“They should have called Katrina ‘Gone with the Wind’”: Charles Burnett’s Quiet As Kept and the Neoliberal Racial State

Abstract

This article explores Charles Burnett’s short film, Quiet As Kept (2007). I explore how the film examines the complex dynamics of the neoliberal racial state revealed by Hurricane Katrina. More importantly, the film also insists upon the intersection of neoliberalism’s cultural aesthetics and political economy. Ultimately, I argue that one must think of neoliberalism as a racial project and through the binary of mobility/immobility. That is, the neoliberal racial state operates, primarily, by mobilizing capital and wealth upward, and immobilizing poor communities of color. And while racial inequality is a hallmark of American history that long precedes the emergence of the neoliberal state, the unique forms it has taken since the 1970s is the product of social and economic policy specific to the neoliberal political project. I conclude with Burnett’s vision of a politics of independent cinema capable of contesting neoliberal politics and aesthetics moving forward.

Keywords:

• black independent film
• colorblindness
• neoliberalism
• popular culture
• race

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Christopher Petrella for his help conceiving and editing this article. In particular, Petrella’s insights on neoliberalism were integral to framing that portion of this article.

Notes

By “neoliberal state” I refer to the re-tasking of state capacity to serve the interests of neoliberalism, which include the upward redistribution of wealth through aggressive deregulation of the free market, the creation of new markets, and the economization of all aspects of social and political life.

See, for example, David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2.

See Loic Wacquant, “Marginality, Ethnicity and Penality in the Neoliberal City: An Analytic Cartography,” Ethnic & Racial Studies Review 37, no. 10 (2014): 1686; “Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity,” Sociological Forum 25, no. 2 (2010):197–220; and Michael C. Dawson, Not In Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Damon Smith, “A Quiet Storm: Charles Burnett on Namibia and His Post-Killer of Sheep Career,” Bright Lights Film Journal no. 60 (May 2008). http://brightlightsfilm.com/60/60burnettiv.php#.VIn3X2TF_38 (accessed January 8, 2015).

Robert Kapsis, Charles Burnett: Interviews (Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), ix.

Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.

Stuart Hall, “The Neo-Liberal Revolution,” Cultural Studies 25, no. 6 (2011): 706.

See Loic Wacquant, “Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism,” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 20 (2012): 71.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 17. Emphasis in original.

Quoted in Brown, Undoing the Demos (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 24–26.

Henry A. Giroux, “The Terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Significance of Cultural Politics,” College Literature 32, no. 1 (2005): 2.

Giroux, “The Terror of Neoliberalism,” 14.

Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 160–165.

Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4.

Ibid., 9.

Loic Wacquant, “Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity,” Sociological Forum 25, no. 2 (2010): 214.

Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 16.

Loic Wacquant, “Marginality, Ethnicity and Penality,” 8–9.

Ibid., 6–7.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2014), 213.

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom. 40th Anniversary Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 110.

Thomas Sowell, Markets and Minorities (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the International Center for Economic Policy Studies, 1981), 87. Emphasis in original.

Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 33.

“Nation’s Largest Private Prison Companies Trying to Do the REIT Thing,” Prison Legal News, January 15, 2013, https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2013/jan/15/nations-largest-private-prison-companies-trying-to-do-the-reit-thing/ (accessed September 8, 2016).

See Christopher Petrella, “How Speculating on Prisons Leads to Mass Incarceration,” Truthout, October 9, 2012. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/11965-is-corrections-corporation-of-america-about-to-embark-onanother-round-of-prison-speculation (accessed September 8, 2016); also, Petrella, “Courting Carcerality: The Rise of Paraprisons in the Era of Neoliberal Racial Statecraft” (Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2016).

Quoted in Adolph Reed, “Undone by Neoliberalism,” The Nation, 18 September 2006, 28.

Reed, “Undone by Neoliberalism,” 28.

See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).

Ibid. For more on the effects of neoliberal policy on the city of New Orleans both before and after the storm, see Reid, “Undone by Neoliberalism” and Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, chapter 4.

Michael C. Dawson, Not In Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 41.

Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 263.

Berenice Reynaud, “An Interview with Charles Burnett,” Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 2 (1991): 323–34. Reprinted in Robert Kapsis, Charles Burnett: Interviews, 58.

Cedric Robinson, “Blaxploitation and the Misrepresentation of Liberation,” Race & Class 40, no. 1 (1998): 5.

Michele Wallace, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (London: Verso, 1990), 1.

Ibid.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “TV’s Black World Turns—But Stays Unreal,” The New York Times November 12, 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/12/arts/tv-s-black-world-turns-but-stays-unreal.html?pagewanted=all (accessed January 5, 2015).

Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for “Blackness” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 74.

Lester K. Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics 14, no. 3–4 (2012): 140. Emphasis in original.

Ibid., 150.

See Justin Gomer, “Colorblindness, A Life: Race Film and the Articulation of an Ideology” (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2015).

Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 444.

Reynaud, “An Interview,” 61.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Justin Gomer

Justin Gomer, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at California State University, Long Beach.