Final 342 - Angela Davis Prompt PDF

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Angela Davis Prompt
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CINE 342 Prof. Shimizu 12/15/16

Angela Davis Prompt Anchored in a traditional documentary format, Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners1 arouses strong interest in the breadth of her archive footage. Early in the film, photographs of the streets of Alabama in the 1950s (where Angela grew up) depict a situation of extreme racism. Its director-writer, Shola Lynch, structures the film as a political-thriller, full of mystery, starting it at the end. In doing so, Lynch uses recreation to engender an intimate climate and humanizes the main character, Angela. In the same way, it is efficient in pointing out the basic contradiction of the Black Panthers, who presented a libertarian political project, but exhibited strong sexism in its moral code - something that Angela tried to fight when joining the movement. Depicting convincingly not only racism, but strong anticommunism in the United States at the time (and of course also today), the film also brings the inevitable realization that, in Western society, being born with a black skin is halfway through to a court conviction - which makes Angela’s decision to flee the FBI perfectly understandable. Shola Lynch’s political documentary, tries to bridge the gap between the generations that, on one hand, have lined up shoulder to shoulder with Angela or have collected funds for the international campaign for the release of political prisoners. On the other hand, they have been born into the anti-war coalition during the post-September 11 and anti-capitalist movements of the new century. In the context of Angela's work, the author has dedicated much of her studies to deconstructing, based on historical information and Marxist conceptualizations, part of the distorted visions of African-American women. Another characterization of the film’s production takes place in the intersections between race, class and gender, in which there is a strong distinction in being able to "radicalize" black feminism with its persistence in the 1

Free Angela and All Political Prisoners. Directed by Shola Lynch. United States: Codeblack Entertainment, 2012. DVD.

dimensions of race and class. It is important to punctuate the “silence” of women of color as producers of knowledge about their own history and experiences. In the case of black women, invisibility is in classical feminist studies, where their experiences were completely ignored in the name of a homogenization of the definition of woman, erasing the dimensions of class and race / ethnicity. 2 Angela's analysis throughout the film is interesting insofar as it compromised the development of the black revolutionary struggle with gender equality, for it becomes one of the requirements for assessing the progress of the revolution. Because of the persistent power of racism, “criminals" and “evildoers" are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. 3 As an activist for the liberation of political prisoners, but also as one who experienced the violence of the patriarchal, racist and misogynist system in her own skin, Angela Davis stood out for the lucidity with which she unveiled the insides of a cruel machinery class, a genre that supports the so-called bourgeois "democracies" of today. Despite all the political persecution and the repeated attempts by conservative powers to silence her voice, Angela Davis continued her courageous journey as an educator, activist, and writer. Angela Davis sees not only vestiges of the slave system in prisons: she sees a historical continuity that leads to her defense that today, in the 21st century, we need a new abolitionist movement. She defends the possibility of an activism focused on obsolescence of incarceration as a dominant form of punishment, but remarks that we can not do this by brandishing axes and literally investing in the prison walls, but by calling for new democratic institutions to discuss problems which are never discussed productively by prisons. 4 Effectively, the need to think about the different problems articulating source of the origins of domination like race, gender, and class was resumed. One of the most popular concepts today among the different feminisms (community, queer, trans, Latin American, lesbian, Chicano and more) is that of intersectionality 5, understanding that different ways of oppression and

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Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Bantom Books, 1984. 3 D  avis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. 4 Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. 5 Yuval-Davis, Nira. Intersectionality and Feminist Politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, SAGE Publications (UK and US), 2006, 13 (3), pp.193-209.

privilege create variations in both forms, as in the intensity in which people experience oppression. Ideologies of sexuality -race and gender- (shape) representations of and treatment received by WOC both within and outside prison. 6 Thus, dialogue takes place more today from a diversity of partial looks and not from a pretension of universality that for years has made invisible those who were not heterosexual, educated and white women of feminist theory. The merit of the film is the contextualization that it makes, in historical and political terms, of Angela’s judgment, in time and space. A vivid portrait is presented, even though most often from a didactic and even chronological narrative structure, but without ever being a bureaucratic, cabinet-like film. The line of argument against Angela Davis was based not only on the doctrines of national security - the anti-communist ideology and the notion of 'internal enemy' - not only in centuries of oppression of white lords against black slaves, but very centrally, in dealing with a woman. As a result of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, African-American women, such as Alice Walker, Bell Hooks, and Angela, made some progress in the movement. Today they are recognized as intellectuals and their productions have guaranteed space. Within the movement there is a position of combat to the sexism on the part of many men. But because the permanences mark many historical processes, some advances have been obtained, and serious problems remain, such as the birth control policies on black women, considered by many sectors of society reproducers of misery and crime. Throughout the readings and the film, Davis investigates the notion of an abolition democracy, yet to come, a set of social relations free from oppression and injustice.

Works Cited

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Shimizu, Celine. "SFSU CINE 342 Lecture 11฀ On Angela Davis and Shola Lynch." Lecture, California, San Francisco, December 5, 2016.

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Free Angela and All Political Prisoners . Directed by Shola Lynch. United States: Codeblack Entertainment, 2012. DVD. Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Bantom Books, 1984. Shimizu, Celine. "SFSU CINE 342 Lecture 11฀ On Angela Davis and Shola Lynch." Lecture, California, San Francisco, December 5, 2016. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Intersectionality and Feminist Politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, SAGE Publications (UK and US), 2006, 13 (3), pp.193-209....