Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic by Amy Abugo Ongiri (review)

Commerce, consumption, creativity, and collectivity are central to literary and film scholar Amy Abugo Ongiri's ambitious interdisciplinary study of the urban cultural politics of the Black Power movement in the United States. Wide-ranging in scope, eclectic in approach, and academic in tone, Spectacular Blackness examines tensions between revolutionary art, popular culture, radical politics, and mainstream appeal.

Analysis of Chester Himes's 1965 detective novel Cotton Comes to Harlem and the 1970 release of its film adaptation serve as an introduction to the study. Himes's choice of Harlem as a locale, and his focus on a masculine underworld of violence and vice helped shape, Ongiri argues, "the creation of a postwar African American culture that was profoundly visual, aggressively vernacular, and grounded in urban lower-class cultural and political expression" (7).

In a similar way, Ongiri offers that the 1970 release of Cotton Comes to Harlem signaled a new "craze for the images of spectacularized African American urban violence" (5). As production on the action movie began in 1967, the film—which was written with assistance from both Ossie Davis and LeRoi Jones—is ripe for exploring the attendant transformation in cultural production as the rallying cry for the African American freedom struggle shifted from "Freedom Now!" to "Black Power!"

It is this charged and pregnant moment, which Ongiri defines as marked both by "the postsegregation call for Black Power and the search to define the contours of a discrete Black aesthetic (7)" and the start of "a wider U. S. interest in production and consumption of popular visual images of African American culture" (8) that animates Spectacular Blackness. Drawing from Himes's contradictory experience as an expatriate writer of detective fiction who briefly returned to the States to make Hollywood films set in Harlem, the book's subsequent chapters examine how cultural workers inspired by Black Power navigated the rapidly increasing hunger for images of "spectacular blackness" in U. S. popular culture.

Chapter one, "'Black Is Beautiful!' Black Power Culture, Visual Culture, and the Black Panther Party," looks at the Party's successful presentation of itself on the national and international stage during the late 1960s as "the vanguard of the revolution," as urban, youthful, defiant, and possessing revolutionary potential, using its "sophisticated understanding of and engagement with mass media and popular culture" (42). This chapter also considers how strategic, sensational, and symbolic imagery created by the Party soon after its founding in 1966 influenced key contemporaneous cultural workers, such as comedian Richard Pryor, as well as the larger cultural imaginary. Mindful of the possibilities and constraints of commodification, Ongiri also explores the paradox of how the Party, though committed to armed revolutionary struggle to stop violence and injustice in the late 1960s, is most remembered now for its "interventions into the realm of symbolic, rather than military, culture" (33).

"Radical Chic: Affiliation, Identification, and the Black Panther Party," the book's next chapter, opens with Tom Wolfe's famous 1970 "Radical Chic" essay that claims to depict a fundraising party for the Panthers at composer Leonard Bernstein's Park Avenue duplex. In his essay, Wolfe's tone is dismissive; he characterizes this gathering of radical black activists and white wealthy supporters as a somewhat pathetic assembly of elite white guilt. After recalling this influential essay, Ongiri unpacks and interrogates Wolfe's implicit claims about the possibilities for cross-racial identification and affiliation. Contrary to Wolfe, she argues that "the Black Panther Party attracted widespread popular support because its visual iconography and discourse of revolution inspired deep identification among audiences with widely divergent aims and interests" (81).

Attentive to current debates about race and identification, and possible links between sexual desire and political action, as well as the historical reality of FBI-inspired chaos and violence within the Party, the author shares the contours of a handful...