Protesting on Screen: Black Protest Films in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract:This article examines the recent (2012–2019) work of Black filmmakers, television show runners, and directors whose aim is to directly engage and bring attention to the #blacklivesmatter movement through film by staging protest scenes in their work. Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s feature film Queen & Slim (2019), George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give (2018), and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) will serve as the anchoring texts for this article. The films were marketed as “a Black Lives Matter picture,” “protest art,” and “a Black Lives Matter odyssey” because of their explicit tackling of police brutality, state-sanctioned violence, critique of racial capitalism, and ability to challenge notions of criminality and justice.Throughout this article I will argue that in seeking to stage protests, Black film-makers have often produced “protest art” that is hollow, misguided, not movement-aligned, and fails to call for action or provide any substantive message for a nascent movement. Beyond examining the protest scenes themselves, this work also delves into how these films as a whole signify two leading and arguably intersecting schools of thought—Afro-Pessimism and Afrofuturism. I consider how salient narratives of nihilism and anti-Black violence animates the work of Afro-Pessimists. Conversely, I look at how these texts both include and at times lack narratives of what Fred Moten describes as “Black optimism,” escapism, and solidarity. Overall, this work considers the question, how can we create protest art that tends to the realities of anti-Blackness, while simultaneously challenging us to reimagine a new collective future, through Black resistance and protest, that is explicitly for us and by us?