Towards a transnational aesthetics of Blackness: Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro

ABSTRACT

This article examines the 2016 documentary from Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro. The film’s opening credits claim it was written uniquely by James Baldwin. Yet Peck repeatedly cuts between Baldwin’s speeches or interposes his voiceover with contemporary footage related to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. My reading privileges Peck’s form over content to argue that Peck’s Francophone voice, spoken through Baldwin, not only denounces ‘American’ racism as existing, in some form, on a global level, but also indicts France for its history of colonization and own racist structures. Moreover, through the overlap of Peck’s own and Baldwin’s voices as well as the inclusion of non-U.S. artists and the Black female experiences, this article contends that Peck’s aesthetics serve to dissolve borders around Blackness and the African diaspora, offering what I term a transnational Black consciousness. In this consciousness, each iteration of the African diaspora and of Black identities can speak its own (hi)stories to and through one another, thereby creating a space for justice and contrapuntal responses to anti-Blackness narratives that exist on a transnational level.

KEYWORDS:

• Raoul Peck
• James Baldwin
• African diaspora
• anti-racism
• Blackness
• Francophone

I’m African-American, I’m African, I’m Black as the heart of a[n] … Aryan– Kendrick Lamar, ‘The Blacker the Berry’

‘Les Français, eux, auraient aimé que le racisme, ça ne soit qu’aux États-Unis’.¹– Raoul Peck, ‘J’étouffe’

Introduction

In 2016, the Haitian-born, Francophone director, Raoul Peck, released a feature-length documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, based on an unpublished manuscript ‘Remember this House’ from James Baldwin, in which Baldwin seeks to tell his story of America through the 1960s murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This Oscar-nominated film uses nothing but Baldwin’s own words, and yet, Peck frequently cuts to contemporary images of race relations and protests, all seemingly from the United States. In one such collection of images, coming in the film’s penultimate sequence, Peck unfurls a series of anonymous, contemporary Black faces. For 30 seconds, the various faces all stare mutely into the camera before Baldwin speaks one last time about what the United States must do to address its legacy of racism and white supremacy. In a film which is, on the surface at least, about and by James Baldwin, a question may arise as to why Peck inserts this penultimate sequence. In answering that question, this article addresses an additional, related, question on why, given the state of race relations in the Francophone world, in particular, France, this Francophone filmmaker was interested in making a film about race relations in the United States.

In an introduction to the film’s published script, Peck’s editor writes that Peck’s avowed intention for the film was to ‘bring into today’s context the brilliant thinking of James Baldwin’ (Strauss 2017, xxi), ‘today’s context’ being, ostensibly, the United States. Yet I read Peck’s form as going beyond this context. Although I Am Not Your Negro is an English-language film about the United States in its content, I argue that, through his aesthetics – the penultimate sequence being an example par excellence – Peck’s Francophone voice can be heard throughout, condemning the systems and structures of white supremacy as existing on a global scale. At the same time, these aesthetics also permit a reading of the muted, anonymous faces from the penultimate sequence outside of space and time that opens up discourse for a more inclusive representation of Blackness and the African diaspora. Here, Peck’s film manifests what I term to be a ‘transnational Black consciousness’, a border-defying Blackness, one which dissolves the traditional boundaries around the identities that have been imposed upon Black and Afro-diasporic bodies.

Raoul Peck and his documentary’s subject, James Baldwin, are both artists who embody a border-defying Blackness, as their trajectories span multiple continents and languages. Baldwin, born in Harlem, spent a great deal of his life and died in France, while Peck, born in Haiti, spent part of his childhood in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and has lived in France, Germany and the United States. Peck has also been Minister of Culture of Haiti and president of France’s prestigious film school, Fémis, in addition to having made films in and about Belgium and Rwanda; not to mention that the documentary is itself a Swiss, French and Belgian co-production with the United States. Moreover, in the published script, Peck himself hints at the border-defying aesthetics to come in his film: ‘[Baldwin] helped me connect the story of a liberated nation, Haiti, and the story of the modern United States of America and its own painful and bloody legacy of slavery. I could connect the dots’ (2017 xi-xii). I take Peck’s notion of connecting the dots between the United States and Haiti even further, drawing on his own trajectory, his Francophone voice and his aesthetics, to form connections not just between all African diasporic countries that underwent colonization and slavery at the hands of a French-speaking country – including but not exclusive to those associated with Peck’s life and career – but to all countries with a history of racialized violence.

In I Am Not Your Negro, Peck’s form and aesthetics work therefore through Baldwin to declare that the structures of ‘American’ racism and narratives of anti-Blackness exist all over the world, in other countries whose pasts and presents invoke a history of white supremacy, including, and perhaps especially, in France.² France is used here as the principal Francophone example due not just to its imperialist past but also to its own refusal to even acknowledge the existence of race and therefore of racism. There are those in France who may refuse to see or acknowledge their country’s own troublesome past and present with anti-Blackness, but Peck’s film seeks to respond to and redress this thinking through its dialogue between Peck and Baldwin, among others. In this dialogue, each iteration of Blackness and the African diaspora can speak its own (hi)stories to and through one another, thereby providing counter images and narratives.

Global anti-Blackness and breaking down borders

Peck claims that each of the film’s 93 minutes is a bomb (Anderson 2017), a bomb which he plants as he effectively interposes his own Francophone commentary atop Baldwin’s. The film opens on a 1968 interview between Baldwin and Dick Cavett. After this first clip, blues artist Buddy Guy’s 1991 song ‘Damn Right, I’ve got the Blues’ erupts in the audience’s ears as Peck cuts to image after familiar image of unrest and apparent Black Lives Matter protests. By cutting from Baldwin to the 2014–2015 protests in response to ongoing instances of police brutality, while Guy’s song plays – released the same year as the Rodney King incident – Peck visually and aurally entangles multi-generational narratives of white supremacy with three generations of Blackness and Black activism in America. Through these multi-generational narratives, the film’s aesthetics begin to break down borders around Blackness.

As the film’s opening ‘familiar’ footage comes across the screen, Peck appears to firmly root and anchor the content of the film in the United States. In one of these particular stills from the film’s opening (Figure 1), a young Black woman is posed with her hands behind her head. Behind her can be seen a Black Lives Matter sign as she herself stands behind an American flag.

Figure 1. Black Lives Matter Protest in the U.S.

Prior to these still photos, in the film’s opening clip Baldwin declares that ‘[i]t’s not a question of what happens to the Negro here or to the black man here … but the real question is what is going to happen to this country’. Nevertheless, with the exception of the woman behind the American flag, the ‘familiar’ images that follow Baldwin’s declaration are virtually devoid of cultural or context clues. Each one could then be, if not a direct representation, an echo of the protests that occurred in France in 2016 following the death of Adama Traoré or in 2017 following the assault of a man referred to as ‘Théo’, or even, to take Peck’s multigenerational narrative into the future, to the 2020 beating of Michel Zecler. All three of these men suffered at the hands of French police and all three sparked anti-racism protests in response to these repeated instances of police brutality, raising parallels with Ferguson, Missouri and Black Lives Matter. ‘The black man here’ or ‘this country’ pronounced could then be translated to the French context or, for that matter, to any country where racialized police brutality and ensuing protests occur.

France, however, represents a somewhat unique case. Officially, ‘race’ does not exist in France; there is no legal category to delineate or differentiate parts of the population upon the basis of race, and it is illegal to collect statistics on race and ethnicity.³ Instead, information on race and the race of victims subjected to police violence comes from activists, scholars, and NGOs like Amnesty International. The French State thus embraces a ‘colorblind’ ideology and expects the same of its citizens through its notion of ‘republican universalism’, or eschewing one’s ethnicity or religious association in public life.⁴ One is French and nothing else; ‘hyphenated identities’ such as African American have no official recognition.⁵ French universalism means that it is rare to hear the names and races of victims of police violence in French media, although the French media appears most willing to report on the deaths of young American Black men.⁶ This mediatic imbalance makes acknowledging the racism that does exist in France even harder, leading to what Crystal Marie Fleming (2017, 37) calls the ‘obfuscation’ of white supremacy. In addition to France’s obfuscation, the French language has a limit when it comes to even talking about Blackness or a Black consciousness: in French there is no one word for ‘Blackness’, as Mame-Fatou Niang (2020) discussed in an interview with France24. Peck’s images that, without any clear, identifying marks, could easily be from French protests against policy brutality thus challenge this ‘obfuscation’, bringing to light the global nature of racism and white supremacy. Simultaneously, by creating a connection between the American and French situations, these context-less images open a dialogue so that those without the language can begin to talk about their Black and Afro-diasporic identities.

Similarly, later in the film, Peck includes footage of Baldwin discussing how Robert Kennedy ‘tells us [Black Americans] that maybe, in 40 years, if you’re good, we may let you become president’. Peck then cuts to a Black man in a crowd with an American flag nearby, while the audience’s mind must, inevitably, think about Barack Obama, whom Peck shortly shows thereafter at his inauguration. But before Obama comes on-screen the camera lingers on that Black man’s face and zooms in so that the American flag disappears off-screen. As the flag is removed from the shot, the film subsequently removes the American context. The film thus speaks to anyone who identifies as Black and is waiting to have a leader who looks like them, like those in France, where there has yet to be anyone other than a white man elected as president. Peck’s aesthetics, then, are not just a way to make visible the forms of racism which do exist in countries like France that deny the existence of race, and therefore racism, but they highlight that though these problems may adopt particular forms in the United States, they are far from unique.

Racialized violence, atemporal Blackness and Peck’s “now”

Similar to his opening explosive sequence, Peck deploys another bomb towards the film’s conclusion, when he cuts from the blond-haired, blue-eyed American actress Doris Day singing about love to photographs of lynched Black men, as Baldwin’s voiceover speaks to white America: ‘You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about me than you know about me’. The stark contrast between the images and Day’s sanguine sentimentality undermines her seeming innocence as it serves to heighten the shock of the violent images that follow. This juxtaposition equally underscores that it is the very belief in the innocence of whiteness that led and continues to lead to racialized violence. In Critique of Black Reason (2017), Achille Mbembe outlines a phenomenon wherein the Black man – who had been made invisible – can become visible, but only if he does not show any of the ‘fundamental violence’ that made him invisible in the first place (67–68, 151–152). Peck’s contrast here defies any such directive, as Peck lays out, in all its ugly truth, not just the physical violence of the lynching but his resounding refusal to accept the invisibility imposed on these Black bodies. As his camera pans from lynched men to the faces of white men in the crowd, tracking their gazes, Baldwin’s voiceover continues, ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced’. Peck, through Baldwin, is making white audiences across the world look and face the horror inflicted upon its Black citizens as well as the complicity of those who watched and did nothing.

In Physics of Blackness (2015), Michelle M. Wright offers an alternative reading of Blackness – drawing from one chapter on Baldwin –, one which combines the notion of racial constructs with the context-dependent performance of Blackness in the ‘now’. In her call for more inclusive, all-encompassing definitions of ‘Black’ and ‘Blackness’, Wright outlines that definitions must rely both upon how each individual identifies and their intersectionality with various group identities – i.e., gender, sexual orientation, class, political or religious affiliation, etc. – to which they feel they belong (3, 7, 22, 43). Moreover, Wright observes that Blackness is anchored concretely in time, in the time and place where it is defined and performed but is also decidedly out-of-time in that it is ever-changing, ephemeral, or what Tressie Mcmillan Cottom called ‘fluid’ (136) or Fleming calls ‘racial temporality’ (16–18). Wright further declares that a more inclusive Blackness means that no individual Black person can ever come to stand in for or subsume a collective Blackness because there will always be multiple, almost infinite, collection of groups to which each individuals can belong. There is no one way, time, or place to be Black, to embody Blackness, to be constructed as such. Rather, as Wright underlines in referencing Paul Gilroy, Blackness has ‘tangled roots … [it is] rhizomatic’ (9). In other words, all these definitions collide and flow into and with each other, in space and time where past, present and future overlap.

In Peck’s lynching sequence, all of the temporal iterations of Blackness flow into and collide with each other, confounding any temporal border around Blackness. The lynched men appear to be from early twentieth century but there is no accompanying chronological indication; these men are thus effectively out of time, belonging at once to the more distant past of slavery and to the less distant past of Jim Crow, but also to the infinite possible ‘presents’ of the audience who watch this film. Through what Paula J. Massood calls the film’s ‘spacetime polyphony’ (2017, 22), Peck reminds us that white supremacy has not really evolved, but perhaps just shape-shifted, and without addressing it as the global phenomenon it is, there is little hope for necessary systemic change. It is as if, by refusing to provide a date, Peck does not merely challenge any temporal border around Blackness but suggests that, without this change, the violence performed upon all its citizens of color will forever be our ‘now’.

Later on, in between the vintage photographs of lynchings and the penultimate sequence of contemporary faces staring at the camera, there is a series of still photographs. Yet this time, there is no Black pain on screen; rather, Baldwin’s voiceover declares ‘the world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is simply a metaphor for power’. For 30 seconds, similar to the images from the film’s opening, additional images without context appear on the screen, showing Black families posing for the camera: a family in front of their car or at a wedding or a group of Black men at work. These images all appear to be from an earlier time but, like with the lynching imagery, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when or where the subjects of these images are from. Peck is effectively taking the power back and showing a world other than the one that white supremacy created; providing a narrative of Blackness to counter the anti-Blackness that has so long pervaded the representation of Black and Afro-diasporic bodies. Peck credits some of the film’s archival usage to the European Union archives as well as French archives such as L’Atelier des Archives and the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée (The Archives Workshop and the National Center for Cinema and animated image). Distinguishing which images in the documentary came from which archives is sometimes feasible, but in this sequence, the American, French, European, and, perhaps, other, images blend together. These stills, indistinguishable from one another, increase a visibility away from Black and Afro-diasporic pain and white oppression and become a necessarily transnational representation of Black and Afro-diasporic ordinary life whether that ordinary life is from the past, present or future.

The need for a transnational Black consciousness

If so-called American structures of racism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness are, themselves, in fact global, then challenges to these structures – in which scholars like Wright call for a more inclusive Blackness – must also be global in nature. For this more inclusive Blackness, Wright relies on quantum mechanics and the multiverse (109–118, 146–166). Yet, whereas Wright speaks of multidimensionality, I speak of transnationalism and borders. Although Gilroy has offered readings of Blackness as that which is ‘explicitly transnational’ (1993, 15), as Wright notes, his focus is mainly on the heteronormative male and on America, the Caribbean and Europe in Anglophone settings (19, 27). Similarly, T. Sharpley-Whiting and Tiffany Ruby Patterson argue for the concept of transnational Blackness to include the Antilles in Europe in order to ‘complicate the boundaries of Europe’ (2009, 89) but their focus remains on this continent.⁷ Peck’s form in I Am Not Your Negro brings not just a Francophone perspective but also allows for a reading that would include all iterations of Blackness and the African diaspora, one which would include not only Anglophone and Francophone identities but all languages, places and people with ties to Blackness and the African diaspora.

Building on and extending scholarship on the transnational nature of Blackness and the African diaspora, I draw principally on Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani’s notion of transnationalism. For Quayson and Girish (2013), transnationalism moves beyond the typical challenges to national border drawings to include not just people and citizenships, but also identities that can traverse and transcend cultural, linguistic, spatial, temporal, or other borders. Transnationalism here supersedes the term diaspora because transnational communities can, unlike diaspora, engage in ‘elective identities’ based on common values or beliefs – for example, sexuality, religion, or class – that go beyond or circumvent the ethnic or national identifications that typically make up a diaspora (4). This question of going beyond, of transcending, I read as exceeding, defying and dismantling boundaries, national and otherwise; this question thus suggests an inherent multiplicity, or as I read Wright’s multidimensionality, in what I argue is a challenge to any possible border drawing around Blackness and the African diaspora. Transnationalism is important therefore because it opens up beyond the nation, language or culture, or even, as the sequences which I have so far emphasized show, generation and time, and reveals both Blackness and white supremacy for what they are: global phenomena that adopt different forms in different contexts and different times.

Early in the film, Baldwin’s voiceover (as narrated by Samuel L. Jackson) states that he suspects that ‘stories’ in Hollywood film and literature, like Uncle Tom, are ‘designed to reassure us that no crime has been committed. We’ve made a legend out of a massacre’. Here, as Baldwin speaks, we see a tracking shot over an empty field. Baldwin may be speaking indirectly about the American context, but the empty field is almost like a blank slate where nearly any place could be imposed, any context invoked. Similarly, Peck lingers for a few moments on a puddle of water, with rain falling upon it as Baldwin observes, ‘The truth is that this country does not know what to do with its black population, dreaming of anything like “the final solution”’. Baldwin may be referring to the United States, but I take the neutral image of the water to suggest that ‘this country’ could be in this case not just France, but also Rwanda, the DRC or the Republic of Congo, Haiti, Martinique, and so on. The ‘us’ could be any Black or Afro-diasporic body, and so on, and the reassurance of ‘no crime committed’ could be any of these places where colonial brutality and white supremacy unleashed racialized violence.

Peck’s aesthetics allow then for a reading across the multidimensional African diasporic and Black histories of colonization and slavery, across what Fleming (2017, 214) calls the ‘complicated and unstable signifier known as “the African diaspora”’.⁸ This unstable signifier has evolved from meaning only those who forcefully migrated as a result of the slave trade – and their descendants, principally in the Caribbean and the Americas – to those who voluntarily immigrate, an act more associated with colonization.⁹ But this category of African diaspora could today apply to or be synonymous with African American, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-descent in Europe, North and South America, etc.¹⁰ Similarly, the categories ‘Black’ and ‘Blackness’ are complicated and unstable signifiers that have, for so long, had boundaries placed around them that include and exclude. These borders could be national, linguistic or cultural. Or the borders could be imposed upon people who may not see themselves as Black, just as many Africans never think of themselves as Black, until they leave the continent and encounter others who see them as Black. Similarly, someone might ‘look Black’ but not identify as such or may identify as Black but not ‘look’ so. Moreover, many conceptions of Blackness rely, problematically, upon the heterosexual male as normative, as the definition of what it means to be ‘Black’, overlooking the intersectionality of Blackness with otherwise excluded groups such as women and LGBTQ+ communities (Wright 2015, 12).¹¹ Attempts to place limits or confines around Blackness and its narratives thus only serve to further impose identifications from the outside rather than from within.

A conflation can therefore often occur between African diaspora and ‘Black’, yet the two labels, as it were, can pull apart from one another just as they can overlap.¹² Blackness, unlike African diasporic subjects, is a construct and one that has historically been imposed by the systems and structures of white supremacy. Blackness can be related to or stem from African descendants, but it is much more about a racialization of the people that could fall under its broad umbrella. The two cannot be used interchangeably and yet both appear here. Moreover, through Peck’s form, I argue that the film demands a broader use of the term African diaspora, to include those who choose to return to Africa or those who never even left so as to prevent further exclusion when it comes to defining who is Black or not, African (diasporic) or not.¹³ While not conflating the two or comparing the multitude of Black or African diasporic experiences, Peck’s representation offers the possibility for the presence of both terms in order to not exclude or preclude the connection for anyone wishing to maintain such a link. Peck’s aesthetics merely open a space wherein each Black or Afro-diasporic individual can refuse the definitions of themselves imposed by the white world and define themselves.

It is through the very question of who controls the image-making of Black and Afro-diasporic bodies that Peck intervenes and seeks to answer the question of how to create a more inclusive representation for those with ties to this shared history. The ending to I Am Not Your Negro mirrors the film’s explosive beginning. Here, Baldwin appears in another interview, underlining the notion of racial constructs as he declares that the ‘white man invented him [the “negro”]’ and must ask why ‘he [the white man] needed him’. Baldwin then declares that ‘the future of the country depends […] on whether it’s able to ask that question’. After Baldwin’s final declaration, another song explodes in the audience’s ears, this time with (Lamar’s 2015) ‘The Blacker the Berry’. Peck’s inclusion of this song after Baldwin’s intervention allows past and present to flow into one another again, time bending in and meeting itself: past is present and present is past and future as well, if the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery among so many others in 2020 and beyond are any indication.

However, unlike in the beginning, Peck’s final bomb represents more than the African American experience. Peck does not merely roll the final credits over Lamar’s song, but he starts in the middle, with the chorus sung by the Jamaican artist Assassin. The film thus foregrounds the Jamaican and Caribbean perspective – Assassin recorded his contribution in Kingston (Emmanuel 2015) – as Assassin’s guttural cries “I said they treat me like a slave, ‘cah me black … How you no see the whip, left scars ‘pon me back” burst loud into the audience’s ears.¹⁴ This moment links different spatial sites of the Atlantic slave trade and its violence performed upon iterations of the African diaspora in Assassin’s Jamaica, Peck’s Haiti, and Lamar’s – both the same and different from Baldwin’s – United States. So more than time bending in on itself, when Baldwin discusses ‘the future of the country’, places bend in on themselves too and the ‘country’ in question could then be any of those places associated with these artists, including Peck’s involvement with the Congo, Rwanda, France, Belgium and Germany. Multiple distinct iterations of Blackness speak through and to one another as each confronts their own racial past and present as they challenge the ongoing horror of forms of violence steeped in racism, colonization, and hatred of the other. Time and space join together, span across one another, as the film’s concluding form – Francophone director playing Caribbean and American Anglophone artists – creates a transcultural, transnational, translingual bridge. All of these unique Black voices converge momentarily in their refusal to accept the given narrative and images of racialized violence, while Peck creates a space for other cultures and experiences, other iterations of Blackness, to represent themselves.

I Am Not Your Negro, read transnationally, represents therefore a border-defying Blackness, or what I term a transnational Black consciousness that defies and undoes the notion of borders – national, linguistic, cultural, temporal, etc. – around the identities of Black and Afro-diasporic subjects. A transnational black consciousness is a political choice to self-identify, but not to choose for or define others, for no individual to stand in for another.¹⁵ The transnational Black consciousness is about choosing one’s own belonging or what Mbembe calls ‘self-determination’ (2017, 87–92). Peck and Baldwin, read through each other, offer the possibility for this self-determination and self-identification by Black and African diasporic bodies that allows for a simultaneous global confrontation of structures and narratives of anti-Blackness, racism, colonization, and oppression. Take, for example, Fleming’s descriptions of both an organization in France which asserts a ‘transnational Black identity’ (2017, 76–81) and other groups that highlight ‘discontinuities between Africa and the formation of French Antillean identities’ (90). A transnational Black consciousness in which barriers around Blackness are torn down would allow for all of these perspectives and possibilities to exist simultaneously, to be both, as Stuart Hall (1989, 74) writes, the same and different. This term offers then the possibility of belonging whether one is part of the African diaspora, Afro-descendant, or identify as ‘Black’. This belonging then complicates the boundaries around these very identities and opens a space where these bodies can tell their stories with their own voices. Where all Black and African diasporic bodies see themselves reflected in some image, without imposing their own image on others, one with a ‘humane relationship to difference’ (Mbembe 2017, 156), therein lies a contrapuntal narrative to anti-Blackness.

Peck speaks through and around Baldwin: inclusivity and border-defying Blackness

James Baldwin is the embodiment of the inability to reduce someone to just one category of ‘Blackness’. Rather, his identity intersects through many other collective identities: gay, immigrant, American, European, anti-religion, anti-classist, etc. Moreover, Baldwin affirmed that Blackness is not a monolith as he did not want to belong to many organizations associated with the Black population (such as Nation of Islam or the Black Panther Party), including the NAACP, because of the class distinctions made by this institution.¹⁶ However, as Wright observes (2015, 30–31; 109–110; 136–137), Baldwin’s work focused almost exclusively on the African American male experience, excluding women, many in the LGBTQ+ community, and any iteration of the African diaspora that comes from outside the United States.¹⁷

Peck’s film, like Baldwin’s writing, could be seen as contributing to the erasure of Black women and the ways in which they are ‘multiply-burdened’ (Crenshaw 1989, 139–140) with its main focus on Baldwin. However, Peck chooses to foreground several of Baldwin’s writings which address the role of Black women in the struggle for civil rights, from Lorraine Hansberry meeting with Bobby Kennedy to the story of a young Black woman being the first to integrate a school in Charlotte, North Carolina. At one point, Baldwin talks about the American dream before he speaks about it being a problem for the West. In the following sequence, Peck imposes Baldwin’s voiceover, speaking of corpses piling up, atop a montage of young twenty-first-century Black people murdered due to police brutality and systemic racism: Tamir Rice, Darius Simmons, Trayvon Martin, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Christopher McCray, Cameron Tillman, and Amir Brooks. Baldwin then declares ‘when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you had a right to be here, you have attacked the entire power structure of the Western world’. Peck is thus, through these distinctly American victims of police brutality, attacking not the U.S. but the whole of the Western imperial, colonial apparatus. Furthermore, the choice to include Stanley-Jones, just one of the young female victims amongst the many who are often overlooked in the mass of male victims, represents an acknowledgement and first step towards including Black women in narratives of anti-Blackness, in this attack on the West and in the multiplicity, border-defying phenomenon of Blackness and the African diaspora. It may be nowhere near enough yet, but this inclusion serves to further defy attempts to categorize who or what belongs or does not.

Similar to his focus on the male experience, Baldwin’s work addresses principally what Baldwin calls the ‘Black American problem’. In his work, Nobody Knows my Name, Baldwin questions whether, other than the ‘history of oppression’, there is anything in common between all Black men, concluding that their commonalities lie in their ‘painful relation to the white world […and] the necessity to remake the world in their own image […] and no longer be controlled by the vision […] of themselves held by other people’ (Baldwin 1993b, 28–9). Baldwin believed in and affirmed the singularity of the African American experience, writing that being African American in France was not the same as being African, Caribbean, or any other iteration of the African diaspora in France (20). Baldwin is right that the African American experience is a unique phenomenon but it is so just as every atrocity or form of oppression enacted upon Black populations and the African diaspora has its own unique brand of horror and cruelty: to take a few examples, apartheid in South Africa is different from French colonization in Africa, which in turn is different from the French slave trade in the Antilles which is different from Belgian colonization in Africa.

In another essay, ‘Encounter on the Seine’, in Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin displays a rather generalizing, and what Wright (2015, 120–122; 136–138) describes as a flawed and essentialist, attitude towards lived African and Afro-diasporic experiences:

In Paris […] the African has not yet endured the utter alienation of himself from his people and his past […] and he has not, all his life long, ached for acceptance in a culture which pronounced straight hair and white skin the only acceptable beauty. (2012, 124)

Through his presumption to be able to speak on behalf of all Africans, comprised of heterogeneous populations from over 50 countries and even more languages and cultures, Baldwin appears problematically unaware that many Africans colonized by the French and post-independence Africans and Afro-Caribbean immigrants to France did feel that ache and need to whiten their skin.¹⁸

On the 20^th anniversary of Baldwin’s death, the Franco-Congolese author, Alain Mabanckou, published a series of essays, Lettre à Jimmy [Letter to Jimmy] in which he engages in a conversation with Baldwin, from a Francophone African perspective. All while agreeing with Baldwin that differences exist between the African American and the African immigrant, Mabanckou nevertheless underlines that there is something of a shared experience, occasionally by quoting Baldwin back to himself: ‘In the end, definitions imprison us, take away from us the ability to create ourselves endlessly […] “the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions”’ (Mabanckou 2014, 150). While not discounting the gulf, as Baldwin calls it (2012, 124), between the African American, African and Afro-diasporic experiences, Baldwin’s essentialist attitude nevertheless excludes and precludes the ability for Africans to build a bridge over that gulf, to find other commonalities.

However, Peck’s form opens up a possibility to build bridges between past and present, male, female and, LGBTQ+, between different cultural and linguistic iterations of the African diaspora, and between the problematic histories of U.S. slavery and French (or other) colonization. His context-less and neutral images allow for a reading that underline and condemn the global nature of anti-Blackness narratives and white supremacy. These images combine with the inclusion of and insistence upon the Jamaican artist Assassin’s contribution to Kendrick Lamar’s song which corrects the particular lacuna in Baldwin’s focus on the African American experience. These aesthetics, together with Peck’s own border-defying Blackness and the international nature of the film’s production and archival work, do not just allow for but call for a transnational reading of the film. Moreover, Peck’s film blends past, present and future to speak to Wright’s notion that Blackness is both rooted in time and firmly out-of-time just as the film appeals to what Mbembe refers to in the context of the African postcolony as a ‘time of entanglement’ (2001, 17). The film is thus not just opening up a space or possibility for a more inclusive Blackness but demanding a representation where all iterations of Blackness and the African diaspora intersect weave into and out of each other, creating their own image along the way.

Returning to the penultimate sequence, Peck presents a series of anonymous, contemporary Black faces who stare, unsmiling, mutely into the camera (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Faces Looking Back.

In this sequence, women and men are given equal grounding, appearing individually as well as in groups of various compositions, further bridging the gender gap in Baldwin’s work. As the audience looks upon these faces, it is as if each muted face, staring straight into the camera looks directly at the audience, almost accusingly. Their gazes defy the white gaze that has for so long held sway over them, their image and representations; representations which were for a long time considered the only legitimate narrative. Peck cuts to these contemporary faces from the black-and-white still images of Black ordinary life, from seemingly far away faces, times, and places. In so doing, he offers a chance for all iterations of Blackness and the African diaspora from any time period to be, as he says, ‘looking back and criticizing’ (Fagerholm 2017) the way they have been treated on both local and global scales.¹⁹

The contemporary images of this sequence are not photographs but film footage of non-actors found through a request for fans of Baldwin to volunteer and that everyone ‘came from totally different backgrounds. Almost nobody had something in common’ (Hunter 2017). This penultimate sequence represents thus a performance of Blackness that defies any possible drawing of borders, not just through Peck’s personal connections to Haiti, the Congo, and France, but also through the silence and anonymity of the 30-second sequence. With nothing but their silent gaze for the audience to contemplate, without any descriptive identifying text to accompany their presence, Peck and Baldwin, through each other create a Blackness that allows for inclusion regardless of class, gender, sexual orientation, language, nationality, religious or political affiliation, social or cultural belonging or any other self-identification, individual or collective. Each one of these faces could belong to any of the various Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, Lusophone, Arabophone African diasporas, or come from the African continent. The anonymity in this sequence, like that of the Black Lives Matter protestors and many of the other nameless, context-less Black faces in the film, is like a refusal to impose any particular narrative of Blackness upon these faces, but to let these faces speak their own stories. No outsider can tell them who or what they are, but each of them can define – or not – their Blackness and Afro-diasporic identity in their own terms. This defiance and transcendence of borders affords a reading of these faces outside of space and time, as any one of these individuals could belong to any particular iteration of the African diaspora, to any particular cultural, national, linguistic, historical dimension of Blackness or to all – or none – of them at once. I Am Not Your Negro thus opens itself up to and performs a transnational Black consciousness in which the diaspora can, paradoxically, silently speak its own histories.

Conclusion

In the summer of 2020, in the middle of global protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Raoul Peck felt compelled to publish an article in the French weekly newspaper, Le 1. In his article referencing George Floyd’s last words, ‘J’étouffe (I can’t breathe)’, Peck decries not the racism that has ravaged the United States but the racism in France. He references the numerous French responses to I Am Not Your Negro, wherein journalists or audience members ask for reassurance that the film is only about the United States. In his article, Peck unequivocally and unapologetically made it clear why he can never offer this reassurance, stating that ‘c’était également la réalité française, tous les jours, systématiquement. Aussi brutale. Aussi vulgaire [it was equally a French reality, every day, systematically. As brutal. As vulgar]’ (2020). Peck’s declaration only states out loud what his cinematographic form had already shown: ‘American’ racism, oppression, racialized violence and white supremacy do exist, in various forms, across nations and borders; his words and his works make it harder for the French to remain ‘colorblind’ and to not affront their own racial injustices. His purported or original intention for the documentary may have been to bring an unpublished manuscript of Baldwin’s to life, but it ended up becoming an indictment of French, and by extension global, white supremacy.

In his book Stolen Images, Peck (2012, 2016) emphasizes that part of why he makes films is to ‘steal images’, by which he means to create images of Blackness and the African diaspora that do not yet exist. I Am Not Your Negro offers Peck an opportunity to steal more images, to create an image of Blackness that does not stop at the U.S. border but allows each and every conceivable iteration of Blackness and of the African diaspora to see themselves, at some point, in some way, reflected in the film. I Am Not Your Negro enacts a new mode of representing Blackness, one which migrates around, through and across boundaries, allowing multiple iterations of Blackness to collide and flow into and out of each other. Peck’s film, understood transnationally, underlines not just the porous borders around Blackness in and of itself, but the ways in which the different iterations of Blackness from different cultures, times, and languages can come together to challenge global anti-Blackness narratives, and yet retain their uniqueness. Maybe, as Baldwin questions, ‘all’ Black experience has in common is its oppression and image-making by the white population, but Peck’s film offers the space for image-making of Black bodies for Black bodies, where the collective narrative of Blackness offers something for each individual without expecting the individual to reflect the collective. Their image is within their control.

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Julianna Blair Watson

Julianna Blair Watson (Ph.D. in French Literature, Emory University) specialises in representations of race, migration, criminality and violence in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and film of the African diaspora. Her research examines the ongoing connection between colonisation, immigration, and racialised violence in Africa, the Caribbean, and metropolitan France; in particular, she focuses on criminality and violence as lenses through which to analyse and develop the ways in which literary and cinematic production thwart France’s discursive and political discrimination of its ‘outsiders.’ She has published on literature from Yasmina Khadra and Baenga Bolya and films including Michael Haneke’s Caché, Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète as well as Raoul Peck’s Sometimes in April and Lumumba: mort d’un prophète. She is currently a French Instructor at Rowan University.

Notes

1. ‘The French would have liked for racism to be only in the United States’. All translations are the author’s own except where a published translation exists.

2. I am indebted here to Crystal Fleming’s argument that the focus on white supremacy as only existing in the United States obscures it as the global phenomenon it is (13). I equally follow Fleming’s directive to connect anti-Blackness to white supremacy (13). I therefore refer to both white supremacy and (narratives of) anti-Blackness as two sides of the same coin.

3. See Diallo (2017); Fleming.

4. See Fleming; Keaton et al. (2012); Tshimanga et al.

5. See Noah (2018).

6. See also Diallo (2016, 2017); Diallo and Assbague (2014); Gerard (2017); Keaton et al; Suaudeau (2019).

7. See also Françoise Vergès who, in her postface to an interview with Aimé Césaire, discusses the transnational flux and ideas in Blackness (94–5).

8. For more on the ties between the diverse histories of colonization and slavery, see Hall (1989); Fleming; Kanor and Anderson (2020); Mbembe; Thomas (2007); Césaire and Vergès (2005).

9. See Nimake and Small (2009).

10. Ibid.

11. Additional problems are the colorism discussed by Frantz Fanon (1952, 20) or what Tessie Mcmillan Cottom (2019, 134–139) calls many universities’ preferences for ‘black ethnics’, that is, those with a foreign accent.

12. See Cottom, Fleming, Hine et al. (2009), Thomas (2007), Wright.

13. Hall (2019) writes that ‘the signifier “black”’ must not be ‘torn from its historical, cultural, and political embedding’ or there is a risk of essentialization and of reproducing structures of racism (91–2). Césaire and Vergès (2005) similarly comment on a shared Afro-diasporic and Black experience.

14. The transcription and orthography of his lyrics here are taken from genius.com.

15. Similarly, Wright talks about the question of choice, as opposed to free will, in global Blackness (p. 114). Mbembe also writes of an imaginary (54–5) much like Hall (1989, 71–3) while Césaire and Vergès (2005) speak of a “conscience d’une identité noire (‘consciousness of a Black identity’, 25–6; 97–9).

16. See Baldwin The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows my Name; Notes of a Native Son

17. Wright equally draws on Baldwin scholars Kaplan and Schwarz as well as Geraldine Murphy for her criticism of Baldwin.

18. See Fanon; Fleming; Mabanckou (Peck 2009).;

19. See also Chan (2017). For more on ‘looking back’, see bell hooks (1992).