Reading a "closet screenplay": Hollywood, James Baldwin's Malcolms and the threat of historical irrelevance.

I am attempting to read this odd thing I can only call a "closet screenplay"--James Baldwin's written version of a film about Malcolm X never realized in the visual medium. The reading skills that literary studies offer this anomalous and necessarily politically charged bastard genre are limited given that there is no film, and therefore no film stills, to "read" for Baldwin's representation of the image of Malcolm X on the American consciousness. (1) There are Baldwin's parenthetical narratives of shots and scenes, dialogues and narrator monologues, directorial notes for conjunctions of voice-overs and images, and succinct utilitarian descriptions of the actions of characters. In short, there are components of a narrative without the visual form to join them into a seamless story about the life of Malcolm X.

But the "closet screenplay" seems an appropriate vehicle for a version of Malcolm X written by a queer writer caught between a virulently homophobic Black Nationalist movement in one corner and a reactionary Nixon-era America in another. (2) The media are in tension, the shapes in the work don't fit, the pieces of a written film pull in multiple directions: outward, inward, between themselves. This literature is not "safe" or "healthy," as Baldwin condemns the status quo. The "closet screenplay" offers a formal lesson in the politics of "mainstream" markets, crossover campaigns, and race relations at the salt point in American history where calls for integration recede and self-determination surfaces on a national scene increasingly dominated by visual culture. Further, the circulating print script might offer an example of a "queer" reading practice that does not shut down questions of history, experience, and self-examination with the trump card of settled identity. For Baldwin, history is something to revisit continually in the light of new experiences and political stances. Therein the "story" of Malcolm X becomes not an autobiographical analog to discrete historical eras; rather, it becomes a necessarily unfinished project that accrues new meanings and significance when its parts enter new fields, eras, injustices, and groupings.

For Baldwin, his un-filmed screenplay is an index to America's failure to invest in Black history and artistic production. Nevertheless, the awkwardness of a "closet screenplay" becomes a great asset in a text whose very title bespeaks an inability to fit Malcolm X into one narrative location: One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The clunkiness of the project and the multitude of subjects (Haley, Malcolm X, Baldwin, and "I") point to what I see as the positive potential of Baldwin's historical meditation. Baldwin referred to his project as a "scenario": one version of Malcolm X aware that it exists among other extant versions--and even more possible versions. The significance of Malcolm X for Baldwin was as yet undetermined and, ultimately, undeterminable. Baldwin creates a space that accounts for, without containing, what is often mutually exclusive in the story of Malcolm X: black and white, man and woman, self-determination and integration, wealth and politics. The "I" that is the announced subject of the "scenario" is not necessarily Malcolm nor Baldwin. Rather, the "I" of the scenario is a subject space that negotiates between poles: between the reader/viewer and Malcolm X/American history. Contrary to the ordered, developmental versions of Malcolm X in popular circulation in The Autobiography and in Spike Lee's 1992 Hollywood film, Baldwin's "closet screenplay" does not provide a roadmap to an inevitable present. Instead, Baldwin's "scenario" induces a lost-ness, an awareness both of the orienting function of historical markers and of the simultaneous possibility of alternate markings and orientations. Thus Baldwin constructs a story of Malcolm X as a project that remains relevant to an American political landscape even after the subject of the story has been removed--by assassination--from the national script.

Historical Irrelevance

In Atlanta [Baldwin] visited the monument to Martin Luther King a monument "as absolutely irrelevant as the Lincoln Memorial." Making monuments was "one of the ways the Western world has learned ... to outwit history [and] time--to make a life and a death irrelevant.... There's nothing one can do with a monument." David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (354)

By 1963 James Baldwin had become a famous literary figure and firmly established as the spokesman of the Negro race--for white America. (3) Baldwin had always disparaged--and would always disparage--America for its willful amnesia that entombed history into static monuments and expressed sincere shock at each new news story of racial violence. (4) When Black Power's threat erupted into the American consciousness a few years later, inevitably Hollywood sought a Malcolm X movie that could offer consumers a palliative version of racism as a past historical era with the bribe of token inclusion in the pantheon of Hollywood heroes. Indeed, the telling of the story of Malcolm X in visual form after his assassination is positioned at an important nodal point for American stories of progress after Civil Rights. Amidst the threat of what he called "historical irrelevance," Baldwin argues in a 1970 dialogue with anthropologist Margaret Mead that history only matters inasmuch as we carry it with us now. To Mead's hollow pleas that we "forget" history in a liberal dream of color-lessness where America's (white) children are not punished for their "fathers' sins," Baldwin vilifies any refusal of genealogical inheritance by insisting on "the recognition of where one finds one's self in time or history or now" (177). Baldwin's project of self-recognition necessitates a complex, un-predetermined process of self-examination within an intricate racial matrix of a now-present history. Baldwin's "scenario" of Malcolm X, then, could not present a history of racial progress settled once and for all.

Shortly after Malcolm's murder in 1965, Hollywood approached Baldwin to adapt the Autobiography. By 1970, aware that he was the "Great Black Hope to the Great White Father" (No Name), Baldwin reluctantly agreed and moved from Harlem to Hollywood (by way of Europe). The studio disliked the effect of Baldwin's early drafts and forced upon him Arnold Perl as a "technical assistant." Baldwin quickly realized that his script would be technically cut down to easily digested action scenes. In fact, Baldwin's former secretary, David Leeming, notes that familiar actor-heroes were considered for the role of Malcolm X, even Charlton Heston--"darkened up a bit" (Leeming 297). Anticipating the inevitable, Baldwin hastily published his original version of the script in 1972 as One Day, When I was Lost, and split town. (5) Baldwin later reflected on the cultural pull of Hollywood in The Devil Finds Work (1976), but by then he was largely dismissed as a relic of a past integrationist age. In one negative review, Orde Coombs rejects the essay's "undirected rage" and considers Baldwin's tortured relationship with Hollywood naive. According to Coombs, Baldwin should have known all along that Hollywood was nothing but a cash register waiting to be filled. In 1976, on the other side of the rise of Black Power, anything associated with American capitalist icons were inherently complicit and therefore defunct.

On his side of 1976, however, Baldwin moved to Hollywood to demand Malcolm X's continued relevance. Malcolm X's protest is widely portrayed as a constantly evolving vision. The choice of what stage, location, or version of Malcolm X one chooses to believe or represent becomes a crucial question. The two popular versions of Malcolm X--The Autobiography and Spike Lee's film--present models where earlier protest messages are discarded at each developmental stage. In his "scenario," however, Baldwin brings together protest moments that do not dissipate or die when their speaker (Malcolm X) leaves the stage. Baldwin envisioned the moving picture version of "Malcolm X" as a means of stirring things up: presenting disparate stages of Malcolm in one shot. To do this, Baldwin makes a subtle but fundamental break from the Autobiography and Lee's film with regard to Malcolm's names. In the Autobiography and in Lee's film, we learn Malcolm's given surname half way through--at the moment it is cast off. In stark opposition, in Baldwin's "scenario" all four of Malcolm's names exist together on page three. Malcolm states, "I have had so many names" (One Day 3). Baldwin employs multimedia technologies to present--in one location--"Malcolm Little," "Malcolm X," "Omowale," and "El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz." While the audio track follows the replacement of Malcolm's X by the ceremonial name Omowale ("the son who has returned"), Baldwin simultaneously offers two more images of nominal inscription: El Hajj Malik El Shabazz in the Book of the Holy Register of True Muslims and Malcolm Little in a family Bible in 1925. Malcolm's story disrupts distinct stages of Black history; rather, Malcolm is a historical participant whose conflicting naming ceremonies navigate America's racist struggles.

The "closet screenplay" reads as a kaleidoscopic history of moving parts: fragments of Malcolm X circle among the same space with a mad jamming together of multiple temporalities, time loops, overdubs, and long parenthetical directorial commands. There is no saved Malcolm to calmly narrate flashbacks in a picaresque montage of the American self-made man that is as well choreographed as Lee's dance scene at the Roseland. Instead, occupying the narrator position to bring together a life story are snippets of dialogue from other scenes, other characters, announcers at political rallies, and, most importantly, Malcolm X's own orations, which serve as historical markers in the form of recorded speeches and other media footage. In his directorial notes, Baldwin describes this use of visual technology as "remembered time." Baldwin does not presume to offer a road to enlightenment; rather, Baldwin brings together pieces of the historical record and moments of Malcolm's story into one scene in order to render the past relevant to the present--and the present relevant to the past. With no narrator from the future, the viewer is inside Malcolm's head bombarded by images or tropes from multiple times. She is just as disoriented and multi-directional as Malcolm who exists in "remembered time." (6)

The temporal dysphoria invoked by Baldwin's refusal to separate clearly the stages of Malcolm X's life story poses an insuperable problem to anyone invested in stories of America's already-achieved progress. Spike Lee refers to the "problem" in Baldwin's script as one of orderliness. Lee explains "Baldwin had stuff out of order. He had Malcolm giving speeches at the beginning of the movie that didn't really come until 1963 or 1964, so we had to get rid of those" (Crowdus and Georgakus 20, emphasis mine). The "out-of-orderness" Lee found so inimical to his project of chronological enlightenment and that he simply "got rid of," however, is precisely Baldwin's strategy to use film to disarticulate the discreteness of autobiography mapped onto historical eras. I suggest that a "closet screenplay" serves as the perfect vehicle for this "out-of-order-ness" because it performs an out-of-placeness where a film must make do in written form. Against Lee's imperative for order, Baldwin uses the story of Malcolm X as a means of making visible the disorder of the racism alive in America after Malcolm X's assassination. Baldwin's bringing together of seemingly incommensurate moments of the Autobiography provokes anxiety that history has not been settled, that the systems against which Malcolm X vehemently protested are with us still. A "closet screenplay" reinforces this anxiety by enacting a generic claustrophobia that confirms the feeling that something is not right. The problem, however, is not Baldwin's. The problem is the unfinished-ness of Malcolm X's project of racial justice.

The Autobiography offers a very different temporal model of history based in personal development. The Autobiography employs an ever-present, reassuring narrator from the enlightened future who casts away old ideologies as always having been wrongheaded--if not fun for a time--as new political stances are adopted. The diurnal model appears in Haley's first sentence: "When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night" (Autobiography 1). The temporal markers ("later," "one night") in the opening sentence are unnecessary for strict plot development. The narrator appears as a guide to ferry the reader through his developmental stages by placing sharp temporal distinctions between now and later, between discrete past moments and present ontologies. In Haley's version, Malcolm X-now, as narrator, makes the very story of American racism narratable because he saves readers from being lost hopelessly and forever in the opening nightmare from which we wish to escape totally. Haley uses the autobiography form to graft seamlessly the story of race/racism onto Malcolm as a map of the "road to the salvation of America's very soul" (377). We begin in "Nightmare," move through "Laura" and Malcolm's "Hustler" days, become "Saved," move through the "Black Muslims" and "Mecca," then end finally with Malcolm as "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz" in the very real moment of "1965." In order to move from nightmare to clarity, the past must be escaped.

Though Baldwin's screenplay was canned in 1972, Spike Lee, in conjunction with Warner Brothers, realized Malcolm X 20 years later. The film follows closely the model of the Autobiography where each "chapter" in Malcolm's life comes alive in stunning visual images and where Malcolm-now is present as narrator to sew together the picaresque and to signal the inevitable movement toward enlightenment. Lee's movie adds to the Autobiography a posthumous reclamation of Malcolm X: in a coda of global solidarity, school children across the world, as well as Nelson Mandela, announce "I am Malcolm X." The film achieves the aim of the Autobiography by imagining successful protest as a seamless grafting of readers/viewers into the life--and voice--of Malcolm X. The ending scene extends Malcolm X's project outside the bounds of America and beyond the time of his assassination in 1965; at the same time it imagines Malcolm X's project completed simply because it is the subject of a major Hollywood film. Describing his personal skirmishes with Warner Brothers executives, Lee explicitly casts his film as the endpoint of Malcolm X's challenge to a racist America: "We had to fight tooth and nail, fight like hell to get what we wanted on the screen" (Lee xiiv). Thus, at the moment Malcolm X adorns the silver screen, the projects of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism enter the past tense.

In a symposium in Cineaste, the film is deemed "remarkably subdued" and its packaging described as "placing stress on themes of personal redemption in a cinematic style thought most appropriate for younger people and a crossover audience" Crowdus 4). bell hooks castigates the film for its failure to get outside (hetero)sexist stereotypes: "Indeed, in Lee's cinematic world, every relationship between a black man and a woman, whether white or black, is mediated by his constant sexualization of a female" (hooks 14). (7) Amiri Baraka publicly protests the film accusing Lee of being a mere opportunist "buppie" intent on using Malcolm X's story to propel Lee's own movement up the class ladder. In short, William Lyne explains, what was lost was any residue of a "transformationist politics" that questions society on a macro level in terms of systemic oppression. What is left, for Lyne, is the easy binary between integrationists and separatists, between Civil Rights and Black Nationalism, between King's eloquence and Malcolm's scary unintelligible terrorism--between white capitalism and black capitalism. Instead, Lyne argues, the exculpatory binary allows those he considers "political conservatives" like Spike Lee and Alex Haley to appear as radicals even when the story of Malcolm X is read "not as a fulcrum for mass activism but rather as a bible for personal improvement" (55). Lyne further notes that the tendency of Lee's films to simply reinforce American traditional values lies in the ways his artistic production follows his absorption into an untransformed system: Lee moves from independent film maker to Nike employee; Hollywood siphons off creativity by appropriating the work of independent filmmakers. For Malcolm X, Lyne argues that Lee relies on the tradition in American "realist" storytelling that hop-scotches between "epiphanic" events: Columbus discovered America, Lincoln freed the slaves and, to extend Lyne's line, Malcolm X sparked a fashion craze for hats. (8) Lyne emphasizes that there is no longer a third choice, a space outside the current system; instead, he argues, all that is left after 1970's blaxploitation and a quashed Black Panther movement is bland complicity. The less popular collection of Malcolm's speeches, Lyne contends, is a better package for a transformationist politics--not an untransformed call for a black-owned and operated movie studio that accepts the American promise of "40 Acres and a Mule" at face value. (9) Yet the "closet screenplay" does offer a "third choice" that refuses to equate a Hollywood budget with complicity and historical irrelevance. Though a much smaller audience has bought the "closet screenplay" than Lee's popular film, Baldwin's "third choice" nevertheless circulates.

While many dismiss Baldwin's legacy as "merely" integrationist or "inclusionist," I wonder if Baldwin's version of Malcolm X and its dissemination as a "closet screenplay" can address the tensions implicit in the competing versions of Malcolm X now circulating. Individual reading practices of the speeches of Malcolm X and even the Autobiography might lend themselves to "transformationist" energies because they can be bought cheaply and consumed in the back rooms of stores, disseminated at political meetings, obtained in prison libraries, and so on. But the corporate theater dooms potentially transformative self- and system-confrontation to questions of "Will this movie spark a riot or not?" Such was the case with Lee's earlier films during the long hot summers of their releases. (10)

In 1970, though, it did not seem necessary to Baldwin to forfeit all of moving picture technology as always and only White and to remain content with a small fraction of the print market. Following Coombs's disparagement of Baldwin's "naivete," Hollywood generally escapes censure because many now agree with Jacquie Jones's contention that "The charge of Hollywood has never been to produce functional political documents" (Jones 10). But Baldwin, writing from the other side of the historical inclusion of black characters, writers, and directors in Hollywood, believed that inclusion of Black history into Hollywood forms could transform its "charge" and could, in fact, imbue Hollywood with political relevance. Whereas Cineaste may rationalize the controversy surrounding Lee's film by noting, "Malcolm X is not the sort of person Hollywood biopics normally celebrate" (Crowdus 4), Baldwin was not content to separate inclusion and transformation into mutually exclusive projects. In the aftermath of the exhilarating gains of Civil Rights and amidst a nascent Black Arts movement, Baldwin entered Hollywood in 1970 with the notion that cinema had the power to transform a generation hypnotized by the white supremacist fantasies of D. W. Griffiths and John Wayne.

I want to turn to 1970 and to the "scenario" in order to see how Baldwin worked with the visual image and filmic technology as useful tools of continuing Malcolm X's legacy in order to save him from "historical irrelevance" as an American icon, a Horatio Alger of racial progress. Baldwin, that is, did not automatically conflate the appeal and growth of visual culture with the loss of progressive politics and counter-cultures that had successfully used the printed word in pamphlets and newspapers as vehicles for disseminating systemic critiques. The role of James Baldwin's script in Spike Lee's film has been thoroughly downplayed, dismissed, or in some way denied. Lee mentions Baldwin's script as one of many from which he worked. Though he claims Baldwin's as the best, he succinctly dismisses it as lacking a finished ending, and often noting Baldwin's heavy drinking and the assistance of Arnold Perl. Though Baldwin explains the "closeting" of the screenplay through studio disputes over representations of Malcolm, Lee's dismissive depiction of "the Baldwin script" enjoys widespread circulation in By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X, and Cineaste replicates Lee's story in a 1993 interview. Contrary to Lee, Baldwin did not envision a Black Hollywood film as an endpoint. Instead, Baldwin remembered his childhood fascination with the seductive power of filmic identification and combined that with his distrust of a Hollywood complicit in promulgating the stories of race Baldwin spent his life unraveling and challenging. Baldwin looked to film itself as an opportunity to use the visual medium to enact a self-questioning placement of the viewer within a not-settled--and never-to-be settled--history that failed if it became a static binary or an easy teleology.

Present-History and Malcolm's Women

You are present when you are away. (Betty's voiceover concluding Baldwin's "Scenario," 268)

But how was Baldwin, in 1970, to navigate the tension between Malcolm X's claims to American ideals of democracy and justice and Malcolm X's claims to black solidarity? How are we, in the end, to read a "closet screenplay"? Baldwin uses the film genre itself to escape the static-ness of the written word generally and the discrete teleology that crystallizes Malcolm X's autobiography. In the "closet screenplay," Baldwin overlaps multiple stages of the Autobiography into the single time frame of individual scenes. Speeches, statements, incidents, ideologies, and stances exist in the same scene by virtue of film's multimedia capabilities: voice-overs, dialogue, visual scenes, and flashbacks. Thus the "scenario" presents multiple versions of Malcolm X that exist inextricably. The temporal model is not a compilation of discrete stages of personal development; rather, Baldwin's "closet screenplay" induces a sense of unfinished-ness and incomplete-ness. If a particular stance by Malcolm X at a particular time is seen as in some way insufficient, the "closet screenplay" offers a model of ongoing protest that can account for differences in the past, present, and future. In addition to overlapping the stages of Malcolm X's political ideologies and activities, Baldwin also interlaces into Malcolm's story the demands of those present protest movements that may have been absent from Malcolm X's "actual" life. Most interestingly, Baldwin's "scenario" responds to a nascent feminist movement.

The reception of Lee's film as well as the rejection of Baldwin's "scenario" by its Hollywood commissioners lie along the same lines: the story of Malcolm X is only digestible once the immediacy of his protest recedes and he becomes another example of a past American hero. Regarding Lee's film, critics contend that, like Haley's Autobiography, a discrete chronology of the formal means by which the average American can claim the figure of Malcolm X: that is, precisely by disclaiming large chunks of Malcolm X's protest history. Locke notes that in Lee's film Malcolm X only uses outright the term "white devils" twice: in a narrated letter and in an interview in the past tense (Locke 5). Approval of Malcolm X as present-hero, then, depends on a total rejection of earlier protest messages of black self-determination, and possibly even his transformationist calls to substantive racial amelioration The challenges of Black Nationalism become relics of Malcolm X's personal past, a cast-off era of misdirected youth. Malcolm X's chronology must be neatly partitioned into discrete eras to avoid systemic transformation. Likewise, versions of American history that imagine Civil Rights and Black Nationalism as distinct chronological eras or as incommensurable ideologies are able to defuse the challenges of each other because they are not imagined as unfinished and related projects. (11)

The threat of historical irrelevance lies in turning Malcolm X into yet another American monument on tourist expeditions into American history. With this danger in mind, Baldwin turned to his "scenario" to extend the unfinished project of Malcolm X. Hollywood cinema of the 1970s, then, with its steady single shots and its monolithic hero worship, seems a curious place for Baldwin to hope to unmoor questions of history, identity, and self-examination. Instead of the possible film version of Malcolm X in 1972, however, the first hit black film was the television series of Alex Haley's Roots. Baldwin lauded Haley's compression of 300 years into one--albeit long--movie to establish continuity across generations. But before Baldwin praised Haley's Roots--and, implicitly, Black-directed cinema--for its technological ability to perform neat historical trajectories, Baldwin recognized the power of the visual images spat at him by White cinema as a youth.

Having grown up with--and been fascinated by--White cinema, Baldwin considered cinema as potentially productive in his project of examining one's self through identification and difference. Jane Grimes turns to Baldwin's fascination with Bette Davis, who, for Baldwin, had "pop-eyes like me," as proof that ugly people can succeed powerfully in America. Baldwin, then, welcomed the complex processes of dis-identification found in a cinematic depiction of white womanhood that he could map onto himself and onto his black mother (Grimes 108-09). For Baldwin, the process of identification between viewer and film content did not have to forge lines of sameness--lines that, in a story about black self-determination, potentially create the very racial polarities Baldwin was trying to negotiate. Instead, Hollywood films' powerful pull of viewers into their subjects could serve as a means of forging alliances between Malcolm X and any viewer. If so, the responsibility for continuing Malcolm X's political project also moves out of the screen and toward the reader/viewer along the lines of cinematic identification.

The Autobiography and Lee's film depict as paradigmatic to an era of Black Nationalism the image of the idealistic young white female student seeking enlightenment from Malcolm X by asking naively, "What can I do?" ("Nothing," Malcolm legendarily responds.) Baldwin, however, neglects this episode and instead chooses to devote a scene to Malcolm X reencountering Laura, his past girlfriend now living on the streets of Harlem as a prostitute. The "scenario," like Lee's film, captures well the scene of the legendary standoff between the white police force and the angry and silent crowd of Harlem residents--a "considerable multitude" (One Day 176)--headed by the Nation of Islam outside the Harlem jail where a Brother is held under unofficial arrest. Unlike the film, though, the scenario follows Malcolm from this scene to an image of Laura-alone--on the streets. Immediately following the euphoric victory over the NYPD, Baldwin presents us with a failure of Malcolm X's rhetoric to fully address Black female experience. To Minister Malcolm's offer of his church as a road map off the streets, Laura rejoins,

"You could have done something for me once--.... The only way for you to marry me now would be for you to have a boyfriend on the side. I don't go that way no more, except for bread.--You're funny. You're shocked. Why are ministers always shocked? You're supposed to know chore about life than other people, not less" (One Day 182-83).

The failure in this scene to bring Laura to salvation--be it political, spiritual or economic--directly juxtaposes the crowd-pleasing success of the previous scene of easily identifiable racism and the power of racial solidarity. For Baldwin's Laura underscores the failures of Malcolm X's message substantively to account for the experience of women. After all, Laura has sought the very same project of self-determination on the streets that Malcolm Little and Shorty sought. Furthermore, through Laura, Baldwin subjects Malcolm to the same baiting of sexuality to which Baldwin was subjected within a masculinist Black Power movement. Here, however, Laura's gay baiting opens up the project of a gendered analysis of the possibilities and limits of Malcolm X's protest.

If Laura's fate is sealed, so is Malcolm's sealed, as he is ultimately "saved" by the model of progress in the Autobiography that is so much a part of the American historical record. Baldwin calls our attention to those persons existing outside normative gender and sexual relations who do not fit into the familiar narrative of Malcolm X's enlightenment. And whereas in the Autobiography and in Lee's film the character of Betty El Shabazz offers the perfect spousal complement to Malcolm, Laura offers a critique of marriage to mark a failed alliance to Malcolm, and an unfinished project of gendered political critique that is now the responsibility of the viewer/reader to see and to continue. Against the pull of the hero-centered biopic, the camera stops and, for a parenthetical moment, the chronology and centrality of Malcolm is ruptured. Baldwin directs, "(He goes. She stays where she is, watching him.)" (One Day 184). We cannot identify solely with the main character now that he has left what has momentarily become Laura's scene. Earlier, a voice-over asks, "Where's Malcolm?" (One Day 27). Baldwin impels the reader/viewer to locate Malcolm as a project or idea, not necessarily as the hero of a biopic.

Baldwin uses the technology of film to engage in a process of political identification to present Malcolm and his protest as a shared project that gets lost or delegated when the viewer is split from the subject, when white cultures and economies are split from black cultures and economies, or when the oppression of women is understood as distinct from racial oppression. Feminist theorists of visual culture have advanced our understanding of identification as more than a psychoanalytic process divorced from anything outside of the individual's self-development. Rey Chow tracks the technologies of visual culture as prime sites in the creation of "difference" itself: the splitting of subject/object, intellectual/spectacular. And popular versions of Malcolm X have created similar differences--as uncrossable as they are politically paralyzing--between history/present, black/white, Malcolm X/King, Civil Rights/Black Nationalism, and so on (Chow 105-06). Contrary to Chow's genealogy of visual technology creating difference, however, Baldwin, in drafting a screen version of "Malcolm X" amidst the initial optimistic call for Black ownership of Hollywood visual and marketing technology, looked to cinema as a chance productively to blur the divide between subject/object, speaker/listener, historical fact/present now, narrator/plot. (12) Moreover, such a creation of a binary along the lines of black/white, man/woman is precisely where the Autobiography fails by imagining a picaresque chronology and a confessional conversion narrative where the "saved" Malcolm is always present as narrator to direct us in an expedition into his delicious past that will inevitably lead us to the already-enlightened present. Lee's film further offers many stark visual binaries as the successful culmination of Malcolm X's protest. In addition to the NYPD scene, for instance, Lee presents a striking image of gender division at one of Malcolm X's speeches where the male and female members of the Nation of Islam occupy opposite sides of the screen/aisle. Though the image of division might appear so hyperbolic as to be critique, Lee's image of binary orderliness with the men dressed in black on the left and the women dressed in white on the right is in stark opposition to the colorful and mixed audience occupying the upper screen in the balcony. Like the powerful scene of solidarity in front of the NYPD, it is the orderly members of the Nation of Islam who offer an effective leadership front to Lee's disorderly representation of the rest of Black America.

Baldwin's envisioned use of film technology as what I have termed a historical "kaleidoscope" machine in the "closet screenplay" may seem overly elaborate or even, in the terms of Baldwin's detractors in the 1970s, self-indulgent in presenting Malcolm X's project of substantive political change and mass organizing in America. But I contend that Baldwin sought to claim the well-funded technology of Hollywood as both necessary to Malcolm X's political project and as potentially belonging to the very people denied access to Hollywood technology. For Baldwin, Hollywood artistic production and relevant race politics were not mutually exclusive. Indeed, Baldwin understood the opportunity to produce his "scenario" and the assassination of King as part of the same project. In No Name in the Street, Baldwin, before abandoning Hollywood because "I didn't want to be a part of a second assassination" (No Name 11), asserted that the film could resurrect, if not Malcolm X, then at least his unfinished project.

Baldwin looked to the project of transforming the Autobiography onto the Hollywood screen as a necessary means of extending the project of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism at a time when "The failure and betrayal are in the record book forever, and sum up and condemn, forever, those descendants of a barbarous Europe who arbitrarily and arrogantly reserve the right to call themselves American" (No Name 10). Within this damning historical record Baldwin looked to Hollywood technology to offer a means of reclaiming a transformed America for all readers/viewers. Baldwin recounts the mythical story of the suit he wore to King's funeral that he could never wear again because it had become "too heavy a garment" (No Name 14). Upon reading this story, an old acquaintance of Baldwin's asks him for the suit. Baldwin realizes that, in his persona of Negro spokesperson, this suit, like his artistic production, threatened the very readerly/viewerly identification on which his politics depended. Baldwin explains of his working class acquaintance, "He couldn't, in short, afford my elegant despair. Martin was dead, but he was living, he needed a suit--and I was just his size" (No Name 14). And so, too, is Baldwin's "closet screenplay" an elaborate machine of "elegant despair." But this does not condemn the "scenario" to irrelevance or self-indulgence. On the contrary, Baldwin's power always lies in his ability to render complex and hopeful the daily experiences of his readership under systems of oppression. Baldwin does not resolve to buy no more coats, or, in my use of the metaphor, Baldwin does not give up on Hollywood. Baldwin instead realizes, "That bloody suit was their suit, after all, it had been bought for them, it had even been bought by them: they had created Martin, he had not created them, and the blood in which the fabric of that coat was stiffening was theirs" (No Name 21). Just as he shifts the responsibility of extending Malcolm X's project to the reader/viewer, Baldwin cedes the propriety of the art object and its means of production to the readership/viewership. Cinematic identification not only creates a historically disoriented "scenario" of Malcolm X, it also determines the very subject of the "closet screenplay": the multifarious people who "created" Malcolm X, just as they had Martin. Further, like the multi-named version of Malcolm in the "closet screenplay," Baldwin never presumes his "scenario" is the definitive story. The "scenario" exists consciously among many other versions including the Autobiography, the speeches and, probably, Lee's eventual film product.

In creating a disorienting history where a Black and proud Malcolm is not the inevitable result of a conversion narrative, the gyrating shards of Malcolm's life collide to suggest alliances lost (or willfully denied) within a predominantly homophobic and misogynist Black Power movement that regarded Baldwin's queerness as a masochistic love of the "blue-eyed devil." Whereas in the Autobiography Malcolm conks his hair and the saved Malcolm, as ever-present narrator, instructs us that this 'do was his terrible desire to be white, Baldwin juxtaposes the self-imposed conk scene with a scene of a light-skinned black woman hated by both black and white men to evoke America's rapist past--and therefore its necessarily interracial present (52).

In additional colliding alliances that I hesitantly call feminist, Baldwin presents Sophia, pre-saved Malcolm's rich white lover, as a figure self-conscious of her given role. (13) In the Autobiography and in Lee's film, Sophia extends the work of the figure of the wealthy young white woman in Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, in which Bigger Thomas and the Invisible Man, respectively, consciously look the image of an obsequious darkie so that they can do anything they want. In the Autobiography and in the film, Sophia lustily recapitulates the myth of the black super sex stud, who, upon conversion into black self-determination, discards her. But in Baldwin's "scenario," Sophia pedagogically explains to Malcolm,

"It's not your fault the world is so fucked up. Maybe you think I'm an awful person--but, at least, I've never lied to you. If I have to live a certain kind of life in Boston, well, maybe that helps to protect us--look: the world sees a girl like me in a certain way. And if you give the world what it wants to see, then it stops looking. It doesn't look any further. And then you're--free" (One Day 85-86).

It is also Sophia, not only Malcolm, who maintains a strategic double-consciousness. In the Autobiography and in Lee's film, critics largely agree that Sophia occupies a crucial role in the first stage of Malcolm's development because, as John Locke contends, she "represents [Malcolm X's] repudiation of blackness through his desire for whiteness, a manifestation of self-hatred" (Locke 6). But in Baldwin's "scenario" there is no post-saved present orientation in a "tripartite" chronology that can discard Sophia as a remnant of a cast-off past. And Baldwin, too, is aware he is the famed Negro spokesman for a moving picture industry deemed "white"--which is to say, safe from the transformative promise of black self-determination. (14)

The Will to Transform (15)

But in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is: in the present case, to accept the fact, whatever one does with it thereafter, that the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam. The paradox--and a fearful paradox it is--is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (95)

I have provisionally cast Baldwin's "scenario" as presenting a transformative disorienting history with multiple Malcolms existing at once in the same location in opposition to Haley's or Lee's versions. But there remains the crucial scene of prison literacy in a chapter called "Saved" in the Autobiography. The "scenario" encompasses this familiar scene of Malcolm X's "awakening" in a distant image of Malcolm reading. Here Baldwin seems at the verge of offering a Hollywood-ready version of an enlightened hero. But we are not necessarily to find closure in our reading practices, only a momentary promise of clarity that will help us to navigate the rest of the "scenario" that refuses to offer a static--and therefore irrelevant--version of Malcolm, Martin, Medgar, or whomever. Just as Baldwin's scenario interpellates and exists within other versions of Malcolm X, the project of the transformation of American race relations does not exist in one particular moment. Transforming injustice requires continual engagement with the changing and overlapping landscapes of oppression.

To counter the threat of historical irrelevance, Baldwin endlessly defers any ultimate meaning of Malcolm's story and rejects an easy answer of self-acceptance or -reliance. Likewise, Kevin Ohi provides a deconstructive reading of Baldwin's 1962 novel Another Country to locate a progressive potential in Baldwin's "queer" representation of New York City. In opposition to a transcendent utopia of sexual self-acceptance, Ohi describes an unending search for self that cannot find a settled meaning at its epicenter. For Ohi, it is the death and absence of the main character (Rufus) that impels the "queer" project of self-exploration among the other characters. For the "scenario," however, the impulse toward self-examination is embodied by a live black man, Malcolm, who embarks on self-examining journeys with those characters he meets in prison, on the streets, in Mecca, in Chicago, in Lansing. "Queerness," then, is grounded not in identity (whether it be absent or present, fixed or mobile) but in a continual interaction with "difference." This version of a "queer" project addresses homoeroticism and homosociality without simply filling in that shape, or what Lee Edelman calls "homographesis."

Baldwin locates movement and interaction at the center of what I provisionally call a "queer" version of Malcolm in the "closet screenplay." Cross-cultural interaction and a clumsy attempt at racial brotherhood characterize Malcolm's visit to Mecca.

THE EGYPTIAN: I will show you how we dress for our journey. We do this in order to enter a state of spiritual and physical consecration. You will do as I do?

(Solemnly, Ire begins to undress. After a moment, MALCOLM follows suit.

Jump-shot: THE EGYPTIAN, naked, stands in the middle of the room, draping a towel around his waist.)

THE EGYPTIAN: We call this the Isar. (MALCOLM drapes his towel in the same way. THE EGYPTIAN throws another towel over his neck and shoulders.) ... So--my brother. Now we are ready for our pilgrimage. (229-30)

Baldwin's "closet screenplay" travels to Mecca and does not discover the teleology of Haley's coherent African American cultural tradition or the Nation of Islam's "dynasty" (Autobiography 213). Though Baldwin may be guilty of a romanticization of otherness, or "orientalism," the move suggests a way in which our queer reading practices must work through the insights of post-colonial theory in terms of self/other dichotomies in order to achieve a racial solidarity that does not collapse into sameness. (16)

Commonly available queer reading practices fail to explain the power of this scene and its placement in a Black Nationalist cultural tradition. One school would read the scene to hint--with a nudge and wink--that Baldwin has offered a "queer" Malcolm while another might dismiss the frank interaction as mere homosociality that will deploy homophobia elsewhere to defuse homoerotocism. But here Baldwin unabashedly offers an explicitly homoerotic scene of nakedness in a vision of queerness and racial understanding that attempts (even if it might fail) to interact across lines of cultural difference in a common project. To borrow from Baldwin's famous explanation of Giovanni's Room, the homoerotic is the vehicle through which the scene moves. Yet neither sexuality, nor race, nor gender, nor culture is overcome to forge brotherhood. Rather, Baldwin folds in flashing images of planes, crowds, and passports throughout the trip to Mecca as a means of evoking the inextricability of place and movement at the heart of his vision of present-history. The scenes of Malcolm's cross-national travels, like Baldwin's persistent overlapping of Malcolm's "stages," offer connections between seemingly disparate places, ideologies, identities, and political affiliations. The nakedness does not present a more real identity or body as the object of Malcolm's quest. Rather, Malcolm undresses in order to follow the lead of his Egyptian guide to re-dress in the same costume. The "brotherhood" of the scene is not one of sameness nor is it one of difference. The scene presents a project of self-examination that, like the "closet screenplay" itself, seeks to move forward from such separations of text/image, American/Egyptian, separatism/integration. Furthermore, this "queer" project becomes directly political by virtue of its historical referents. Though Rufus is the dead-center of Ohi's reading of Another Country, Malcolm's death also takes place out side the "scenario." Malcolm X's real--not literal--death is the occasion for and necessity behind Baldwin's project of disorienting us into a present-history in which Malcolm's quest lives on.

To return to the final product of this ghost Hollywood film (the never attained destination of the "closet screenplay"), Lee's film does not totally wipe away Baldwin's present-history to offer an "irrelevant" martyr. Jonathan Scott Lee attempts to salvage what he sees as Lee's stylistic break from his earlier films that concatenated the romantic and the nitty-gritty of the street toward what appears to be a more "conservative" style. To do this, Scott Lee seizes on what he calls moments of "cinematic parapraxes" that point to a "postcolonial aesthetic." Scott Lee turns to the flashback of the Klan's raid on Malcolm's home and the moonlit sheeted silhouettes as the most "shockingly gorgeous" shot in the film. These are "flaws" in the film for Scott Lee that point toward what he deems Spike Lee's "counter-aesthetic" that tears holes in the seamless fabric of Hollywood bio-epics (Scott Lee 157-58). (17) But the flashbacks in Lee s film are resolutely teleological and distinctly chronological: we know they are past moments that will inevitably move us forward.

Perhaps the breaks in the "seamless fabric" are really indices of the unfinished project of erasing Baldwin's hand completely from the movie that ultimately does not bear his name. (18) The tears are the places where the dirt has blown away to expose an improperly buried Baldwin tucked away from Black history and from an ever-growing Black niche market invested in narratives of achieved democratic promises. My image of the "burying" of Baldwin draws directly from the partially buried murdered black boy, Richard, who is based distantly on Emmett Till, lying in the ditch separating White Town and Black Town on the stage in Baldwin's 1964 play Blues for Mister Charlie. I am suggesting that Baldwin has been ditched as well: not as a means of separating White and Black America, however, but as a means of enticing all America--through Lee's film--into market systems of individual entitlement and self-made men, which works against systemic analyses of the effects of a racist present-history.

If I have presented the dangers of teleological, discrete chronologies and the transformative possibilities of moving history as marking a potential divide between text and image in Baldwin's use of the technologies, I have done so only as a test case. Such lines get muddled in a "closet screenplay" that announces itself as distributed in the incorrect form. But the eventual disappearance (or "closeting") of all the Baldwin-esque interracial nuances and temporal dysphoria in Lee's well-funded film product point to the still-present failure of big budget moving pictures to convey anything but a chronological history of reified race relations. But this failure did not seem inevitable at the onset of the late 1960's promise of Black ownership or authorship of the Hollywood moving image when Baldwin accepted the project of imagining a film version of Malcolm X's project. In the end, the relation between text and image brokered by the never-filmed "scenario" is little concerned with generic differences between print and visual cultures or formal differences between film and text. The "closet screenplay" makes visible the racial propriety of an increasingly visual popular culture while it negotiates between seemingly immiscible poles: white and black, man and woman, text and image, history and the present, Harlem and Hollywood.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Another Country. New York: Dial P, 1962.

--. Blues for Mister Charlie. New York, Dial P, 1964.

--. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial P, 1963.

--. No Name in the Street. New York: Dial P, 1972.

--. One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X. 1972. New York: Dell P, 1992.

--. "A Review of Roots." 1976. The Price of the Ticket. New York: St. Martin's, 1985. 553-56.

Baldwin, James, and Margaret Mead. A Rap on Race. New York: Lippincott, 1971.

Baraka, Amiri. "Spike Lee at the Movies." Black American Cinema. Ed Manthia Diawara. New York: Routledge, 1992. 145-53.

Chow, Rey. "Postmodern Automatons." Feminists Theorize the Political. Eds. Joan Scott and Judith Butler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 101-17.

Coombs, Orde. Rev. of The Devil Finds Work. 1976. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Ed. Fred L. Standley and Nancy V. Burt. Boston: Hall, 1988. 238-40.

Crowdus, Gary, ed By Any Reviews Necessary: Malcolm X Symposium. Cineaste 19.4 (1993).

--, and Dan Georgakas. "Our Film Is Only a Starting Point: An Interview with Spike Lee." Crowdus 20-24.

DeGout, Yasmin. "Dividing the Mind: Contradictory Portraits of Homoerotic Love in Giovanni's Room." African American Review 26 (1992): 425-35.

Edelman, Lee. Homegraphesis. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Field, Douglas. "Looking for Jimmy Baldwin: Sex, Privacy and Black Nationalist Power." Callaloo 27.2 (Spring 2004): 457-78.

Georgakas, Dan. "Black Supremacy and Anti-Semitism: Religion in Malcolm X." Crowdus 15-16.

Grimes, Jane. "Green Like Me." Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences. Eds. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby. London: British Film Institute, 2001. 105-20.

Haraway, Donna. "Ecce Homo, Ain't (Ar'n't) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape." Scott and Butler 86-100.

hooks, bell. "Male Heroes and Female Sex Objects: Sexism in Spike Lee's Malcolm X." Crowdus 13-15.

Jones, Jacquie. "Spike Lee Presents Malcolm X: The New Black Nationalism." Crowdus 9-11.

Lee, Jonathan Scott. "Spike Lee's Malcolm X as Transformational Object." American Imago 52.2 (1995): 155-67.

Lee, Spike with Ralph Wiley. By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X ... Including the Screenplay. New York: Hyperion, 1992.

Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Penguin, 1994.

Locke, John. "Adapting the Autobiography: The Transformation of Malcolm X." Crowdus 5-7.

Lyne, William. "No Accident: From Black Power to Black Box Office." African American Review 34 (2000): 39-59.

Malcolm X with the assistance of Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. 1965. New York: Ballantine, 1973.

Malcolm X. Dir. Spike Lee. Screenplay by Spike Lee and Arnold Perl. Warner Brothers, 1992.

Ohi, Kevin. "'I'm Not the Boy You Want': Sexuality, 'Race,' and Thwarted Revelation in Baldwin's Another Country." African American Review 33 (1999): 260-81.

Perry, Patsy Brewington. "One Day When I Was Lost: Baldwin's Unfulfilled Obligation." James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Therman B. O'Daniel. Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1977. 213-27.

Porter, Horace. Stealing the Fire. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1989.

Reid-Pharr, Robert. "Tearing the Goat's Flesh: Crisis, Abjection, and Homosexuality in the Production of a Late-Twentieth-Century Black Masculinity." Studies in the Novel 28.3 (1996): 372-94.

Scott, Darieck. "Jungle Fever? Black Gay Identity Politics, White Dick, and the Utopian Bedroom." GLQ 1.3 (1994): 299-321.

Thomas, Kendall "'Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing': Black Masculinity, Gay Sexuality, and the Jargon of Authenticity." Representing Black Men. Eds. Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham. New York: Routledge, 1996.55-69.

Wall, Cheryl. "On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: Debating Aesthetics and/as Ideology in African American Literature." Aesthetics & Ideology. Ed. George Levine. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994. 283-303.

Notes

(1.) I am conscious of the gendered term "bastard." The misogynist grounds of Baldwin's dismissals warrant the term, which also accounts for the script being "cast off" or "unclaimed" by its Hollywood commissioners.

(2.) The history of animosity between anti-homophobic and anti-racist struggles is long documented, and I defer to those studies that typically cite the disavowal of Baldwin by Eldridge Cleaver in Soul On Ice (1968). Ohi uses Edelman's queer reading of Baldwin to remind us of the dangers of pitting minorities against each other. See Ohi 280 n.1. See also Field, Reid-Pharr, Scott and Thomas.

(3.) Baldwin appeared in a 1963 Time cover story. Porter bemoans Baldwin's fame after The Fire Next Time (1963) as sealing his "complex fate" as merely a polemical race spokesperson.

(4.) In direct opposition, in the one extant article devoted to Baldwin's "scenario," Brewington Perry excoriates Baldwin for not sticking to the Autobiography and therefore to Haley's dictum to "keep [Malcolm's] story safe from 'interpreters'" (213). Instead, Perry notes, Baldwin continually "interprets" the story and focuses on Malcolm's "second" period as a hateful separatist and negatively downplays Malcolm's epiphany in the "third" stage about racial amelioration.

(5.) For Baldwin's introspective discussion of the fate of the screenplay and the impact of the new generation of Black Nationalists, see No Name in the Street. Before Baldwin left California he had his first meetings with members of the Panther party. Hollywood, in a sense, brokered the meeting between Baldwin and Black Power.

(6.) For instance, when young Malcolm X is discouraged by his white school teacher, Baldwin directs, "([Mr. Ostrovski is working alone in his office and he looks up as we--that is, Malcolm--approach]" (One Day 38). The confusion of subjectivity where the reader/viewer must see--and be aware of seeing--Americanness and/as whiteness through Malcolm X results from Baldwin's use of camera technology as different from a narrator.

(7.) hooks grounds this argument in the portrayal of Sophia, a moment I find central in Baldwin's version. hooks argues, "The film does not show that Malcolm maintained contact with Sophia long after their sexual relationship ended. In Lee's version, relationships between black men and white women never transcend the sexual" (14).

(8.) The last cited event is my own sarcasm, but I believe it contains the spirit of Lyne's argument. Georgakas further decries the evaporation of Malcolm X's transformationalist potential or, more accurately, controversial stances, by noting, "Withheld is how Malcolm X was defining El-Hajj Malik El-Shabass [sic]. That new identity does not fit neatly on a baseball cap, and it does not play well in Peoria" (16).

(9.) This is the name of Spike Lee's production company.

(10.) Lyne recounts the expectations by some that Lee's Do The Right Thing would justify violence and would act as "potential catalysts for riots" (50). In the early 1970s when Baldwin wrote his "scenario," perhaps raced fear was more widespread because grounded in actual events. Therefore, Baldwin's project that does not present Malcolm X's story as past era to a national audience gains relevance in Lyne's sketch of the history of Blackness in Hollywood.

(11.) In other schools of thinking, feminist and postmodern critics have absolutely rejected universalist meta-narratives and closed teleologies as implicitly embedded in assumptions of an untheorized neutral subject that inherently excludes in the process of narrating a seamless history. Instead, these theorists look for histories that embody "difference" through open-ended and partial subjectivities grounded in theorized experience. Haraway, for example, finds "the figure of a broken and suffering humanity, signifying ... a possible hope" (87) in the numerous versions of Sojourner Truth circulating in print.

(12.) The publishing history of Baldwin's "scenario" provides a similar arc from optimistic publisher-artist relations to cynical market tactics. In 1992 Dell Publishing reissued Baldwin's 1972 "scenario" in mass market paperback to compete with Lee's film. The cover of the reprinted edition typifies the failed promise of marketing technologies to do anything but vie for profit. The cover announces itself as a screenplay for a film about Malcolm X and bears a glossy image of half of the face of Malcolm X. The packaging looks exactly like the knockoffs of books re-released with Hollywood film stills on their covers. The eerie effect is that--to 21st-century market-savvy eyes--one expects a picture of Denzel Washington instead of a picture of the "real" Malcolm X.

(13.) Another scene deconstructs gender to place racial wisdom in female characters in a Black Muslim household. "(Sidney): Sorry Mama.... But women really are subordinate in this Muslim household, Malcolm.... (Lorraine): You've [Malcolm] got a lot of training--in being black. That's what you'll need. (One Day 162)." Such frank acknowledgements of gendered divisions are absent from Lee's film. The conspicuous divisions of men and women remain solely visual images without self-reflexive comment on the politics of sartorial codes and spatial divides.

(14.) Tripartite is Locke's term for Lee's filmic structure, which follows a staged chronology: "a man leads an aimless, self-destructive life; he experiences enlightenment; he is redeemed" (6). I contend that Lee's autobiography is meant to overlap neatly with a theory of African American history: integration, Black Nationalism, already-achieved American democracy.

(15.) I am borrowing liberally from Cheryl Wall's article "The Will to Adorn" that, in my reading, argues for the "refiguring" power of Black women writers who take up the cultural refuse of White capitalism (i.e., advertising circulars) and make it into something beautiful, and therefore into an ideological act.

(16.) Critics have recently updated early readings of Baldwin's dualism to forge a new version of "queer" Baldwin. For example, DeGout destabilizes readings of a self/other dichotomy in Baldwin's work by exploring Baldwin's depictions of "good" homosexuality in relation to "bad" homosexuality in Giovanni's Room.

(17.) Scott Lee uses Spike Lee's film as a "test case" in how to use psychoanalytical theory to construct a postcolonial filmic aesthetic attuned to Fanon's "national culture." For Scott Lee, any "flaws" are necessarily intentional. The collaborative nature of film production--especially Baldwin's role--complicates directorial intentionality.

(18.) The VHS and DVD cases do not bear Baldwin's name. The script published in Lee's By Any Means Necessary, however, does. The erasure of Baldwin follows the chronology from writing to production to distribution.

Brian Norman is Assistant Professor of English and Philosophy at Idaho State University. His research concerns writer-spokespersons, and his current book project constructs a genealogy of the American protest essay. He also worked for four years as staff writer at Medical Education for South African Blacks, an international nonprofit organization in post-apartheid South Africa.