TO THE POINT OF TOTAL LIBERATION SONYA DYER
The Black Power Mixtape, poster
The films The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 and The Spook Who Sat By the Door present two distinct accounts of early 1970’s Black radical politics in the USA, and its relationship to both State and counter-hegemonic violence. We see violence presented as heroic (The Spook…) and horrific (The Black Power…), women as decorative, marginal (The Spook...) and as central intellectual, strategic and moral forces (The Black Power…). The politics of hair—“natural” and “processed” also inevitably makes its presence felt particularly on the bodies of Black women. In this text, I aim to explore the dissonance and connections between the two filmic “texts,” and to reflect on how they in turn provide accounts of the potentiality (or indeed futility) of revolutionary violence, ideas of gender in the US Black Power movement, and also on the portrayal of an independent counter-hegemonic Black agency in the USA.
THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975 / AN INTRODUCTION The Black Power Mixtape 1967 -1975 (2011) is a Swedish documentary film which utilizes archival news footage of the US Black Power movement shot by a Swedish news crew,
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juxtaposed with contemporary commentary from a range of public figures from the arts and politics, including Harry Belafonte, Professor Angela Davis and rapper / activist Talib Kweli. It features a number of stand-out moments including a tender sequence in which Stokely Carmichael interviews his mother Mabel, pressing her to share her experience as a first-generation Caribbean immigrant to the US and the personal / social injustices she and her husband experienced. (How strange to reconcile this gentle, respectful Carmichael with “The only position for women in SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) is prone”1 vision…). Accumulatively, the film also presents a strong sense of what led to the rage behind the civil rights movement—the effect of hundreds of years of injustice and economic exploitation on Black America—and its relation to global injustices and neo-colonial geopolitics. (For example, Martin Luther King Jr. was the first major public figure to speak out against the Vietnam War, linking militarism with racism.) No mention is made of the misogyny and sexual exploitation of women in the movement, sadly (for this we must seek testimonies from female veterans of the movement on YouTube and in memoirs and other forms of critical writing). It does however indicate the effect of imprisonment on the (largely male) leadership and the role this played—amongst other factors such as drugs—on the diminution of the movement. The lure of capitalist //
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