copyright 2022, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Jump Cut, No. 61, fall 2022

Disruptive nationalisms: aesthetics, markets, and the anti-audience of Black media

by Richard Purcell

This essay[1] [open endnotes in new window] returns to a pivotal moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s to explore how media-makers and activists aligned with the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and Black Power Movement navigated the tension between the need to attract “audiences” for the purposes of cultivating resistant forms of Black subjectivity and the need to combat forces of mainstream commodification. I argue that Black Power-aligned media-makers’ theorizations of Black aesthetics carry with them an emergent discourse about the creation of and the changing market for Black art in an age of media’s massification during the second half of the twentieth century. More specifically, I posit that within these discourses an anxiety emerges over the commodification not only of the Black artwork but also of a Black audience for this artwork. Such commodification came into conflict with the central ideological and political work of radical Black Power politics of collective self-determination outside of—and in resistance to—capitalism. And that resistance was expressed both through cultural nationalism and various kinds of transnational and intercommunal visions that emerge out of Black radical thought during this historical moment.

Put another way, the dilemma then facing Black Power-aligned media-makers and artists was this: Can “the technology of the oppressor,” to borrow Huey P. Newton’s phrasing (Newton 9), be harnessed towards reproducing and expanding a counter-hegemonic community? For BAM and Black Power-aligned artists, the question captured their ambivalent engagements with mass media.

Such media has the goal of capturing audiences and so forms what the media theorist Dallas Smythe will call at the end of the 1970s “the audience commodity.” In his essay, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Smythe defines the “audience commodity” as the commodity produced during media consumption, specifically through the creation of audiences to sell to advertisers. Smythe argues that advanced capitalism is what he called a “consciousness industry” (1).[2] One of the most important mass-produced goods of advertiser-supported communications during late-twentieth century monopoly capitalism is, in fact, “audiences and readerships” (3). But the time people spend watching and reading is also a fraught and capricious time. As Smythe puts it, the laborer, in reproducing labor power, “might be responding to realistic conditions which may on occasion surprise and disappoint their advertisers” (6).

Ultimately, for Smythe, the political significance of the audience commodity does not lie in the traditional Marxist concept of the alienation of workers as they produce commodities in general. Instead, it resides in

“the alienation of workers from the means of reproducing themselves” (7).

For Smythe, the means of reproducing oneself is not just the rest we do between each workday. Instead, such unorganized time has political potential. However, when the aggregate of viewer/readership is transformed into an “audience,” the value of such surplus time, which can be used for cultivating revolutionary ideas, gets captured by capital (7). Smythe’s essay was published in 1977, almost a full decade after the height of BAM. But I would venture to say that his political-economic analysis of the “audience commodity” already concerned the emergent Black Power-aligned media-makers.

What connects Smythe to BAM and Black Power intellectuals and artists, in particular, is their shared interest in what audience formation could usurp—that is, the potentially revolutionary use of surplus-watching/reading-time. For the intellectuals and artists examined in this article, like many other artists and media-makers in the post-1968 period, the social activities of reading and viewing constituted key sites of struggle over the reproduction or, alternatively, the capture of Black radical and revolutionary collectivity.[3] Unleashing this surplus time from its capture by capitalist mass media, they argued, is a vital step towards a larger political goal: using mass media to seize the means of capitalist social reproduction. To advance this aim, Black artists and media-makers have explored whether the formulation of a Black Aesthetic—and the insertion of this aesthetic into mainstream media—can disrupt late-stage capitalistic mechanisms of audience formation to create another object: an anti-audience whose attention is freed from reproducing capitalist structures of labor time and consumption practices.

Generally speaking, the BAM emerged out of a series of disparate local and often grassroots organizations of Black artists and intellectuals that began to emerge in the early 1960s and that expanded after the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. It was primarily associated with Amiri Baraka’s formation of the Black Arts Repertory Theater of Harlem, but there were in fact a multitude of Black arts organizations across the United States, including in cities like Philadelphia, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Chicago. BAM challenged the literary and critical movements of the New American Poetry, the New York Intellectuals, and the New Criticism primarily through establishing an alternative body of publishing venues for Black writers as well as developing critical methods and terms to assess the work of these same artists. This dominating trinity was, in part, what Amiri Baraka, Hoyt Fuller, and others would call “the mainstream” of literary style, intellectual culture and criticism. However, while BAM artists formulated their critique of the mainstream in relation to dominant literary institutions, what has been critically underappreciated is their focus on mainstream media institutions like television and cinema. In contrast, not only did Larry Neal and Don L. Lee write film reviews in the pages of Black World and The Liberator but, as I will discuss, Neal and Baraka saw cinema as a key form in BAM aesthetics to counter on a mass scale the “cultural imperialism of…white communictions media” (Neal, 350). In so doing, Black Power-aligned artists and media-makers contested “the mainstream” as the dominant media platform for the attention of Black people.

Despite conflicting accounts of the BAM, all agree that the Black Aesthetic describes an intertwining of Black liberation with aesthetics. Yet a fraught “blind spot” in contemporary Black Studies’ assessments of the Black Aesthetic has been the tendency to largely ignore BAM and Black Power-aligned artists and critics’ rigorous interrogations of the relation between the ideology of Black liberation and the political economy of mass media. For this reason, I enter into a discussion of the Black Aesthetic through the writing and editorial work of Hoyt Fuller. There are a number of reasons why his approach to the “Black Aesthetic” was crucial within the context of an emergent Black Arts Movement. Arguably, Fuller is one of the first intellectuals to emerge out the BAM who attempted to manage the material, aesthetic and political complexities involved in merging avant-garde Black ideas within mass culture.[4] For this reason, Fuller’s role as editor of Negro Digest/Black World—a mass circulation magazine within the John H. Johnson Publishing empire of the 1960s—and his attempts to disseminate the ideas of a “Black Aesthetic” on a national (and perhaps global) scale make his engagement with the Black Aesthetic a crucial place to start.

Here I trace Fuller’s cultivation of this concept of the Black Aesthetic within the pages of the magazine Negro Digest/Black World and its reappearance in the commentary around Melvin Van Peebles’ film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). While Fuller only implicitly addresses the relation between the commodification of the art object and the commodification of the audience in his editorial decisions for Negro Digest/Black World, we see a more direct engagement with the audience commodity in the critical reception of Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasss Song. By describing how Fuller, Van Peebles, and others engaged the problem of producing an audience for a “Black Aesthetic” across two important mass media forms—the magazine and the cinema—I seek to emphasize the unavoidable problematic that inextricably links two levels of struggle—that is, ideological struggles over aesthetic and political representation with political economy issues, on the one hand, and dealing with the evolving function of media at a crucial moment of late-stage capitalism.

Discussions of the Black Aesthetic amongst BAM artists and intellectuals after 1968 thus offer an explicit theorization of the contradictions that emerge between the formation of Black radical community through mass media and the formation of a Black audience. This fact has invaluable bearing in our contemporary platform era of late-stage capitalism media consumption, a point which I will further elucidate at the article’s conclusion. As I will show, Fuller, Van Peebles, and others saw the potential of cultivating a Black “anti-audience” through print, cinema and other mechanisms of mass media. The idea that emerges from Fuller and the debates around Van Peebles’ film is that the representation of Black struggle via a Black Aesthetic is not determined by the mechanisms of audience capture. Although their efforts were medium-specific (print magazine vs. cinema), both Fuller and Van Peebles attempted to use the mechanisms of audience capture against itself.

The imperative that Black Power-aligned media-makers constitute and address a Black collective subject found itself in tension with the capitalist imperative to mine and constitute new subject positions for consumers, including Black consumers. BAM’s theorization of a Black Aesthetic unfolded against and in opposition to the commodification of avant-garde tactics. It presented an alternative imagination of a Black aggregate belonging that oscillated between cultural nationalism and broader forms of proletarian and transnational left solidarity. The Black Aesthetic is not just a style or mode of representation but requires a kind of vocational work by way of Black participation in an alternative “attention economy” cultivated for revolutionary purposes. The anxiety expressed by artists and theorists of Black Power-aligned media occured at the juncture between the desire to advocate for a collective act of participation within this alternative “attention economy” and the risk that a wider dissemination of the Black Aesthetic through mass media will reproduce the audience commodity. It is this ambivalence that I track in this essay.

The Black Aesthetic against the audience commodity

In 1961, John H. Johnson, the founder of the Johnson Publishing Company and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, asks veteran journalist Hoyt Fuller to revive Negro Digest. First published in 1942, Negro Digest was presented as a Black Reader’s Digest. Yet, instead of a Black version of the middlebrow conservatism of Reader’s Digest, Fuller and Johnson’s revival became perhaps the most widely circulated outlet for what the historian of Black literary and print culture James Smethurst has described as

“high-level African American political commentary and cultural expression aimed at a black audience” (208).

Especially after 1965, Fuller pushed Negro Digest toward an intellectual engagement with both the Black Arts and Black Power movements—a shift that would also occur at other Johnson-owned publications. Fuller’s interest in Black Power and Black Arts was a hallmark of his intellectual development towards Kwame Nkrumah’s Marxist Pan-Africanism, as well as a recognition of the impact of desegregation and decolonization on Black political consciousness. In this sense, the 1961 relaunch of Negro Digest/Black World was unique. While the majority of John H. Johnson’s Black magazines were traditional, advertisement-driven publications, with Hoyt Fuller’s second run of Negro Digest/Black World, a decision was made to make it a “commercial” free periodical, which means Johnson decided that the magazine would not place advertisements within its pages, which was a radical departure from the 1943-1961 run of this and the rest of Johnson’s publications.

Johnson himself cited the rise of the Civil Rights movement as well as lack of “ready outlets” for Black writing as his impetus for relaunching Negro Digest/Black World.[5] Also, Johnson was staking the magazine’s financial success on the legitimacy Fuller already earned amongst BAM artists as well as from the more community based, grassroots publishing and political work Fuller did in Chicago in the 1960s.[6] But as Albert Kreiling and James Hall both state, the absence of advertising does not necessarily mean Negro Digest/Black World was free from Johnson’s intentions to monopolize Black readership across his various magazine properties, which one could easily describe as an effort at audience segmentation. Johnson rehired Fuller to develop a Johnson property antithetical to the advertisement-driven layout and content conventions of Jet and Ebony Magazines and one that actively published and elaborated the “Black aesthetic” under the market imprimatur of Johnson’s commercial publication cache. Such a business move shows that Johnson had designs for Negro Digest/Black World that sought to capitalize on growing Civil Rights unrest. This was done, to a certain extent, as part of a media format war to further coopt Black readership away from Black weekly newspapers and into Johnson’s own publications, which marketed an aspirational Civil Rights agenda within its content tethered to advert-driven Black access to the U.S. marketplace.[7]

Fuller’s reinvention of Negro Digest unfolded within a wider context; there was an explosion of Black-owned presses dedicated to engaging an alternative market for Black art, especially avant-garde art and criticism. And the explosion of Black-owned presses and alternative aesthetic markets occurred here within the emergence of a wide-variety of alternative and underground presses as well as media during the Long Seventies.[8] For example, in 1965, the Detroit-based Black artist Dudley Randall founded Broadside Press. Poet Haki Madhubuti followed Randall two years later and founded Third World Press in 1967. It was also during this period that a string of Black Arts inspired journals and magazines, such as Liberator, emerged around the flourishing Black arts and intellectual scene.[9] However, while Broadside and Third World Press explicitly rejected Black popular culture in favor of a mix of cultural nationalism and Black avant-gardism, Fuller explored the possibility of cultivating a readership for avant-garde aesthetics within the context of popular print media.

Specifically, Fuller was experimenting with how to bring into being an imagined aggregate Black subjectivity for BAM’s “Black” artwork and Black aesthetic within commercialized mass media. Fuller’s editorial staff published predominately Black writers all along the ideological spectrum throughout his run with Negro Digest/Black World, although those that appeared the most were the luminaries of the BAM. And while poetry dominated its pages, Negro Digest/Black World gaves an incredible amount of space to book reviews and cultural criticism during the height of its influence from 1968-1971 (Thompson 243-244).

------JC p.2--------

Arguably, Negro Digest/Black World’s cultivation of this readership was 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 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 engaged in textual performances that created an “anti-text,” that is, writing styles that were “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 halted the transformation of culture into capital and replenisheed a revolutionary self.

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

The conscientious cultivation of reading practices can be one way to understand how Fuller steered 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 underwent during the mid-60s. Prior to that moment, early content of Negro Digest/Black World was in the conventional digest format, which meant reprinting pieces from middlebrow magazines from the early 1960s such as Atlantic Monthly and Johnson’s own Ebony. However, beginning in 1964, Fuller began 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 was 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 published edited versions of the answers each writer provided and Fuller wrote 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]

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 was 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 was 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 was 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 attempted 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 were perilous and uncertain, balancing between the contemporaneous political emergence of Black radicalism and cultivating a readership that could meet the critical demands of aesthetic experimentation at the same that he had no sense of how his readers/audience were using the space, ideas, or “mood” he was 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 was constrained by the limited resources Johnson 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 saw print media imbricated in the emergence of late capital’s media apparatus and positioned a Black Aesthetic against the audience commodity, the growing, racialized audience-segmentation of U.S. film and television meant that cinema was 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” became focal points for the contradictions that artists and activists were 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, specialized in genre fiction, mostly science-fiction, soft-core pornography and queer erotica. The film, he told 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 distanced himself from the very Blaxploitation cycle of films that Sweetback inaugurated. Yet Van Peebles used 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 used a pre-fame Earth, Wind & Fire for the soundtrack of the film, which he produced by showing the band rough cut clips of the film before Peebles was done with principle shooting of his film. Van Pebbles then released Sweetback’s soundtrack months before the national release of the film, where it cracked the Billboard Top 20 in 1971 and ushered 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 paid the band for their work. Pre-releasing a soundtrack was just one strategy used in New Hollywood to drum up promotion but also help finance production.

Van Peebles engaged 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 told local unions that he was filming a pornographic film (an industry that does not require union labor) so he could retain full autonomy over whom he hired rather than using union labor and paying higher wages (Wiggins, 31). Producing and distributing Sweetback under the guise of a pornographic film then led to the most powerful marketing tool Van Peebles could wield, that Sweetback was 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 premiered 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 gave an interview to the Associated Press where he described Sweetback as a film derived from “the Black aesthetic,” a direct reference to Fuller’s concept. Van Peebles stated,

“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 meant by a “black aesthetic,” Van Peebles suggested 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 claimed that Sweetback ignores white audiences completely, a claim only bolstered by his fight against Jack Valenti and the MPAA. Furthermore, he dismissed 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 made explicit and implicit references to the intersection of race, class, and audience in determining the negative reception of Sweetback, suggesting, for instance, that Sweetback was 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 represented an “authentic” Black working-class constituency.

Van Peebles’ mix of shrewd political agitprop and marketing genius comes out in these promotional interviews where he addressed his “audience,” which he asserted was neither White nor Black andbourgeois. However, it is in his aforementioned shooting diary for the film where he engaged, 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’ drew from a combination of Black Aesthetic and “Third Cinema” concepts when he described 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 was 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 indicates the key distinction Van Pebbles drew between advertisement-driven commercial television and the political and aesthetic independence that “self-funded” cinema, which did not rely on corporate sponsors, could potentially grant to filmmakers. Van Peebles often discussed 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 made a materialist, medium-specific argument for cinema. In it, he acknowledged 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]

------JC p.3---------

It is in the context of Van Peebles’ articulations of the audience along racial and class lines, as well as his acknowledgement that a cinematic audience can potentially be an anti-audience or an audience freed from its commodification, that we must reckon with the complicated and seemingly antithetical nature of Sweetback’s connection to the discourse of the Black Aesthetic as well as revolutionary cinema post-68. One the one hand, for Van Peebles, revolutionary cinema meant a revolution. Van Peebles explicitly gestured towards the language of insurgency by describing his film production organized like “guerilla units” to evade the political economy of telecommunications.

In their manifesto for a Third Cinema, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino describe the “participant comrade” as taking part in a purposefully structured viewing experience (“a free space”) that turns audiences into participants in communal discursive experience about the ideas within revolutionary cinema. The key for Solanas and Getino is deemphasizing the film object as a commodity (“subordinating its own form, structure and language, and propositions”) and instead turning it into what they call a “film act” (Solanas and Getino 9). As Lars Lierow suggests, similar exhibition techniques were used for the screening of The New Ark, a semi-documentary portrait of the Black Arts cultural politics associated with Spirit House that doubled as a call to action and collective responsibility co-directed by Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka (9). The New Ark was exhibited in a “community context, at local festivals, libraries, churches and community centers,” which reinforced the function of Black Arts cinema as both “artistic expression and propaganda instruments” (15). [25]

In this regard, skepticism about entertainment and mass cultural forms expressed by Black Aestheticians is just as strong as it is within discussions of revolutionary cinema, which are primarily associated by Solanas and Getino with the documentary form. Disarticulating revolutionary film from the cinema of spectacle means conceptualizing the masses differently. Revolutionary cinema takes the audiences/spectators out of the realm of commodity and reproducing the ideology of “US financial capital” and into an alternate space of social reproduction and action (Solanas and Getino 4). Between the Black Arts Movement and more recognizable Third Cinema film discour, we can thus identify the desire to transform the audience/spectator into an anti-audience. This will potentially happen through a series of intentional exhibition and distribution practices that de-commodify watching-labor and disconnect it from reproducing the ideology of finance capital into revolutionary, anti-capitalist forms of social reproduction.

On the other hand, however, Van Peebles also embraced auteurism as well as Hollywood’s full-spectrum approach of multimedia synergy and saturation for marketing Sweetback through the production of ancillary, spin off products like books and soundtracks.[26] Indeed, Van Peebles’ conceptualization of the “masses” who watch Sweetback—which for him is a racialized proletariat (Black, anti-bourgeois “street people”)—sits just as easily alongside capitalist conceptualizations of a conventional audience, who consume commodities and produce the commodity of “watching.” What his shooting diary makes clear is Van Peebles did not see any contradictions between this audience and the idea of an anti-audience. In fact, he found no other way to make revolutionary film to reach the masses within the United States except to embrace this contradiction. As he wrote,

“The Man has an Achilles pocket and he might go along with you if at least there is some bread in it for him. But he ain’t about to go carrying no messages for you, especially a relevant one, for free” (68).

Unlike the film theoreticians of the Black Arts Movement or Third Cinema, Van Peebles thought a “revolutionary mood” was possible within the paradigms of first cinema via the genre-driven spectacles of entertainment, something we can see in his first Hollywood-produced film, Watermelon Man.[27] The point here is less to establish a revolutionary litmus test for Van Peebles, even though, at least amongst Black Arts associated artists and intelligentsia, this was precisely what happens in the wake of Sweetback’s release. Instead, I see Van Peebles’ invocation of the Black Aesthetic and the reaction to his film as evidence of a growing theoretical self-awareness amongst Black Power-aligned culture workers as they contend with the commodification of spaces they have carved out for the purposes of revolutionary social reproduction. In other words, can the audience-commodity become a space for cultural nationalist, proto-Marxist, or other forms of fugitivity?

There has been a vast array of responses to Sweetback across Black media outlets, from reviews in Black newspapers to a 1971 episode of Tony Brown’s Black Journal dedicated to the film. However, the dueling reviews of Lerone Bennett and Huey P. Newton in 1971 best embody the central questions raised by Sweetback, which is whether a fugitive, anti-audience can be created, via a Black Aesthetic, within commercial cinematic forms. Their respective focus on the relation between representation and ideology, and whether revolution can be embodied and recognized in aesthetic forms, has understandably influenced the way we still talk about Sweetback. Bennett’s review appeared in the Johnson Publishing Company’s Ebony magazine three months after Newton’s essay appeared in the Black Panther Intercommunal Service newsletter.[28] Bennett, a social historian and Ebony’sassociate editor, concludes that Van Peebles’ approach to Black audiences attempts to simultaneously “entertain and instruct” by mirroring mass media commodities like “CBS, NBC and James Bond.”[29] This leads to Bennett’s observation that “the real work of art creates an audience instead of seeking one” (118, emphasis mine). Bennett’s suggestion that Sweetback does not create its audience but rather “delivers it” betrays a fundamental anxiety over the development of an audience commodity through mass media networks (his allusions to CBS and NBC) and franchising (“James Bond”). The battle against the forces of audience commodification is fundamentally tied to the space of leisure time, where attention is the key component of exchange value and where developing a mode of attention that does not co-opt the consciousness of Black women and men is at stake (Bennett 114).

Whereas Bennett sees no hope except for independent and Black non-commercial art, Huey P. Newton’s “revolutionary analysis” of Sweetback in his review, “He Won’t Bleed Me,” suggests this is not the case. In his review, Newton placed a heavy emphasis on a cinematic version of Black “signifying” that he argues Van Peebles engages in throughout his film.[30] Newton suggests that through these signifying practices Sweetback does in fact create its own anti-audience against the desires of the “corporate capitalist…who either ignore(s) or fail(s) to recognize the many [revolutionary] ideas in the film” (3). And just as the character Sweetback uses “their technology […] but in a positive way…to deliver him from the jaws of the monsters who are using the most advanced technology to try and capture him,” Newton suggests that commercial communications and the very technological and material processes that create the audience commodity can be seized to form a new, liberated intercommunal aggregate.[31]

Even after Newton and the Black Panther Party moved away from Black Cultural Nationalism, one can see its legacies in Newton’s thought after 1970, especially in his request that readers of “He Won’t Bleed Me” engage in conspicuous consumption and buy the soundtrack and book versions of Sweetback, going as far as to list the price and address for where readers can send their checks. Newton’s off-hand statements about consumption are fascinating given what one would assume to be the alignment between Black Panther intercommunalism and Third Cinema’s theorizations of a “participant comrade.” And ironically, it appears as if it is to Bennett, publishing in Ebony magazine, that we find a doctrinaire expression of the Black Aesthetic and anti-audience sentiment. Yet, Newton’s embrace of consumption is premised on what he sees as Van Peebles’ seizure of the means of technological and mass media production via Sweetback. And this seizure is a key component in the Panthers’ shift to intercommunalism.[32] In this regard, there is some resonance with Third Cinema’s approach to the problem of film finance and production, which Solanas and Getino see as achieved through the “expropriations of the bourgeoisie” (9). The difference, in Newton’s account of Sweetback, was the subversive and perhaps clandestine nature of the way Van Peebles expropriated these finances.[33]

The films that immediately followed Sweetback then caused consternation rather than rigorous analysis. Gordon Parks’ Shaft (1971) and Gordon Parks Jr’s Super Fly (1972) replicated the formula of Sweetback’s success while sublimating its explicit engagement with Black Power communal ideas into what Kara Keeling calls a codified

“individualistic, macho, black action hero fight[ing] against injustice (and/or the ‘the white man’) in an urban milieu outside of the legal mechanisms ostensibly in place to fight injustice” (102).

While the genre petered out because of intense criticism and eventually turned into parody by the end of the 1970s, these films leave a complex legacy into the late 1970s and in future articulations of Black cinema. They reveal a market of young, urban Black women and men whose Black Nationalist sentiments are ripe for commodification in the wake of 1968. In particular, cinematic modes of identification are a critical instrument for this exploitation precisely because they offer something that is missing from Hollywood commercial cinema—images of Blackness, and particularly Black masculinity, that allow black audiences to “collectively reconstitute subjectivity” (Ongiri ,185). However, as Keeling points out, we should take caution in even summoning the genre of Blaxploitation itself. This is because film theories that posit the existence of Blaxploitation also do the work of exploitation as well by calling

“into being…a population that might be isolated in excess of the audience Hollywood assumes exists for its mainstream features” (103).

What Keeling’s warning points towards is a confusion between a Black aggregate summoned vis-à-vis the commodity and “real” political formations in the world.

Streaming services have made us all revolutionaries

By arguing for an alternative genealogy of the idea of a “Black Aesthetic,” I am asking media scholars to approach this idea as not simply about the politics of representation. As I have shown, there are also materialist concerns regarding the audience commodity and its formation post-68. I also want to connect the powerful critiques of media that exist within Black Radical thought in the late 1960s to Smythe’s and other emergent post-Marxist ideas regarding the evolution of the commodity form and its relation to aesthetic and political economy in the 1970s. I would not go as far as to say that Black Radical thinkers theorized the audience commodity first. Rather, I see the debates regarding Black Nationalism, the Black Aesthetic, and its relationship to the rapidly expanding market for Black art and media as creating a crucial context for sophisticated engagements with mass media and the revolutionary potential of leisure-time. While I do not want to trivialize this theoretical moment of “liberation” by aligning it with words like “leisure time,” what Black Power-aligned intellectuals and media-makers have realized is that the space and capacity for the attention of Black people is in the balance. It’s about the possibility to have Black people work against the audience commodity and for mass political mobilization. In this regard, Black Nationalism has been a powerfully disruptive and destabilizing political, economic and aesthetic force, especially as it crystalizes the idea of a “Black Aesthetic”—this despite the commodification of movement politics that one could say has happened alongside its emergence.[34]

We live in a moment when the geopolitics and protests that have revitalized Black radical intellectual traditions are reminding us that there are alternatives and that possibilities of counter-hegemony still exist. The twin crises of continued anti-Black state-sanctioned violence and the COVID-19 pandemic have foregrounded the centrality of Black life and Black social death to both the functioning and dismantling of U.S. neoliberalist regimes. Spurred by the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd Jr. we have seen the rapid mainstreaming of the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” a stunning turn of events given what, to me, was the failure during an analogous moment of political reckoning during the tail-end of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2012-15. It is also important to remark that the revival of Dallas Smythe’s work occurred in the period between Occupy and the first wave of racial uprisings in the way of Trayvon Martin’s death.[35] Just as activists and academic scholarship has begun to grapple with anti-Black state violence, the political economic and social consequences of digital labor, surveillance and platform capitalism, Smythe’s theorizations of the audience commodity has become even more “suited for describing the exploitation of user activities by corporate platforms on the contemporary Internet” (Fuchs, 545). Media studies scholarship has indeed set out to theorize the intersection of social media platforms and progressive activism.[36]

Missing from Smythe’s revival was an engagement with connection between his ideas and racial capitalism as well as an assessment of the contemporaneity of his ideas. As I have argued above, Black radical thinkers and artists were also grappling with the rise of advanced technocapitalist commodity forms like the audience. And while Smythe’s work never took hold within Black Studies let alone Black Media Studies, there is a range of recent scholarship like Brian Jefferson’s Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digitial Age (2020), Armond R. Towns’ On Black Media Philosophy (2022), Simone Brown’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015), Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) and others that seeks to grapple with the intersection of race, media and digital forms of platform capitalism and surveillance.

In addition, what should we make of the swift adoption activist discourses by the titans of platform capitalism: Netflix, Google, Twitter and Spotify? Of the many differences between 2014 and now, what feels most salient is the rapidity to which, in the wake of global racial uprisings, many platforms—even those that provide safe harbor to white ethno-nationalist pages, followers, and accounts—have rushed to coopted progressive activist discourses for the purposes of categorizing platform content. In fact, one would be remiss to note the rapidity by which scholars and activists associated with Black Lives Matter or the promulgation of anti-racism trainings—a hallmark of corporate capitalist self-care and university administration—have also inked content deals with media companies.[37]

We need to thoroughly interrogate this moment, one in which activism has been transformed into content for our platforms, and “anti-racism” has become a new way to tune the algorithms that create and aggregate entertainment on our streaming services. A pressing question is this: Our contemporary moment is one in which we are witnessing the platform content-ification of Blackness as well as the parallel reorganization of mass mobilization and alternative forms of aggregate belonging through algorithmic culture. How does a radical Black, anti-capitalist politics work with this unique political challenge? This question also extends to those of us in the academy whose scholarly ideas are met by a media industry already adept at hyper-reflexive, para-industrial forms that exploit intellectual capital and rapidly aggregate audiences. It is fair to say that media already functions as what John Caldwell calls a “shadow academy,” which mirrors “the very theoretical (and political) modes of engagement” that we have developed and returns them back to us in anti-democratic, techno-capitalist aggregates that are the opposite of what one would ideally call a public, let alone a counter-public (Caldwell, 721-722).

In other words, the easy way in which activist language has come to organize media content suggests that the ontological and political difference between an audience, public, and counter-public has blurred. The audience, a thoroughly commodified aggregate, readily stands in for progressive forms of racial (and political) solidarity rather than an object that we identify as managing democratic energies. If Black radical engagement with the problem of the “audience” provides a heuristic for our present, it is in the form of reassurance that there is a precursor to our contemporary moment. As Black radical thinkers directly confronted the problem of the commodification of political subjectivity at the dawn of neoliberalism, their legacy of struggle, success, and failure can orientate us in the present.

Notes

Works cited

Aguayo, Angela J. Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019. Print.

Aubert, Danielle. The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing.
Los Angeles, CA: Inventory Press, 2019.

Ault, Julie. Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985: a Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.

Bell, Kevin. “Black Spring” Modernism/Modernity Volume 5, Cycle 4. URL: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/bell-black-spring

Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019. Print.

Bennett, Lerone, “The Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland,” Ebony, September 1971.

Boltanski, Luc., and Chiapello, Eve. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2005. Print.

Boyle, Deirdre. Subject to Change : Guerrilla Television Revisited. New York, New York : Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters : on the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Print.

Caldwell, John T. “Para-Industry, Shadow Academy.” Cultural Studies (London, England) 28.4 (2014): 720–740. Web.

Churner, Leah, “Out of the Vast Wasteland: The Early Years of Public Access Cable Television in New York City,” http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/out-of-the-vast-wasteland-20090618

Collins, Lisa Gail. et al. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Print.

Crawford, Margo Natalie. Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics, University of Illinois Press, 2017.

------. “Textual Productions of Black Aesthetics Unbound.” In Hutchinson, George, and John K. Young. Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Print.

Fenderson, Jonathan. Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Print.

 ------ “Black Studies Post-Janus.” The Black scholar 48.4 (2018): 1–7. Web.

Featherstone, Liza. Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation. ‎ (OR Books, 2018)

Field, Allyson Nadia, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart. L.A. Rebellion : Creating a New Black Cinema. Ed. Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015. Web.

Flatley, Jonathan. “How A Revolutionary Counter-Mood Is Made.” New Literary History, vol. 43, no. 3, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, pp. 503–25.

Fuchs, Christian, “Dallas Smythe Today—The Audience Commodity, the Digital Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory. Prolegomena to a Digital Labour Theory of Value” in Christian Fuchs, and Vincent Mosco. Marx and the Political Economy of the Media. Brill, 2016. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost com.cmu.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=1079883&site=ehost-live&scope=site. [link has something missing]

Fuller, Hoyt, “Towards a Black Aesthetic” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angela Mitchell, Duke University Press Books, 1994.

------. “Literary Lions and Values,” Negro Digest, January 1968, Vol. XVII, No.3.

Gates, Racquel. “Subverting Hollywood from the Inside Out: Melvin Van Peebles Watermelon Man.” Film quarterly 68.1 (2014): 9–. Print.

Gayle, Addison, “"The Black Aesthetic: Defender.” Black World 24 (December 1974): 31-43.

------, “Cultural Strangulation” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present ed. Angela Mitchell, Duke University Press Books, 1994.

Gelmis, Joseph, “Melvin and the Street People” The Atlanta Constitution (1946-1984); May 23, 1971, 9F.

Gillespie, Michael B. “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song: ‘I’m Gonna Say a Black Ave Maria For You.’ https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7545-sweet-sweetback-s-baadasssss-song-i-m-gonna-say-a-black-ave-maria-for-you.

Getino, Octavio and Solanas, Fernando. “Toward a Third Cinema,” in Cineaste, Vol.4 No. 3, Winter 1970-71, Latin American Militant Cinema, 1-10.

Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness : The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Print.

Gussow, Mel. “The Baadasssss Success of Melvin Van Peebles” in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: a Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004. Print.

Hall, John C. “On Sale at Your Favorite Newsstand: Negro Digest/Black World and the 1960s” in

Heitner, Devorah. Black Power TV. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Print.

Jackson, Sarah J., Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles. #HashtagActivism : Networks of Race and Gender Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020. Print.

Jefferson, Brian. Digitize and Punish : Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Print.

Jenkins, Henry. By Any Media Necessary : the New Youth Activism. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Print.

Jhally, Sut and Livant, Bill, “Watching as Working: The Valorization of Audience Consciousness,” Journal of Communication, Vol.36, N.3, 124-43, 1986.

Keeling, Kara, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, Duke University Press Books, 2007.

Khan-Cullors, Patrisse, Asha Bandele, and Angela Y. Davis. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. First edition. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018. Print.

Kreiling, Albert. “The Commercialization of the Black Press and the Rise of Race News in Chicago,” in, Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communications History, ed. William S. Solomon and Robert W. McChesney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1993).

Lee, Don L., "The Bittersweet of Sweetback; or, Shake Yo Money Maker.” Black World #21 (1971). pp. 43–48.

Lierow, Lars. “The ‘Black Man’s Vision of the World’: Rediscovering Black Arts Filmmaking and the Struggle for a Black Cinematic Aesthetic.” Black camera : the newsletter of the Black Film Center/Archives 4.2 (2013): 3–21.

Newton, Huey P., “He Won't Bleed Me: A Revolutionary Analysis of 'Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song,” The Black Panther, June 17, 1971.

------. “Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970” in To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Vintage, 1972), 20-38.

McMillian, John., and John. McMillian. Smoking Typewriters : The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America. Cary: Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 2011. Print.

Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art. 2nd edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Print.

Moore, Alan W. Art Gangs: Protest & Counterculture in New York City, Autonomedia, 2012

Neal, Larry, “The Black Art’s Movement” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present ed. Angela Mitchell, Duke University Press Books, 1994.

------. “Film and the Black Cultural Revolution,” Arts in Society 5, no. 2, (Fall 1968).

------. "Goldfinger," Liberator V, 5 (May, 1965).

Nishikawa, Kinohi. “Between the World and ‘Nommo’: Hoyt W. Fuller and Chicago’s Black Arts Magazines.” Chicago review 59/60.4/1 (2016): 143–163. Print.

Ongiri, Amy Abugo, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic, University of Virginia Press, 2010.

Quinn, Eithne. A Piece of the Action : Race and Labor in Post-Civil Rights Hollywood. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2019).

Ramsby, Howard, The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry, (University of Michigan Press, 2011).

Smethurst, James. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, (Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Smythe, Dallas, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de théorie politique et sociale, Vol 1. No 3., 1977.

------. Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada. (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1981).

Straub, Whitney. “The Baraka Film Archive: The Lost, Unmade, and Unseen Film Work of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka,” Black Camera , Vol. 7, No. 1 (Fall 2015), pp. 273-287.

-------. “Recovering The New-Ark: Amiri Baraka’s Lost Chronicle of Black Power in Newark, 1968,” Bright Lights posted: April 17, 2014, URL: https://brightlightsfilm.com/recovering-new-ark-amiri-barakas-lost-chronicle-black-power-newark-1968/

Towns, Armond R. “Toward a Black media philosophy,” Cultural Studies, 34:6, 851-873.

-------. On Black Media Philosophy. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2022. Print.

Tinson, Christopher M. Radical Intellect: Liberator Magazine and Black Activism in the 1960s. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Web.

Tyler, Parker. Underground Film: A Critical History (Grove Press, 1969).

Van Peebles, Melvin. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song : a Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004. Print.

Vasquez, Delio, “Intercommunalism: The Late Theorizations of Huey P. Newton, ‘Chief Theoretician’ of the Black Panther Party,” Viewpoint Magazine, June 11, 2018 (URL: https://viewpointmag.com/2018/06/11/intercommunalism-the-late-theorizations-of-huey-p-newton-chief-theoretician-of-the-black-panther-party/#f+9945+1+1)

Weems, Robert E. “The Revolution Will Be Marketed: American Corporations and Black Consumers During the 1960s.” Radical history review 1994.59 (1994): 94–107. Web.

West, E. James. Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America. Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 2020. Print.

Wiggins, Benjamin, “You Talkin' Revolution, Sweetback”: On Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Revolutionary Filmmaking,” Black Camera, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter 2012), pp. 28-52.

Wyatt, Justin. “The Stigma of X: Adult Cinema and the Institution of the MPAA Ratings System” in Bernstein, Matthew. Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Print.

Young, Cynthia Ann. Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Print.