Seize the Time!: Military Aesthetics, Symbolic Revolution and the Black Panther Party

Abstract

Government agencies like the FBI and CIA and both local and statewide law enforcement agencies would successfully meet the challenge of the Black Panther Party with a military intervention that would destroy its political power, but they were relatively powerless to counteract their successes in the realm of the symbolic in which the Panthers successfully re-scripted a visual language of military might to argue for Black liberation. While most militaries conceive of propaganda as a way of ‘selling’ the violence that they are charged with conducting, the BPP saw propaganda as one of their most primary imperatives. Just as the Panthers used images of the Black body in military poses and formations to challenge ideas of national belonging in the US, the Panthers’ use of a military aesthetic challenges us to think in new ways about the uses to which a militarised body might be put beyond further state sponsored notions of masculinity.