Every Nigger Is a Star: Reimagining Blackness from Post–Civil Rights America to the Postindependence Caribbean

In 1974 the film Every Nigger Is a Star, produced in Jamaica by Caribbean-born blaxploitation star Calvin Lockhart and shot by noted African American filmmaker William Greaves, was released in Kingston and in Nassau, Bahamas. This article explores this lost film’s production, distribution, disappearance, and unexpected but extensive transatlantic afterlives through the work of visual artists Dave Smith, Barkley L. Hendricks, Nelson Stevens, and Jae Jarrell. Produced in the ideological crosshairs of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements, post–civil rights debates in the United States around the signification and resignification of the word nigger, blaxploitation filmmaking, and the distribution of these films in the postindependence Caribbean, records indicate the film was a sincere attempt by Lockhart to document black creativity in expansive ways. While the film failed to live up to its producer’s expectations, I argue that the photography, paintings, and music drawn from its creation, exhibition, and infectious soundtrack performed the political and cultural work within the diaspora that the film perhaps could not.