, the discourse of revolutionary filmmaking, and the relation between film and other mass media forms.[21] Within the “Ideas” section of the book, Van Peebles’ draws from a combination of Black Aesthetic and “Third Cinema” concepts when he describes his desire to make a film that

“reconquer(s) our own minds” such that cinema can serve as a vehicle for reversing this process of “colonization” (Van Peebles 66).[22]

Cinema is especially important for Van Peebles because it can be shielded from what he calls the “racist economic pressures” that plague television and other advertising-sponsored modalities of mass media.[23]

TV, writes Van Peebles,

“was out; television at this stage in the game, as it is practiced in America at least, is not a feasible tool for carrying really relevant ideas to the minds of the disenfranchised. The umbilical cord from the TV program to its sponsor is short and very vital and can be cut abruptly, too abruptly for a program to get away for pushing an extra-uppity ideas” (66, emphasis mine).

This last sentence denotes the key distinction Van Pebbles draws between advertisement-driven commercial television and the political and aesthetic independence that “self-funded” cinema, which does not rely on corporate sponsors, can potentially grant to filmmakers. Van Peebles often discusses the lessons he learned from trying to wrestle control from Columbia Pictures while directing his first Hollywood-produced feature-length film Watermelon Man (1970). However,his shooting diary is the first time that Van Peebles’ explicitly makes a materialist, medium-specific argument for cinema. In it, he acknowledges the distinction between two types of viewership. On the one hand, the potentially collectivist nature of cinematic spectatorship potentially engages with the audience (or perhaps against the formation of an audience commodity). On the other hand, there is always an implied commodification of watching found in advertising-sponsored mass media forms like television.[24]