Militant Visions

Elizabeth Reich

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780813572581
• eBook ISBN: 9780813572598
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History

Militant Visions examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. In the process, Elizabeth Reich reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and black filmmakers. Contextualizing the figure in a genealogy of black radicalism and internationalism, Reich shows the evolving images of black soldiers to be inherently transnational ones, shaped by the displacements of diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of black artistry and performance. Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, black internationalism, and American militarism. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, but also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself.  

Part I

“We Return Fighting”

The Integration of Hollywood and the Reconstruction of Black Representation

1

The Black Soldier and His Colonial Other

It is a place where life and death are so entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them, or to say what is on the side of the shadow or its obverse: “Is that man still alive, or dead?”

—Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony

“Three months ago they were all jerking soda!” Sergeant Dane complains to another soldier, Feingold, in the jungle of Bataan. “Do you see a soldier in the lot, Jake? I said soldier,” he insists, and looks over his shoulder toward the collection of men assigned to serve with him. They are an unusual bunch—white Anglo, black, Jewish, Latino, and even Filipino—at least unusual for the segregated silver screen in 1943.

In the background, out of focus through the dappled forest light, the black soldier Wesley Epps sings and washes his shirt bare-chested in Bataan (1943). The sound of his deep, rich voice seems to carry his image into the foreground of the frame, and within seconds of Dane’s comments, Epps’s shirtless torso fills the screen, stomach glistening with sweat and expanding and contracting visibly with his breathing. He is perhaps the most unlikely soldier of them all, and the first of a new, carefully crafted figure: the integrated and dignified black soldier, the product of a collaboration between the U.S. government’s Office of War Information (OWI), the Hollywood studios, and the NAACP.1

This intensely physical introduction to one of the first black soldiers in an integrated U.S. war film conveys the ambivalence surrounding this new filmic figure. While the dangers of such a hypermasculine image—a half-naked, glistening black man with a gun—might well be absorbed by Epps’s dedication to the nation and its protection, this black soldier remains nonetheless a risky figure. Indeed, the film both asserts and questions the presence of the powerful black body on the screen: the camera allows the image of Epps to fill the frame, but the sergeant wonders about the black soldier’s—and the rest of the unit’s—viability as representatives of the nation.2 Dane’s comments suggest that this diverse crew might, in fact, not be capable of becoming legitimate soldiers, and raises the otherwise unarticulated concerns circulating in popular culture at the time that they might be too weak, inexperienced, or cowardly; that, like the jittery, jazz-focused Latino soldier Ramirez, they might be unable to concentrate on battle; or that they might, like so many black American leaders of the late 1930s (W.E.B. Du Bois, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, and Marcus Garvey, for instance), find allegiances outside and beyond the nation, among separatists and revolutionaries.3 In 1943, with race riots spreading across the United States, many involving both white and black soldiers, Wesley Epps at once signaled the cinema’s efforts at careful containment and the potential disruptiveness and volatility of this new and empowered figure for American blackness.

Epps was an important figure for wartime Hollywood, which in 1942 began producing black soldier films in an effort to help with war propaganda while promoting a new race-liberalism. But because of their radical potential—to depict an unprecedentedly integrated America and to reveal the imbrication of race/racism in U.S. global policies—Hollywood’s black soldier films had to tread lightly. And, as I’ve described in the introduction, Epps was not the only black soldier to suddenly appear in integrated Hollywood war films in the early 1940s. Crash Dive (1943), Sahara (1943), and Lifeboat (1944) also presented versions of this “new” black soldier with representations that served both to support their nation (in the fictions of the films) and to integrate their casts in Hollywood and the public spheres of theaters across the United States.4 Yet while these soldiers appeared in integrated films’ integrated military units as part of the government’s program to counteract black disaffection and increase black and Allied support for the war, neither the United States nor its military was in fact integrated at the time of Bataan’s or any of the other films’ releases. The gradual integration of the military didn’t even begin until Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9801 in 1948. These seemingly prescient films with their integrationist messages faced the dilemma of how to present these new relations in the cinema without alienating their viewers, most of whom lived in and supported a segregated America.

In part, the films made recourse to already circulating images and discourses about colonialism to solve the “problem” of showing, too early, an integrated America. They placed their black soldiers far from the continental United States, in strangely liminal spaces: far-flung colonies, peopled by ethnically diverse military units (in Bataan and Sahara), and sea vessels stranded in international waters (in Crash Dive and Lifeboat). “As though traced from a template supplied by the OWI,” Thomas Cripps describes, “[Bataan, Sahara, Crash Dive, and Lifeboat all] used the war to thrust a black figure into a small white circle . . . [in order to] forecast an enhanced black status as a result of war while showing whites they had nothing to fear from change.”5 The films deftly delivered their black soldiers—and their part-integrationist, part-propagandist messages—within predictable and increasingly familiar narratives of America’s victory over Japan and Germany, democracy’s victory over fascism, and civilization’s triumph over barbarism—and, all in all, at far remove from domestic space.

In their construction of Epps, and the handful of other World War II filmic black soldiers, Hollywood filmmakers—however unintentionally—brought together a number of differing representational and political discourses about race: race at home, in America; and race abroad, in the colonies, territories, and enemy lands. In fact, it was through the filmic black soldier’s contradistinction to U.S. and Allied colonial subjects that he became, in the worlds of the film (and perhaps beyond), a robust American citizen, participating fully in the life of the nation. Implicit in this soldier’s construction is the way in which his lack of rights at home in the United States might be transformed into full enfranchisement by his unique efforts to extend imperial subjugation (packaged as “democracy”) to other peoples of color abroad. This black soldier, then, fighting on the cusp of the civil rights movement, was a hybrid figure whose blackness, contradictorily, reflected both his subjugation and his exceptionalism as a member of a society founded on racism but allegedly in the midst of sociopolitical transformation.

Not only did he embody this unusual duality of the exception/exemplar, but the World War II black soldier also reflected the seemingly contradictory ways in which (actual as well as filmic) black soldiers were shaped by their experiences of both Jim Crow at home and Third World race relations abroad.6 In other words, the black soldier—in his initial presentation(s) in World War II–era films and in his multiple (re)incarnations across the subsequent thirty years—was doubly hybrid. The coincidence of this new development of black representation with the marking off as “other” of colonial film bodies is central in this, the first chapter of a book about the role of black soldiers in American cinema, for two reasons: first, because of how it mirrors the U.S. government’s efforts to preempt would-be alliances between black and brown subjects in the United States during the long civil rights movement;7 and second, because of the ways in which it, however unintentionally, reflects what were—and had long been—significant black American efforts to identify and organize internationally, in concert with Third World peoples and in their struggles against U.S. and European imperialism.

Black soldiers had been at the vanguard of black internationalism since their return from Europe following World War I, where their experiences abroad had at once radicalized them and transformed them into apt symbols in the struggle for black citizenship at home. Veterans had served as activists, editorialists, and paramilitary foot soldiers in the numerous militant New Negro organizations that sprang up in the wake of World War I, including the League for Democracy (LFD), the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB).8 And many of the more radical among them (from Harry Haywood to A. Phillip Randolph) had continued to travel and work beyond the United States, aligning themselves with the Communist Party, the Soviets, and the Chinese.9 According to Minkah Makalani’s history of black internationalism, “through theorizing the international dimensions of race, black radicals from the ABB” engaged in the 1922 Comintern’s Fourth Congress and began to “connect[] African and Asian diasporic struggles,”10 establishing what Brent Hayes Edwards has described as “intercolonial internationalism.” In the late 1930s and early 1940s, supported quite publicly by famous actor-singer-activist Paul Robeson, scores of African Americans joined the International Brigades to fight fascism in Spain, believing, in the words of historian Robin D. G. Kelley, “that fighting in defense of republican Spain against Franco’s fascists (1936–39) was a way of avenging Ethiopia for Mussolini’s bloody invasion in 1935.”11 While never referenced in the text of Bataan (or Sahara, the other film on which this chapter focuses), these histories of black internationalism necessarily haunt the movie(s), compelling in-the-know spectators—which would have included a wide range of black Americans, at least—to view the film’s stories of transnational, colonial encounters by black soldiers through their internationalist lens.

In what follows, my readings of Bataan contextualize and trace the construction of the black soldier in relation to the United States’ role in the South Pacific and its brown/colonial subjects. I then turn to Sahara, another black soldier film from the same year also set in colonial space (though in an environ far more vague than Bataan), in which the bodies of the black American soldier and the colonial subject are collapsed, folded into one multivalent figure. I argue that this collapse does not so much obscure the political representation of the Americanist figure as reveal his inherent status as a quasi-colonial subject even at home, and the ways in which his constructions as “other” and soldier are in fact essential to his function as a representative of coming American integration and U.S. imperial projects abroad. In both sets of readings, my attention is to the ways in which the figure’s representational and ideological double (and often quadruple) duty reveals the biopolitical operation of race in the midst of the United States’ imperial expansion.12

A Brief History of Black Wartime Politics, or Black Soldiers as the Sign of Democracy

World War II forced both white and black Americans to think about their roles in racial struggles across the globe. While African Americans debated the merits of joining a war movement that sought to protect minorities abroad without guaranteeing any rights to black citizens at home for the second time in half a century, mainstream America found itself defending the lives of Jews in Europe and Chinese and Filipinos in Asia alongside those of white Europeans. Because part and parcel of this defense was America’s increasing involvement in nation and empire building (and dismantling), even for white Americans, “World War II elevated U.S. racial division to a question of national security, international relations, and global justice.”13 In other words, as the United States suddenly sought to establish alliances with non-European peoples and nations abroad, it faced the challenges of transforming its existing relationship with racial minorities at home. Thus, according to Nikhil Pal Singh, “the imperative to include blacks within the nation was increasingly linked to the struggle to imagine the world-system and the future U.S. role within it—what might be called the international reconstruction of nationhood.”14

This “reconstruction” took place on at least three fronts: in the formation of new U.S. foreign policy; in U.S. domestic law; and in America’s national and international cinematic public spheres. The significant shift in black representation in Hollywood, in particular in films like Bataan and Sahara that were produced for export as well, was thus integral to this project. Indeed, Singh’s employment of the term “reconstruction” directs us to connect these mid-twentieth-century governmental efforts to the unfinished historical project of mid-nineteenth-century Reconstruction. But whereas America’s post–Civil War Reconstruction launched a (however incomplete) rebuilding of racial relations within the country, the U.S. reconstruction of nationhood during World War II was an international one, shaped then, and forever after, by America’s extranational aspirations.

U.S. imperial aspirations found their filmic icon in the figure of the black soldier, who, at first blush, signified (however inaccurately) both the success of democracy at home and a new inclusive, democratic approach abroad. Thus, in each of the World War II black soldier films, and most evidently in Bataan and Sahara (which I discuss in detail below), the black bodies in uniform signified more than “enhanced . . . status” and the coming of integration for the subjects they purportedly represented. Telling the story of multinational, cobbled-together military units struggling to stave off the encroachment of fascism, Bataan and Sahara (for instance) deployed the new figure of the black soldier as both a revision of America’s visual relationship to race and an exemplar of American democracy in action. However, while it may have been the films’/filmmakers’ hopes that the interconnections between black soldiers and colonial subjects reflected well on the United States, the images and narratives in the black soldier films also (albeit somewhat more obliquely) demonstrated the ways in which race in the U.S. context (abroad or at home) functioned through exclusion rather than alliance, and how Americanness was constructed over and against “otherness” rather than alongside it.

Thus, though Bataan and Sahara may have obscured the reality of antiblack racism in the military with false representations of multiracial, multinational integration, the films also offered surprisingly accurate reflections of African Americans’ ideological affiliations and alliances with other U.S. minorities and colonized peoples.15 The films’ multiracial or multiethic casts, presented to camouflage the newly integrated black soldier, may well have encouraged against-the-grain and reconstructive readings of interminority alliance—readings that enabled the un-narrated histories of black internationalism and radicalism to nonetheless become legible. So while films like Bataan and Sahara aimed to align viewers with anti-Japanese and anti-German sentiment, it is not clear, where black audiences were concerned, that they would have been entirely successful. In other words, by portraying their integrated black soldiers as powerful, dignified defenders of the American way of life abroad, Bataan and Sahara also presented American foreign—and specifically colonial—policy as inextricably and problematically bound up with its domestic racial politics.16 Black audiences were already primed to see these interconnections. Walter White, who was president of the NAACP during the war, has himself recounted what is now an oft-quoted story of black preference for a Japanese victory over the United States. White describes trying to rouse a black audience to pro-war sentiment and hearing instead that leadership by Hitler couldn’t make things worse for blacks and rule by Japan might well make them better.17 And some twenty years earlier, in his 1919 editorial in The Crisis, Du Bois had described black, brown, and Asian soldiers across the world as one sleeping community, defined by their subjection to white colonial powers and their revolutionary potential.18

The black soldier films’ cinematic work also recalled broader conversations in the literary public sphere, where, according to Penny Von Eschen, “journalists and writers analyzed the implications for the future of colonialism using black troops and, in turn, linked the fate of Jim Crow to the fate of imperialism.”19 Their concern with the ways in which race in the United States and imperialism abroad were mutually imbricated was not a new one, but rather arose out of older, ongoing discussions about black and Third World radicalism made (in)famous by artists and activists including W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, A. Phillip Randolph, Paul Robeson, and Claude McKay, a number of whom were already living or traveling extensively abroad by the start of the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Historicizing and Internationalizing the “Baadasssss” or Imagining Cinematic Reparation
• Part I. “We Return Fighting”: The Integration of Hollywood and the Reconstruction of Black Representation
• Part II. “Fugitive Movements”: Black Resistance, Exile, and the Rise of Black Independent Cinema
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author