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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 films 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.
Popular Culture and the Democratization of Blackness
The 1970s was a decade where the meaning of blackness was democratized. No longer were race leaders from the respectable black middle class seen as the defining voices of blackness in America, and no longer did black power belong to a precious few. Instead, those who claimed and chose to define blackness as well as embody it moved in and through "the talented tenth," transcending class and geographies, while riding an unprecedented and powerful wave of access to popular culture in order to fashion a broader spectrum of blackness. Beyond "Negro" and "Colored," "Black" offered something unquantifiable and powerful: the power of authorship; the power of self-making and self-actualization; the power of visibility expressed in art, language, and the performance of black style.
This power to shift, remake, and expand signification seemed, for a time, to stop short at the word nigger. To some, nigger is an intransigent word. It is a word that newly declared black folk in the Black Arts Movement seemed unable to resignify in the same way as "bad" and "black." Over time and space, it had arguably come to represent the ultimate objectifier-a word that dehumanized and enacted "thingness"-a conceptualization that fixed a racialized dichotomy...