Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Ed Guerrero makes it his priority in his book to trace the history of representation of black characters on film, and, here and there, television. He does so by contextualizing the struggle for non-harmful representation on screen within the struggle for equality that black people were fighting for throughout the 20th century. He also contextualizes the struggle in the book within the overdetermining system of film production, particularly in Hollywood but eventually expanding into the independent boom of the late 80s and early 90s (when the book was written and published). He notes that Hollywood tended to ignore the demands of black folx until it becomes desperate for their audiences to bolster flagging profits at the box office. There is then, in the 70s with Blaxploitation and then in the indie boom mentioned above, a brief period of pandering to the black audience (which also attracts a white audience looking for something new) until the black films become less novel and Hollywood turns to the next fad. Writing as Guerrero does in the middle of the second boom of black filmmaking makes the last chapter of this book, focused on the output of that generation of filmmakers (Julie Dash, Spike Lee, and John Singleton getting the most play here), gives the book an extra sense of urgency. In the end of the last chapter, Guerrero looks ahead with cautious optimism, hoping for his moment to be a portent of a real change in the way Hollywood treats its black members (in front of and behind the camera), but also knowing that it is very possible, based on Hollywood’s profit motive, that it will soon turn away from the people who are currently making it money.

The history Guerrero traces from Birth of a Nation to Malcolm X is a familiar one to film scholars. It is similar to how Hollywood treats marginalized groups of most varieties. First, there’s actively harmful depictions wrapped up in narratives that perpetuate white supremacy, then as it faces backlash, Hollywood cedes as little ground as it possibly can to appease what Guerrero calls a conservative mass audience. Guerrero does point out how Hollywood’s history with blackness is different from other marginalized communities given the way chattel slavery has shaped the nation and has never really been dealt with. He notes that race, and specifically the tension between the U.S.’s black and white population, has become a central part of Hollywood’s storytelling, first in the open during the first half of the 20th century, then subsumed into allegory and metaphor in genre movies like Blade Runner, then back in the open again in fits and spurts as Hollywood cycles through right-ward and left-ward turns which influence the depiction of black characters on screen in either recuperative or (mildly) liberatory directions. He notes, for example, in the post-Blaxploitation moment, influenced by Reaganism and the turn towards blockbuster production, how Hollywood would allow one black character in a film, who would be surrounded by white characters and striving to protect or restore order to a white world. He notes in this period the revival of the black-white buddy film and how this type of film rarely gave much attention to the inner lives or even outer lives of the black characters. He notes, also, that the black star would often have to be comedic in nature (Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Whoopi Goldberg, for example) to make them palatable for a white audience who was ok with seeing an updated minstrel performance but not serious black characters in their giant blockbuster films.

In the final chapter of the book, Guerrero traces the two(!) modes of production available to black filmmakers in the early 90s. There’s the independent route where filmmakers might have to wrangle their own financing and are therefore freer to experiment with style and substance (Dash’s Daughters of the Dust being the primary example here, but with early Lee joints also in the mix), and then there’s the mainstream route where filmmakers follow the (white) Hollywood style playbook and must cater to mass audiences in ways that might compromise the filmmaker’s vision or desire to put non-harmful representation on screen, though with the considerable tradeoff of people actually seeing your film in great numbers (later Lee, from Do the Right Thing on, and John Singleton are the exemplars here, demonstrating once again Hollywood’s hesitancy to give women (and particularly women of color) the reins on big budget films). He is sure to point out that these are not the only two possibilities offered to black filmmakers, that they are more ends of a spectrum upon which there are many points and shades of gray to accommodate the realities of filmmaking in such an expansive moment. Though you can also sense Guerrero’s fondness for the former, more underground category of films/filmmakers, he saves his last analysis for Lee’s Malcolm X, a big budget epic that Guerrero sees as a triumph of both glossy filmmaking and a strong black voice behind (and in front of) the camera.

Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Guerrero specifically calls out Althusser, from whom he takes the concept of overdetermination with its potential for subversion and liberation hidden amongst a knot of constraining influences, and Freud, from whom he takes Robin Wood’s variation on repression that leads to horror monsters and the concept of societal recuperation after periods of liberation. He also specifically mentions Houston Baker’s concepts of the “deformation of mastery” and the “mastery of form” to explain the indie vs. mainstream black filmmaking impulses in the final chapter.

I’m most interested, however, in the cultural moment Guerrero writes from. It’s clear that the book is driven by the enthusiasm he feels from the boom from within which he is writing, but that also leaves open grounds for further exploration and a more retrospective understanding that Guerrero can’t have. Noticeable in his final two chapters on the 80s and 90s respectively is a sense of excitement for films that have not stood the test of time, though he does hit on most of the movies that have lasted in the cultural lexicon. I don’t view this as a problem, just something to be aware of. I’m going to look up Guerrero’s later work to see if he ever revisits this era or writes about the same ideas in the following 30 years of films.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Guerrero takes a historical materialist perspective, which analyzes the history of black representation on screen through the cultural and economic influences while choosing certain exemplar films to analyze in depth. This allows him to chart trends as well as perform some good, old-fashioned film analysis. This is the kind of writing I prefer to read because it doesn’t overlook the specificity of the individual film while providing a broader understanding of what’s going on and how the film in question fits in with what else was happening at the time.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Guerrero definitely takes on a more argumentative angle than some other similar books I’ve read. He is not precious about sacred cows, and is happy to rip into, say, Do the Right Thing for its acquiescence to the dominant ideology both in style (which I don’t really agree with, but understand) and theme/message (which is persuasive to say the least) as he notes that the film discards the actual revolutionary politics of collective struggle for the white dominant norm of individual responsibility. I often latch on to the kind of aggressive re-writing of history that this project attempts to do because it makes for more compelling reading and usually opens a new perspective for me. This book is an excellent example of that clear-eyed revisionism.

Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Guerrero’s book has been influential, and I’ve read his name in the bibliographies of other books/essays I’ve read throughout my graduate career. That makes this book slightly less revolutionary that it might have felt upon publication. However, I still really enjoyed reading it, and I think it will intersect with my own areas of interest in some really interesting ways. The process he writes about of Hollywood’s slow acquiescence to cultural pressures is one that will be at the core of my study of the legacyquel, and he even writes about Rocky and Star Wars at some length, so I can definitely cite him for an understanding of what the original films of those series were engaged in culturally. I’m excited to explore what I can make of his ideas.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

“Overdetermined,” representation, cultural studies, recuperation, liberation, independent, mainstream, Blaxploitation, repression

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Unfortunately, relations of power, greed, and racism being more stubborn than the visionary hopes of genius, the idealistic projections of these two cinema giants [Sergei Eisenstein and Charles Chaplin] were never to fully develop in proportion to the vast commercial and cultural domination of the film industry. Instead of efforts to construct a truly universal system of communication that builds egalitarian understandings between diverse groups and cultures, what we have seen arise in commercial cinema is a monopolistic, capital-intensive film business. And in spite of some narrative innovation, dissenting artistic exploration, and political countercurrents, the industry has been formula bound and conservative in its vision in order to deliver commodified visual entertainments to the broadest possible consumer market. Instead of inspiring aesthetic, cultural, and political masterworks aimed at liberating the human potential, Hollywood, for the most part, has tended to focus narrowly it’s increasingly shallow product on escapism, sentiment, glamor, romance, and, more recently, spectacular orgies of violence and sexplotation, all in the service of feeding the dulled cravings and fantasies of the dominant social order. What all this means, specifically, for African Americans (and extrapolated to a wide range of other minorities) is that in almost every instance, the representation of black people on the commercial screen has amounted to one grand, multifaceted illusion. For blacks have been subordinated, marginalized, positioned, and devalued in every possible manner to glorify and relentlessly hold in place the white dominated symbolic order and racial hierarchy of American society. (2)

Fortunately, though, for African Americans and this discussion of the way Hollywood has gone about framing blackness, the ideology of racial domination and difference can never be permanently fixed in place as a complete or static “thing.” Instead, it is a dynamic, shifting “relation” defined and conditioned by social struggle, the demands of the historical moment, and the material imperative of an industry that privileges economics and short-term profit before all other human, aesthetic, or philosophic possibilities or concerns. Because the cinematic representation of blackness is the site of perpetual contestation, struggle, and consequently change, Hollywood’s unceasing efforts to frame blackness are constantly challenged by the cultural and political self-definitions of African Americans, who as a people have been determined since the inception of commercial cinema to militate against this limiting system of representation. So this book is concerned with African Americans not as mere victims of Hollywood’s conjurings. That is, I examine the dialectical push of Hollywood’s cultural construction and domination of the black image and the pull of an insistent black social consciousness and political activism that has recently generated waves of black focused and independent films into commercial cinemas trajectory. (2-3)

What would be desirable in future cinematic inscriptions of slavery would be the production of black and other independent features that artfully historicize and politicize the issue in a way that not only reveals slavery’s past but at the same time, by allegory, illusion, or otherwise, communicates its relevance to all Americans today. (35)

Given the ample evidence of its varied expressions, we must expect the sedimented thematics of slavery to continue to surface in commercial cinema. Whether slavery is constructed as a unified subtext in the form of allegory or sustained parody or is displaced into other historical periods, fantastical worlds, and different genres, or whether it surfaces in fleeting images or moments, the dynamic of slavery’s repression and return is too much a part of popular cinema and its codes and images to disappear completely from American cinema. Insofar as popular cinema is an integral part of the commodity system itself, vulnerable to economic ups and downs and the twists of right and left cycles, we should also expect the intermittent recuperation of some of the cruder hegemonic manipulations and stereotypes depicted in the older films of the plantation genre. (56)

In the beginning of the 1980s and under the political impulse of Reaganism, blacks on the screen, in front of and behind the camera, found themselves confronted with the “recuperation” of many of the subordinations and inequalities they had struggled so hard to eradicate during the years of the civil rights movement and the emergence of black power consciousness that followed it. Thus the caricatures and stereotypes of Hollywood’s openly racist past proved to be resilient demons as they were subtly refashioned and resurfaced in a broad range of films. Concurrently, the 1980s saw a steady reduction of films with black narratives and leading roles as black actors found themselves increasingly pushed into the margins or background of the cinematic frame. (113-114)

Despite the shrinking of a broad political base of support, protests centered on specific films and issues continue to challenge Hollywood on its blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic practices. And, if it did nothing else, the Blaxploitation bloom, so to speak, let the black audience out of the bag, by helping shape a politically self-conscious, critical black audience aware of its commercial power and hungry for new cinematic representations of a diverse range of African American subjects and issues on the big screen. Moreover, the “black independent cinema movement” inspired by the films of university-trained black filmmakers of the 1970s made a clear political, philosophical, and aesthetic foundation for an ongoing cinematic practice that challenges Hollywood’s hegemony over the black image. (137)

Following trends set in the 1980s, the commercial cinema system has continued to stock its productions with themes and formulas dealing with black issues and characters that are reassuring to the sensibilities and expectations of an uneasy white audience. These filmic images tend to mediate the dysfunctions and delusions of a society unable to deal honestly with its inequalities and racial conflicts, a society that operates in a profound state of racial denial on a daily basis. Thus images are polarized into celebrations of “Buppie” success and consumer-driven individualism that are consonant with a sense of black political quietism, tokenism, and accommodation, or condemnations of violent ghetto criminals, gangsters, and drug lords. (162)

If black independent filmmakers tend directly to resist or oppose cultural and political domination through their avant-garde languages, forms, socially urgent narratives, and insider depictions of the black world, then those black directors who work within the “mainstream” tend to be more concerned with learning and perfecting the conventions of dominant cinema language and addressing their projects to the colonized desires of the vast consumer audience encompassing blacks, other non-white minorities, and extend à la crossover marketing to whites. Most of the black directors who have had commercial successes argue that they work within the studio system in order to expand the definitions and possibilities of being black and to subvert the dominant norm by marketing a “black sensibility” to as broad an audience as possible. (180-181)

Only by weighing the many possible answers that arise in the riddle-like social transactions of “race” can black filmmakers create authentic humanized images and narratives of black life. Inevitably this decade will bring new spectacles and entertainments that celebrate black life and culture. The new insurgent cinema languages, films, and possibilities of the black movie boom are the primary means African Americans have to challenge the compromised, niggardly images designed to keep them in their media-constructed place. African Americans must continue to expand their influence over the production, distribution, and exhibition systems that make up the dominant cinema apparatus, while insisting that the emergent narratives of the black world’s be rendered from an honest, unco-oped, liberated perspective. (208)