This book is wild. It posits that Black people are not people, but Slaves. Fungible, accumulating objects. Red people are the Savage. White people are Settlers. I see the logic but I find a lot of this cynical. But Frank B. Wilderson also echoes some of my darkest, most depressive feelings toward film and media and how non-Whites are (re)presented in their (White) space.
Either way, enjoy?
Notes on Red White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
Written by Frank B. Wilderson III
(Notes on chapters 3 & 4)
Right off the bat Wilderson identifies the Slave film
“Feature films whose director is Black and whose narrative strategies must intend for the films’ ethical dilemmas to be shoulders by central figures who are also Black and, for our purposes, elaborated by the conditions of the Western Hemisphere” (p.95)
For Wilderson to highlight the fact through two separate authors, the “transnational” experience of Black folk dispersed (in the diaspora) makes me revel in self-satisfaction of my personal employment of British cultural writers for my initial thesis. I remember the push back I got from using Stuart Hall not only because his writing did come out in the 1980s but also because he’s British...I just wanted to point that out.
From here Wilderson sets up the question this chapter will pose: How can a film about the dead? (paraphrased from p.96)
Making note of Gramsci’s “good sense” and “common sense”
Good sense: revolutionary, subversive to “civil societies’ founding episteme” (p.96)
Common sense: “ruling class hegemony” (p.96)
I don’t know if I made not of Wilderson’s cynicism on the last set of notes, but it is in full force here.
Beginning the discussion of Antwone Fisher with user reviews from IMDB, he points out that spectators “‘see’ anything and everything in a film except race” (p.99)
Antwone Fisher works against (perhaps feebly in the eyes of Wilderson) to forge Blackness with Humanity
Something that is literally impossible to a dead object, one that is outside of the realm of the living and subjectivity (p.100)
What is this “ontological excess of the nigger” Fanon speaks of
This movie works, according to Wilderson, because the film first constructs a man that is “not a nigger” and then to reclaim his masculinity, he must let three Black women “take the rap for his void.” He must overcome Black femininity to be “negotiated within a frame of reference” (p.101)
Fascinating to think that if reparations were given, it would be an admittance of wrongdoing, globally
The cost of slavery is the “the flesh”, taking away one's’ humanity
And so the film, though dealing with the trauma of slavery (in its way), does not have one “White hand” literally or figuratively cutting down Antwone, but it is three Black women that do all the damage
And these bodies, the bodies of these woman, are ranked according to skin color, as the closer to white (“mulatta”) these women are, the closer they are to ‘acceptable’ (102)
And to make matters worse, the way Antwone finds his himself as a man, a strong man is through the US Navy (essentially the “pigs” according to Wilderson)
“Black woman not only administer the technologies of slavery but embody its estate” (102)
Hollywood films attempt to give agency to Black bodies by casting them as police, but according to Wilderson, “few characters aestheticize White supremacy more effectively and persuasively than a Black male cop” (103)
The film posits violence upon black folks, particularly that of the woman upon boys/men, has been adapted as a “cultural norm”
Wilderson protests: “ Beatings and bondage, torture and verbal abuse are only accepted by civil society as both cultural and normative in an ethnography of Blackness: (106)
Antwone Fisher assumes the law is not inherently anti-Black
In fact, the movie assumes “Black masculinity is the law” (110)
And because of the this integrationist narrative, one where there will be law, the embodiment of law, but no access to a/the civil society, this is a disavowal (112)
I’m going to make note of the fact that a Black filmmakers’ movement is the real catalyst for this making of this movie, but as Wilderson points out, the story of Black violence outweighs a story of Black creativity
Increasingly, the disavowal seems mostly of Black woman
At every chance, Wilderson points out how the men of the film operate in a certain fashion whereas the Black woman (not the racially ambiguous or light skinned woman) are repeatedly demonized in manner, gesture, framing and lighting (113-115)
He closes the chapter with a quote that draws comparisons of Black self-hate to Nazi Germany
What Wilderson clarifies is that unlike the access to subjectivity and civil society Jewish people possess, Black bodies do not embody the same liberties, kinda perfectly put in a quote from Fanon from Bernard Wolfe (or course used by Wilderson): “It pleases us to portray the Negro showing us all his teeth in a smile made for us. And his smile as we see--as we make it--always means a gift.” And Wilderson adds: “Blacks are so comprehensively fungible that cinema can make them die and smile at the same time” (115)
Film does have the facility to show the line between civil society and the Slave estate and one of best to do so are the filmmakers who comprise the LA Rebellion (Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Jamaa Fanaka, and Julie Dash)
The films made by this group (and others inspired by the climate of the times) were in active revolt of civil society
Fanon was a major influence on these directors, for these films “are predicated on Fanon’s postcolonial paradigm” (121)
Slaves, who have no contemporary (according to Wilderson) were able to find an “alibi” in the “postcolonial subject” and in doing so the Slave was “able to project his or her violent desire, cinematically, in a manner that could be understood and perhaps appreciated by spectators who were not Slaves” (121)
Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth serves as the “ur-text” of the LA Rebellion
In it, Fanon says two main things that contradict how White reviewers saw those films as, well, doing too much without reason for all of its “excesses”
One: Violence is necessary to move politics from questions to actions
Two: Violence is necessary for “restoration of native land” (122)
Bush Mama’s protagonist Dorothy not quite aligns with the woman in the MPLA poster (a Black woman holding a gun in one hand and baby in the other) but she does share the “‘cleansing’” relationship to violence (123)
Issues of land and restoration are called back to by Wilderson
The beginning of the film is an extradiegetic confrontation with being Black on the streets of LA and the police--they are harassed and that real encounter remained in the otherwise fictional film
The altercation proves the point of certain violence for the simple fact of being Black
Wilderson recounts a scene in which we learn our protagonist can not read through a letter sent from TC that had to be read by her neighbor and through filmic techniques of shot and sound, the filmmakers draw comparisons to TC literal prison and Dorothy's figurative one
Wilderson points out the film was released amongst the Roe v. Wade decision. Feminism was/is not a position from which an “accumulated and fungible object” (128) can hold
Abortion was imminent by force (welfare office directions) or by force (beaten out by the police)
White radicalism is basically run by the same ideology as White supremacy, in that (looking at the case study of David Gilbert, the initial flower child pacifist), white liberals although well meaning, would prefer to see violence upon Blacks (where it belongs) rather than to White people (“the end of the world” because the violence is misplaced) (pp.129-32)
White feminism can’t exist without Black “femininity” (134)
Wait, on the bottom of p. 134 is he saying that the existence of revolutionary Black woman is a threat to the pure White state because she could THINK? Or because she could make another Black baby?
Wilderson shifted to Italian feminist and their understanding of destruction of state (much like the Panthers or BLA)
However: “White Italian feminism imagines, much like the US feminism, and exploited and alienated body. But Spillers reminds us that Blacks cannot form bodies; they are ontologically deprived of the body” (136)
Thus it brings us to the point that even if a White liberal can see the problem and “sincerely” (put in quotes due to Wilderson’s use of the world to describe David Gilbert and his ilk) they all know it’s better to “not be a nigger” (137) which puts them still no different that a White conservative...what’s more, that sincerity of empathy so rarely is even shared with Black folks, it’s “displaced onto a myriad of investments...environmentalism...pacifism, or feminism” (138)
Cinema, according to Wilderson, is “always anti-Black” (139)
But in Bush Mama, cinema was finally on the side of the object and wanted to destroy civil society (139)
Cinema takes the time to comfort the “Human spectator” (139) and gives reasons for the film’s anger or violence
He shifts to Daughters of the Dust to illuminate, sure, the immigration story is “universal” but this is different, as these Slaves are talking about moving from one plantation to another (139-40)
Back to Bush Mama, Wilderson points out that the film doesn’t bother to explain the violence and disruption of the Slaves (the characters in the film)
This approach to these depictions are revolutionary the same way the Black Panthers were or the BLA
Black politics are a strange thing because in order to have politics or a position, one must have subjectivity...Blacks don’t.
So a Black can be a “worker or gay or female subject--but not as a Black object” (142)
I like how Wilderson also speaks of “imganitive labor”, it reminds me of “speculative value” in that there is a novelist ideology that drives both concepts
Wilderson calls it “dancing with the dead” but he posits Bush MamaI and films like it made in this era asked spectators to immerse themselves in the anti-lives of Black people
He ever so lightly points out that tho Bush Mama is a revolutionary film, the script plays into the “structural antagonism” (143) just a bit:
The script “gives” her a reason to kill a police
Overall the film “shits on the inspiration of the personal pronoun we” (143)
The films of the LA Rebellion along with The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Up Tight!, or Soul Vengeance (and some other pointed selections) did their best to ask the Slave’s questions of existence, explored what does it mean to be a Slave living within civil society, challenged the contingency of Black on White violence
He also mentioned that Blaxploitation films are the antithesis of these revolutionary films, just wanted to note that