AFRICANICITY IN BLACK CINEMA

Abstract

This essay reviews the conceptual tensions between black cultural and political identity in order to discern new conjunctural ‘practices of identity’ occurring, specifically, in some black films. It suggests that a specific paradigm of communication, such as ‘historical affective re-enactment’, can illustrate the ways in which blacks articulate their identity through the medium of cinema. Examination of this paradigm as a discursive practice of ‘détournement’ or ‘marronage’ allows us to understand the more complex effects of Africanicity as a necessary re-enactment of social and historical commentary, which ‘labyrinthic’ horizon transcends any decoding structure of political and cultural identity. This essay concludes that rather than being a decoding structure of identity, the notion of Africanicity is a conjunctural ground of investigation through which trans-geographical practices of identity emerge.

Keywords:

• affective-re-enactment
• black cinema
• commentary
• crystallization
• identity
• marronage

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Halifax 2003 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences and won the Van Horne Prize for its critically challenging topic and originality.

2. One may disqualify the relevance of Afrocentricity, or even argues that it is not an entire paradigm. However, from a purely disciplinary model, I argue that Afrocentrism happens to be, particularly in the US, a prototype of counter-Liberal criticism and Eurocentrism. The central issue, therefore, is not about the relevance of Afrocentric frameworks and their connection with Pan-Africanism, Garveyism, African Renaissance, etc., which made up most criticisms against this line of thought. Rather, the central concern here is to admit that the emergence of Afrocentricity creates, somehow, a balance of power, at least on the discussions concerning the experience of black people. For criticism against Afrocentrism, see: Manthia Diawara (1992), who argues that on reducing blackness ‘to Egypt and kente cloths […] Afrocentrism has become a religion, a camp movement, where one can refuge from the material realities of being black in Washington D.C., London, or Nairobi.’ Gilroy (1992) also argues that Afrocentric frameworks shifts its main focus to the ‘reconstruction of individual consciousness rather than the black nation in exile or elsewhere.’ In Black Atlantic, Gilroy adds that Afrocentrism is ‘an invariant, anti-historical notion of black particularity to which [Conservative Afrocentists…] maintain privileged access’ (1993, p. 91). For Clarence E. Walker (2001), Afrocentrist discussion on issues related to the experience of blacks should avoid being the repetition of ‘a totalitarian groupthink,’ (p. xxiv) that uses ‘therapeutic mythology’ (p. 23) to either accept or reject its fundamental premises.

3. See particularly Stuart Hall (1980, 1990, 1993), David Morley (1980), Storey (1993) and Turner (1990).

4. For example some contemporary cultural analysis articulate classless, raceless and cultureless frameworks suggest that the effort of non-Western cultures in the twentieth century has been coming to terms with modernity, or, ‘learning how to cope with or respond to Western ways and Western patterns of thought, chiefly democracy and science’ (Watson 2000), quoted by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (2002). See also Paul Gilroy (2001), suggesting that that race-thinking has distorted the finest promises of modernity, however, concluding that any racialess attempt is a utopian project.

5. In this article, the New World signifies the idea of African diasporas, and thus includes the Caribbean, the Americas, Australia, Asia, and Europe.

6. This historical emergence at the foundation of Black Nationalism can be traced through multiple political panels such as: the first Pan-African Congress, in London, 1900, followed by Paris (1919), London and Brussels (1921), London and Lisbon (1923), and New York (1927) organized by W. E. B. Du Bois. Subsequent meetings with African leaders took place between 1927 and 1944, for the first time claiming African autonomy and independence. For example, African political figures such as Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Kwame Nkrumah (Gold Coast, today Ghana), Akintola (Nigeria), Johnson (Sierra Leone), and Armattoe (Togo) launched the idea of the United States of Africa at the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945.

7. Beloved, starring Oprah Winfrey (Sethe), Danny Glover (Paul D. Garner), Thandie Newton (Beloved), and Kimberly Elise (Denver) is Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel directed by Jonathan Demme. It might also be useful to note that this novel is based on an actual occurrence that Morrison discovered in a newspaper clipping about an escaped slave women who killed her children so they would not have to experience the horrors of slavery. The freed slave, Margaret Garner, was on the verge of being caught by her master and brought back into slavery, along with her four children. This put her into a crazy rage in which she killed one of her babies.

8. My emphasis, quoted by Mariniello (1995, p. 135).