Mary C Schmitt, PhD | Quinnipiac University (original) (raw)

Papers by Mary C Schmitt, PhD

In addition, I'd like to acknowledge the support of many institutions and persons who made this p... more In addition, I'd like to acknowledge the support of many institutions and persons who made this project possible. UCI's Graduate Division awarded me the Graduate Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year, which allowed me the time during the Fall quarter to work on the dissertation without employment. I'd also like to thank the international journal Black Camera for allowing me to reproduce work from the article I published in 2018. Moreover, I would like to send my deepest thanks to KQED, Inc. in San Francisco and, in v particular, to Robert Chehoski, KQED's archival manager, for allowing me access to their very important documentary Black Power, Black Panthers. Finally, I'd like to thank UCI's former Visual Studies librarian Emilee Matthews for her assistance in helping me to access archival materials central to this dissertation. Friends, old and new, deserve special acknowledgement for the sustaining and myriad types of support they've provided. Maggie Dethloff has been an amazing confidante and dissertationwriting partner; I cannot thank her enough for the caring and thoughtful conversations we've had about our work and our lives. My new friend and family member, Jim Gaszynski, deserves special mention for his role in keeping me connected to family throughout this process and for always being curious and ready for spirited conversations. A shout-out to my core group of Chicago women who always had my back throughout my life and encouraged me to pursue my dreams. Heather Watts is the reason I even went to college. Becky Schramm's confidence in me warded off my doubts and fears. Christy Nguyen inspired me to always learn, evolve, and push beyond myself. Lisa Clark (and Tommy) have shown me love and joy that rejuvenate me. Finally, I'd like to also acknowledge my union comrades and thank them for teaching me the beauty and struggle of grassroots organizing and the strength of collective power. My parents, Darlene and Mike Schmitt, are my roots and part of everything I do. They're unconditional love has created the foundation for my commitment to make a better world and stand on the side of justice. My brother is my forever-hero, who has been there for me through the best and the worst and deserves a special thanks for answering many random calls about film history (when I'm supposed to be the expert). My sister-in-law is my she-ro, whose spirit and intellect keeps me on my toes and who also deserves recognition for always lending her ear and advice about nearly everything. My nephews are the light that drives my purpose; everything I do is for the world I dream of leaving them. Through it all, and in every way, there is one person whose love, generosity, and spirit has sustained me through the process of writing the dissertation and eight years of graduate school. Richard Gaszynski, my partner in life, has been there day-in, day-out to listen to my struggles and experience my triumphs. He has lent me his ear and mind to work through the most critical arguments of my research. He has supported my political, educational, and spiritual transformations. All the while, he has made life more fun and more beautiful than I've ever imagined. This dissertation is as much his as it is mine.

Black Camera, 2018

Abstract:How is it possible for Malcolm X’s famous call for justice and dignity “by any means nec... more Abstract:How is it possible for Malcolm X’s famous call for justice and dignity “by any means necessary” to become a neoliberal sound byte for self-responsibility? What are the social, cultural, and economic conditions that demand a liberal refashioning of the history and memory of Malcolm X? What is at stake not only in the erasure of Malcolm X’s radical message, but also in its deployment in the service of neoliberal policies and logic? This essay explores these questions through a close analysis of the 1992 CBS television documentary Malcolm X: The Real Story. To set the foundation for this analysis, I first explore the resurgence of Malcolm X’s memory in the 1990s and the cultural, political, and economic conditions that shaped the era’s discourse on race. To develop a radical lens through which to interpret the documentary, I relate racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and social movement history to the political contexts of the Reagan and Clinton administrations. In the final analysis, I closely examine rhetorical and visual devices to illustrate how the liberal rewriting of the CBS documentary operates. I mean to expose and critically analyze how white supremacist logic undergirds neoliberal forms of anti-racism and to see the ways in which neoliberal logic contains and adulterates what we can think in terms of equality and justice. I also mean to disclose how presumably anti-racist texts, such as the CBS documentary, under the terms and lexicon of neoliberalism, work to rationalize and justify the violence racial capitalism necessitates.

Black Camera: An International Film Journal, 2018

How is it possible for Malcolm X’s famous call for justice and dignity “by any means necessary” t... more How is it possible for Malcolm X’s famous call for justice and dignity “by any means necessary” to become a neoliberal sound byte for self-responsibility? What are the social, cultural, and economic conditions that demand a liberal refashioning of the history and memory of Malcolm X? What is at stake not only in the erasure of Malcolm’s radical message, but also in its deployment in the service of neoliberal policies and logic? This essay explores these questions through a close analysis of the 1992 CBS television documentary Malcolm X: The Real Story. To set the foundation for this analysis, I first explore the resurgence of Malcolm’s memory in the 1990s and the cultural, political, and economic conditions that shaped the era’s discourse on race. To develop a radical lens through which to interpret the documentary, I relate racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and social movement history to the political contexts of the Reagan and Clinton administrations. In the final analysis, I closely examine rhetorical and visual devices to illustrate how the liberal re-writing of the CBS documentary operates. I mean to expose and critically analyze how white supremacist logic undergirds neoliberal forms of antiracism and to see the ways in which neoliberal logic contains and adulterates what we can think in terms of equality and justice. I also mean to disclose how presumably antiracist texts, such as the CBS documentary, under the terms and lexicon of neoliberalism, work to rationalize and justify the violence racial capitalism necessitates.*

*This work is highly indebted to the scholarship of Jodi Melamed in her influential book Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). My definitions and understanding of how liberal modes of antiracism operate derives largely from Melamed’s work in Represent and Destroy. Liberal antiracisms, or what Melamed also calls race-liberal orders, are official, state-sanctioned modes of antiracism “for making the inequalities that global capitalism generate[s] appear necessary, natural, or fair” (xvi).

CV by Mary C Schmitt, PhD

Conference Papers by Mary C Schmitt, PhD

Marvel's 2018 film Black Panther is the third highest grossing theatrical release of all time whi... more Marvel's 2018 film Black Panther is the third highest grossing theatrical release of all time while spotlighting one of the most important historical symbols of Black radical liberation: the Black Panther. The historical impact of this symbol and the powerful images of Black superheroes and heroines reverberate in the largely positive response to this film. The film even garnered critical acclaim from Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrice Cullers, who proclaimed: " Black Panther is a celebration of black life and the global black diaspora, and it centers on a world where black people are in charge of their own destinies. " This powerful statement reflects the historically radical principles of the real Black Panther Party, that is Black self-determination and international solidarity, which are also part of BLM's own political platform today. The fact that Disney's production company would actually feature, and perhaps even celebrate, these radical ideals seems unfathomable. This presentation sets out to investigate this unfathomability, and what is happening when Disney gets hold of Black radical symbols, history, and memory., among others, who interrogate the hegemony of liberal antiracist discourses in cultural production. These interrogations are most familiar in cultural critiques of multiculturalism, diversity, and identity politics that work to legitimize and conceal conditions of violence and give white supremacist structures and systems a veneer of civility and respectability. These types of critiques are especially familiar in liberal re-writings of the Civil Rights Movement that bolster narratives of US exceptionality and color-blind universalism. A less familiar critique focuses on the way these liberal antiracist discourses work to rewrite Black radical memory, and here, Pan-Africanist memory. This terrain of unfamiliarity, or unfathomability, is what is distinct about my project. I interrogate how it is possible, and what are the stakes, in fitting Black radical, internationalist symbols, histories, and memory within this hegemonic liberal framework. To pursue this interrogation in Black Panther, my analysis focuses on the portrayal of the CIA, the imaginings around raw materials and resources in Africa, and the treatment of US Black radicals (specifically N'Jadaka/Killmonger and T'Chaka) and their Pan-Africanist visions of Black liberation. These focal points open up an examination of the histories that haunt the film, specifically the memory of the Black Panther Party, the memory of the Pan-Africanist leaders Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah, and the memory of a Black internationalist revolution. This also opens up an examination of the historical use of the " Black criminal male " in popular media portrayals of Black radical thought and praxis. The goal is to deconstruct the visual and rhetorical conventions that reform these radical figures and legacies and distort the more transformative, anti-racist impulses and principles of our past and present social justice leaders.

Conference Presentations by Mary C Schmitt, PhD

My paper examines, and aims to initiate a conversation about, the role popular media play in reme... more My paper examines, and aims to initiate a conversation about, the role popular media play in remembering Black struggle, specifically, Black Radical struggle. I examine a very current, popular documentary that will allow us to engage a particularly contradictory and complex example of Black Radical memory-making; one that may help us navigate and identify the insidious effects of liberalism on our revolutionary thinking of what antiracism and decolonial struggle can mean and do.

The following paper focuses on the radical filmmaking of Ivan Dixon and Sam Greenlee in their co-... more The following paper focuses on the radical filmmaking of Ivan Dixon and Sam Greenlee in their co-production of the 1973 film The Spook Who Sat by the Door, examining how the film's cinematography and mise-en-scene contribute to the radical politics and history for which the film is known. Scholars and proponents of the film have concentrated on the film's production history, due significantly to the federal censorship of the film and the guerilla filmmaking tactics deployed in its production, and the film's diegetic narrative, which critiques the embrace of racial liberalism by the black bourgeois class and, through the training of a revolutionary guerilla army, offers a more radical solution to empower black people of all classes. Building on these concentrations, this essay seeks to address a gap in the scholarship that has overlooked the significant role played by the aesthetic choices that are central to the film's political message. The cinematography of the film contributes a metatextual critique that works to demystify the power dynamics of classic Hollywood filmmaking and expose the disciplinary operations of a post-civil rights, race-liberal gaze. The filmmakers play with and parody classic Hollywood filmmaking and Blaxploitation film codes and mobilize camera angle, camera movement, and mise-en-scene to immerse viewers into cinematic identifications (with the black bourgeois class) only to subvert and alienate their expectations. In these varied aesthetic choices, the filmmakers deploy a strategy of resistance that I am calling cinematic absurdity. As the film is many times described as a satire, I follow the instruction of postcolonial theorist/activist/dramatist Ngugi Wa Thiongo in attending to the way cultural producers mobilize satire in an already satirized reality. Ngugi asks the question, " how does one satirize a satire? " , probing the space of absurdity these forms of cultural expression open. By critically inhabiting and subverting the race-liberal gaze, through a cinematics of the absurd, The Spook Who Sat by The Door presents a radical critique of the toxically limiting contours of antiracist thinking under post-civil rights racial liberalism, offering cinematic tactics of resistance that battle modes of vision that collaborate with racism, American imperialism, and the exploitation of poor people of color. The film's aesthetic choices are, too, part of the radical political act for which the film stands.

Black Camera, 2018

Black Camera: An International Film Journal, 2018