1. I owe an incredible debt to Jerry Gonzalez, Matt Tierney, Mike Litwack, Maya Cade as well as the editors at Jump Cut for their incisive commentary and assistance on my essay. [return to page 1]

2. It is important to note that Smythe’s description of the “consciousness industry” and insistence on the importance of the “audience commodity” is a critique of previous Western Marxist positions, especially those generated within the Frankfurt school, on culture and the culture industry. For Adorno, Horkheimer and others, the culture industry’s primary product is standardized entertainment whose message and mode of production reflects the dominant ideologies of late stage capital, which Adorno states are nakedly governed “by the principle of their realization as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation” (99). For Smythe, this tendency to focus on “entertainment” as the valued good is an idealist one, which does not quite capture the critical terrain from which hegemony and possible counter-hegemony can take place nor provides an accurate picture of media’s location within the base rather than as simply superstructure. The principle question motivating Smythe in “Blindspot,” which for him is the properly materialist question is: “what is the commodity form of mass-produced, advertising-supported communications?” (2). For Smythe, it is the attention provided by audiences.

3. For more on this history, see Sylvia Harvey, May 1968 and After.

4. Here, I follow Howard Ramsby’s argument in The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry and Jonathan Fenderson in Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politic of the 1960s.

5. Johnson H. Johnson, Negro Digest, June 1961, 3.

6. See Nishikawa’s “Between the World and Nommo: Hoyt W. Fuller and Chicago’s Black Arts Magazines.”

7. See Albert Kreiling’s “The Commercialization of the Black Press and the Rise of the Race News in Chicago” and Hall’s “On Sale at Your Favorite Newsstand: Negro Digest/Black World and the 1960s.” I will elaborate more on the commercialization of Black Radicalism in the concluding section of this essay.

8. On the range of scholarly efforts, both past and present, that have documented this historical moment see: John McMillian’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (OUP, 2011), Cynthia Young’s Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (2006), Danielle Aubert’s The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing (Inventory Press, 2019), Christopher Tinson’s Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s, Julie Alt, Alternative Art New York (1965-1985): A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective. James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, Parker Tyler’s Underground Film: A Critical History and Alan W. Moore’s Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City to name a few.

9. See Christopher Tinson’s Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s (2017).

10. In the survey, Fuller asked writers if they: “…see any future at all for the school of writers which seeks to establish a ‘black aesthetic?’ (Negro Digest, 48) [return to page 2]

11. Fuller surveyed and printed the responses from the following writers: Saunders Redding, Alice Walker, Carolyn Rodgers, Charles Wright, Julian Mayfield, Conrad Kent Rivers, K.W. Kgositsile, Margaret Danner, Jean Wheeler Smith, John Edgar Wideman, Mari Evans, Margaret Walker, S.E. Anderson, Julia Fields, Woodie King Jr., Ernest Gaines, Robert Boles, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Branch, John O. Killens, Addison Gayle Jr., Robert Hayden, Cyrus J. Colter, Laurence (Larry) P. Neal, Alice Childress, James A. Emanuel, Etheridge Knight, Sarah Webster Fabio, Kristin Hunter, Samuel Allen, Dudley Randall, Mignon K. Holland, Don L. Lee, Ronald Milner, John A. Williams, and Clifford Mason.

12. Here, I am invoking Jonathan Flatley’s “How A Revolutionary Counter-Mood Is Made,” which takes an affective approach to the way Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement labor organizers used their newsletters along with other organizing activities to eventually form the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Fuller’s work differs significantly from Flatley focus on the incredibly local nature of DRUM’s organizers’ engagement with physical location and proximity with workers.

13. Omitted.

14. This was the title of an article by Larry Neal that appeared in the journal Arts in Society in the fall of 1968.

15. The subtitle, “A Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto” was added in subsequent editions.

16. See Cedric R. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning.

17. On a number of occasions Van Peebles’ resists providing any substantive ideological or political statement about Sweetback’s meaning. Perhaps the most widely known of these evasions is his 1972 New York Times interview with Mel Gussow. When asked if he was a revolutionary Van Peebles states, “In this milieu, survival puts you immediately in confrontation with politics. I don’t really talk about these things. Everything is in enemy territory.” Even his first television interview about Sweetback, given the day his film premiered in Detroit, shows his careful approach to the political dimensions of his film. When asked by his interviewer if Sweetback is anti-white he responds that “the film is anti-injustice…there is a universality of the human experience that transcends frontiers of color if the people can get behind it.” On Black Journal, when Tony Brown asks if Sweetback is revolutionary he does not answer the question but instead expresses his dismay about Black criticism and wonders aloud why Black critics question Sweetback and not white films. In fact, his interview with Tony Brown ends (their interview takes place in an outdoor park) with Van Peebles discussing the uncertainty of what “the revolution” will look like, which leads Brown to press him more on critical responses to his film. As Brown is formulating his question three young women enter into the frame, in what was undoubtedly a staged appearance, and visibly distracts Van Pebbles. At this point, Van Peebles, who was sitting with Brown at the base of a tree during their interview, gets up and leaves with the young women; the implication being Van Peebles is blurring the lines between Sweetback’s on screen portrayal as a revolutionary sexual wunderkind and his real life.

18. Sweetback was distributed by Cinemation Industries, a soft-core porn distributor. See Justin Wyatt's "The Stigma of X: Adult Cinema and the Institution of the MPAA Ratings System" in Controlling Hollywood.

19. In “The Emancipation Orgasm,” which I will discuss below, Lerone Bennett takes Van Peebles to task for invoking the black aesthetic, suggesting that part of what Sweetback reveals is the valueless nature of the concept for Van Pebble’s. Bennett quotes Van Peebles’ using the term twice but I was only able to track down one instance from an interview Van Peebles gave to AP. It is noteworthy that Van Peeble’s does not use the term with the black press, in his many television appearances, nor in his book, Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmaking Manifesto (1971). With that said, it is clear from how Van Peeble’s talks about “black art” that he is drawing from BAM discourses regarding the black aesthetic even if he does not consistently invoke them directly.

20. Here, I am quoting from an interview with Van Pebbles titled “Melvin and the Street People” that appears in The Atlanta Constitution in 1971.

21. Van Pebbles’ claims aside, he was not alone in thinking about the relationship between revolutionary politics and Black independent cinema. Not only was the L.A. Rebellion film school directors contemporaneous with Van Pebbles’, who shot Sweetback in Los Angeles, but, as I mentioned in the beginning of this section, Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and other Black Arts Movement associated artists were also exploring the connection between Third Cinema and independent Black cinema. While The L.A. Rebellion associated filmmakers were screening Third Cinema films on California campuses during the early 1970s at Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey, Black Arts Movement associated artists were producing similar screenings. For more, see L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, eds. Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart (2015) and Whitney Straub’s “Recovering The New-Ark: Amiri Baraka’s Lost Chronicle of Black Power in Newark, 1968” (2014).

22. Here, I am referring to Michael Gillespie’s excellent essay, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song: ‘I’m Gonna Say a Black Ave Maria For You.’” Gillespie infers a direct relationship between Van Peeble’s film and revolutionary concepts that the historical record suggests is much more muddled and ambiguous, especially when taking into account Van Peebles’ own vacillations in the press and in his shooting diary, which makes very few references to existing Black aesthetic practices, which would have been readily accessible to him by 1971. In fact, the majority of his references in the book are to European and American literature as well as commercial and art cinema.

23. Van Peebles make an understandable, if erroneous assumption regarding the differences between the mediums of cinema and television that his own production practices contradict. It is true that cinema can allow for a collective experience unlike television viewing, which is often done in the home. However, such medium-specific engagements are breaking down during the 1970s. Also, in his quest for creative and “political” independence, Van Peebles pursued financing strategies that mimicked rather than undermined similar methods perfected within New Hollywood and exploitation cinema. This is not to suggest that the aesthetic of the film is somehow crudely determined by its mode of production. However, the film’s production was for all intents and purposes more in-line with commercial film than not, with the exception of Van Peebles’ use of non-union labor, which does raise useful questions about the role unions in the creative trades play in perpetuating long standing issues of institutional racism within the film industry. Regardless, such production methods were very much in contradiction to the discourse of revolutionary filmmaking during the period. Simultaneously, with the emergence of public access television, public broadcasting and especially the rise of technologies like Sony’s Portapack and other video playback technologies in the late 1960s marked the beginning of a shift away from the dominance of conventionally advertisement-driven television and the potential extension of television into a more collectivist medium. For the changing role of television and video during this period see Devorah Heitner’s Black Power TV (2013), Chris Meigh-Andrews’ A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function (2006), Leah Churner, “Out of the Vast Wasteland: The early years of public access cable television in New York City” (2009) and Deirdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (1997).

24. Van Peebles makes a similar statement in clip of an interview that appears in Joe Angio’s documentary How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It) (2005). The clip is not sourced in Angio’s documentary but looks to be from a television interview from the 1970s. Van Peebles states that “if Cinema no longer becomes relevant to the struggle I won’t make another film….the media does not dictate the message the need dictates the media.”

25. Please see Matthew Holthmeier’s “Entertainment-wise, a motherfucker: Critical Race Politics and the Transnational Movement of Melvin Van Peebles” for an excellent analysis of Van Peebles’ relationship to Solanas and Getino’s idea of “third cinema” and 1960s revolutionary film more broadly: http://www.ejumpcut.org/
archive/jc59.2019/HoltmeierVanPeebles/text.html [return to page 3]

26. In A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post-Civil Rights Hollywood, Eithne Quinn argues that Van Peebles’ radical praxis also became “the blueprint for a more individualist and macho entrepreneurial creative archetype” (126). Van Peebles auteurism and at times authoritarian approach to production management did not necessarily fit with the communal democratic nature of guerilla filmmaking that Solanas and Getino outline in “Towards a Third Cinema.”

27. Racquel Gates sees Jeff Gerber’s transformation in Watermelon Man from reluctant Black man into possible revolutionary as foreshadowing the revolutionary turn Sweetback makes in Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadaasss Song in their essay “Subverting Hollywood From The Inside Out: Melvin Van Peebles Watermelon Man.”

28. For more on Bennett’s relationship to Johnson see James E. West’s Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (2020).

29. Bennett’s observation is quite prescient. In a 1972 interview with Mel Gussow, Van Peebles states that he in working on sequel to Sweetback, which, as we know, never came to fruition.

30. Where the canonical understanding of Black “signifying” practices in the work of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism is used to argue for the presence of an intentional, self-referential, aesthetic tradition within Black literature; the way Newton’s uses it suggests both an aesthetic and ideological subversion of cinematic language and meaning whose referent leads back to the cultural practices of the Black proletariat for the purposes of turning leisure time into a space of revolutionary social reproduction. While Newton does not cite Van Peebles book I do think his argument about the film come from Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, where Van Peebles makes a similar argument about his approach to Sweetback’s concept.

31. It is important to note here that while I do think it is useful to reframe our engagement with Newton's “He Won’t Bleed Me” to focus on the materialist approach to mass media, the audience commodity and the possibility of revolutionary aesthetics it is hard not to acknowledge the lens he filters all of it through, which is to romanticize the brutal nature of sex work and the objectification of black women for the sake of the struggle. In this regard it has made it easy to reject Newton's understanding of the revolutionary art commodity as gendered, sexualized and only open to manipulation by men.

32. Where Bennett sees no hope in the age of telecommunications except for independent and Black non-commercial art Huey P. Newton’s “revolutionary analysis” of Sweetback suggests this is not the case. The important, if underappreciated, context to read “He Won’t Bleed Me” is Newton’s introduction of the theory of “intercommunalism” in the Fall of 1970 at Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The version of Newton’s speech I refer to here is the November 18, 1970 speech at Boston College where Newton rearticulates the Black Panther Party’s move away from both cultural nationalism and internationalism. It is the grounds of the Party’s ideological change that are worth highlighting. For Newton, “community” is not in and of itself a revolutionary formation but a “comprehensive collection of institutions that serve the people who live there” (Newton, 33). The now “communal” transformation of the nation-state is a consequence of reactionary forces that have accelerated growth of late-stage capital, the relationship between multinational corporations and the functions of empire and, for the purposes of this essay, most importantly “the development of technology…the mass media” along with “the fire power of the imperialist” that have ushered in the emergence of “the non-state” (Newton, 32-33). Revolutionary intercommunalism then is the socialist and Black radical response to liquidation of the state and the managerial role that capital, technocrats and the military have in the present. If, as Newton theorizes, revolutionary intercommunalism will end with the seizure of “the means of production,” the redistribution of “wealth and the technology” he also suggests that Black revolutionary thought must “acknowledge how the world is hooked up” through mass media (Newton, 34-35).

33. See Benjamin Wiggins’ “You Talkin' Revolution, Sweetback”: On Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Revolutionary Filmmaking.” He details, as does Van Peebles himself, the creative ways Van Peebles financed Sweetback.

34. This is not only the point Keeling and Onigiri make in their respective books but a sense of reassessment of mourning for the commodification of Black movement culture can be read across African-American, Black and Africana Studies from the 1980s into the present Some of that reassessment can be reading into John C. Hall and Albert Kreling’s work, quoted above, about the demise of Black independent publishing but also in works ranging from Robert Weems’ “The Revolution Will Be Marketed: American Corporations and Black Consumers During the 1960s” (1994) to more recent scholarship like Jonathan Fenderson’s lament about the representational turn in Black Studies scholarship, which, as he writes in “Black Studies Post-Janus” (2018) has jettisoned the focus on political economy that defined the Black Radical scholarship of the 1960s and 70s.

35. Smythe’s scholarly renaissance was primarily driven by Marxist academics interested in theorizing the hyper-extractive as well as gendered elements of digital labor and platform capitalism. Here I am thinking of the already cited work of Christian Fuchs but also Fuchs and Vincent Mosco’s Marx is Back—The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today (2012), Elieen Meehan and Ellen Riordan’s Sex and Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media (2002), Trebor Scholz’s “Facebook as Playground and Factory” in Facebook and Philosophy (2011), Brett Caraway’s “Audience Labor in the New Media Environment: A Marxian Revisiting of the Audience Commodity” (2011) and Lee McGuigan and Vincent Manzerolle’s The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media (2014) just to name a few. Janet Wasko, Vincent Mosco and Manjunath Pendukar edited Illuminating the Blindspots: Essays Honoring Dallas W. Smythe (1993)the year after Smythe’s passing. And of course, there was the “blindspot” debate, about what kind of role late-capital played in telecommunications, amongst Marxist theorists in the years following Smythe’s essay. Here, one can read Graham Murdock’s “Blindspots about Western Marxism: A Reply to Dallas Smythe” (1978), Bill Livant, “The Audience Commodity: On the ‘Blindspot’ Debate” (1979), and Livant and Jhally Sut’s “Watching as Working: The Valorization of Audience Consciousness” (1986).

36. See, Sarah H. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles, #Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (2020); Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Arely M. Zimmerman, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (2018); Angela Aguayo, Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media (2019); and Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bendele, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2017).

37. Here I am referring to the respective multiplatform development deals that Patrisse Cullors and Ibram X. Kendi signed in the wake of the 2020 racial justice uprisings. Patrisse Cullors signed a production deal with Warner Bros. Television Group, which lead, in part to the documentary Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground (2021), which was streamed in HBO Max. Ibram X. Kendi similarly signed a deal with Boat Rocker Entertainment Company to launch a production company called Maroon Visions, to produce scripted and unscripted content for streaming services.