Influences: Black Consciousness and African American

10 I use inverted commas here in order to distinguish this use of the term black from my previous use, in order to highlight that in this context (i.e., the way it is used in the films), it refers to the term as used by African Americans to mean “African American,” and the subsequent reference to an idea of a culturally “authentic” conception of African Americanness.

11 Malcolm X’s 1964 speech, The Ballot or the Bullet, makes reference to this peculiarity:

Right now, in this country, if you and I, 22 million African-Americans -- that's what we are -- Africans who are in America. You're nothing but Africans. Nothing but Africans. In fact, you'd get farther calling yourself African instead of Negro. Africans don't catch hell. You're the only one catching hell. They don't have to pass civil-rights bills for Africans. An African can go anywhere he wants right now. All you've got to do is tie your head up. That's right, go anywhere you want. Just stop being a Negro. Change your name to Hoogagagooba. That'll show you how silly the white man is. You're dealing with a silly man. A friend of mine who's very dark put a turban on his head and went into a restaurant in Atlanta before they called themselves desegregated. He went into a white restaurant, he sat down, they served him, and he said, "What would happen if a Negro came in here? And there he's sitting, black as night, but because he had his head wrapped up the waitress looked back at him and says, "Why, there wouldn't no nigger dare come in here. ”

The challenges which grew from the interminable denial of a common US American national identity for African Americans, brought the Du Boisian “strife”¹² to the forefront of many political and cultural dialogues which proliferated from the turn of the 20^th century on.

The call to construct a new identity disassociated from prevailing negative stereotypes and set in an ideology which encourages a sense of self-worth and collective dignity found particularly vigorous, public action and voice between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s.

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee -- the cry is always the same: ‘We want to be free’ (King Jr. 1968).

As can be heard in Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, the successful independence struggles in Asia and those in Africa – beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1970s – were motivating factors in the emergence of the civil rights activities that dominated the 1960s in the US. African American political voices like Martin Luther King Jr.’s, alluded to these triumphs over white political and cultural colonisation which indicated a rhetorical shift from previous references, that saw Africa and Africans as a continent and a people which would benefit from African American influence, as was envisaged by black nationalist activists like Martin R. Delany.¹³ Delany’s reference to a rich heritage, “[the] shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx”

(46), together with Marcus Garvey’s speculation, “[it] is only a question of a few more years when Africa will be completely colonized by Negroes” (52), seemed to finally be taking shape with the establishment of these new, independent African countries.

Historically excluded from the wider economy and considered pariahs by white America, it could be argued that African Americans were both citizens and non-citizens of a nation which systematically kept them segregated and exploited, thereby necessitating and encouraging the search for other ways of creating community cohesion and positive self-identification. Widely publicised by the works and actions of Garvey and Du Bois, Pan-Africanism was seen as a way in which African Americans and indeed black people worldwide could become a force of united empowerment against the racist, imperialist challenges presented by white political and societal hegemony. Pan-Africanism is an

12 “One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings . . . The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost” (Du Bois 45).

13 Delany, for example, in his publication, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, conceived a railway which would run from East to West Africa, promoting trade across the continent.

ideology which promotes the unity of all black people based on the principle of a shared African heritage, as well as the active desire to build and maintain social and political networks which would serve the economic betterment of all black people.¹⁴ By virtue of their successful decolonisation campaigns, African independence leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Samora Machel, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Gamal Abd El Nasser, and many other outspoken advocates of Pan-Africanism, leant credence to the ideology which meant that it found renewed vigour during the 1960s and 1970s. Consequently, many of its concepts can be detected in later black consciousness ideologies that have since developed and evolved, such as Black Power or Afrocentrism.

From blaxploitation (1970s) to the hood film (1990s) phases of the African cinematic record, the influence of the contemporary black consciousness movements on conceptions of a unified, group identity as well as their references to real or imagined Africa and/or Africans, are an important part of the narratives of the selected films. The political themes within this cinematic record frequently deal with matters of citizenship and collective uplift, which both require in the first place, the defining of an African American identity. As has been posited, this involves viewing Africa as a central point of origin and as a source of history for the purposes of an Africa-centric cultural rootedness. Eventually, as notable in the hood and post-hood film phases, these “political themes” turned to focus more on urban realities in specific cities or neighbourhoods and the challenges faced by the African American communities in them (i.e., drugs and poverty in New Jack City, or the destruction of the community by capitalist interests as shown in Barbershop). In these cases Africa as a unifying element is not dealt with in the narratives in as direct terms as it had been previously (e.g., in Shaft in Africa or The Spook Who Sat by the Door). When the emphasis in the popular political ideologies and philosophies explored in some of these African American films begins to shift to focus more on an African American identity with particular, discernible cultural markers, as a corollary, the narratives in these films tend to concentrate more on the need to differentiate African Americans from Africans (and other black identities). In such circumstances it is sometimes then only important for the filmmakers and actors to, for example, simply show that “this is an African” as a way of highlighting some aspect of an African American character, or in setting these black identities apart from each other.

14 From a wealth of scholarly material which affirms this definition, see for example, Agboton 2012, Geiss 1974, Gilroy 1993, or James 2012.