I Am Not Your Negro

A Docalogue

Jaimie Baron, Kristen Fuhs, Jaimie Baron, Kristen Fuhs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367178949
• eBook ISBN: 9780429603266
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: History

As the inaugural volume in the Docalogue series, this book models a new form for the discussion of documentary film.

James Baldwin's writing is intensely relevant to contemporary politics and culture, and Peck's strategies for representing him and conveying his work in I Am Not Your Negro (2016) raise important questions about how documentary can bring the work of a complex thinker like Baldwin to a broader public. By combining five distinct perspectives on a single documentary film, this book offers different critical approaches to the same media object, acting both as an intensive scholarly treatment of a film and as a guide for how to analyze, theorize, and contextualize a documentary.

Undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars of film and media studies, communication studies, African American studies, and gender and sexuality studies will find this book extremely useful in understanding the significance of this film and the ways in which it offers insight into not only Baldwin and his writings but also wider historical and contemporary realities.

1 I Am Not Your Negro’s queer poetics of identity and omission

Courtney R. Baker

I Am Not Your Negro is a cinematic journey, prompted by its subject’s quest to make sense of his life in the wake of three earth-shattering deaths. As James Baldwin narrates his friendship with and admiration of the civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the film explores Baldwin’s relationship to the current conditions of blackness in the United States which have been informed by the legacies left by all four of those men. Authorized by Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, the film plays with time and the utterance to supply a complex but necessary study of the relationship between identity and history.

While the film does not announce itself to be particularly invested in Baldwin’s queerness or even in the more expansive albeit academic discursivity of “queer Baldwin,”¹ it nevertheless adopts what might be termed a queer cinema poetics to reflect the fluidity of Baldwin’s thoughts and writings. These poetics, rooted in the cinematic vocabulary of the shot and the cut, supply a dynamic, radically unbounded vision of US race relations as they play out on screen. Attending to but not determined by historical events, I Am Not Your Negro cruises the dystopia of American antiblackness in order to reflect upon Baldwin’s insights on race, selfhood, and cinema.² Through a resistance to stasis and a commitment to movements both political and temporal, the film structurally embodies principles of radical progressiveness.

Whereas the film foregrounds director Raoul Peck’s processing of Baldwin, resulting in the cinematic text known as I Am Not Your Negro, a critique of the film may itself be regarded as yet another layer of processing – this time by the spectator – which in turn produces yet another text, this time comprised of the spectator’s encounter with the film text – itself comprised of a unique encounter between the filmmaker and the subject, James Baldwin. Though claims that a documentary reveals more about the filmmaker than the ostensible subject are not uncommon assertions, I Am Not Your Negro provides an especially compelling object of examination precisely because it foregrounds its constructedness and the labor entailed in the production of meaning. It is a film that allows its seams to show.

As a film project sourced from Baldwin’s literary archives, the film necessarily employs a retrospective gaze but also makes an effort to trouble the presumed certitude of such a gesture. Indeed, it adopts a perspective akin to that presented in Peck’s earlier film, Lumumba: Death of Prophet (1990), in which absences and aporias are permitted to resonate and in turn offer the viewer moments in which to reflect and to mourn. These moments of absence mark the places where the past touches the present but is not fully brought into it. These scenes, themselves characterized by abstract depictions of modern urban movement (literally planes, trains, and automobiles), bridge temporal moments but resist filling them. Instead, they return the viewer to watching time unfold and in so doing invite the viewer to interrogate the certainties of the past, of the present, and even of identity itself.

In the introduction to the book accompaniment to I Am Not Your Negro, Peck describes the importance of Baldwin’s prose to his own self-knowledge as a Black man in the West. Baldwin was one of a handful of authors who “were telling stories describing history and defining structures and human relationships that matched what I was seeing around me.”³ This emphasis upon the interconnection of “history” and “structure” made sensible through “stories” invites a post-structuralist interpretation of Peck’s meaning-making project, then and now, in which the power of discourse and language are foregrounded in a relation of non-dominance to either history or the present. Considering how C. L. R. James and Michel Foucault theorize the ordering of historical events for uses in the present illuminates the ways that Peck’s films convey meaning. Specifically, Foucault’s rejection of histories “of tradition and invention” in favor of a “history of ideas” that denotes a “history of perpetual difference” clarifies how an historiographic work, including a film, might emphasize invention rather than fixed knowledge of the past and future.⁴ Similarly, C.L.R. James’s figuration of the strategically suppressed accounting of the Haitian Revolution as a recoverable lever in the war against global fascism casts the history and the archive as undetermined but powerful sources of and for the present.⁵

Peck presents I Am Not Your Negro as a deeply personal film – not quite a hagiography but a sort of open letter in which the maker acknowledges his and our indebtedness to an author who is out of reach. While the author’s individual biography is no determinant of meaning, one may consider how the film circulates alongside French and Francophone Caribbean philosophies of language and the self. Indeed, Peck, who is Haitian by birth, describes his childhood self as “inhabiting a myth in which I was both enforcer and actor” – a description that resonates with both French theorist Roland Barthes’s notion of the cultural myth – the enabling but also restrictive system through which meanings are circulated – and Martiniquan psychoanalyst Franz Fanon’s crushing self-awareness as the mythological Negro of cosmopolitan French fantasies.⁶

Following another post-structuralist thread laid down by Barthes’s philosophies of language and literature, one perceives I Am Not Your Negro – as well as Lumumba – to be “writerly texts” that reject as false the notion that a complete(d) film is a closed text. To the contrary,

[t]he writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.⁷

The stoppages of ideology et alia are resisted in the film conceptually by responding to Baldwin’s own writerly prose as such, “disseminating it, … dispersing it within the field of infinite difference.”⁸ Denying fixity in favor of dissemination and difference, I Am Not Your Negro embraces what Fred Moten describes as the poetics of the break and the atemporal “wherein black radicalism is set to work … as part of a critique immanent to the black radical tradition that constitutes its radicalism as a cutting and abundant refusal of closure.”⁹ The film formally establishes its commitment to this tradition through both the cut and scenes of movement. These cinematic poetics work through and on the historical events referenced in Baldwin’s writings (the murders of Evers, X, and King) and in our more recently passed moments of antiblack conflagrations (the Ferguson uprising and the murders of Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and too many others). As in Lumumba, the film strives to reconstruct sense for our current moment out of the archive’s abundances as well as from its prior, insufficient stories and the nonsense of history’s aporias.

Following the opening sequence – a riot of stillness and motion and words comprised of Baldwin’s calm but pessimistic appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1968 and a montage of photographs of the Ferguson uprising of 2015 accompanied by Buddy Guy’s rollicking blues number, “Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues” – the film returns to stark white text on a black background. Modernist, almost futurist animation announces the film as “Written by James Baldwin” and “Directed by Raoul Peck.” With these words, I Am Not Your Negro announces itself as a collaboration afforded by a medium that can transgress the boundaries of death itself. The film, through its recruitment of visual, aural, and written records, operates as a spiritualist medium, echoing the wisdom of the past in the scenes of today.

The sequence that follows the titles reinforces the movement and shuttling between the past and the present that characterize this project. The narrator’s voice, supplied by actor Samuel L. Jackson, breaks into the silence, announcing, “To Jay Acton.” These words reflect the text of a source letter of Baldwin’s written to his literary agent. Within moments, white letters mimicking typewriter script appear on a black screen, punctuated by the sound of tapping typewriter keys. The voice and the images on screen reinforce the moment of our viewing time and of Peck’s directorial time; yet the words themselves reference the time of Baldwin’s composition: June 30, 1979 to be exact. A past moment is reenacted in the moment of its passing in this scene.

In the letter and in the larger project of “Remember This House,” Baldwin expresses the uncertainty about identity and direction that the film mirrors in its imagery and sounds. Baldwin’s letter to Acton references the author’s “divided mind” and the woeful sense that “[t]he summer has scarcely begun, and I feel, already, that it’s almost over.” Baldwin’s letter goes on to announce his impending birthday and the commencement of a journey, one that Baldwin explains, “I always knew that I would have to make, but had hoped … not to have to make it so soon.” Despite the felt inevitability of the journey, Baldwin remarks that the character of such a journey is itself, by nature, unknowable: “I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.”¹⁰ In the context of the film, with the words spoken by Jackson and visualized by Peck, the “I” – as well as the “you” – for whom these logics cohere is multiplied, generating multiple journeys for multiple addressors and addressees.

In this early scene, the film plays with the grammatical logic of its title, resisting not only the possessiveness of the words “your Negro” but also the inevitable belatedness and accuracy of the words “I am not.” Certainly and sadly, James Baldwin is no longer, yet the film and the title articulate, seemingly despite themselves, a desire to return to the moment when the “I” could be located, assuredly, in the body of Baldwin himself. As in Lumumba, following shots of train tracks, cars viewed hazily through a rain-soaked window, and tracking shots of landscapes as though viewed through a car or train window signal the absence of the film’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Introduction: the timeliness of I Am Not Your Negro
• 1 I Am Not Your Negro’s queer poetics of identity and omission
• 2 James Baldwin’s embodied absence: I Am Not Your Negro and filmic corporeality
• 3 “Some One of Us Should Have Been There with Her”: gender, race, and sexuality in I Am Not Your Negro and contemporary Black experimental documentary
• 4 James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (1989) and I Am Not Your Negro (2016) as historicist documentaries
• 5 Techniques for truth-telling from Haitian Corner to I Am Not Your Negro
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Contributor biographies
• Index