The first piece of audio in this video essay offers an important disclaimer for the project: “I probably wouldn’t say this in front of white folks. But in front of y’all [Black folks] I’m gon’ speak my mind.” The sound bite, borrowed from Tim Story’s Barbershop (2002), speaks to what Leslie Odom Jr. described as “dangerous” and “daring” (Hunter 2021) in Kemp Powers’s script for the 2020 film adaptation of One Night in Miami… (ONIM). The film is a fictionalized story of a real historical moment when Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, and Malcolm X met in 1964 at the Hampton House Motel in Miami, Florida. The gathering occurred during a time of social turmoil, heightened political activism, and personal crossroads for each character. Powers uses this setting as the backdrop to imagine the dynamics of a private conversation fueled by ideological debates on religious organizing, colorism, classism, economic exploitation, social activism, and, ultimately, Black power.

In line with Odom’s description of ONIM, this video essay is itself a daring exploration of what I refer to as “racial aesthetics.” Drawing on the work of Josef Sorett (2016), I use racial aesthetics to refer to the assemblage of discourses and debates that have occurred in/through Black American cinema for over a century. If aesthetics refers to a “certain distribution of the sensible” (2009, 1), as Jacques Rancière suggests, and “a way of inhabiting space… looking and becoming,” as bell hooks (2009) argues, then racial aesthetics signifies the process of and intention to make sensible the simultaneously constructed, incongruous, embodied, and “real” experiences of race through cultural productions. Racial aesthetics challenge Eurocentric Western notions of “common sense” aesthetics (Dyer 1997; Gikandi 2001) by illuminating the assemblages and the multifaceted dialogics of intraracial conversations, performances, and significations of race in what Melissa Harris-Perry (2004) calls the “everyday talk” of Black communities. From Oscar Micheaux to Gordon Parks, Julie Dash, Cheryl Dunye, Spike Lee, Tyler Perry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, the centrality of this type of everyday talk is evident across Black cinematic history.

Throughout the video essay, I use bricolage to audio-visually echo the polyphony of voices, visuals, and sounds that signify both the unifying factors and the cracks in Black racial constructions. The montage sequences include clips from Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920), Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree (1969), Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman (1997), Keenen Ivory Wayans’s White Chicks (2004), and other films to highlight the continuity of conversations about Black identity, history, and futures across Black films. Along with this, I layer audio from nonfiction speeches, interviews, and debates, in which Black artists, activists, and cultural theorists offer pointed statements on racial solidarity, disagreements, and possibilities for social progress. Including Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X’s 1960 debate, alongside James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni’s 1971 conversation, for example, not only frames the historical period of ONIM’s fictionalized history but also historically grounds the discourses on Blackness and the politics of art that are grappled with in the compilation of fiction films. While many private-public debates often privilege the voices of Black men, as in ONIM, the compilations of films featured in Parts One and Three of the video essay intentionally highlight Black women’s presence as interlocutors in racial aesthetics, signifying the critical role that Black women have played in these conversations, as Odom (Hunter 2021) also implies in his interview. The juxtaposition of audiovisual materials in each part represents a cinematic ebb and flow in the production of Blackness.

To build on the political imperative that Tommy L. Lott (1999) assigns to contemporary Black cinema and the discursivity that Michael B. Gillespie (2016) demands of “film Blackness,” the intertextual and polyphonic assemblage of audiovisual materials in the video essay demonstrates the “critical capacity” (2016, 5) of Black American cinema to hold the tensions of racial aesthetics. Within ONIM itself, the ensemble cast, characters’ movements, and cinematic framing signify the mutability of discourses within intraracial conversations. Beyond ONIM, the ensembles of characters, dialogues, images, and performances seen across the history of Black American cinema evince the instability yet persistence of racial configurations and the imaginative possibilities of pluralistic representation through the cinematic form. Racial aesthetics in/through cinema illuminates the historical continuity of strategic essentialism as a pointed political practice while, at the same time, revealing and embracing the inconstancy, intersectionality, and difference within group identities. While debates over positive and negative Black representations continue in the everyday talk of Black communities (Gates 2018), these unresolved debates are themselves important practices of critical questioning and, according to E. Patrick Johnson, make up the “very thing that constitutes ‘black’ culture” (2003, 2 emphasis added).

Two key scenes from ONIM ultimately frame the discussion of racial aesthetics in this video essay. In one clip, featured in the opening of the video, Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) insists that “we [Black people] are all far from the same” despite Malcolm X’s (Kingsley Ben-Adir) insistence on the commonness of Black experiences. In the other clip, featured at the conclusion, Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) explains to Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) that, despite some hesitation to adopt the term “Black power,” his definition of the phrase fundamentally means self-definition and agency—in his words, “a world where we’re safe to be ourselves.” The conversations in these scenes signify the precarity of racial constructions and the imperative to imagine ourselves as “so much more,” in Cooke’s words. This video essay explores the Black cinematic tradition as a site through which Black discursivity, as Gillespie (2016) describes, has been performed. In conjunction with other storytelling art forms (such as literature, poetry, and photography), recognizing Black American cinema as a tradition of representational and discursive assemblages makes clear the heterogeneity, creativity, and agency of Black communities and our ongoing practices of self-definition.

Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. Routledge.

Gates, Raquel J. 2018. Double Negative: The Black Image & Popular Culture. Duke University Press.

Gikandi, Simon. 2001. “Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic.” Michigan Quarterly Review 40 (2): 318–50.

Gillespie, Michael B. 2016. Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film. Duke University Press.

Harris-Perry, Melissa V. 2004. Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. Princeton University Press.

hooks, bell. 2009. Belonging: A Culture of Place. Routledge.

Hunter, Karen. 2021. “The Cast of Regina King Directed One Night in Miami….” The Karen Hunter Show, January 12.

Johnson, E. Patrick. 2003. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Duke University Press.

King, Regina, dir. 2020. One Night in Miami…. Amazon Studios.

Lott, Tommy L. 1999. “A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema (1992).” In African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000, edited by Hazel Arnett Ervin. Twayne.

Rancière, Jacques. 2009. “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge.” Critical Inquiry 36 (1): 1–19.

Sorett, Josef. 2016. Spirit in the Dark. Oxford University Press.

Story, Tim, dir. 2002. Barbershop. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).

Danyelle M. Greene is a scholar-practitioner whose areas of interest include the study and production of African-American cinema, documentary, and aesthetics. Her work focuses especially on the politics of representation and re-presentation of blackness, gender, and religion in film. Greene uses filmmaking and written scholarship as complementary modes of critical inquiry and exploration. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges theory and practice, traditional scholarship and creative research.

Greene’s video essay uses a range of films to demonstrate her arguments regarding racial aesthetics in One Night in Miami…. In particular, she states that the film, in a kind of critical fabulation, uses “fiction to explore a continuous conversation on what it means to be Black in America” (Greene, 2025). In order to emphasize the way the film participates in this ongoing conversation, Greene uses split screen, overlapping sound, voiceover and text on screen to place into dialogue clips from the film with archival footage of the Clay-Liston match, interviews with Malcolm X, and from the tumultuous year of 1963–64, including the March on Washington and the escalation of the Vietnam War.

While providing this broader historical context, Greene is attentive to the formal strategies of the film, particularly the movement of the characters between the private space of the hotel room, and the public spaces of hyper-surveillance and racial discrimination. In terms of selection of clips, Greene makes an extremely astute use of the scenes with Malcolm X and Sam Cooke, highlighting the ideological differences within the Black separatist and integrationist models. Greene is also attentive to the composition of the scenes, noting the use of racking focus, mobile camera, and framing to emphasize the ideological tensions between Malcolm X and Cooke.

For Greene, the staging of the conversations among the characters forward ongoing questions about Black life in America, including “Does change happen within or outside a broken system?” and “What does (or should) activism actually look like?” Greene employs Gayatri Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism to “assemble one’s imagined community” towards political ends. At this point, Greene reads in voiceover a quote by Spivak, while we read a quote from James Baldwin’s “The Creative Process” (1962), with the relation between the two unexplained, perhaps more conjunctural, a strategy Greene employs through the layering of Nikki Giovanni’s conversation with James Baldwin from 1971, with a quote from W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Criteria of Negro Art” from 1926. The video essay ends with a montage of Black cinema “speaking” to each other across time and space.

Greene’s video essay offers a productive concept of racial aesthetics to read Black cinema as participating in an ongoing dialogue about the nature of Black culture, politics, and being. Most usefully, she asserts that this dialogue can be found in Black cinema across different time periods, genre, and industrial practice. Greene further draws upon a breadth of Black film scholarship that have engaged questions concerning the nature and goals of Black cinematic art, as well as audience and reception practices. Altogether, Greene has used the video essay to deftly illuminate another dimension of Black film aesthetics.

In a powerful work of assemblage, Greene has brought together a host of rich materials from films, interviews, scholarly writing, and her own conceptualization to create a scorching interrogation of media images and their connections to the question of racial identity, particularly focusing on those moments when Black folks—outside of white earshot—stop “wearing the mask,” to quote Paul Laurance Dunbar. Green unpacks Josef Sorret’s notion of “racial aesthetics” and reads it across Regina King’s important, sovereignly quiet but stealthy film, One Night in Miami… (2020). This video essay represents a key study of an under-examined film from an important Black woman filmmaker, highlighting an important moment of intra-cultural meaning-making, dialogue, and exchange between Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Muhammad Ali, and Jim Brown.

In its powerful revision of the notion of “aesthetics” in a political framework, Greene’s work braids film analysis into a broader cultural context and cinematic history, including voices as varied as James Baldwin, Paul C. Taylor, Melissa Harris Perry, Jacques Rancière, Stuart Hall, Leslie Odom Jr., Racquel J. Gates, Shohat and Stam, and curating a rich set of clips from Nothing But a Man (1964), The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), The BlacKkKlansman (2018), and Barbershop (2002), as well as news clips and a set of powerful archival photographs. The author builds a vision of Black internal worlds—whether moments of prayer, conversation and respite for mega-stars Ali, X, Cooke and Brown, barbershop moments, or those captured in the photographs of Black women’s portraits. The author situates “talk” as a part of the aesthetic world of Black people rather than just a means of communication. Key to their discussion is the notion of “everyday talk,” a crucial, peaceful and deliberative mode of reflection behind closed doors that is important to Black life but rarely revealed in media. Excavating care and determination, and their power as sites of respite and restoration, is a key contribution of this brimming and insightful essay.

CC by 4.0