Rhodes explains the necessity of the Black Panthers' alternative news source as a "weekly act of resistance against the corporation and homogenization of mainstream media, which generally demonized the Panthers as a threat to national order" (103). If the Black Panthers were at war with dominant symbolic culture and its representations of blackness, did their employment/manipulation of media visibility effectively produce a shift in the meaning of blackness?
If, as Fanon suggests, blackness is hinged to its historicity--or, its colonially constructed meanings from the past, is it possible to remove the black image from its past, its negative connotations? Furthermore, if even positive images of blackness do not erase the problems of visual representation, can negative or stereotypical images be used as a method of resistance to white dominance?
The Black Panthers' use of hypermasculine black images worked to provoke white fears, but, as Keeling argues, it also functioned to confound whites' ability to recognize the now unfamiliar black image. Blackness became a threat--not only to white dominance--but to symbolic meaning. It revealed that the previous connotations of blackness were inadequate to understand these new images of black men sporting guns. Did the Panthers succeed then in seizing and transforming the meaning of black identity and visibility by overcoming black 'historicity' and 'liberating the black man from himself,' as Fanon describes?
Is the Black Panther vision--one of class-based politics, overturning of white hegemony, community service, and rhetoric-propaganda--an extension of Fanon's conception of the freedom gained from eschewing the past? How would Fanon's vision negotiate the masculinist-heterosexist-homophobic ideology embedded within Black Panthers' "resistive" and "radical" agenda?
No comments:
Post a Comment