Abstract
W. E. B. Du Bois’s quotation imagines a self-contained community in which organized cultural production continually affirms and reinforces connections among individuals and institutions. The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was, in many respects, a concrete manifestation of the type of organized cultural production that Du Bois advocated, and the relationship between the BAM and the Black Power Movement (BPM) roughly paralleled the type of synergism envisioned by Du Bois. The principal thesis of this investigation is that external manipulation and co-optation of important cultural symbols effectively neutralized the potential of organized community-based cultural production to promote BPM objectives. The analysis focuses special attention on the role of blaxploitation films in diluting the potential of important cultural symbols to facilitate political mobilization and collective action. This particular mode of cultural counterattack involved systematic imposition of invisibility on the BPM and/or the misrepresentation of the BPM as dysfunctional, disorganized, opportunistic, and impotent. The propagation of this imagery complemented direct physical assaults and disinformation campaigns waged by governmental officials against BPM organizations and their leaders. The systemic disruption of cultural production as a means of neutering the BPM set in motion a continuing pattern of compromised cultural production that continues to constrain contemporary efforts to develop and implement mass-based resistance to racial oppression.
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Notes
Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding, Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 5–6.
James Stewart, “Message in the Music: Political Commentary in Black Popular Music from Rhythm and Blues to Early Hip Hop,” in Journal of African American History 90, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 196–225.
William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 215.
Ward, 316.
Ibid., 317.
Melba Boyd, Wrestling with the Muse, Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 126.
Ibid., 152.
W. S. Tkweme, “Blues in Stereo: The Texts of Langston Hughes in Jazz Music,” African American Review 42, nos. 3/4 (Fall 2008): 503–12.
James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 370.
Smethurst, 370.
Ibid.
Ibid.
David Kraemer, C. Neil Macrae, Adam E. Green, and William M. Kelley, “Musical Imagery: Sound of Silence Activates Auditory Cortex,” Nature 434 (March 10, 2005), 158.
Samuel Floyd, The Power of Black Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 227.
Ibid., 226–27.
Josiah Howard, Blaxploitation Cinema: The Essential Reference Guide (Surrey, England: FAB Press, 2008), 7.
For celebratory information about this genre see http://www.blaxploitation.com/.
In Across 110th Street actors Paul Benjamin and Ed Bernard play two Harlem residents driven by desperate circumstances to steal $300,000 from the local mob. In Superfly, actor Ron O’Neal plays Youngblood Priest, a Harlem coke dealer who wants to get out of the business but must outwit the cops who have a vested interest in the Harlem dope trade.
Yvonne Sims, Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2006).
Ibid., 193.
Superfly, Curtom Records CBS 8014-ST, 1972, 33? rpm; and Across 110th Street, United Artist Records UAS-5225, 1972, 33? rpm.
Curtis Mayfield, vocal performance of “Freddy’s Dead,” 1972, on Superfly, Curtom Records CBS 8014-ST, 33? rpm.
Bobby Womack and Peace, vocal performance of “Across 110th Street,” by Bobby Womack and James Louis Johnson, 1972, on Across 110th Street, United Artist Records UAS-5225, 33? rpm.
Curtis Mayfield, vocal performance of “No Thing on Me,” 1972, on Superfly, Curtom Records CBS 8014-ST, 33? rpm. Thanks to Perry Hall for this recommendation.
Howard, 10.
Sims, 8.
A review of the Wattstax film by George Singleton can be found at http://www.reel-moviecritic.com/movies20034q/id1947.htm. My thanks to Tom Poole for suggesting this source.
G. Gutierrez, “American Sitcoms: A Diversity of Flavors in Society,” Contribution to English Media Culture (University of California, Santa Barbara), http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~monicamd/gloriapaper.html.
Andrea Enisuoh, “The Life and Legacy of Malcolm X,” SocialistAlternative.org (1993), accessed August 4, 2010, http://www.socialistalternative.orgs/literature/malcolmx/
Tony Brown, “‘Mad Black Woman’ Draws from Gospel ‘Chitlin’ Circuit,’” The San Diego Union Tribune, March 24, 2005, http://www.signonsandiego.com /uniontrib/20050324/news_1c24black.html
“Many Ways to Pressure Black Radio,” Black Commentator, E-Mailbox, Issue 46, http://www.blackcommentator.com/46/46_email.html
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© 2014 Tamara Lizette Brown and Baruti N. Kopano
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Stewart, J.B. (2014). Neutering the Black Power Movement: The Hijacking of Protest Symbolism. In: Brown, T.L., Kopano, B.N. (eds) Soul Thieves. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137071392_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137071392_7
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