Dreams of a Black Cinema: The Filmic Turn in African American Literary Production

Abstract

Beginning in the 1960s, a wave of African American writers increasingly turned their attention to film. They wrote screenplays, directed and edited movies, published film criticism, organized film festivals, taught film in their college classrooms, and theorized film and film-going in their fiction. Enabled by new developments in media technology and expanding in dynamic dialogue with the socio-political context of civil rights, these writers’ emerging enthusiasm for the artistic and political possibilities of cinema simultaneously refigured their own literary work and helped launch an unprecedented boom in black filmmaking in the second half of the 20th century. Dreams of a Black Cinema: The Filmic Turn in African American Literary Production tells the story of this rich period of cross-pollination between African American literature and film for the first time.

Drawing on extensive new archival research, Dreams of a Black Cinema recovers and analyzes a series of extraordinary filmic experiments that were pursued by African American writers, especially women, from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s. I begin with the work of Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, whose earlier cinematic aspirations set the scene for what was to come, and then I explore in depth the artmaking and activism that emerged from the 1960s onward, focusing in particular on the careers of Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Kathleen Collins, and Toni Morrison. I combine a big-picture narrative about these writers’ participation in the development of black cinema with close readings of their individual work. By situating their individual engagements with cinema within larger artistic and political networks, I aim to reveal the key role that film played in the histories of black radical politics, black feminism, and black expressive culture.

In reconstructing this literary and filmic history, I advance three central claims. First, I show how African American writers’ experiments with film reciprocally shaped their aesthetic practices and their ambitions for literature. Second, I contend that black writers’ film projects became an important site for political activism in the 20th century, as writers explored political conditions through film, sought to build mass movements through cinema as a mass medium, and challenged the racist and sexist norms of Hollywood film, ultimately opening up more space for black filmmaking. Finally, I emphasize the crucial role that black women played in this post-1960s turn to film and I argue that the cross-pollination between literature and film was a key context for new developments in black feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Often working collaboratively and taking advantage of film as a medium that could combine multiple art forms in a single work, black women authors and artists, I argue, developed new models for spectatorship and media activism as they tacked back and forth across literature and film.

Tracing this turn to film in both the published works of African American writers and the dynamic, behind-the-scenes processes of artmaking that are captured in the archive and in unfinished film projects, I aim to account, both historically and theoretically, for the forms of resonance and kinship between the arts, beyond influence or adaptation, that reshaped film and literature in the late 20th century, as African American writers worked to realize an array of dreams for a new black cinema.