This is the edited transcript of an interview with Haile Gerima that took place in August 2012 at the Sankofa store-Sankofa Films, Videos, Books and Cafe-at 2714 Georgia Avenue, NW, Washington DC, 20001. Located across from Howard University, where the filmmaker teaches in the John H. Johnson School of Communications' Department of Radio, Television and Film, this site is a vital Black community center as well as the postproduction site for his Negod Gwad productions. The interview spanned two and a half hours and covered a wide range of topics, most of which pivoted around Teza (2008), his most recent and internationally renowned film; Teza was released on DVD in May 2012 and can be ordered at www.sankofa.com.

This article examines Haile Gerima's film work from his earliest cinema (Hour Glass, Child of Resistance, and Bush Mama) to his latest cinema (Teza) with the political and intellectual work of George L. Jackson distinctly in mind. It analyzes these Pan-African screen texts with other seminal texts such as Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye and thus locates "Comrade" George L. Jackson, "the Dragon," in the theater of African cinema of liberation. Finally, it recalls rather than overlooks the filmmaker's own radical invocation of the revolutionary prisoner as a source of artistic inspiration toward new possibilities of African film criticism and Global African social and political consciousness.

Regard Haile Gerima’s earliest cinema, from beginning to end, and watch his tendency to do remarkable things with the mundane. Behold what he often does with closing credits from Child of Resistance (1972) to Teza (2008). The first set of films does not identify him as producer, director and scriptwriter, or editor. The auteur signed Bush Mama (1976), simply, “ ANSWERABLE.” The message was that he strove to be answerable himself; artistically, he was and is answerable to forces that leave auteur individualism in the dust: Ancestors, community, elders, youth, humanity, “All Over the World Afrikans” as one firebrand poet put it ages ago. This was an important point to establish in places and spaces where other filmmakers might not think to make meaning or leave messages at all. The ensuing gallery of words and images illustrates both how poetic his Pan-African cinema is and how answerable it is to poets of the page. Here, it is the call to their response; and they respond quite visually to this series or flow of juxtaposed film stills that reconnects images, geographies, time spaces, and populations too often disconnected, even systematically segregated, by academic criticism and assorted politics of the status quo.

This article examines how the revolutionary African cinema of Djibril Diop Mambety reconceptualizes what is conventionally termed sexuality, pleasure, or eroticism, under colonialism and neocolonialism. Critically, it argues against puritanical interpretations of continental film work and for an anti-imperialist black body politics freed from puritanical imperialism or its project of dominating desire of all kinds. In particular, it demonstrates how Mambety's magna opera, Touki-Bouki and Hyenes, expose and resist what Frantz Fanon called "the naked truth" of colonization, or the capitalist empire of the West, toward an ecstatic politics of pan-African revolution.

Reviewed by: Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Double Crossings Greg Thomas Linda Lang-Peralta, ed. Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Double Crossings. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2006. 171 pp. The critical response to the writings of Antiguan-born author Jamaica Kincaid constitutes a very interesting phenomenon and a potentially great topic for literary study itself. For example, there is the largely negative, more or less anti-colonial/anti-imperial reading of her work in the Caribbean and among Caribbean scholars in various African Diasporic locales—even if this voice does not always find itself in print. There are the generally more invested, yet complex readings of Black and Caribbean women critics invested in past, present, and future Black and Caribbean women’s writing, across colonial national boundaries. Then, there is also the reading of Kincaid as a kind of lone cult hero for universal feminism—offered by mostly white or Western feminist critics in North America (and, less often, Europe) who pay little or no attention to more anti-colonial/anti-imperial readings of her in the context of neo-colonial/imperial worlds, literary and otherwise. Linda Lang-Peralta’s new collection of critical essays belongs to this latter category and might be interestingly engaged in this light toward a new set of readings of Kincaid’s icon-status and corpus. This is a compact compilation of conference papers (eight in all) presented at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference held in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2002. The context is significant. For the Kincaid of “American” or “American Comparative Literature” is scarcely the Kincaid of other, less doting scholars or schools of thought, for whom Kincaid is neither exotic nor simply and strictly heroic. Yet Lang-Peralta makes larger claims for this compilation that are problematic: “relatively little has been published on her exciting work since the 1990s, work that includes rich analysis of issues central to literary criticism in recent years . . . . In this groundbreaking collection of essays, scholars have given Kincaid’s ‘new developments’ the serious critical attention it deserves” (“Introduction” 13). The collection is not so groundbreaking, in truth. Most (if not all) of the contributors approach Kincaid’s older and newer works as if they had never been approached before beyond their more canonical positionings—as if a range of Black and Caribbean scholarship in and outside of the Caribbean did not exist, and as if Callaloo: A Journal of African Diasporic Arts and Letters did not devote an entire issue to Kincaid in 2002 (although this special issue was ironically quite Eurocentric and open to many criticisms itself). Is this not the colonial tradition claiming ground (“new” to it) continued or the consequences of an US Americanism amplified in Kincaid herself? Further, the first three of these eight essays still focus on Kincaid’s Lucy from 1990. The next three focus more on her The Autobiography of My Mother from 1996. The remaining three essays close [End Page 919] things out with a focus on My Brother from 1997, My Garden (Book) from 1999, and then Mr. Potter from 2002, respectively. There is a detailed and useful bibliography of Kincaid texts, interviews, and secondary sources supplied at the end of this collection, although some of the items in the bibliography contradict a number of Lang- Peralta’s editorial claims. Later works are not really emphasized or adequately explored, and their relationship to earlier works that remain misunderstood is not clarified as a result. Such an examination of Kincaid’s later works in relation earlier ones is a worthy project that might be attempted with these essays in mind. One of the consequences of this hegemonic “Americanist” interpretation of Kincaid is that it systematically interprets Kincaid in romantic isolation, separate from any other literature that is not British or “Anglo-American” — “Anglo-American” meaning US settler-colonial “American,” then and now.This mode of interpretation is what Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Double Crossings has to offer. How heroic or rebellious could Kincaid come off in this criticism if it could juxtapose her, her characters, her books, her interviews— all one great big, seamless (and unquestionable) text for so many consumers of her literature—with the far more...

The Freedom Archives would produce The Struggle Inside which in 2001 would become The Murder of George Jackson for Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Liberation, an audio documentary on the 30th anniversary of the death, or murder, of Comrade George, George Lester Jackson, The Dragon. The revolutionary thinker, activist, organizer and author of Soledad Brother (1970) and Blood in My Eye (1972) did not die a natural death, of course. As Jonathan Jackson, Jr. recites, prison guards at San Quentin ruthlessly murdered George Jackson. Mother of George and Jonathan, Georgia Jackson offered more on what happened on August 21, 1971: They set up his murder just like they do everybody else that speaks out against them; and they'll probably do me the same way because I am going to speak every chance I get. . . . People don't love this country so much; they're afraid of what their own country will do to them. Now, who should be surprised that this is not the story told by the un-freedom archives of the FBI, whose first automatic declassification of documents of the U.S. government some would celebrate at the close of 2006?

Welcome to the house of Sylvia Wynter. For this interview conversation, she received us physically and intellectually at her new home somewhere in Oakland, California. Was it this visit or another when we were met with the most amazing meal--to eat--as well as a monumental plate of ideas? It was a few moons ago but you’d never know. This talk was so fully, so completely engaging that it seemed like only a few minutes had passed by once we were done for the day, a perception which this record of it clearly belies. She covers so much material with each answer to each question prepared, often in advance of the asking. She strains to have us meet the call of her words with a response of understanding (“You see?” “You understand what I’m saying?” “The point that I’m trying to make is . . .”). She thinks and urges us to think and re-think as if our very lives depend on it--because they do!

BEFORE SOMEBODY ELSE DIES, I WANT TO BEGIN WITH AN ILLUSTRATION TO make my ultimate point about white sexual violence and Black people. I want to begin with a powerfully illustrative reference or set of references. Yet, as soon as I get particular to make this case poignant and current, what many dub "Babylon" manages to date my examples, make them look old, manufacturing new cases overnight that insist upon our consciousness despite all filtering, whether by popular or academic media. I could recall the now old strip-searching of Black Power activists in public, nationwide, to at once humiliate and titillate; or the new gang/plunger rapes of Black males in police departments or prisons, on one U.S. coast, for example, before a carnival of bullets fired on an unwitting Black male by a special police squad searching for their own serial rapist; or the town shower-hangings and draggings to death of Black men in the South/Midwest and Rocky Mountains; or the state murder of a young Black female, on the other U.S. coast, whose "womanhood" was seen as so dangerous that she was thought to pose a lethal threat, even though she had fallen asleep overnight, afraid, in her [End Page 235] stalled car. From coast to coast, and beyond, I want to begin with a current illustration, but can't.